Page:American Journal of Psychology Volume 21.djvu/258

 nearest environment; we allow ourselves to be infected and carried away by it. Originally the affects and their physical manifestations had a biological significance; i.e., they were a protective mechanism for the individual and the whole herd. If we manifest emotions we can with certainty expect to receive emotions in return. That is the sense of the predicate type. What the 45-year-old woman lacks in emotions; i.e., in love in her marriage relations she seeks to obtain from the outside, and it is for that reason that she is an ardent participant in the Christian Science meetings. If the daughter imitates this situation she does the same thing as her mother, she seeks to obtain emotions from the outside. But for a girl of 16 such an emotional state is to say the least quite dangerous; like her mother she reacts to her environment as a sufferer soliciting sympathy. Such an emotional state is no longer dangerous in the mother, but for obvious reasons it is quite dangerous in the daughter. Once freed from her father and mother she will be like her mother; i.e., she will be a suffering woman craving for inner gratification. She will thus be exposed to the greatest danger of falling a victim to brutality and of marrying a brute and inebriate like her father.

This consideration seems to me to be of importance for the conception of the influence of environment and education. The example shows what passes over from the mother to the child. It is not the good and pious precepts, nor is it any other inculcation of pedagogic truths that have a moulding influence upon the character of the developing child, but what most influences him is the peculiarly affective state which is totally unknown to his parents and educators. The concealed discord between the parents, the secret worry, the repressed hidden wishes, all these produce in the individual a certain affective state with its objective signs which slowly but surely, though unconsciously, works its way into the child’s mind, producing therein the same conditions and hence the same reactions to external stimuli. We know that association with mournful and melancholic persons will depress us, too. A restless and nervous individual infects his surroundings with unrest and dissatisfaction, a grumbler, with his discontent, etc. If grownup persons are so sensitive to such surrounding influences we certainly ought to expect more of this in the child whose mind is as soft and plastic as wax. The father and mother impress deeply into the child’s mind the seal of their personality, the more sensitive and mouldable the child the deeper is the impression. Thus even things that are never spoken about are reflected in the child. The child imitates the gesture, and just as the gesture of the parent is the expression of an emotional state, so in turn the gesture gradually produces in the child a