CHAPTER VIII. Political Administrators

POLITICAL ADMINISTRATORS

Some administrators are full of ideas and others are seldom attracted by novelty. Some do their best work under a rather indulgent chief; others fall to pieces unless there is strong pressure from above. There are administrators who derive their influence over subordinates from the authority of their positions rather than from the authority of their personalities. There are some who may be depended upon for the conscientious performance of detailed tasks, while others neglect details and think in terms of general policy.

Viewed developmentally, it appears that one group of administrators is remarkably akin to the agitators, differing only in the fact that they are bound to particular individuals more closely, and thus displace their affects upon less generalized objects. This gives a certain independence to the administrator from the compulsion to “get a rise out of” large numbers of the population. It ties him more securely, however, to the members of his own environment, whose relations he seeks to co-ordinate. The administrator is a co-ordinator of effort in continuing activity.

The group which is allied to the agitators includes those who show imagination and promoting drive. The history of H belongs in this class, and has the incidental interest of showing how H behaved in war time.

While it is accurate to say that H is diplomatic and seemingly open and frank in dealing with his superiors, it should be added that in situations which involve the fate of his own projects, he is noticeably overtense, and likely to evaluate himself much higher than others. He becomes slightly accusatory if his demands are rejected. The elderly executive with whom H did his best work sometimes complained that a conference with H was as fatiguing as a whole day’s work. The older man felt that H might be entirely broken up if his projects were rudely rejected, and he also believed the young man to be too valuable to damage. H recognizes that he has often found himself shirking when his superiors let him alone, and wonders why this attitude, which is contrary to his own interests, should take hold of him. H displays a tendency to behave arrogantly toward subordinates, and when he was in the army it was obvious that he could maintain discipline only through the formal authority vested in him.

H is an only child. His father was a big, overpowering person, who was a strict disciplinarian. The parents were very prudish in sexual matters, and one of his embarrassing memories is the confusion and vexation of his mother when he asked her about babies. Left to his own resources, and stimulated by a variety of incidents to explore sexual problems on his own initiative, the boy became involved in a set of episodes and reveries which he tried to keep from the family, and thus met every family situation with some anxiety lest his sins should find him out. H grew into a hyperactive and seemingly light-hearted youngster, who obeyed his parents implicitly and met strangers with ingratiating charm. H was constantly occupied with the task of adopting a manner toward authority which would conceal his secret preoccupations.

About the age of four, H surprised his parents in a sexual embrace, and vividly recalled his own mixture of burning curiosity and embarrassment. Some of his early dream fragments indicate that he repressed a powerful hostility toward his father, who he thought was hurting his mother, and likewise repressed hatred of his mother, who he felt was disloyal to him.

His experiences continued through a long chain of incidents. There was mutual exposure of sexual parts between him and a playmate of his own age. A deeply repressed episode was a seduction in which he played the principal part. He was meanwhile completely successful in playing the rôle of model boy.

When H was ten years of age, however, there transpired an incident which for a time branded him in the neighborhood as a nasty little renegade, and which had many subsequent repercussions. He touched the exposed sexual parts of a neighbor girl, who was somewhat his junior. The sister and brother of the girl were interested spectators. The children told the cooks, and the news finally got around to the mother of the girl. She took it calmly enough, but thought she ought to tell the boy’s mother. H’s mother passed the story to his father, which was the worst thing that could happen, from H’s point of view. His father administered a sharp dressing-down, and forbade him to play outside the yard for a fortnight. H’s father was very angry, and lectured him about his sins every night for a while. Presently the father went over to see the neighbor, and seems to have taken the line that the girl was as much to blame as his son if not more so. This tactless behavior completely alienated the neighbor.

Now this neighbor happened to edit an important newspaper, and ever afterward this newspaper lost no opportunity to assail the efficiency of the department in the city government headed by H’s father. These attacks continued over many years, and H’s father occasionally threw it up to him that he had been responsible for the original quarrel.

As it was, the boy was ostracized in the neighborhood for a year or more, and was not invited to go to parties, although he could play with the children. But H was self-conscious, and sought companionship farther away. The brother of the girl thought that he ought to turn against H, and there were some fights.

