Just what is it which differentiates between two lives of similar asocial behavior or suffering affectional wounds, one becoming disorganized, the other attaining higher levels of mental and social integration? Certain psychoanalytic biographies show struggles of eminent men and women who passed through periods of mental strain or moral failure, yet rose superior to and even strengthened by their wrestling with life. Our revered Abraham Lincoln not only kept bride and guests waiting on the first date set for his wedding, but disappeared from family and friends for three days. Imagine the frenzy of the modern press over such an event.
Psychiatrists are interpreting to nervous patients symptoms of strain and sorrow, assisting them to assimilate such emotional experience and to regain poise. It is possible to minimize sexual blunder as unfortunate but not irreparable. One recovers from disease, from disappointment. One lie told may bring from the parent an explanation of the importance of truth and be a milestone on the upward path. Such lesson, however, should never be based on condemnation but must be linked with idealism. A wise physician said, “Nature tends toward meliorism.” This accounts for the success of girls who pull themselves up without aid.
That nature has brought us up from the amœba to man should give us confidence in Life Force. Life is not so simple as to have one “definition of the situation” solve the whole problem. This will take further trial and error. The scientific mind observes, differentiates, finds contrasts and resemblances. Bits of inorganic elements may be identical, but in the study of living organisms the higher the type the greater the possibility of variation, till in man no two are identical in finger print, still less so in emotional reaction. Even when a new period of socialization shall have simplified life, each individual must still be considered separately, each personality approached with utmost reverence, accepted for values and possibilities which when developed displace asocial behavior. The problems of sexual disharmony, retarded emotion, affectional distress, which send people of wealth to the sanitarium or divorce court, lead the poor to delinquency. The future court of domestic relations may become a clinic for all.
On the whole this period of individualization is more fortunate for women than otherwise. Their struggle for independence is winning higher standards of affectional association in friendships with both sexes, higher psychic and social levels of group coöperation. Though one deplores the necessity of divorce one watches its increase with the feeling that consecutive marriages are an advance upon simultaneous promiscuity. From marriage based upon possession there is evolving a fine comradeship in which psychic fertilization becomes ever more significant as is seen in the collaboration of man and woman in art, science, literature and social service. While marriage within the law may attain the highest level of human mating known today, and social sanction is necessary for right environment for children, it is not law which achieves this result but the ever evolving adjustments of fine personality shown by men and women in whom emotion and intellect and will have matured harmoniously and in whose lives sublimation begun in childhood has given stability.
Sex has always baffled humanity. Alternately it has been considered sacred and sinful, attached to temple worship or cast beyond the pale. In this day of scientific synthesis we are solving some at least of the fundamentals of this Welträtsel.
This present research of William I. Thomas with his trenchant sociological analysis is a distinct contribution not only to the study of delinquency but to educational and industrial problems. As his conclusions point toward the practice of the most advanced experimental schools and also conform to the theories of certain leading psychiatrists, this triple concurrence of opinion indicates approach to scientific truth. Mr. Thomas’s interpretation of today’s unrest as a “period of individualization following and preceding periods of socialization” emphasizes our present opportunity to reorganize the administration of justice. Let such reorganization be based upon that emergent truth which Dean Pound has called “the most important change of the century,—the transference of the sense of value from property to humanity.”
Ethel S. Dummer
CONTENTS
| CHAPTER | PAGE | |
| Editorial Announcement | [iii] | |
| Foreword. By Mrs. W. F. Dummer | [v] | |
| I | The Wishes | [1] |
| II | The Regulation of the Wishes | [41] |
| III | The Individualization of Behavior | [70] |
| IV | The Demoralization of Girls | [98] |
| V | Social Agencies | [151] |
| VI | The Measurement of Social Influence | [222] |
| Index | [259] |
THE UNADJUSTED GIRL