Psychology and Social Sanity

by Hugo Münsterberg

A serious warning lies in the well-known fact that of all professional students, the young medical men have the worst reputation for their reckless indulgence in an erotic life. They know most, and it is psychologically not surprising that just on that account they are most reckless. The instinctive fear of the half knower has left them; they live in an illusory safety, the danger has become familiar to them, and they deceive themselves with the idea that the particular case is harmless. If the steps to be taken were to be worked out at the writing desk in cool mood and sober deliberation, the knowledge would at least often be a certain help, but when the passionate desire has taken hold of the mind and the organic tension of the irritated body works on the mind, there is no longer a fair fight with those sober reasons. The action of the glands controls the psychophysical reactions, so that the ideas which would lead to opposite response are inhibited. Alcohol and the imitative mood of social gayety may help to dull those hygienic fears, but on the whole the mere sexual longing is sufficient to break down the reminiscence of medical warning. The situation for the boy is then ultimately this: A full knowledge of the chances of disease will start in hours of sexual coolness on the one side a certain resolution to abstain from sexual intercourse, and on the other side a certain intention to use protective means for the prevention of venereal diseases. As soon as the sexual desire awakes, the decision of the first kind will become the less effective, and will be the more easily overrun the more firmly the idea is fixed that such preventive means are at his disposal. At the same time the discussion of all these sexual matters, even with their gruesome background, will force on the mind a stronger engagement with sexual thought than had ever before occurred, and this will find its discharge in an increased sexual tension. On the other hand, this new knowledge of means of safety will greatly increase the playing with danger. Of course it may be said that the education ought not to refer only to sexual hygiene, but that it ought to be a moral education. That, however, is an entirely different story. We shall speak about it; we shall put our faith in it, but at present we are talking of that specific sexual education which is the fad of the day.

V

Sexual education, to be sure, does not necessarily mean education of young people only. The adults who know, the married men and women of the community, may not know enough to protect their sons and daughters. And the need for their full information may stretch far beyond their personal family interests. They are to form the public opinion which must stand behind every real reform, their consciences must be stirred, the hidden misery must be brought before them. Thus they need sexual education as much as the youngsters, only they need it in a form which appeals to them and makes them willing to listen; and our reformers have at last discovered the form. The public must be taught from the stage of the theatre. The magazine with its short stories on sex incidents, the newspaper with its sensational court reports, may help to carry the gruesome information to the masses, but the deepest impression will always be made when actual human beings are shown on the stage in their appealing distress, as living accusations against the rotten foundations of society. The stage is overcrowded with sexual drama and the social community inundated with discussions about it.

It is not easy to find the right attitude toward this red-light literature. Many different interests are concerned, and it is often extremely difficult to disentangle them. Three such interests stand out very clearly: the true æsthetic one, the purely commercial one, and the sociological one. It would be wonderful if the æsthetic culture of our community had reached a development at which the æsthetic attitude toward a play would be absolutely controlling. If we could trust this æsthetic instinct, no other question would be admissible but the one whether the play is a good work of art or not. The social inquiry whether the human fates which the poet shows us suggests legislative reforms or hygienic improvements would be entirely inhibited in the truly artistic consciousness. It would make no difference to the spectator whether the action played in Chicago or Petersburg, whether it dealt with men and women of to-day or of two thousand years ago. The human element would absorb our interest, and as far as the joys and the miseries of sexual life entered into the drama, they would be accepted as a social background, just as the landscape is the natural background. A community which is æsthetically mature enough to appreciate Ibsen does not leave “The Ghosts” with eugenic reform ideas. The inherited paralysis on a luetic basis is accepted there as a tragic element of human fate. On the height of true art the question of decency or indecency has disappeared, too. The nude marble statue is an inspiration, and not a possible stimulus to frivolous sensuality, if the mind is æsthetically cultivated. The nakedness of erotic passion in the drama of high æsthetic intent before a truly educated audience has not the slightest similarity to the half-draped chorus of sensual operetta before a gallery which wants to be tickled. But who would claim that the dramatic literature of the sexual problems with which the last seasons have filled the theatres from the orchestra to the second balcony has that sublime æsthetic intent, or that it was brought to a public which even posed in an æsthetic attitude! As far as any high aim was involved, it was the antiæsthetic moral value. The plays presented themselves as appeals to the social conscience, and yet this idealistic interpretation would falsify the true motives on both sides. The crowd went because it found the satisfaction of sexual curiosity and erotic tension through the unveiled discussion of social perversities. And the managers produced the plays because the lurid subjects with their appeal to the low instincts, and therefore with their sure commercial success, could here escape the condemnation of police and decent public as they were covered by the pretence of social reform. How far the writers of the play of prostitution prostituted art in order to share the commercial profits in this wave of sexual reform may better remain undiscussed.