At fourteen H began to go to high school. He kept away from the swimming pool during the first year or two because he was much embarrassed by the lack of hair around his genitals. This supposed retardation, about which he worried a great deal, lasted but a short time, when a new set of worries came up. He now believed that his penis was abnormally large, and that his testicles were too low-hanging and perhaps deformed. In college he was nicknamed “Cocky,” on account of his jauntiness, but he secretly suspected that this was an allusion to his penis.

A chum taught him how to masturbate, and he continued to do so for about six months, when his emissions became so frequent that his mother told his father. For once, H’s father handled the situation with good sense, and after a kindly interview in which the father explained that it was not a good idea to indulge excessively, H quit. But even this matter was not terminated, for the disturbing reverie remained that perhaps his excessive masturbation had permanently impaired his manhood.

H had a lively curiosity about his mother’s body of which he was intensely ashamed. He recalls loitering in his mother’s room while she made ready to change her clothes, hoping that she would forget to send him out. He found himself speculating about the shape of her body, and was several times on the verge of spying through the keyhole. But his impulse was inhibited when he remembered the story told by his father in which a “peeper” was spoken of with the greatest contempt. H dreamed of sexual intercourse with his mother on several occasions, nearly always during periods of unusual strain. These dreams were deeply buried and came out into the clear with great difficulty.

His sexual curiosity extended to animals, and he stimulated the sexual parts of his dog. This further associated sex with the bestial and unclean, and convinced him of his own guilt for so much as wondering about it.

H’s first sexual intercourse cost him much worry. It occurred during his second year in high school. He had been sent with the family automobile to drive home a guest, and noticed a girl of about his own age who was gay and flirtatious. On the way home he picked up the girl with two boys whom he knew slightly. All of them had sexual intercourse with the girl. He was terribly worried that he might reach home too late. His strict father had laid down the rule that if he got home at any hour of the night, he was to wake up the family and give an account of himself. In his haste he neglected to inspect the car and his father found some hairpins in the tonneau. H denied that he knew anything about them. The incident, however, was not closed. He saw an item in the newspaper about several men who were arrested for rape, and wondered whether he had committed a horrible crime himself with his companions. Before long the girl became pregnant and was brought before the juvenile court. She named another gang of boys, and this gang accused H and his two companions of being to blame. He was horrified at the prospect of going into court and dragging his family to disgrace. H was afraid that his partners in wrongdoing would confess, but he denied everything to his father, and his father’s political influence kept him from being haled into court. But for at least a year the black cloud of possible exposure hung on the horizon of his mind.

All during his high-school days he had occasional sex intercourse, but every episode was marred by some disagreeable features. While there were such experiences with girls of low social standing, he had many friendships with girls of good social position whom he idealized as above sexuality. He attended a private school which was patronized almost exclusively by children from very wealthy families, and H, who was handsome, well dressed, quick, and agreeable, found his friends among them. He was often in their homes and admired the signs of wealth and culture. He became sensitive of the cultural limitations of his own parents, and was afraid to entertain his school friends at home, but fortunately from his point of view his father was willing to furnish enough money to make it possible to hold up his end of the social bargain at exclusive clubs and restaurants.

In college H continued to draw a sharp line between those who could be petted, but who were too rich and refined to be approached for intercourse, and those who could be petted, and who were poor enough to be asked for intercourse. He continued to associate with a smart and wealthy set, and finally concentrated his attention on the daughter of a rich business man whom he wanted to marry. His left-handed affairs continued at irregular intervals, and he felt remorseful when he had the perversions performed on him.

Enough has been reported to convey an impression of H’s inner state. His unsatisfied sexual curiosity had been whetted by his prudish parents. His father defended his own ascendancy in the home by ordering the boy about a great deal, and H responded to authority by a system of reactions which became characteristic of him. He was tactful, deferential, and acquiescent, qualified by inner resentment and rare gestures of defiance. The father was not a friend but a barrier to be circumvented, and the father’s hegemony was protected by the sense of guilty inferiority which he had created in his son. Family differences, such as arose when the father objected to housekeeping details, or when the boy wanted more freedom to use the car, always showed the same balance of forces--mother and son versus the father. The mother did not defend herself by robust contradiction but by weak complaints. There were only two instances in which the boy flared up enough to resist his father openly.

