Character

CHARACTER. The scope of the concept of 'character' cannot be defined within the framework of medical designations alone. If, as is commonly thought (Kraus, Ewald, Hoffman), by character one should understand the peculiarities of the system of psychic reactions, dependent on the nervous-somatic appearance of the individual, then even such an understanding goes beyond the scope of medical designations. Indeed, besides the fact that the dependence of the system of psychic reactions on the nervous-somatic soil is still far from clear, the very concept of a 'system of psychic reactions' is extremely amorphous, and the boundaries of this concept extend far beyond the circle of directly physiological phenomena. This forces the researcher to place the resolution of the problem of character on a significantly broader path, namely, on the path of understanding character in the light of its development, as well as in the light of examining the individual mechanisms of this development depending on the concrete conditions that create the possibility for the manifestation of certain, rather than other, traits, peculiarities, and structures of character. Thereby, the task is set of studying the regularities of character formation or, in other words, the study of 'typical character in typical circumstances' (Engels). For the physician, this problem is posed in relation to the individual peculiarities of the personality, the properties of its nervous-somatic organization, and the systems of its predispositions and hereditarily conditioned differences. By virtue of the above, the task of determining the primary foundations of character, represented in the simplest acts and functions, is brought to the forefront of attention. Thus, recently, attempts by a number of researchers to study the psychic tempo, or rather, the individual tempo of the personality, relying on the peculiarities of the subject's psychomotor structure (Enke), have become widespread. Efforts by a number of other researchers (Schalweit, A. Bleuler) to study the elements of character based on the peculiarities of individual elements of the subject's fantasy (study in relation to the Rorschach method), or the attempt to link elements of character with the peculiarities of not only imagination but also its processing into complex representations (the Jaensch brothers), etc., follow the same line. Immeasurably greater prospects for such a necessary isolation of the foundations of character are revealed to us by the works of the brilliant physiologist I. P. Pavlov, in which an extremely fruitful attempt is made to isolate 4 types of nervous systems (see Conditioned Reflexes). Each of the types of nervous system can be imagined as a peculiar foundation of characterological formations. The very development of character assumes not only the presence of certain peculiarities of this foundation but also the peculiarities of the conditions in which this given foundation receives its full or partial realization. Thus, proceeding from the principles developed by I. P. Pavlov, one should study not only the dependence of the 'system of psychic reactions' on one or another type of nervous system (weak-strong, excitable-inhibitory) but also the method, mechanism, and history of the development of this 'system of psychic reactions,' understanding it as the unfolding, improvement, complication, and change of the indicated foundation. In this direction, it seems extremely important to study the interactions of character and intellect, the dependence of the unfolding of certain characterological formations on different age stages, the peculiarities of pathological exacerbations of character depending on certain ('internal' and 'external') conditions of personality development, and, finally, the dependence of the manifestation of hereditarily conditioned characterological formations on the conditions of the unfolding of character itself. The tasks of studying the connections between the structure of character and the peculiarities of the structure of the entire organism follow the same line. Modern characterology, even at that imperfect stage at which it still finds itself as a science, attempts to provide an answer to a number of posed questions. In particular, this answer is decisive in its mouth where it concerns the somatic expression of the peculiarities of character. With the light hand of Kretschmer, it has become banal to assert the correspondence of the pyknic body build with the cycloid makeup of the personality, and the asthenic, or leptosomic, with the schizoid. A number of researchers do not limit themselves to this but attempt to go far 'forward,' deriving, for example, a 'congenital inclination to delinquency' from the peculiarities of the subject's somatic appearance (von Rohden), and the peculiarities of worldview and their causes from characterological data (Gaupp): it is proposed to seek the causes of 'liberalism,' 'conservatism,' and 'revolutionary anarchism' in nothing other than the peculiarities of the organization of the given personality. It is no wonder that such assertions, which have nothing in common with science, have been used entirely by German fascism. Modern characterology, along with this, attempts to solve the question of the elements constituting character itself. One of the founders of the modern doctrine of character, the psychologist Klages, proposes to consider the elements that make up a single system of psychic reactions in three basic categories: the material of character, its structure, and its expressiveness (intensity). By the material of character, Klages understands the quality of the personality that facilitates the assimilation of experience ('spiritual content'), the individual whole of predisposition; by structure—the peculiarities of the tempo of psychic life; by expressiveness (intensity) of character—the peculiarities of drives, the mechanism, and the process of the psychic life of a given individual. The indicated subdivisions are extremely schematic and bear the trace of obvious metaphysics. However, in the first stages of research, Klages' schematic positions help to dissect, if only for purely heuristic purposes, a number of phenomena that present great complexity for research. That this is so is shown by the entire history of characterology. From Aristotle and almost to our days, the doctrine