Section 64. 2. Difference between Man and Women
There are many attempts to determine the difference between
the feminine and masculine psyche. Volkmar in his "Textbook of
Psychology" has attempted to review these experiments. But the
individual instances show how impossible is clear and definite statement
concerning the matter. Much is too broad, much too narrow;
much is unintelligible, much at least remotely correct only if one
knows the outlook of the discoverer in question, and is inclined to
agree with him. Consider the following series of contrasts.
Male
- Individuality
- Activity
- Leadership
- Vigor
- Conscious activity
- Conscious deduction
- Will
- Independence
- Particularity
- Negation
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Female
- Receptivity (Burdach, Berthold)
- Passivity (Daub, Ulrici, Hagemann)
- Imitativeness (Schleiermacher)
- Sensitivity to stimulation (Beneke)
- Unconscious activity (Hartmann)
- Unconscious induction (Wundt)
- Consciousness (Fischer)
- Completeness (Krause, Lindemann)
- Generally generic (Volkmann)
- Affirmation (Hegel and his school)
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None of these contrasts are satisfactory, many are unintelligible.
Burdach's is correct only within limits and Hartmann's is approximately
true if you accept his point of view. I do not believe that
these explanations would help anybody or make it easier for him to
understand woman. Indeed, to many a man they will appear to be
saying merely that the psyche of the male is masculine, that of the
female feminine. The thing is not to be done with epigrams however
spirited. Epigrams merely tend to increase the already great confusion.
Hardly more help toward understanding the subject is to be
derived from certain expressions which deal with a determinate
and also with a determining trait of woman. For example, the
saying, "On forbidden ground woman is cautious and man keen,"
may, under some circumstances, be of great importance in a criminal
case, particularly when it is necessary to fix the sex of the criminal.
If the crime was cautiously committed a woman may be inferred,
and if swiftly, a man. But that maxim is deficient in two respects.
Man and woman deal in the way described, not only in forbidden
fields, but generally. Again, such characteristics may be said to be
ordinary but in no wise regulative: there are enough cases in which
the woman was much keener than the man and the man much more
cautious than the woman.
The greatest danger of false conceptions lies in the attribution of
an unproved peculiarity to woman, by means of some beautifully
expressed, and hence, apparently true, proverb. Consider the well
known maxim: Man forgives a beautiful woman everything, woman
nothing. Taken in itself the thing is true; we find it in the gossip of
the ball-room, and in the most dreadful of criminal cases. Men are
inclined to reduce the conduct of a beautiful sinner to the mildest
and least offensive terms, while her own sex judge her the more
harshly in the degree of her beauty and the number of its partisans.
Now it might be easy in an attempt to draw the following consequences
from the correctness of this proposition: Men are generally
inclined to forgive in kindness, women are the unforgiving creatures.
This inference would be altogether unjustified, for the maxim only
incidentally has woman for its subject; it might as well read: Woman
forgives a handsome man everything, man nothing. What we have
at work here is the not particularly remarkable fact that envy plays
a great rôle in life.
Another difficulty in making use of popular truths in our own
observations, lies in their being expressed in more or less definite
images. If you say, for example, "Man begs with words, woman
with glances," you have a proposition that might be of use in many
criminal cases, inasmuch as things frequently depend on the demonstration
that there was or was not an amour between two people
(murder of a husband, relation of the widow with a suspect).
Now, of course, the judge could not see how they conversed
together, how he spoke stormily and she turned her eyes away.
But suppose that the judge has gotten hold of some letters—then
if he makes use of the maxim, he will observe that the man becomes
more explicit than the woman, who, up to a certain limit, remains
ashamed. So if the man speaks very definitely in his letters, there
is no evidence contradictory to the inference of their relationship,
even though nothing similar is to be found in her letters. The thing
may be expressed in another maxim: What he wants is in the lines;
what she wants between the lines.