If H had been more successful in winning applause outside the family, it is quite possible that his position would have been made much easier inside it. His social charm brought him into the most influential circles, and this gratified his parents, but his father was a man of action who felt that while wealthy friends were an asset, his son ought to show more positive achievements. Though he never nagged H, the father’s sternness, suspiciousness and absence of praise made a deep impression on the boy, and gave him a sense of insecurity and inadequacy. Although H scored no great successes, he went along without academic catastrophe until college. He was suspended at the end of his Freshman year for poor work, but came back after six months, during which he pretended to his father that he was still in school. The suspension was partly due to the advice given to the dean by his fraternity brothers, who had found him very hard to manage, and wanted to “bring him to his senses.” H was having a fling, since he was away from home for the first time, and away from the intimidating father. Presently he steadied down enough to get along.

Reminiscences of his guilty sexual experiments, deeply charged with guilt-feeling, were continually bobbing up to interfere with his progress. Once he was assigned to debate in high-school public-speaking class. His opponent proved to be the brother of the girl with whom he had the notorious incident several years before. The brother was a prominent school leader who had no doubt forgotten the affair, but it continued to weigh on H. He always had felt uncomfortable in the other boy’s presence, and on this occasion, being poorly prepared, the situation became so unbearable that he fainted.

He began to study agriculture at college, but soon found that he had made a mistake. His family owned a ranch which he often visited during vacations, and very much enjoyed. Farming was an avocation of his father, and H had the idea that ranching was a genteel occupation without much work, and with much ordering of other people about. He vaguely thought of himself as a country gentleman of cultivated leisure. The war saved H from agriculture. He took up aviation, without losing “credits,” partly because the snobbish mother of his favorite girl was bowled over by the uniform, and partly because he thought it would be better to go into the war, if he had to go, as an officer than as a private. His father’s influence secured a deferred classification for him in the draft, and H, though feeling quite small about it, said to himself that it was better for people to die who were without his own advantages and achievements.

His career as an officer in the camp brought out the traits to which reference has previously been made. His engaging deference toward his superiors won them all, but he had trouble with the men. His own insecurity led to an arrogant pose on his part that offended every man in the company. He also discovered that the moment discipline was relaxed he became very careless in performing his own duties.

The same constellation of traits reappeared in his administrative career, modified by the fact that he learned to assume a less provocative attitude toward his subordinates. He made a very good record, and proposed a number of changes that were adopted for the improvement of the service.

Looking back over H’s history, the striking thing is his prolonged worry about his adjustment to specific persons. H was never able to make the hurdle into abstract interests. Even his administrative ideas were closely tied to the immediate context of the service. H’s life was very much dominated by his relationship to definite people, and this meant a prolonged carry-over of early attitudes to these individuals. Unlike B, who could rightly feel that his father and brother and aunt were treating him unjustly, H was all too aware that he “deserved” more than he got. His success as an impostor was rudely interrupted in some early episodes.

Another “marginal” history shows what happens to some men with agitating aspirations who are not able to disentangle themselves from a place inside an organization and to give themselves up wholly to agitational work. Mr. I is a type occasionally met with inside administrative staffs who makes a serious problem for himself and others. He radiates plans that he neglects to execute, and he is supercilious and defiant toward superiors. He lacks the drive, however, to move over into agitational work entirely by identifying himself with a sufficiently dramatic cause. Sometimes this is due, as in I’s own case, to powerful early identifications with particular projects, and with administrative work as such. When such a person can be pried loose from certain of these early fixations, he often proves capable of fulfilling the expectations which he is able to arouse.

The father of I was a man whose extraordinary talents won him great distinction, but who never quite managed to come through as brilliantly as people had a right to expect from one so richly endowed. I’s father could talk five or six languages and read many more. He was educated in England, France, and Italy, and after serving as a professor of modern languages, his interest in educational problems led him to become the head of a famous preparatory school, and later of a public school. He spent most of his time reading, and during the last decade of his life drank heavily, but without impairing the quality of his work. Someone who knew him pronounced the man “a self-centered intellectual who died without a friend.” The mother of I was an adopted daughter of a member of the British aristocracy, and was brought up in distinguished social and intellectual circles. The mother was exceptionally active in all sorts of humanitarian enterprises but lavished much time and love on the boy, who was “dreadfully spoiled,” and accepted everybody’s judgment that he was a budding genius.