of character was to a significant extent developed by philosophers of various schools and directions. Without going into the history of the development of these doctrines, it should still be mentioned that the qualities with which these researchers operated were extremely complex and motley. They lay in the plane of the most complex social relations and by their genesis belonged to the fundamental phenomena of a social-ethical order. It is worth recalling Dilthey, Spranger, and others to understand the entire complexity and motley nature of the problems they put forward. The isolation of the so-called economic, rational, aesthetic person, whom individual philosophers and psychologists put forward as a type, did not bring one closer to understanding the actual mechanisms of character formation, to understanding the very phenomenon of 'character.' That is why Klages' proposal to consider character from the point of view of its material structure and the intensity of its expression, despite all the vagueness of the content of these categories, was a step forward, especially in the direction of isolating the biological prerequisites of character and the mechanisms of its formation. Undoubtedly, when posing the question of the biological prerequisites of character, we encounter the greatest difficulties in separating the actual foundations of character from their derivatives. With every such isolation (Kretschmer's typology serves as a vivid example of this), doubts arise about the primacy of one or another peculiarity of character. Whether we touch upon the peculiarities of thinking (e.g., viscosity, inclination to detail, etc.) or temperament (excitability, lack of affect control, inclination to 'short-circuit' type reactions)—in all these cross-sections, the question arises: what is primarily conditioned and what belongs to the nature of the development of the latter? Attempts to find the biological foundation of character relate to the early stages of its natural-scientific understanding. Hippocrates, Gall, Lavater, Lombroso, and others already attempted to isolate these peculiarities, presenting them in the properties of the humoral system, body structure, etc. They sought direct and immediate connections between the bodily organization of the individual and his psychic life, between the makeup of his somatic functions as a whole and the tempo of psychic reaction. These searches for direct and immediate connections, however, did not lead to an understanding of the peculiarities of character. In more recent times, Kretschmer again posed this task and, at a new stage, attempted to revive the search for these connections. He followed the path of analogies between the correlation of the somatic order and the psychic, standing on the same path of parallelism of phenomena of the somatic and psychic order. In his brilliant study 'Physique and Character,' Kretschmer reveals a certain regularity of correspondences between somatic and psychic proportions (see Temperament). Proceeding from the correspondence of the indicated proportions, Kretschmer draws a conclusion about the interrelation of character and body structure. In this search for correspondences and analogies lies the fundamental error of this brilliant researcher. The point is not at all that in dysplastics one notices a peculiarity of thinking characterized by slowness, stickiness, and an inclination to abstraction. All this is indeed encountered. The point is how to evaluate this fact. Kretschmer believes it possible to say that a certain type of body structure corresponds to the presence of a structure of psychic life characteristic of it by analogy, whereas this peculiarity of structure grows in unity with somatic differences and only in its development, in its so-called history, receives a different regularity. Hence the rigidity and ossification of character in Kretschmer's understanding.

But for all this, Kretschmer advanced the study of Character far forward, if only by the fact that he finally moved along the lines of isolating the primary and nuclear features of Character. What are these primary features? Empirical facts and clinical observations, which allow for the isolation, in the sense of Klages, of the basic qualities of Character, allow one to think that these primarily conditioned features of Character do not at all refer to individual traits and properties, such as, for example, excitability, autism, paradoxicality, sociability, etc., but to whole components, complex formations lying at the basis of the personality. Excitability, lack of affective restraint in combination with viscosity in thinking, with a tendency toward detailing, with features of the sensory tone of intellectual life, represent an undoubted kinship and unity of a certain series. Experience indicates that the regularity of the formation of such a specific complex of phenomena is different than, for example, excitability taken in combination with superficiality in emotional life, with the comparative mobility and plasticity of the intellect. In this sense, the material of the psychic organization of the personality must not contradict either the structure or the degree of intensity of its expression. The coherence and sounding on one register of psychic life (Kraepelin) points to one and the same nature of its origin. This does not at all exclude the fact that within such a unity, certain opposing tendencies may sound. The so-called asynchrony of these primarily conditioned complexes belongs not to a different nature of origin, but to different mechanisms of development. This position illustrates Heberlin's assertion that in each individual case there is present a connection of features of structural relationships of Character peculiar to it alone. We are, therefore, not talking about separating the "deep" from the "cortical," but about their genuine interaction, about a single complex of phenomena, the nature of which lies in the features of the organization of certain brain structures and systems. These latter are in turn connected with the entire aggregate of predispositions lying at the basis of both electrolyte tone and endocrine-vegetative organization, and in the interactions of more crudely given somatic structures. It is characteristic that the pathology of certain structures immediately brings to the fore disorders of such a complex order. Recent