The Unadjusted Girl, With Cases and Standpoint for Behavior Analysis

by William Isaac Thomas

And to think that he learned this engraving in a public library.[^[111]]

And there are many cases in the records of courts and prisons showing a high degree of imagination, ingenuity, constructive intelligence, artistic ability, and careers as long continued in crime as legitimate life careers in physics, engineering, or art.

93. Adrian Gorder, born in Holland, the son of a night watchman, set about making of himself a counterfeit priest with as much thoroughness as Wilken set about making counterfeit money. He learned all the technique of the church service, including music and church history, celebrated Mass perfectly, posed as member of various religious orders, dressed richly, was poetic and plausible. He visited, for example, Budapest, made certain representations of himself to the clergy there, showed pictures of eminent ecclesiastics and spoke of them as his friends. Talked intimately about church affairs, celebrated Mass, borrowed money or cashed worthless paper and disappeared. He was not so perfect a counterfeit as Wilken’s bills because he had not completely mastered Latin as a spoken tongue, but in spite of frequent incarcerations he operated for twenty-five years over a large part of the world.[^[112]]

All the types of wishes coexist in every person,—the vague desire for new experience, for change, for the satisfaction of the appetites, for pleasure; the new experience contained in a pursuit, as in the cases of Pasteur and Wilken; the desire for response in personal relations (“there was a girl Wilken liked and who liked him”); the desire for recognition (Wilken was “ambitious for success, for wealth, for position, for luxury”); and the desire for security,—the assurance of the means and conditions for gratifying all the wishes indefinitely. And all of these classes of wishes are general mental attitudes ready to express themselves in schemes of action which utilize and are dependent upon the existing social values. These values may be material, as when Wilken used the library, the printing office, the paper mill, or they may be the mental attitudes of others, as when a bogus nobleman imposes on the desire for recognition of a bourgeois, or a scientist appeals to a philanthropic person to endow an institution for medical research. That is, the attitudes of one person are among the values of another person.

The attitudes of a given person at a given moment are the result of his original temperament, the definitions of situations given by society during the course of his life, and his personal definitions of situations derived from his experience and reflection. The character of the individual depends on these factors.

Any mobilization of energies in a plan of action means that some attitude (tendency to action) among the other attitudes has come to the front and subordinated the other attitudes to itself for the moment, as the result of a new definition of the situation. This definition may be the counsel of a friend, an act of memory reviving a social definition applicable to the situation, or an element of new experience defining the situation. Thus in Wilken’s case the newspaper item stating that a package of counterfeit money had been picked up identified itself with a wish that was present and seeking expression; the fact that Wilken already had some skill in drawing entered into the definition of the situation, and the result was an attitude and a plan: get money by counterfeiting.

The definition of the situation by Cölestine was determined by the death of Ursula, and the scheme was made possible by the current theological definition of heaven and the credulity of Ursula’s parents, used as values by Ursula. In Gorder’s case we may assume that his observation of the life of priests, and certainly some particular expression of this, caught his attention and defined the situation for him. It may be remarked that this whole process is similar to the steps in a mechanical invention,—a particular datum working on a body of previous experience, producing a new definition of the situation and a plan or theory.

The moral good or evil of a wish lies therefore not in the cleverness or elaboration of the mental scheme through which it is expressed but in its regard or disregard for existing social values. The same wish and the same quality of mind may lead to totally different results. A tendency to phantasy may make of the subject a scientist, a swindler, or simply a liar. The urge to wandering and adventure may stop at vagabondage, the life of a cowboy, missionary, geologist, or ethnologist. The sporting interest may be gratified by shooting birds, studying them with a camera, or pursuing a scientific theory. The desire for response may be expressed in the Don Juan type of life, with many love adventures, in stable family life, in love lyrics, or in the relation of the prostitute to her pimp. The desire for recognition may seek its gratification in ostentatious dress and luxury or in forms of creative work. That is to say, a wish may have various psychologically equivalent expressions. The problem is to define situations in such ways as to produce attitudes which direct the action exclusively toward fields yielding positive social values. The transfer of a wish from one field of application to another field representing a higher level of values is called the sublimation of the wish. This transfer is accomplished by the fact of public recognition which attaches a feeling of social sacredness to some schemes of action and their application in comparison with others,—the activities of the scientist, physician, or craftsman on the one hand and the activities of the adventurer, the criminal, or the prostitute on the other. This feeling of sacredness actually arises only in groups, and an individual can develop the feeling only in association with a group which has definite standards of sacredness. Practically, any plan which gets favorable public recognition is morally good,—for the time being. And this is the only practical basis of judgment of the moral quality of an act,—whether it gets favorable or unfavorable recognition.

The problem of the desirable relation of individual wishes to social values is thus twofold, containing (1) the problem of the dependence of the individual upon social organization and culture, and (2) the problem of the dependence of social organization and culture upon the individual. In practice the first problem means: What social values and how presented will produce the desirable mental attitudes in the members of the social group? And the second problem means: What schematizations of the wishes of the individual members of the group will produce the desirable social values, promote the organization and culture of the society?

The problem of the individual involves in its details the study of all the social influences and institutions,—family, school, church, the law, the newspaper, the story, the motion picture, the occupations, the economic system, the unorganized personal relationships, the division of life into work and leisure time, etc. But the human wish underlies all social happenings and institutions, and human experiences constitute the reality beneath the formal social organization and behind the statistically formulated mass-phenomena. Taken in themselves statistics are nothing more than symptoms of unknown causal processes. A social institution can be understood and modified only if we do not limit ourselves to the study of its formal organization but analyze the way in which it appears in the personal experience of various members of the group and follow the influence which it has on their lives. And an individual can be understood only if we do not limit ourselves to a cross-section of his life as revealed by a given act, a court record or a confession, or to the determination of what type of life-organization exists, but determine the means by which a certain life-organization is developed.