The Psychology of Deafness

IF this paper seems sometimes to have gone a step beyond the usual point of view of a layman, it is for two reasons. My particular bent in thought and study had long led me into much venturing along the edge of the realm of science, including that division which, with the advent of deafness, I perceived had given into my hands some useful knowledge of analytical psychology. Without this, I could not have gone far. The hopeless mystery of a dispirited personality could not have been solved, or its unhappy effects overcome.

The other reason is the fact that the head of my house is not a layman. Knowledge of certain correlated sciences always at hand brought inevitably much to bear on the treatment and elucidation of many perplexing questions and conditions.

I feel constrained to make this explanation, because the interest of the deaf is so vital as to make it imperative for them to feel that, when one presents any new point of view, it is at least with a shade of authority.

I

There is a fundamental difference in the experience of deal ness between different classes of people. What meets the needs of one class may have much less bearing upon those of another. One of the most certain differences is between men and women.

It has always been considered that men are more generous to one another than are women. Whether this be true, and men lend themselves more kindly in the ways which lessen the deprivations of deafness, or not, men’s lives undoubtedly do include a greater possibility of diversion, and more compelling interests. Business interests — ‘making money’ — have a way of absorbing most things. To that extent men might easily be less disastrously affected than women.

Another difference has to do with whether one is seized with sudden severe deafness in mature life, or very early in life. To be educated in deafness from childhood, to be trained and developed according to its measure from the first, is a different thing from being plunged into it at thirty, in the full tide of all one’s activities and responsibilities, pleasures and participations in life. To check them violently, to turn them back, to battle with obstruction and vagueness, till one can break a way into some clearer vision of life, is a different proposition from the other.

I do not minimize the magnitude of the other. My comparisons are not to show which is the greater, but only to show that they are different, and therefore require different methods of procedure. Youth is plastic. It adapts from sheer power of growth. The adult is a comparatively fixed quantity. His individuality is stamped with maturity. He is crystallized into a system of reactions to a hearing environment. He has to be made over, as it were, to fit a new world, and the making is wholly dependent upon himself, without the correlative of external influences. It is less a process of development than of subduing and reorganizing a personality already strong in itself.

A deaf person should never be disheartened because it may seem that someone else has handled his problem with greater success, achieved a better result, than he has. It is not a matter of individual bravery. Your problem might have been a very different test for him, with a very different result.

My first paper—‘The Road of Silence’— was written from what might be called a disinterested point of view, with little thought of its significance to others. But it proved to be the finding of a voice and words for hundreds who had labored under the same depression which it briefly set forth, and which they could not account for, either to themselves or to the world. They were not blind; why had every sensation of pleasure gone out of the heart? Mind and reason had remonstrated in vain. But both were wrong. Both had come to the borderland of a domain over which they could not reign till they more fully understood it — a psychophysical province whose minister was keeper of the heart and feelings.

It was this point of being able to account to one’s self for this depression, and the resulting effect of the accounting, of which the author had happened to gain the secret early in the game, which gave to ‘The Road of Silence’ its first appeal.

The ‘resulting effect’ — that is, lifting the depression by finding out its blind cause, the actual why of its existence— seems out of all proportion to the simplicity of the means. Yet it is just here that the one important thing which applied psychology can do for the deaf takes place. Emphatically, it is the first thing to seek.

Steadily, in these later years, people have learned the tremendous power for good there is in psychologically understanding themselves. Especially is a grasp of the psychology of deafness of the greatest value to the man or woman who is just facing his problem, who is doing it valiantly yet without headway, because he is in that position which Münsterberg described as fighting ‘where despair is inevitable, and the enemy necessarily stronger than his own powers.’

The presence of this condition, in pronounced and sudden deafness, is almost universal. It is no chance that, by way of many letters and personal knowledge, such statements as, ‘I was in despair,’ or, ‘I was just slipping over the brink of utter discouragement,’ or, ‘Why do I feel so sad all the time?’ are most common expressions. Even if they represent only a class, the condition is so destructive and serious that its separate consideration and treatment are justified. To get rid of the depression is an imperative necessity. Little can be done toward a useful and happy existence till that is gone. Yet there is such a thing as its not being accomplished.

