Salter, Chapters 5 & 6 & pages 268 – 271 Flashcards
The Excitatory Personality
Relaxed, spontaneous, takes things as they come
Judgments and improvisations are expressions of the full individual
Emotionally honest/honesty of response
Direct
Sincerely likes people, but doesn’t care what they think
Free of anxiety
Likes responsibility
Happy
Using General Eisenhower as an example of an excitatory person because he illustrated spontaneous, outgoing feeling.
This, Salter says, is the basis of mental health
“A happy person does not waste time thinking:” self -control comes from no control at all
Excitatory act
Act without thinking
Inhibitory act
Think without acting
In doing this, one deludes oneself into believing that they are highly civilized
Inhibition and Success
It is possible to be inhibitory and successful, but at the price of happiness
Without emotional honesty, there can be only discontent and misery
The important things in life are called juvenile because the inhibitory are suspicious of emotional language they do not understand
“Extroverts”
Salter points out that most extroverts are actually inhibitory because they express dishonest emotion
Excitation is a matter of emotional freedom and has nothing to do with social participation
People with energetic drive and a liking for people = not necessarily excitatory
Inhibitory Personality
Inhibitory person suffers from “constipation of emotions”
Feelings need to be vented to ensure mental health
Man obeys the same emotional laws as any other animal
Characteristics:
Suspicious and seldom relaxed
Lack of sense of humor
Frequently satirical and cruel; practical jokers
Unnatural, unhappy
Insecure
Conceals/distrusts true emotional impulses
Condones one’s behavior with logic, but feels unsatisfied
Finds relations with others uncomfortable or annoying
Feels no lust in living
Unable to fully express affections to the opposite sex
Constantly have unfinished business
“Keep roadblocks between the heart and the tongue”
Suppress gut, inflate brain (suppress emotions; think too much)
Refuse to fight others and end up fighting themselves
“Chameleons,” trying to please the people they’re with
Consider themselves open-minded, tolerant, democratic
One rationalization for behavior: one desires acceptance from others
Dwells on others’ infractions against oneself, and describes oneself as sensitive
Constantly feel as if one is attracting too much attention or inconveniencing someone
Indecisive; opinions are neutral
Dwells on the past; worries about the future
Discontent
Discontent with oneself is the product of discontent with one’s relationship with others
Salter says, “The person who jumps out of a window wouldn’t have done so if he had pushed someone else out”
Self-sufficiency, an aspect of inhibition
Lack of it destroys any chance at happiness
Low Self-Sufficiency:
Confides everything to everyone
Must always be encouraged; seeks advice a lot
Would rather be dominated than work alone
Perpetually psychoanalyzed
Hesitate, fluctuate, and procrastinate through life
Passive
This trait won’t be found among the well-adjusted
In therapy, this is a discouraging trait and must be treated with finesse and caution if it is to be affected at all
Inhibition Generates Inadequacy
Upon seeing a new case, Salter asks:
How did his natural freedom get lost?
And, more important, how can his natural freedom be restored?
Sexual Dysfunction
Talking oneself out of one’s bodily desires = impossible
Impotence/frigidity (male/female sexual dysfunction) is best treated by disinhibition and associational reconditioning
Associational reconditioning:
e.g. Man who was impotent since he moved to a new apartment with his wife
In therapy, it came out that he had been interrupted by a third party while having sex (prior to being married) in a room with similar wallpaper to his new apartment
Once the wallpaper was changed, he was fine
Sexual Dysfunction Explained Using Pavlov’s Definitions of Inhibition
External inhibition:
• A conditioned response was diminished by some outside stimulus acting as a distraction
• e.g. a woman who is “frigid” may have become so because she was constantly interrupted during intercourse
Internal inhibition:
The positive conditioned stimulus itself becomes, under definite conditions, negative or inhibitory
Experimental extinction
o Was presented continuously without reinforcement
Inhibition of delay
o Too much of a delay between sexual stimulation and satisfaction, sexual responses become inhibited
Conditioned inhibition
o When a woman has sex with man A, her sexual responses are inhibited and she can’t have an orgasm. However, when she’s with man B, she can because man A – the conditioned inhibitory stimulus – is absent.
Also: an inhibitory stimulus is applied simultaneously and repeatedly for short periods of time together with some neutral stimulus, the NS will develop an inhibitory function of its own.
• This is higher-order conditioning
** Higher-order conditioning and the juxtaposition of unfortunate circumstances account for symptoms encountered in psychotherapy.
Salter’s Grand warning
“Overwhelming proportion of humanity is freed from its shackles of inhibition…the earth may be doomed to fear, hatred, hypocrisy, misery, war, and destruction. Only through excitation can we achieve mastery of ourselves.”