What do these plays really teach us? I think I have seen almost all of them, and the composite picture in my mind is one of an absurdly distorted, exaggerated, and misleading view of actual social surroundings, suggesting wrong problems, wrong complaints, and wrong remedies. When I studied the reports of the vice commissions of the large American and European cities, the combined image in my consciousness was surely a stirring and alarming one, but it had no similarity with the character of those melodramatic vagaries. Even the best and most famous of these fabrications throw wrong sidelights on the social problems, and by a false emphasis inhibit the feeling for the proportions of life. If in “The Fight” the father, a senator, visits a disorderly house, unlocks the room in which the freshest fruit is promised him, and finds there his young daughter who has just been abducted by force, the facts themselves are just as absurd as the following scenes, in which this father shows that the little episode did not make the slightest impression on him. He coolly continues to fight against those politicians who want to remove such places from the town. In “Bought and Paid For” marriage itself is presented as white slavery. The woman has to tolerate the caresses of her husband, even when he has drunk more champagne than is wise for him. The play makes us believe that she must suffer his love because she was poor before she married and he has paid her with a life of luxury. Where are we to end if such logic in questions of sexual intercourse is to benumb common sense? England brought us “The Blindness of Virtue,” the story of a boy and a girl whom we are to believe to be constantly in grave danger because they are ignorant, while in reality nothing happens, and everything suggests that the moral danger for this particular girl would have been much greater if she had known how to enjoy love without consequences.

The most sensational specimen of the group was “The Lure.” It would be absurd to face this production from any æsthetic point of view. It would be unthinkable that a work of such crudeness could satisfy a metropolitan public, even if some of the most marked faults of construction were acknowledged as the results of the forceful expurgation of the police. Nevertheless, the only significance of the play lies outside of its artistic sphere, and belongs entirely to its effort to help in this great social reform. The only strong applause, which probably repeats itself every evening, broke out when the old, good-natured physician said that as soon as women have the vote the white slavers will be sent to the electric chair. But it is worth while to examine the sermon which a play of this type really preaches, and to become aware of the illusions with which the thoughtless public receives this message. All which we see there on the stage is taken by the masses as a remonstrance against the old, cowardly policy of silence, and the play is to work as a great proof that complete frankness and clear insight can help the daughters of the community.

The whole play contains the sad story of two girls. There is Nell. What happened to her? She is the daughter of a respectable banker in a small town. A scoundrel, a commercial white slaver, a typical Broadway “cadet” with luring manners, goes to the small town, finds access to the church parlours, is introduced to the girl, and after some courtship he elopes with her and makes her believe that they are correctly married. After the fraudulent marriage with a falsified license he brings her into a metropolitan disorderly house and holds her there by force. Of course this is brutal stage exaggeration, but even if this impossibility were true, what conclusion are we to draw, and what advice are we to give? Does it mean that in future a young girl who meets a nice chap in the church socials of her native town ought to keep away from him, because she ought all the time to think that he might be a delegate of a Broadway brothel? To fill a girl with suspicions in a case like that of Nell would be no wiser than to tell the ordinary man that he ought not to deposit his earnings in any bank, because the cashier might run away with it. To be sure, it would have been better if Nell had not eloped, but is there any knowledge of sexual questions which would have helped her to a wiser decision? On the contrary, she said she did elope because her life in the small town was so uninteresting, and she felt so lonely and was longing for the life of love. She knew all which was to be known then, and if there had been any power to hold her back from the foolish elopement it could have been only a kind of instinctive respect for the traditional demands of society, that kind of respect which grows up from the policy of silence and is trampled to the ground by the policy of loud talk.