In the case of Beethoven, he was aware himself of the greatness of his genius — knew it was so great that it must not be lost to the world. This, he said, on seeing a flute played near him of which he could not hear a note, ‘was the only reason why he did not take his life on the spot.’ He had not put into outward form the music which he knew was within him. But he was acutely depressed, and became, in the words of one of his biographers, ‘gradually the victim of morbid irritability and hopeless melancholy.’ He was able to compose without hearing his composition, only because of the intense power of his imagination — often the concomitant of great genius. It was exactly this supreme imagination which was meant when it was said of Raphael that, ‘if he had been born without hands, he would nevertheless have become a great painter’; and — in extreme form— which Goethe put into words when he wrote of his ‘vision’ on the road to Sesenheim: ‘Not with the eyes of the body, but with the eyes of the mind, I saw myself coming toward myself.'

Yet Beethoven may not be quite a fair illustration, because his personality — the whole man — was so merged in the most æsthetic form of sound as to make the case extreme. Music has an ineffable power of uplifting any mentality. Here its loss would mean tragedy. It is a topic which I have occasion to refer to later.

II

To the mechanic, the absorbed business man and woman, the milliner, the accountant, the machinist, and countless other people in the busy walks of life, psychology — the science of mental processes — may not have gained a large place in interest. There may even be a faint feeling that it is foreign to the grasp. It is true that its development has been one of long and complex scientific study. But the simplicity of some of its applied results is surprising.

Its connection with our subject here is made plain by two statements. The first, that finding the cause of your depression changes your feelings. This in itself displaces the depression. You cannot have two distinct and unlike kinds of feelings at one and the same time. One must move out, as it were, for the other to move in. If you can acquire a sudden sharp interest, it must take depression’s place.

The other statement is, that bare sound has much more to do with producing feelings and emotions than has any other external influence. This is the first key to the unreason of your depression. The loss of your normal feelings of cheerful well-being was not correlative with the loss of words and their significance to the mind, — notwithstanding conversation is the universal and ceaseless habit of the human family, — not with the physical hardship of deafness, not with most of the things which you thought it was. It was correlative with the absence of sound pure and simple.

In its specialized forms sound conveys facts to the understanding. But, primarily, it is the great stimulus of feelings. Shut that stimulus off, and they remain unaroused, dead. Prolong that deadness, and it is intensified into depression. It becomes unendurable. It may almost be said, the eyes are for the intellect, the ears for the heart. Even the blind have sometimes had an inkling of this. Milburn, the blind clergyman of Washington, said, ‘The eye is a haven at which the treasure fleets that sail through the ocean of light are unloading, and their stores deposited in the vaults of the intellect: but it is through the whispering gallery of the ear that man reaches the heart of his fellow man most quickly and surely. . . . Man’s voice, tuned by sympathy . . . may perform the sweetest ministry of human life.'

There is great significance in his words, whispering, voice, and tuned. — words which refer in every instance to sound alone, and hold in themselves a singleness of meaning. Standing in darkness, he had discovered the hidden power of sound itself, though perhaps not fully to understand it. But his unconscious choice of words revealed the concept of his mind. The deaf man reads as from an open book. With two senses operating together, the mind does not distinguish their respective work. But when one is absent, there is perfect clearness of their separate action.

We are, of course, subject to a civilization and social existence of which organized sounds — words, language, music — are the great systems and vehicles. But, besides this, in a more elemental significance, sound and tones in simpler complex are at the bottom of the daily morale of human life. This is revealed in that universally accepted idea, the cheerfulness of the blind.

Elementally, the conditions are in no way under the dominion of will-power or moral force of any kind. The initial power is sound. Without it, emotion lies dormant, and not to be started by either persuasion or pretension. Especially is making believe child’s play.

Is there any other conceivable way in which a blind man could ever be cheerful, with the bitter knowledge of his blindness, except he be the passive recipient of a force which he does not control — inaugurated millenniums ago in the evolution of the human animal? Any difference in will-power, or determination, or natural disposition between the two cannot be a universal and invariable accident in favor of the blind.

That bit of proof which was cited once before is the most revealing — that we can perceive through the eye what we know is great suffering, with comparative calmness; but get that same knowledge by way of the ear, in sound, and we are instantly distressed and excited. Hearing it makes us realize it. In reality, it is because sound is an utterly different stimulus from sight, with a far more intense mental reaction. Seeing it was knowing it, but not feeling it. Hearing it was both. What we know is a thousandfold less personal than what we feel.

