HOW THE GLANDS INFLUENCE THE MIND 185 



fancies of the fearful neurotic for example. The post-pituitary 

 confers the lability of the underlying state of brain in all of these 

 imaginative tincturings of consciousness. The constructive 

 imagination, one of the few truly precious gifts of a personality, 

 is probably the expression of a certain balanced activity of the 

 ante-pituitary and the post-pituitary. 



Moods and the Organic Outlook 



The lability the post-pituitary confers upon the combinations 

 of perceptions and conceptions, grouped as the imagined, extends 

 to the ruling mood that may be spoken of as the organic outlook. 

 Post-pituitary in excess, without compensation or balancing by 

 one or some of the other endocrines, is associated with an insta- 

 bility of mood and the organic outlook. Concomitant is a 

 defective self-control. Typically, one sees the effects in the 

 mental abnormalities of women during the premenstrual period. 

 A number of them have their pituitary balance upset then, with 

 an overtopping of the ante-pituitary by the post-pituitary. 

 Irritability, a sub-hysteria, or an actual hysteria may emerge in 

 the usually most placid characters. A quiet wife and mother 

 may go for her husband, curse and mortify him, even strike and 

 beat him. She may slap her children at that time and no other. 

 It is well known that most of their crimes are committed by 

 women during the menstrual period. So are the suicides. De- 

 terioration of mentality and character so often observed during 

 the menopause, with its apathies or excitements, melancholia or 

 mania, the fits of weeping or gaiety, the loss of grip upon reality, 

 the complete change in mood and temperament that reflect the 

 transformation of the organic outlook, demonstrate clearly the 

 overwhelming influence of the endocrines upon the attitudes of 

 the self toward the self. 



It is possible to speak of thyroid moods, adrenal moods, ante- 

 pituitary or post-pituitary moods, gonadal moods. Each of these 

 is the echo in the mind of cells stimulated or depressed, by con- 

 centration or dilution in the blood of particular internal secre- 

 tions. Restlessness and excitement can be produced experi- 

 mentally by feeding thyroid. Vague anxiety, depressive fancies 

 and fears, imaginative overactivity can be removed by inhibiting 

 the post-pituitary. Hypersecretion of the ovary will cause a 

 sexual susceptibility and a mood of genital obsession, capable 

 of the most remarkable sublimations and perversions. 