The great difficulty of distinguishing between man and woman
is mentioned in "Levana oder Erziehungslehre," by Jean Paul,
who says, "A woman can not love her child and the four continents
of the world at the same time. A man can." But who has ever
seen a man love four continents? "He loves the concept, she the
appearance, the particular." What lawyer understands this? And
this? "So long as woman loves, she loves continuously, but man
has lucid intervals." This fact has been otherwise expressed by
Grabbe, who says: "For man the world is his heart, for woman her
heart is the world." And what are we to learn from this? That the
love of woman is greater and fills her life more? Certainly not. We
only see that man has more to do than woman, and this prevents
him from depending on his impressions, so that he can not allow
himself to be completely captured by even his intense inclinations.
Hence the old proverb: Every new affection makes man more
foolish and woman wiser, meaning that man is held back from his
work and effectiveness by every inclination, while woman, each time,
gathers new experiences in life. Of course, man also gets a few of
these, but he has other and more valuable opportunities of getting
them, while woman, who has not his position in the midst of life,
must gather her experiences where she may.
Hence, it remains best to stick to simple, sober discoveries which
may be described without literary glamour, and which admit of no
exception. Such is the statement by
Friedreich[1]: "Woman is more
excitable, more volatile and movable spiritually, than man; the
mind dominates the latter, the emotions the former. Man thinks
more, woman senses more." These ungarnished, clear words, which
offer nothing new, still contain as much as may be said and explained.
We may perhaps supplement them with an expression of Heusinger's,
"Women have much reproductive but little productive imaginative
power. Hence, there are good landscape and portrait painters
among women, but as long as women have painted there has
not been any great woman-painter of history. They make
poems, romances, and sonnets, but not one of them has written
a good tragedy." This expression shows that the imaginative
power of woman is really more reproductive than productive,
and it may be so observed in crimes and in the testimony of
witnesses.
In crimes, this fact will not be easy to observe in the deed itself,
or in the manner of its execution; it will be observable in the nature
of the plan used. To say that the plan indicates productive creation
would not be to call it original. Originality can not be indicated,
without danger of misunderstanding, by means of even a single
example; we have simply to cling to the paradigm of Heusinger, and
to say, that when the plan of a criminal act appears more independent
and more completely worked out, it may be assumed to be
of masculine origin; if it seeks support, however, if it is an imitation
of what has already happened, if it aims to find outside assistance
during its execution, its originator was a woman. This truth goes
so far that in the latter case the woman must be fixed upon as the
intellectual source of the plan, even though the criminal actually
was a man. The converse inference could hardly be held with justice.
If a man has thought out a plan which a woman is to execute, its
fundamental lines are wiped out and the woman permits the productive
aspect of the matter to disappear, or to become so indefinite
that any sure conclusion on the subject is impossible.
Our phenomenon is equally important in statements by witnesses.
In many a case in which we suppose the whole or a
portion of a witness's testimony to be incorrect, intentionally invented,
or involuntarily imagined, we may succeed in extracting
a part of the testimony as independent construction, and thus
determining what might be incorrect in it. If, when this happens,
the witness is a man and his lies show themselves in productive
form, and if the witness is a woman and her lies appear to be reproduced,
it is possible, at least, that we are being told untruths. The
procedure obviously does not in itself contain anything evidential,
but it may at least excite suspicion and thus caution, and that, in
many cases, is enough. I may say of my own work that I have often
gained much advantage from this method. If there were any suspicion
that the testimony of a witness, especially the conception of
some committed crime, was untrue, I recalled Heusinger, and asked
myself "If the thing is untrue, is it a sonnet or a tragedy?" If the
answer was "tragedy" and the witness a man, or, if the answer was
"sonnet" and the witness a woman, I concluded that everything was
possibly invented, and grew quite cautious. If I could come to
no conclusion, I was considerably helped by Heusinger's other
proposition, asking myself, "Flower-pictures or historical subjects?"
And here again I found something to go by, and the need to be
suspicious. I repeat, no evidence is to be attained in this way, but
we frequently win when we are warned beforehand.
[[ id="n64.1"]]
J. B. Friedreich: System der gerichtlich. Psychol. Regensburg 1852.