But music is the supreme revelation of the benign power of sound. It stirs the feelings in the whole range from joy to sadness. Even an animal is sometimes susceptible to its power. Jack was a little fox-terrier of no accomplishments, but he had a heart. A piece of music came into the house — a slow march of most beautiful melody. All the sorrows of the world seemed gathered into the beat of its soft syncopated sound. As the first notes stole through the house, Jack would come into the room and drop down with his nose on his paws. Soon he would begin to whimper; and as the music swelled into a fuller strain, Jack would point his nose to the ceiling and howl to heaven the dumb sorrow of his heart.

But there are very different examples from this. History lias left us a little story of surpassing interest. Making allowance for the phraseology, because certain old historians wanted always a religious point of view for everything, the story runs that a certain king had become depressed. They said that the spirit of the Lord had departed from him and an evil spirit from the Lord troubled him. Now it happened that among his servants there were some with thoughtful minds, who had known this spell of the beauty of music in their own hearts. These went, to the king and asked him to let them find a man who was ‘a cunning player on a harp,’ actually saying to him that, when he listened to this music, ‘thou shalt be well.’

So they brought the youthful and handsome David. And he sat down with Saul and played to him on one of those most beautiful of instruments, a harp. In the words of the historian, ‘Saul was refreshed, and was well, and the evil spirit departed from him.’ In our words, he was no longer depressed.

Of course, we know further that Saul had an unfortunate temperament — his passionate moods mixed with his finer impulses. But that does not discount the force of the illustration. The Jews were a musically gifted people, and though their harps were not perfected as they are to-day, yet their music was already a soothing and beautiful power.

But we do things on a large scale nowadays. With our great art of music and all its splendid musical instruments, the establishment of a chair of musicotherapy (music-healing or curing) in one of our great universities is but the scientific expression of the bearing of sound upon the feelings — the very same which the servant of old felt so vividly when he urged it for the sick heart of his king three thousand years ago.

If I have dwelt at some length on this statement, it was to make sure of a plainer grasp of the commonly unrecognized relation of sound to feeling.

The other statement, put briefly, was that finding out the cause of your depression cured it. This fact is less easily analyzed than the other. Why should knowing the cause cure the condition? To attempt to answer at length is to pass into a too technical consideration of psychology itself. But it is not necessary. One does not have to account for the whole ‘why’ here, in order to enter into the result. But there is illumination in considering another point of view. There is a certain marked relief in the knowledge that what one had experienced as an intense trouble of heart, which he would not have considered undue if he had been blind, but could not justify when he was only deaf, was simply the result of a perfectly natural law — the logical outcome of a psychophysical thing, and not a sort of remorse or inward lamentation. Like everyone else, he had always supposed this thing of feelings was much in the control of will and strength of mind. Now he knows that in this case it lies entirely outside of either the one or the other. And to know where it docs lie is to exchange the helplessness and unrest of complete ignorance for light and satisfaction.

III

The history of man for thousands of years has been ultimately to challenge arbitrary mystery. He is never at peace with it. Human intelligence is now too imperious to tolerate being thrust out of its rights of well-being without wanting the reason why, whether it is consciously aware of it or not. Given the explanation, rational and understandable, it is the very office of intelligence to accept it and be soothed — to perceive that there is nothing unjust or illogical in one’s position. It is the keynote of the change. While our case in itself is not strictly parallel to the original, — the cause there being something within the personality,— the fact that here it lies outside of it does not seem to be relevant. It is the cause, and the result is closely allied if not absolutely the same.

There must be no confusion of ideas as to there being any specific moral element in the matter, and, least of all things, any mysticism. It is straightly medical, on the side of psychotherapy — a restoring of things mental.

Given the passage of years, a person who has suddenly become pronouncedly deaf will perhaps learn painfully to get used to it, to improve in many of its phases. But it is a slow growth, always at the expense of wasted years, of endurance rather than buoyancy of spirit. Life is dull — a haunting sense of waiting, rather than the happiness to which you had a right. Its hardship must be outlived rather than outwitted. But let them get some sort of advantageous hold in the beginning, some fundamentally enlightening point of view, and it means all the difference between a life of enthusiasm and possibility, and one irretrievably narrowed in pleasure and fulfillment.

Passing to the practical social everyday life, the deaf person’s satisfactions and pleasures, as well as his usefulness and success, come, like everybody’s, from his occupations and interests. Above all things he must have occupations and interests—business and responsibility if possible, even if it be carried on by means of written communication. More than others he must have the thing that he likes; that yields him profit and consumes his time; that calls upon his ability and intelligence, and leaves open some door of progress for him. Otherwise he tends to become less and less an entity. His individuality decreases, not only to himself but in the reckoning of other people also.