The other girl in the play is Sylvia. Her fate is very different. She needs melodramatic money for her sick mother. Her earnings in the department store are not enough. The sly owner of a treacherous employment agency has given her a card over the counter, advising her to come there, when she needs extra employment. The agency keeps open in the evening. She tells her mother that she will seek some extra work there. The mother warns her that there are so many traps for decent girls, and she answers that she is not afraid and that she will be on the lookout. She goes there, and the skilful owner of the agency shows her how miserable the pay would be for any decent evening work, and how easily she can earn all the money she needs for her mother if she is willing to be paid by men. At first she refuses with pathos, but under the suggestive pressure of luring arguments she slowly weakens, and finally consents to exchange her street gown for a fantastic costume of half-nakedness. The feelings of the audience are saved by the detective who breaks in at the decisive moment, but the arguments of the advocates of sexual education cannot possibly be saved after that voluntary yielding. Sylvia knows what she has to expect, and no more intense perusal of literature on the subject of prostitution would have changed her mind. What else in the world could have helped her in such an hour but a still stronger feeling of instinctive repugnance? If Sylvia was actually to put her fate on a mere calculation, with a full knowledge of all the sociological facts involved, she probably reasoned wrongly in dealing with this particular employment agency, but was on the whole not so wrong in deciding that a frivolous life would be the most reasonable way out of her financial difficulties, as her sexual education would include, of course, a sufficient knowledge of all which is needed to avoid conception and infection. She would therefore know that after a little while of serving the lust of men she would be just as intact and just as attractive. If society has the wish to force Sylvia to a decision in the opposite direction, only one way is open: to make the belief in the sacred value of virtue so deep and powerful that any mere reasoning and calculation loses its strength. But that is possible only through an education which relies on the instinctive respect and mystical belief. Only a policy of silence could have saved Sylvia, because that alone would have implanted in her mind an ineffable idea of unknown horrors which would await her when she broke the sacred ring of chastity.

The climax of public discussions was reached when America had its season of Brieux' “Damaged Goods.” Its topic is entirely different, as it deals exclusively with the spreading of contagious diseases and the prevention of their destructive influence on the family. Yet the doubt whether such a dramatized medical lesson belongs on the metropolitan stage has here exactly the same justification. Nevertheless, it brings its new set of issues. Brieux' play does not deserve any interest as a drama. With complete sincerity the theatre programme announces, “The object of this play is a study of the disease of syphilis in its bearing on marriage.” The play was first produced in Paris in the year 1901. It began its great medical teaching in America in the spring of 1913. Even those who have only superficial contact with medicine know that the twelve years which lie between those dates have seen the greatest progress in the study of syphilis which has ever been made. It is sufficient to think of the Wassermann test, the Ehrlich treatment, the new discoveries concerning the relations of lues and brain disease, and many other details in order to understand that a clinical lesson about this disease written in the first year of the century must be utterly antiquated in its fourteenth year. We might just as well teach the fighting of tuberculosis with the clinical textbook of thirty years ago.

How misleading many of the claims of the play are ought to have struck even the unscientific audience. The real centre of the so-called drama is that the father and the grandmother of the diseased infant are willing to risk the health of the wet nurse rather than to allow the child to go over to artificial feeding. The whole play loses its chief point and its greatest pathetic speech if we do not accept the Parisian view that a sickly child must die if it has its milk from the bottle. The Boston audience wildly applauded the great speech of the grandmother who wants to poison the nurse rather than to sacrifice her grandchild to the drinking of sterilized milk, and yet it was an audience which surely was brought up on the bottle. It would be very easy to write another play in which quite different medical views are presented, and where will it lead us if the various treatments of tuberculosis, perhaps by the Friedmann cures, or of diphtheria, perhaps by chiropractice or osteopathy, are to be fought out on the stage until finally the editors of Life would write a play around their usual thesis that the physicians are destroying mankind and that our modern medicine is humbug. As long as the drama shows us human elements, every one can be a party and can take a stand for the motives of his heart. But if the stage presents arguments on scientific questions in which no public is able to examine the facts, the way is open for any one-sided propaganda.