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Thus pain in slight degree is exciting, and in the sexual sphere pain is often sought as a means of heightening the pleasure, especially by women and by the roue. I suspect also that the haircloth shirt and the sackcloth and ashes of the anhedonic hermit were painful methods of seeking excitement. Sometimes pain is used in small amounts to relieve excitement.
Fairly frequent among these who either through choice or necessity are to remain continent. The anhedonic or exhausted. Found in the sensualists and often reacted to by the formation of religious and ethical codes, which eliminate sex, Tolstoy, the hermits, certain Russian sects, etc. There is under-inhibition of a good kind.
Many a hermit, I fancy, who found the sensual and ambitious pleasure of life intolerable, who sought to fly from crowds to the deserts, was anhedonic but he called it renunciation. Seeking excitement is one of the great pleasure-trends of life.
The enthusiasm of purpose and the eagerness of appetite go at once, in certain delicate people, when pride is seriously injured or when a once established superiority is crumbled. The humiliated man is anhedonic, even if he is a philosopher.
This lack of desire for the joys of life is attended by a restlessness, a seeking of excitement for a time, until there arises a curious over-reaction to excitement. The anhedonic patient finds that noises are very troublesome, that he becomes unpleasantly excited over music, that company is distressing because he becomes confused and excited, and crowds, busy scenes and streets are intolerable.
The records of every neurologist contain many such cases, most of whom recover, but a few go on to severe incurable mental disease. I pass on, without regard for logic or completeness, to a personality type that we may call the anhedonic or simpler a restless, not easily satisfied, easily disgusted group.
The treatment must be directed at first to the physical factors, and with these conquered the acquired forms of anhedonia usually yield readily. It would be interesting to consider other types related to the anhedonic personality. The complainer, the whiner, the nag, all these are basically people who are hard to satisfy.
I pass these interesting people by and turn to the opposite of the anhedonic group, the group that is hearty in tastes and appetites, easily pleased as a rule and often crude in their relish of life.
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