True to anticipations, the boy shot through school like a meteor, ranking first in his subjects, and taking every available honor with ease. In college he branched out into social and political life on a large scale, and joined about twenty organizations, managing to have himself put on every important committee.

Like his father, the son took up public-school work. Becoming interested in psychology, he did some graduate work, and quickly published a book that received very favorable comment among those best qualified to judge it. The idea of educational reform fired his imagination, and he lectured far and wide, engaging in agitations to secure legislation which would authorize a number of experimental schools.

The part of his history which is especially interesting to the student of administration is this: He was continually at outs with his superiors and colleagues. His first teaching position began with a feud, and lasted but a little while. He was invited to resign his next post. He was asked to resign the next position. He was asked to resign the next position. These entries appear monotonously through his record.

Everybody conceded the brilliance and fertility of his mind, and did homage to the originality of his plans. He began work but failed to carry it far, seeming to think that work planned was work done. His methods were always aggressive. Seized of an administrative idea, he went to his superiors. When they criticized the scheme, or rejected his suggestion, he often took the bit in his teeth and tried to run the ship in his own way.

More than once financial irregularities have been discovered in connection with his work. He has given out checks when no funds were available, and run unduly large expense accounts. Whenever he has been in financial jams, he has turned to other people for aid as a matter of course, seeming to feel that he has a claim on the world for support.

He has always been childishly dependent on his wife for praise. He resented his wife’s motherhood, but has been overindulgent with the two children, who, his wife says, have no respect for him. He likes to be the center of attention, and is a clever showman, and a great deal of a bluffer. He is usually not high tempered but affectionate. He is inclined to be accusatory toward his wife--“a vixen”--but his wife appears to be a keen person, who was enough impressed by his precocious brilliance to marry and to pamper him, but who in later years has delivered herself of pointed comments on his character.

It seems that he has gone through several periods of alternating exhilaration and despondency. The exhilarations came when he had a position and when life became a little monotonous or a little hard. At least one of these swings was sufficiently pronounced to lead to a period of retirement in a sanitarium. During this time he was asked what kind of work he liked best, and replied, “Reforming the world--my first choice; second, exploiting the world.”

The strength of his narcissism is self-evident, and the feminine marks in his character are numerous. He expects to be nurtured and supported by the world as a matter of right. He demands constant “mothering” from his wife, and coddles the children. His father-hatred, which was thoroughly repressed in the family, comes out in his difficulty with father-surrogates, and in his determination to change the educational system at points where the father took it for granted or overtly defended it. The selection of the pedagogical rôle is itself indicative of the strength of his father-identification. What seems to have happened in his development is a fixation of interests in a relatively narrow sphere in which the affects are so powerful and at the same time so contradictory that difficulties are assured. He finds it impossible to shake off his managerial aspirations sufficiently to devote all his time to the propagation of ideas. Although his affects are displaced upon abstract problems, they are not displaced upon objects sufficiently removed from his father, and the displacement does not succeed in making it possible for him to achieve an impersonal attitude toward his superiors and colleagues in educational administration. The exaggerated praise heaped upon him as a boy had much to do with the narcissism. His incapacity to follow through is no doubt related to his early conflicts over genital activity. The chief point of significant contrast with A is that the narcissistic component interfered more seriously with H’s development, since it led him to insist upon playing an administrative rôle. A’s environment was less prostrate before him, and he was able to avoid assuming administrative obligations where he would be cramped and subordinated.

The history of J, which has been reported by Alexander, shows what lies behind a powerful administrator’s thirst for responsibility, and reveals how changes in the working relations inside an organization may disorganize the individual.