For one with whom the question of occupation is solved by remaining the same as ever, he may go deeper into his craft or work. If one can no longer get the diversion of mind, the whiling away of hours in the old way of conversation and association with his fellows, — and there is very little association without, conversation, — he must turn to books. The deaf person reads with a great deal of advantage. His attention and concentration are immune to the petty distractions of sound. He may carry on reading of a weighty nature at almost any time and place, under far more profitable conditions than people who hear. A deaf person may educate himself with surprising ease.

There are a great many occupations which are closely related to a history and beauty w hich those who follow them have probably never been familiar with. With books as accessible as they are, why, for instance, — to choose an illustration wholly at random, — should not a plain carpenter come to have a scholar’s knowledge of the history and beauty of architecture, — one of the oldest and finest arts, — from the excellence of the post-and-lintel construction of primitive man to the glories of ancient Greece and Rome?

Such pursuits become in the end not a mere pastime, but the abiding possession of a lifetime. One has added something immensely worth while to his mental outlook. A mind with such a bit of side training is always in a land of new discoveries, finding treasure where others are blind. Beauty is beneficent wherever it comes; and especially is it harmonizing to an overtired psychology. To recognize it habitually is to open a door into a new world.

In books and study, however, there is some temptation to overdo, especially if by chance one is a natural student.

The unintelligibleness of people’s ideas and wishes produces perpetual mental strain for the deaf, which, in association on the basis of conversation, causes intense fatigue, bodily and mentally. Not infrequently deaf people become less robust in health. But there is exactly the same mental need and desire for association with people that there is on the part of those who hear; and everybody knows what that is. You do not break down the necessity because the means have broken down. That could not be done if you would, because man has been gregarious too many thousands of years.

The best way — in fact, the only way — which remains to overcome this situation is through recreation, that is, amusement and play. It serves a double purpose and you gain on both counts — the pleasure of play and the association with people.

This kind of association — golf, tennis, cards — does not entail conversation, at least not more than you can manage. It is not the main thing. You know what to do and what others are going to do, by the rules of the game and their movements and gestures, without the need of talking. The exhilaration of your feelings by the play of your mind, without the blocking and effort of perception, is impossible to describe. The stimulus of excitement, mild or otherwise, of competition, is keenest relief, because the human mind craves it and must have it. It seems to be the natural principle of half the interests of life, and this method of play is almost the sole one which supplies it to the deaf. Without it monotony is intense. It should involve no inconvenience to anyone. It is only that one cannot play tennis or cards alone. He is dependent, like everyone else, upon the coöperation and help of others.

These things should be cultivated, not only for the invaluable results mentioned, but because whatever makes for the outdoor habit is remedial, directly and indirectly. One may have been a lover of the outside world in his own way — the way of the woods and fields, where nothing escaped him. But there is now an unaccountable strangeness on the face of nature. The symbols of it which he sees lack realism. He especially needs to find substitutes to entice him back to the open.

But there must always be motive and definite objective in outdoor life. Nothing bores like the aimlessness of just going out. Yet there are some unsung ways of accomplishing it which are wonderfully successful.

I know a deaf woman who has the privilege of a little real country life. Her friends call it her fad. She knows it has become her dearest hobby, the best of her holidays. Twice a year she goes down to an old farm set in wide fields by the sea. In the springtime she does her ‘planting’ — in the midst, to her, of a world resplendent. All through the season, at intervals, time and care are still required. In the autumn she harvests — through those warm fruity placid days of late September and early October. The nights of the ‘hunter’s moon’ are a season of events to her, which no round of picture galleries can surpass in the glory of memories that are left in her mind. She goes to bed at eight o’clock, because the peace of the silent fields has fallen upon her spirit. She rises at five, because the splendor of the summer dawn irresistibly calls her, because the very plunder of life lies in the June day before her, and she cannot thrust her hands into the golden horde too quickly.

For those more fortunate, who have come to fill a wider sphere, who touch the edge of adventure, in business or travel or strange lands, much is made up to them. Entertainment and diversion come to them instead of being sought. The inner life is more alert because the outer world is more varied and new. But for the many who walk in the quiet places — and they are the great majority—all the devices for diversion are needed. And especially do these need the initial light from an understanding heart, for, after all, there is no balm in all life like the knowledge that there is someone who understands us.

