Body Week 6: Who am I? Ask my body.

[imomus]

Sometimes at university I'd get down. I'd get 'nobody understands me' feelings, or 'I'm not like other people' feelings. Now, you might think that a quick trip to the student union bar to get hammered might have sorted this out, but that's because you don't understand me: I'm not like other people. Instead of heading downtown to the Red Lounge, I'd walk to the big Queen Mother Library -- it stayed open late into the night, a big rational blaze of light and books held together by calm Modernist architecture -- and check out psychology books. I was particularly interested in books about 'the creative personality' and books about the psychology of thin people; I figured my 'problems' -- and also my strengths -- we all tied up with being thin, being introverted, being creative. Rather than dissolving my differences in beer and banal universalist well-being at the Student Union, I wanted to find justifications for my particularities. I wanted to exaggerate and celebrate them. I was, quite possibly, a narcissist ponce and a silly prig.



The books worked. They made me feel better about... well, whoever I figured I was. Their studies of 'the creative personality' told me that it was quite normal for me to shun the Red Lounge. Creative people were, on the whole, introverts. They were 'desurgent', which meant they didn't get loud and excitable, but tended to stay pensive and rather melancholic. And they kept 'an internal locus of evaluation', which meant they measured their achievements by their own standards and didn't seem to care what the people around them thought. I loaded my slim frame with heavy books -- behaviourist psychology, humanist psychotherapy, and existentialist morality -- and staggered home to my hall of residence up on the hill. I became a devotee of existentialist-Marxist-spiritualist Erich Fromm, whose The Art of Loving and To Have or to Be became moral guidebooks for me.

Fromm wrote a lot about creativity. He identified four traits which he said should be nurtured: our capacity to be puzzled, our ability to concentrate, our capacity to accept conflict, and our willingness to be reborn every day. These messages made perfect sense to me. They meshed perfectly with the boho moralism of the lyrics of Ari Up of The Slits, another mentor, who described doped-up uncreative white people in new towns 'sniffing televisino or playing footballino' or declared 'difficult fun is hard to find, but empty fun is easy to find' or 'if you don't make eye-contact stepping down the street / You're one of them and you are safe, sleeping down the street'. It all meshed; the existential stuff meshed with the moral stuff, which meshed with the boho stuff, which meshed with the creativity literature by humanist psychologists like Baron, Rogers and Maslow. Maslow could have been describing my idealised image of Ari Up when he sketched the creative personality as 'spontaneous, expressive, effortless, innocent, unfrightened by the unknown or ambiguous, able to accept tentativeness and uncertainty, able to tolerate bipolarity, able to integrate opposites... a healthy, self-actualizing person.'



If the humanist psychologists of the creative personality made me feel better and focused me on how to become more creative, they tended to present a model of creativity as something rooted in the personality, but not necessarily in the body. William Sheldon was refreshingly different from these 1960s shrinks. For a start, he was a 1940s man. He was also a measurer and a collector, a maker of schemas, a medical doctor who made photographs of thousands of Yale students and classified them by body type, as an entomologist might classify his insect finds by the shape of the thorax and exoskeleton. Sheldon went further -- he linked human temperament to the buzz of the human nervous system, the crackle of synapses, the pumping of the digestive system, the ratio of skin to guts. In Sheldon's schema I was an ectomorph by body and a cerebrotonic by temperament. 'Ectomorph' meant that I was thin, flat-chested, delicate of build, young in appearance, tall, lightly muscled, stoop-shouldered, with a large brain. 'Cerebrotonic', the personality type associated with this build, meant that I was self-conscious, liked privacy, was introverted, inhibited, socially anxious, artistic, mentally intense, and emotionally restrained.

I recognised myself in that all right. I also recognised, between the lines, some of my musical heroes. Reading Sheldon's description of cerebrotonic ectomorphs, I saw familiar faces behind the weird behaviorist ratings. He'd describe a quiet, self-possessed subject as 'high-T', meaning that their skin had high textural quality, and I'd think of David Sylvian. He'd speculate that ectomorphs might be 'hyper-evolute' and I'd think of Bowie as Thomas Jerome Newton, or remember that line about children 'in golden rays / They're the start of the coming race'. Yes, I was perhaps a bit of a glam prig.

Sheldon's work had been questioned since the 40s (partly no doubt because it seemed to undermine ideas about free will with a sort of biological determinism, and partly because of PC accusations that his body-measurements of thousands of students had been in some way unseemly or undignified). But his basic point seemed, intuitively, to make sense to me. It didn't trouble me at all to think that my personality was intimately connected to my body type, or that my 'soul' was not, in the end, separable from the shape of my skeleton.

Comments

[duende.livejournal.com]

This is very interesting. Thanks for posting it.