Most of the evidence accumulated in the examination and treatment of morbid conditions characterized by a restless, incoordinate activity of the brain cells points to excess of the post-pituitary secretion as the cause, or as one of the most important causes.  The thyroid and the adrenal medulla also exert their influence.  But the strongest appears to be the post-pituitary.  Phobias, fears which obsess the mind, anxiety neuroses, suspicions, hallucinations, delusions, nervousness, all expressions of what we may sum up technically as the imaginative state of mind, occur and occur frequently, associated with other symptoms of posterior pituitary overactivity.  Persons in whose make-up it rules are more liable to imagine disturbances of their mentality, or exhibit a well-developed imaginative streak.  Normal states of overactivity of the post-pituitary such as occur in some women during the menstrual period and pregnancy, and in some men as part of the endocrine cycle of their everyday lives, are accompanied by increase in the susceptibility and vigor of the imagination.  Whether the feeding of excess post-pituitary would lead to a stimulation of the tendency or ability to imagine is still to be decided.  But it is known that quieting the post-pituitary by various means will cause a depression of the faculty, and eliminate its pathologic manifestations.

Psychologists distinguish between the constructive imagination that expresses itself in an ordered activity and the unbalanced 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 instability 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.  Deterioration 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.