IV

The blind man is blind to his fellows materially, which the world instantly perceives and then acts accordingly — that is, it conducts him to the necessary goal, if he is absolutely at a standstill. The deaf man is blind to his fellows mentally, which seems amazingly difficult for people to grasp and keep in mind. Always they demand him to do the impossible; and, as one writer points out, often with either the touch of impatience or that unmistakable and exasperating air of dealing with one who is not bright. Not one in a hundred ever voluntarily thinks, in some especially embarrassing situation, to make use of the one sure and easy means of leading to the idea by a few written words.

Therefore the deaf have had to come to their own rescue. They have been forced to invent a sort of new braincapacity, by seeing what is said instead of hearing it. In the twenty-five or thirty guilds for the deaf in the large cities in this country, and the lip-reading schools connected with them, there exists the largest and most fruitful movement for overcoming the incapacitations of deafness. Everyone should exert himself to acquire the art to some very appreciable extent. It is incomparably ahead of everything else. This is not to say that he will not make use of all the artificial means which he may have. But many of them are often wearisome compared with the efficiency of the other. Too much cannot be said in its favor.

Yet it is wise not to make the mistake of thinking it is too easily done. As a matter of fact, to become proficient requires steady effort, for a greater or less length of time. I have seen the statement by one who could hear, and therefore knew nothing about it, that it was very easily acquired. This is misleading. Words and phrases are easily enough learned; but that is not the point. One may start, however, without feeling that he must accomplish the full limit. Much or little, it is greatly worth the effort. But one must not be staggered to find quite often people whom he cannot read at all. There are those whose lips are cryptic.

In any paper of this kind, whose aim is to be helpful, certain attitudes of hearing people toward some phases of deafness may well be mentioned. Putting it mildly, there seems to be an amazing lack of realization that they have any individual share of responsibility in the one or two things which depend alone upon others to do. There is little enough which the deaf person does not do for himself, but that little unqualifiedly belongs to other people.

It is no accident — on the contrary it is a significant fact—that I open letters or read from some published report and find such statements as these: ‘It is such a lonely life, for very few people have patience with one who is deaf’; or, ‘The people I am with are not in the least interested . . . sometimes I go for days without being spoken to, other than in my work.’ Or, again, ‘I am very fond of social life but am denied everything.’

Such conditions are explainable in one of two ways only. The situation which allows a person to go days, or even one day, without being spoken to, unless absolutely necessary, is due to heartless indifference or actual selfishness. If excry person with whom this woman was associated had spent two minutes each day speaking with her, or writing, if speech was too difficult, it would have made all the difference in the world to her, because that was the particular thing in her case which would have made for her pleasure. Two minutes of common agreeableness in twenty-four hours is a petty self-sacrifice for even the most indifferent. Or, in the case of the one who was fond of social life, if, on one occasion a month even, a few hours of the social pleasure which it was known she could enjoy had been made possible for her, it would have made the difference between happiness and unhappiness, at the expense only of an effort once a year by some one of a dozen people.

It all but seems that hearing people have the idea that the deaf do not need, and can do entirely without, the very pleasure which they themselves are always seeking. Nothing could be further from the truth. They need it and desire it more than ever before.

Of course, the employment of the hands is the one universal and unfailing means of interest for the deaf, especially if it be creative work. But there is no one who has not some particular bent. That must be his cue, whether it is millinery or machinery, writing stories or raising strawberries. Indeed, it is far less a question of what to do than of getting a chance to do half the entrancing things one wants to do. Art is truly long and time is fleeting. I am a perpetual shock to my friends because the one thing I should like beyond all other things in the world would be to know that I shall live a thousand years.

When I look out upon this amazing cosmos, giving up to the human mind one secret after another; when I look within, and am aware of the aims and desires and untried possibilities of my mental workshop, I am strongly inclined to make it two thousand instead of one. After all, everything is in the mental outlook.

That is why I have sought to stress the psychology of deafness — because some grasp of it helps the deaf person to preserve his personality. It sets him right. It gives him back himself in the midst of lost things. He reclaims the poise and force of character so rudely shaken. He will not relegate himself to some limbo of the inconsequential — he keeps the relative values in their place. It is the great worth-while triumph. For, in the last analysis, personality is the most subtle and determining force in all the world.