J was a driving executive whose superiors deferred to his judgment and accepted his plans. His abounding energy sought an outlet through the assumption of heavier and heavier responsibilities inside the organization. Finally, a change in the chief executive brought J under the immediate control of a man who handled him with cool assurance, holding him firmly but considerately to his own formal sphere of action. Confronted for the first time in his life by a more powerful personality who knew how to regulate him, J took the wife of another man for his mistress, and in spite of the remonstrances of those who knew him, he held tenaciously to both the mistress and the wife.

An analysis showed that J was characterized from early childhood by a notable split in his personality. Side by side with his aggressive, masculine drive there existed a strongly repressed, though powerful, feminine tendency. His personality is to be rendered intelligible only as a compromise formation between those two incompatible motives. The repression of the passive component produced a regressive fixation upon the wife, who was compelled to play a markedly maternal rôle, and to humor his every whim. He resented it if his every wish was not defined and fulfilled before he had to go to the trouble of putting it into words. J has delicate aesthetic sensibilities, and is a cultivated amateur in the arts.

In sharpest imaginable contrast to his behavior at home was his insatiable thirst for authority and responsibility in his professional life. One of his dreams acutely symbolized him as a giant automobile of untold horse-power, whose body was a light French coach of the rococo period.

As Alexander comments, J’s life-problem was to indulge his passive demands without doing violence to his masculine ideal. But this was not accomplished without strain. He could earn periods of indulgence in aesthetics by exaggerated aggressiveness in his work, but as his feminine tendencies were gratified, his masculine ideal was endangered, and he would be driven back to high-pressure management. The psychological significance of his work was symbolized in the following dream: He was penetrating a thick sheet of cardboard with a needle, and continually asking for new sheets to bore through. He succeeded in going through several thicknesses. The cardboard represented his occupational problems, and the needle his penis. His professional activity was largely a sublimation of his aggressive, active sexuality.

The equilibrium between his aggressiveness in work and his passivity in marital life was upset by the new chief executive, who skilfully hemmed in his activity. Alexander remarks that it is impossible for a man who has struggled all his life against very strong unconscious homosexuality to serve under a strong man. The dominating personality arouses the latent attitude, and the subordinate must resort to special means of maintaining his repression. In the case of B, which we have previously considered, the means of restoring some sort of equilibrium was escape (by resigning), but when that became very difficult, he fled into a world of fantasy (a psychosis). J met the crisis by breaking through the sublimation of his heterosexuality, and taking a mistress as an outlet for his thwarted drives. Further than that, he vindicated his masculinity in a very dramatic way. He not only took a mistress, but he took the wife of another.

From now on, he was dependent on both women to preserve the equilibrium of his personality. Previously the equilibrium had been maintained between wife and work; now it depended on wife, mistress, and work, for the aggressive, masculine component required the mistress to make up for the limitations imposed upon his working sphere.

Alexander reports that in the course of a long analysis this remarkable split in the personality was traced back to early childhood. “At the age of four he was already the same person.” At the age of four he continued to drink milk out of a bottle, stubbornly resisting every effort to break him of the practice. But--and it was with an emphatic “but” that J produced the reminiscence--at the same time the boy was especially adventurous and independent, riding all by himself out on the highway. Here was the same antithesis that later expressed itself in his peculiar relation to wife and work. The child won the right to indulge his infantile, oral tendencies in one particular by exaggerated boldness in other respects. This solution was the prototype for his later life.

The rôle of the bottle was later taken by his wife, whom he often treated like an inanimate object whose only function was to minister to his needs, while his work, and later his mistress, were the successors to the bicycle, by means of which he was able to prove his independence and his masculinity to himself and the world.

The castration fear, which was aroused by the means adopted to break up his infantile masturbation, favored the oral fixation, and came into conflict with his strong masculine genital drive, laying the basis for this notable character split.

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The records so far discussed have had to do with inventive or driving administrators. A type often met with in the public service is the conscientious, overscrupulous official, whose touchiness, fondness for detail, delight in routine, and passion for accuracy at once preserve the integrity of the service and alienate the affections of anybody who has to do business with the government. K was such a man. For some years he was in the forestry service, where part of his duties was to mark the trees that might be cut by private lumbermen. The lumbermen naturally argued that the straight, sound trees should be cut and the damaged ones left for seed. K took a variety of other factors into account, and spent days measuring and estimating position, growth rates, and shade area, exasperating the lumbermen with his everlasting and often superfluous scrupulousness. He keenly felt his responsibilities as a public servant, and disliked the very appearance of succumbing to private pressure. At one time K resigned the service in disgust because of “uncivil” treatment by a superior, but his “touchiness” was much more deeply rooted in his nature than he had any idea.

