TAKING Lessons IN LOVE
What Famous Scientist Says about Polygamous Men, Modern Women & Marriage
Women in future will not have to marry for social or economic protection; men who have grown up are not polygamous, although those who do not understand loving, who, mentally, are still children, ARE polygamous, says a famous Viennese scientist, Dr. Alfred Adler.
His interesting prescription for the world's social ills, which includes a suggestion for schools to train us in love, is given in the following article, obtained by The Australian Women's Weekly London representative.
By DR. ALFRED ADLER
CRIME, nerves, suicides, unhappy marriages, and other social disorders could be swept away in a couple of generations if tackled in the world's schoolrooms, where evil tendencies develop with very little check.
The world has never made any effort to cure crime. Society punishes crime, but that is no cure.
If all schoolteachers were trained psychologists—a dream of mine that will some day come true—the wayward, difficult and socially antagonistic child would never develop into the criminal of to-morrow.
Unhappy marriages are created by our peculiar social system. If every man and girl who love each other could marry, if money did not enter into it, if social connections did not enter into it, and if relatives could be prevailed upon to mind their own business, there would be far fewer unhappy marriages.
Women's Choice
THE women of the future will not have to marry for a home or protection—that will wipe out one fruitful cause of unhappiness.
The girls of the future will not be looked upon as failures if they do not annex a husband, because they will be so psychologically trained that they will attract the male and yet be able to decide whether they will marry or not—another reason for unhappiness gone.
Men who have grown up are not polygamous. Only those who do not understand loving, who, mentally, are still children, are polygamous. They are not ready for marriage, and from that fact alone comes the instinct of promiscuousness, which is really a revolt against marriage.
The person who is trained to love, the person who understands that even in love there must be give and take, could never be polygamous.
We Are Improving
THOUGH heredity has tremendous influence on our physical attributes, it has scarcely any on our mental make-up. Our kindest actions are often the outcome of vanity, ambition or fear.
Heredity is a strange thing. We are the products of our ancestors, and, except on certain subjects such as war and economics and psychology, we think very much as they thought.
We are better than they were. The world is a better place than it was, and I know it is all the time becoming better because the bad is gradually dying out. Only the good and the great remain.
People who have given nothing to society die out. Architecture, art, literature, music, that goes on forever, but the ordinary person who was not very good or very clever or did not produce children who are good or clever is dead—forgotten.
The strange thing is that murderers have never been known to produce murderers, and drunkards rarely produce drunkards, because their children are brought up in such a way as to eradicate those very traits.
You can see, therefore, how easy it is for the psychologist to notice and eradicate traits in more fortunate children.
All the same, many psychologists probe too deeply into human motives. The reaction is the thing that matters, not so much the motive behind it.
It is rarely right to strip people of their illusions. We all have our dreams, and they are good for us, provided they do not get the upper hand.
Childhood Training
IT is easy to pick out the child with criminal tendencies. He is always the grabbing child. He is the "getting" type, and when he is older and can't get, he takes. He is usually full of vitality for his own projects, and lazy and unenthusiastic about other people's. He wants to lead, to boss, and he always has imaginary grievances.
The trained psychologist can put him right while he is still a child, but when adolescence is past, it is almost too late.
The child who will develop into the neurotic is also a very definite type. He is self-centred, shy, wanting to be at home all the time with mother or sister, longing to be alone, to imagine himself the hero of every tale he reads, and never having the will to grapple with the world as it is.
I study a person's practical reactions to the everyday world rather than concerning myself with their sub-conscious memories and inhibitions.
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THE greatest help in dealing with wayward children is an understanding mother.
This is why the children of the poor are often so much more difficult to treat than the children of the rich, for contrary to general conceptions the former are much more indulged and pampered than the latter.
Watch a poor mother with her baby. It cries for something. She gives it to him whether it is for his good or not. She plays with him when he wants to play. He is not taught to give, but to take.
The rich child is only allowed what is good for him. He is fed only at meal times, and he learns to give in to society even as a baby.
Children's Dreams
IT is the dream life of children that I try most to influence, for it is in their thoughts that children mostly develop. In all these things I say I am talking only of children who are well and who are not mentally defective.
To the mentally normal nothing is impossible. People make their own limitations. One person will say, "I can't sing," but any person who can speak can also sing, for speaking is the most complicated of all human activities and it should also be the most musical.
One of the troubles of the world to-day is that there is not enough concentration.
If teachers, instead of telling children that they cannot do this or that, would only show the children how to concentrate, they would have no failures in examinations or in life.
The failures in life are those who feel beaten, those who feel they cannot accomplish what they must. No one need feel like this. There should be no limit to man's power.
Anyone who is not getting on well in his work, who is not feeling well and yet has nothing organically wrong, should consult a psychologist, just as he would a doctor. In America this has become the custom, and I think, somehow, there are fewer square pegs in round holes there than almost anywhere in the world.
Fuente: transcripción a partir de las imágenes de las páginas en Trove (National Library of Australia, nla.news-article47476404): The Australian Women's Weekly, Sídney, 17 de octubre de 1936, pp. 3 y 26. El OCR de Trove se ha cotejado con la imagen. Varios párrafos van en negrita en el original (no se marcan); se restituyen algunos puntos finales que la impresión apenas deja ver en la p. 26. El texto no coincide con el artículo de Adler sobre la delincuencia y la escuela reimpreso en el Newcastle Sun (20-7-1936, AA1936-08), aunque comparte algunas ideas.