The endocrines / by Samuel Wyllis Bandler.

  • Bandler, S. Wyllis (Samuel Wyllis), 1869-1932.
Date:
1920
Catalogue details

Licence: In copyright

Credit: The endocrines / by Samuel Wyllis Bandler. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    little child clung- to his father and said: “I want to go home.” The father replied: “All right, but let’s hear just one more of those lovely sounds and watch that beautiful smoke.” At the next report, the father said: “Isn’t that lovely? Let’s watch another,”—and he jumped up and down, repeating the words, “lovely, fine, beautiful,”—and soon the child also jumped up and down, repeating these words, watched the whole performance, and was taken home with fear changed to an emotion of pleasure by the shunting or shifting process which interposed a switch between the stimulus given through the eye and ear and the first instinctive reaction. The same method was applied to thunder, and the child now regards thunder as the talk of the clouds telling the raindrops to fall. One day this child screamed out with a note of fear in his voice when his older sister, growling like a lion, asked him to hide under his bed-clothes for the sake of play. When asked why he cried out and why he refused to play, he replied that he was afraid to go under the bed-clothes because there might be a lion there. Now, for hours he had played with his father, hiding under the bed-clothes, while the indulgent parent pre¬ tended to seek him elsewhere, and he would continue this play without let-up on innumerable occasions had his wish been followed. But hearing the growl, with his sister impersonating a lion, meant something different to him. The next day when his father carried him upstairs on his back, he said: “I am going to be a big lion and you are the baby lion; you know lions don’t talk as we do, they growl, but they understand each other. Now I am going to growl real loud, and that means T love you’; and then you’ll growl back, and I’ll know you are saying that you love me. Now, when I am going upstairs, if you want me to go faster, growl louder still, and I will know what that means.” As a result, the lion play, with the bed¬ clothes, is a source of pleasure to this three and a half year old boy. One summer, a five year old child,—a little girl brought up without any element of fear, protected from stories in which death w'as mentioned, a child to whom no fairy tales were read