The record of K is not only the story of a pedantic official but of an ardent patriot. One of the highest forms of patriotism is supposed to be volunteering for posts of conspicuous danger in war. K pulled all the wires within reach to get a place on the front line, and only the point-blank refusal of his superiors to allow him to squander his technical ability prevented him from achieving his desire. From a close examination of his intimate history we learn how one variety of superpatriot comes to be.

K was the youngest of four children. His next brother was eight years his senior, his sister was five years older than this brother, and his oldest brother was eighteen years ahead of him.

He never remembered a time when his mother and father, who were divorced when he was eight, were on good terms with each other. They seldom spoke, except to quarrel. This family background was reflected in the mental life of the growing child. K was notoriously nervous and timid. From a very early day he began to be preoccupied with why he was different from everybody else in the world. His sense of isolation and strangeness led him to believe that perhaps he was the only real person in the world and that everybody else was an illusion. He would sometimes come up wonderingly to touch his mother, and then himself, to see if she, too, were real. He speculated on how he could get away from the human shadows around him, and became convinced that he could fly. Several times he laboriously climbed up on the seat of a kitchen chair, spread his arms like a bird, and leaped into space. Every time he crashed to the floor, his frightened mother rescued him, but he always felt surprised and rather aggrieved that he should fall, and secretly believed that he could fly after all. This type of reaction characteristically appears where emotional conflicts in the home create an acute problem of emotional orientation for the child.

As a small boy he was sent by his mother to follow his father when he left the house, and to report where he went. K developed a strong sense of guilt for this, and after the divorce was afraid that his father would return and take revenge on him in some unknown and horrible way. His father did occasionally reappear, and once invited the boy to spend the night with him, but K was too frightened to accept.

The family often lived in the country, and the self-consciousness of K in the presence of strangers was heightened by frequent removals into new and often isolated places. One of the towns near which he lived when about nine was on a frontier. Gun-play was frequent, and K remembers having seen the corpses of men who had been shot down in street brawls. There were ominous-looking fellows around town, and the boy gave them a wide berth.

The death of his mother when he was twelve robbed K of his main emotional support in a dangerous world. She died after two years of suffering from an infected limb. She would also spit into bits of papers and burn them in the stove. K wondered why she did this, and later developed a reverie the importance of which will soon appear.

The older members of the family were left with K on their hands, and they decided to club together and put all thought of marrying out of their heads until he was able to stand alone. The boy did not then realize the sacrifices they made for him, but he later discovered that his older brother put off marrying the girl of his choice until she broke off the engagement and married someone else. It was not until about the time that he graduated from high school and the home was broken up that he became aware of what he owed them, and ever after he was plagued by the thought of his unworthiness, and his incapacity to repay his brothers and sister for their care. Up to that time he had experienced no particular sense of gratitude, and although his older brother once or twice referred to his dependent position, his private feelings were mainly of resentment against the restrictions imposed upon him.

And these restrictions were not inconsiderable. The family ran a greenhouse, and the drudgery involved in such an occupation was incessant. There were slips to transplant, beds to weed, and loads to pull and carry. There were long hours of boredom over routine occupations. K was expected to dash home from school at the earliest possible moment, and to lend a hand with the endless chores about the place.

Occasionally he succeeded in evading his duties. He stopped to play on the way home from deliveries, and he stayed at school on some pretext or other to join the drill squad. But he was always haunted by fear and guilt. His older brother was a strict disciplinarian, and beat him several times. His sister occasionally let him have some spending money, but as a rule he was tightly cramped financially. When his gang organized into a drill squad, and chose their uniforms, he was humiliated when the necessary dollars were not forthcoming from home.