works in the field of studying tumors lying close to the so-called stem part of the brain (Foerster, Sachs, Dorothea Russell, et al.) point precisely to such complex disorders, characterized primarily by a combination of disturbances both in affective life and in the sphere of thinking and intellect. Proceeding in this direction, one can once again receive confirmation of the correctness of the propositions expressed by I. P. Pavlov regarding the study of the elementary and simplest bases of Character. The typical in his biological understanding of Character lies not in the isolation of individual traits and differences, such as, for example, autism, explosiveness, viscosity, syntony, superficiality, etc., but in an isolation of a different kind, proceeding from the principle of studying the regularity of the functional abilities of the entire nervous system. Thus, the study of inhibition processes in a weak nervous system or breakdown during phenomena of excitation in a strong nervous system shows with significantly greater objectivity what is primary in the very system of the unfolding of "psychic reactions." And further, studies of the same kind, given the presence of an extremely thorough accumulation of data on the life curve of an individual, allow one to pose the question of the dependence of precisely this kind of type of psychic reactions on a number of hereditarily conditioned predispositions, called to life by the conditions of the development of Character itself. Thereby, a number of long-observed facts lying in the plane of studying the curve of age-related changes in Character also receive their theoretical justification. So-called pubertal sharpenings of individual traits of Character, realized either in an increase in vulnerability, sensitivity, withdrawal, timidity, or in some coarsening, emotional coldness, affective explosiveness, scatteredness, often a tendency toward unjustified play of fantasy, etc., receive their understanding precisely in the light of manifestation under the influence of the somatic peculiarity of the pubertal period of development. At the same time, the mechanism for the manifestation of these or other complex formations is a system of certain predispositions, constituting a ready-made path along which the temporary sharpening of these or those traits proceeds. In this direction, one should also seek the mechanism not only of temporary, but also of pathological changes that have a tendency toward fixation, usually manifesting at this age segment (e.g., epileptic, schizophrenic processes). In accordance with the above, at the other end of the life curve—in the period of the age of reverse development—we can also note a number of changes in Character, proceeding either along the line of sharpening its basic traits, or along the line of manifestation of pathological formations in the psyche, lying not so much in Character as, throughout life, soldered to it. This includes so-called climacteric, arteriosclerotic sharpenings of Character, as well as exacerbations of various kinds of pathological processes. It goes without saying that pathological processes do not grow out of Character, but merely use it as a channel for their manifestation, while ordinary sharpenings grow directly out of Character itself and do not change its qualitative basis itself, merely exposing this or that degree of weakness of the neuro-somatic bases of Character (weakness of "psycho-cerebral pathways" according to Berze). The indicated considerations undermine the understanding of the development of Character as it is given by one of the most prominent characterologist-geneticists of modern Germany—Hoffmann. The latter insists, in agreement with the psychologist Heberlin, on isolating in Character groups of "hereditary radicals of personality," which are in constant opposition to one another (antithetical nature of Character). This opposition is the development of Character, which fits, however, within the narrow framework of hereditarily given predispositions. In actual fact, however, the process of the development of Character is infinitely more complex and diverse. The multicolorfulness of the development of Character is determined by the fundamental factor, which receives especially important significance in conditions that liberate the personality. Where the latter is compressed, flattened, crushed by the very course of social development, there, of course, the conditions for the development of Character also acquire an ugly, dull appearance. And only with the radical breaking of such a social order, in conditions of the growth and strengthening of socialist society and culture—only in these conditions does the personality receive the possibility of genuine flourishing. It is precisely in these conditions that the factor of the remaking of the consciousness of the personality begins to act with special force. Together with the growth of consciousness, its expansion, the power of the intellect is remade, grows, and multiplies—this is the sharpest weapon of Character. One must fully agree with Jaspers, who expressed the proposition that the absence of intellect or its underdevelopment distorts Character. It must be emphasized, at the same time, that the presence of a full-fledged intellect allows one to change Character in the direction of revealing its most valuable sides for life. This influence of a full-fledged intellect proceeds not only along the line of compensatory formations, but also along the line of direct changes in the very structure of Character and the degree of intensity of the expression of its individual formations. On a number of empirical facts, these connections between intellectual data and Character are irrefutably confirmed, if only by the well-known change in Character during the period of maturity. In conditions where intellectual data receive all possibilities for their flourishing, this connection of theirs with Character and its bases is even more defined. The most valuable traits of genuine Character are revealed: purposefulness, the ability to achieve a set goal, the ability to break down all sorts of obstacles standing in this path. And it is the business of the entire system of socialist upbringing to master this influencing factor of enormous significance for the growth and strengthening of the new person, the person of socialist culture.