The ectomorph, the cerebrotonic, is essentially an introvert and lives in a permanent state of restraint. His actions are restrained. He has great difficulty in communication. He is not a good mixer. He feels that the endomorph, with his pouring out of what he is feeling, is very shallow, very trivial, and vulgar in many ways, and he is horrified by the driving energy of the mesomorph. He is very fond of privacy and doesn’t make much noise. Under the influence of alcohol he just feels ill.
So much for what seems to be the most highly developed scientific correlation yet made between physique and temperament. I find it extraordinary that this should have been so totally neglected by Freudian and by neo-Freudian psychology, but unfortunately, among many schools of psychology at the present time, the importance of hereditary physical differences in the whole study of the human psyche is sadly under-estimated. I want to read a brief passage from a recent book by Professor Norman Brown, Life Against Death. He is speaking very critically of the neo-Freudians and blaming them for thinking too much in purely psychological terms, and he sets up against them what he calls the ‘materialism’ of Freud himself.
He says, ‘With the loss of the Freudian materialism of the body, psychology becomes in neo-Freudian hands, as also in Jungian hands, once more what it was before the Freudian revolution, a psychology of the autonomous soul.’ But when we pass from this generalization to the specific facts of the case and see what Professor Brown, who is an ardent Freudian, has to say about ‘Freudian materialism of the body’, we find that the materialism consists almost exclusively in a preoccupation with events in only two parts of the body—the mouth and the anus. It is an absolutely extraordinary fact that the ‘Freudian materialism of the body’ boils down to this incredibly limited preoccupation with such an infinitesimal part of the total physical organism. After all, we are much more than these two aspects of the body, and we do know that our bodies have the most profound influence upon our behaviour and upon other people’s behaviour.
Psychologists proceed as though we were disembodied souls or souls connected only with one or the other end of a digestive tube, as Freud would have us believe, and nothing else. And it is all the more remarkable when one reads that so extremely acute and philosophical a psychiatric writer as Erich Fromm, one of the neo-Freudians, defines temperament as the psychic qualities which are rooted in a constitutionally given soma. This is an admirable definition. Then he says that it is extremely important that psychologists should take account of these temperamental differences. And he says that undoubtedly in the future this will take place. But he himself pays no further attention to them at all, ignores the fact that there is already a very large literature on the subject, and proceeds as though nothing whatever had been done.
Not only are the main schools of psychiatry today indifferent to the relationship between the psyche and the physique, but we find the same sort of indifference in behaviourism. We have, for example, in B. F. Skinner’s Science and Human Behavior, a very fully developed science of human behaviour which is exactly like, say, the science of the laws of motion. But the laws of motion are illustrated in very different ways by a breaking wave, a flying arrow, and a butterfly. It seems to me self-evident that the laws of behaviour are illustrated in very different ways according to the physique and temperament of the person who illustrates them, yet there is the minimum of reference to the fundamental physical and temperamental differences between people.
Sheldon has also done very valuable work in the field of mental illness. On the basis of standardized photographs of three thousand schizophrenics in various mental hospitals, he has come to some very interesting conclusions. He found, first of all, that Kretschmer’s earlier insight that schizophrenia was very largely correlated with a high degree of ectomorphy is true. But he goes on to say that what Kretschmer did not make clear is that in a very large proportion of these cases there was not merely ectomorphy but also a high degree of disharmony within the body, which was clearly reflected by a disharmony within the temperament. Consequently, one has to consider the idea that while schizophrenia may be precipitated by traumatic experiences, these experiences are felt to be traumatic because they occur to people in a high ectomorphic region with a high degree of dysplasia. There wouldn’t have been such disastrous effects if these people had been shaped differently.
Here again we see the enormous sociological importance of Sheldon’s ideas. If there are people who can be identified as, so to speak, predestined to go towards schizophrenia, then there is quite a lot we can do in the way of prevention by means of differential education to shield them from disturbing shocks. And there is probably also something which can be done on the pharmacological level, for it seems to be pretty clear that most schizophrenics have some biochemical anomaly. Presumably the traumatic experience accentuates the biochemical anomaly, which in turn makes people schizophrenic mentally, which in turn makes them more subject to these traumatic experiences—and so a vicious circle is set up. The importance of finding a way to check this most serious of all the scourges which now affect civilized men becomes clear when we realize that more than 50 per cent of all hospital beds in this country are occupied by schizophrenics. It is our major health problem at the moment, and it is simply not being solved by the kind of psychotherapy which is at present available, largely because this psychotherapy has ignored the physical correlates of the disease.
A very interesting case of the correlation between physique and character is to be found in the traditional image of Christ. Christ has been painted now for nearly two thousand years and if we look at his traditional image we find that he is always represented as a personage with a high degree of ectomorphy. On the basis of a study of many hundreds of these images, Sheldon says that the average figure of Christ in Christian art is a 2-3-5, that is to say, there is a certain amount of endomorphy, which gives the power of communication and sympathy; a bit more of mesomorphy, which gives the messianic drive and the power to carry through the message; and a high degree of ectomorphy, which gives the inward-looking life and the doctrine of restraint which has run through the whole orthodoxy of Christianity. What to do with the extreme mesomorphs has been one of the great problems of Christianity. They have in the past been controlled by the various orders of chivalry and by elaborate educational procedures, all based upon a cerebrotonic view of life, with an idea of restraint and control.
It is quite clear that there has always been an intuition among Christians that this was the inevitable physical form of the Saviour. In fact, it is very interesting that in the rare cases where artists have departed from this traditional norm we are often rather shocked by the representation. Certain artists have represented the form of Christ as a much higher mesomorph. There is a very famous picture of the resurrection by Piero della Francesca which shows this tremendously athletic figure rising from the grave. It is a magnificent picture, but it is curiously out of the traditional view of Christ. There are also muscular, powerful figures of Christ in many of the paintings of Rubens. When he had seen some of these paintings William Blake made the little rhyme which says,
I understood Christ was a carpenter
And not a brewer’s servant, my good Sir.
We should remark here that no artist whatever has represented Christ with a high degree of endomorphy. In this Christianity differs very much from Confucianism, for some of the Chinese sacred figures are typical endomorph figures—big, soft, and comfortable. Actually, the Confucian system is essentially endomorphic. It is a system of relaxation, of great preoccupation with family, of ceremoniousness, and it is thus not at all like the Christian system. It has a different kind of temperamental background to it.
We see, then, that on the deepest level our unconscious equals our constitution: we are determined by what we physically and temperamentally are. Naturally the environment plays a very great part, but it plays the particular part it does because we are the particular people that we are. It is important to bring out this deepest physical level of the unconscious because it is quite pointless to talk about the unconscious unless we see it rooted in the constitutional differences which make us the individuals we are.
The end