K was worried by what appeared to be a lack of physical stamina and endurance. This idea (which had no basis in fact) in part grew out of his efforts to do what his brothers did. They occasionally broad-jumped or pulled weights, and of course K made a poor showing beside them. But for the unconscious hostility against them, such unequal results would not have disturbed him. His morbid worries about his strength led him to submit to a great deal of bullying by town toughs.

His adolescent years were marred by perpetual anxieties about his social adequacy. He had been the victim of an explosion which left his face marked with powder stains, and this repugnant tattooing, which disappeared very gradually, embarrassed him for years.

K’s older brothers and sister sometimes took him with them to parties because there was nobody to leave him with, and an annoying sense of being in the way added to his growing sense of social inadequacy. During high-school days he fell in love with the daughter of the most influential man in the locality, but as her social standards became more exacting, his lack of money, leisure, and prestige made it impossible for him to travel with her set. One of the most humiliating episodes in his life was the one which broke up their relations. K had arranged to meet her at a dancing class. Another girl called up to see if he would take her, but he said he wasn’t going. His oldest brother had listened in on the telephone extension, and was astonished to see K appear all dressed up and on the way out. He launched forth on a tirade, declaring that K gallivanted around throwing money away and shirking his job, though he was absolutely dependent on others for his daily bread. K was cut to the quick, and went back to his room churning with too many emotions to call up and offer explanations to the girl.

K had taken it for granted ever since he was a small boy that he would go to college. He traced back his determination to an incident when he was driving across the plains one magnificent starry night. He sat in the bottom of the rig, rapt in contemplation of the sparkling sky, while his mother chatted with her neighbor. Suddenly he asked how he could find out about the stars, and she replied that people could study all about them in college. He then and there resolved to go to college, and never had a moment’s doubt about it, although the members of his immediate family went no farther than the common school.

In spite of his inferiority feelings, K was not cut off from some measure of recognition in high school. His dependable and sympathetic qualities impressed themselves upon those who came into close daily contact with him, and he was made an officer of his high-school class. He was respectful toward his teachers and good in his studies.

College was an entirely different affair. His personal worries multiplied during the transition period. Lacking funds, he sought a scholarship. The only one tenable from his district to the state university was in ceramic engineering, and after looking up “ceramic” in the dictionary, he applied and was selected for admission. The work proved to have no particular interest for him, and his social life was even less satisfying. He was met at the college town by the members of a church group who lived together in a dormitory (some friend had written them), and he, though never devout, stopped with them during the first term. This marked him as a non-fraternity man. He waited tables in a fraternity house, and as bad luck would have it, a former teacher wrote highly recommending him to the consideration of this particular fraternity. When a committee broke the news to him, he was utterly confused and made such a lamentable impression that it was not possible to extend him the bid. One of his odd jobs was beating carpets at a sorority house, and this turned out to be the sorority that had pledged the girl with whom he had been (and still felt) in love.

For relaxation K was forced into the domain of the kitchen maids. A servant girl struck up a friendship with him, and he had sexual relations with her. He had tried intercourse once during high-school days, and had a premature emission, a practice which often bothered him later, providing a permanent source of humiliation.

Transferring to another college, he began his work in forestry, in which he had acquired some interest during hikes with a friendly high-school teacher. Handicapped by lack of money and worried by a mounting sense of social inadequacy, his life was no more successful than before. In high-school days he envied a talkative lad who astonished the company by glibly recounting anecdotes about Napoleon. One of his relatives whom he had known as a boy left an ideal of social charm which never was attained.

K’s inner uncertainties finally reached a point which led him to resolve that he ought to discover once for all whether forestry would prove to be a proper vocation. He left college and joined the government service. This was to be the great test of his ability to master himself.

So keen was his preoccupation with self-mastery that he resented every effort to influence him, and acted with unnecessary strictness in dealing with private lumbermen. He was often deprived of human relationships during his days in the field, and gradually his mind became more and more enmeshed in morbid reflections about himself. His mind simply refused to concentrate on the technical volumes which he had brought with him to improve the solitude. Reveries which had been slowly germinating on the periphery of his attention now began to foliate. K had always wondered why his mother burned those little bits of paper. It dawned on him one day that she might really have died of tuberculosis, and that he must therefore be predisposed toward that disease. Early in his high-school days, he had begun deep-breathing exercises, though he had never freely admitted to himself or anybody else what lay behind it. He always gave the usual account of his mother’s death to insurance examiners, smothering his doubts in affirmation.

This was his state of mind when America entered the war. He found himself saying that since he was going to die anyhow from a loathsome disease, he might as well die at once and get it over with. Enlisting without delay, he sought to reach an exposed position as rapidly as he could. But the government had different ideas, and assigned him to a branch of the service where his technical skill would prove useful. In his disappointment, all the old feelings of inadequacy returned. Interviewed by an officer he floundered and stumbled, neglecting to report essential facts about his training and experience. The accidental intervention of an acquaintance straightened out the matter, and secured the authority to which his record entitled him. At first he was very much embarrassed in the company of lumberjacks, but his behavior never showed his confusion. His actual record was, as usual, excellent, and his conscientious efficiency won the indorsement of everybody who knew him.

K married a rather dominating school-teacher whom he had known for some time. When things went badly, as they often did, he was partially impotent, and also showed the phenomenon which has been christened “Sunday neurosis.” Every Sunday afternoon when he was at home he would find himself assailed by deep depression, and would weep quietly to himself. In spite of these neurotic troubles, K was able to make an important place for himself inside a bureaucracy, when he came back from the army.

From one point of view, K’s character may be summed up by saying that his overscrupulous performance of duty was an elaborate effort to demonstrate his potency, and that his longing for danger came at a time when he was willing to surrender the struggle. K’s morbid moods and persistent feelings of inadequacy are self-imposed penalties for his hostilities against the environment. He possessed very powerful aggressive drives which were partly expressed in the adoption of a self-ideal which was far more ambitious than anything deemed feasible by the family. His narcissism was such that he was prevented from viewing himself as an object, and from modifying his demands upon the world for recognition, and upon himself for production, until these demands bore a closer relationship to his own skills and opportunities. The basis for his obsessive scrupulousness was laid during early childhood, when he was torn between father and mother-loyalties, and acted out within his own nature the clashes that occurred between them. His strong mother-identification is shown by his belief that he suffered from her diseases, and would die from tuberculosis as she had died. He preferred death to a reduction in his demands upon himself and the world. Such a reaction has in it the primitive demand of the child to treat the world as controllable at will by the omnipotent fantasy. His genital difficulties testify to the intensity of the castration conflict, and show the passive-oral regression. K deeply resented having to adjust to the world at all. His capacity for hard work was achieved against high resistance, and in part had the value of a penance. Thus when workless days came around, he was always ill at ease, and sometimes showed the spells of weeping on Sunday afternoons. To work was to prove his potency, and to supply a ritual substitute for and defense against his antisocial impulses. He was unable to emancipate himself very far from the reactions of the people in his immediate environment.

* * * * *

As a class the administrators differ from the agitators by the displacement of their affects upon less remote and abstract objects. In the case of one important group this failure to achieve abstract objects is due to excessive preoccupation with specific individuals in the family circle, and to the correlative difficulty of defining the rôle of the self. Putting agitator A at one end of the scale, we may place administrator K or H near the other. Agitator B was less able to displace than A, as shown by the more personal character of the reforms which interested him. K or H were so concerned about definite people, and about their own failures in relation to many of them, that emancipation was unattainable.

As a hypothetical construction from these “marginal” cases, we may suggest that another group of administrators is recruited from among those who have passed smoothly through their developmental crises. They have not overrepressed powerful hostilities, but either sublimated these drives, or expressed them boldly in the intimate circle. They display an impersonal interest in the task of organization itself, and assert themselves with firmness, though not with overemphasis, in professional and in intimate life. Their lack of interest in abstractions is due to the fact that they have never needed them as a means of dealing with their emotional problems. They can take or leave general ideas without using them to arouse widespread affective responses from the public. Tied neither to abstractions nor to particular people, they are able to deal with both in a context of human relations, impersonally conceived. Their affects flow freely; they are not affectless, but affectively adjusted. Very original and overdriving administrators seem to show a fundamental pattern which coincides with that of the agitators; the differences in specific development are principally due to the cultural patterns available for identification at critical phases of growth.