Now, recent research seems to leave no doubt that heredity does operate to some extent in the causation of bashfulness, since most bashful persons--at any rate, among those who come under the care of physicians--have a strain of the neurotic in their family histories. On the other hand, it has been quite as positively established that the matter of external appearances has a causal relation to bashfulness in comparatively few cases, though it may act as an aggravating element. In case after case the first manifestations of true chronic bashfulness have been traced to a period in life far antedating any anxiety on the person's part respecting the way he walks or dresses or looks. More than this, when the bashful themselves are questioned as to the causes of their bashfulness, they usually either profess entire ignorance, or emphasise mental, rather than physical, factors.
"I attribute my bashfulness to no physical cause," is a characteristic response. "I attribute it to a certain weakness of mind, to my lack of self-confidence, to fear of ridicule, and especially to a nervous excitement which I feel whenever others look at me."
Of course, apart from the doubt which such a response casts on the external appearances theory of bashfulness, and its emphasis on the mental, as opposed to the physical, factor, it really throws scarcely any light on the question of causation. Just as there are many awkward, badly dressed, and deformed people who are not bashful, so there are many modest and sensitive ones who go through life in wholly normal fashion, perhaps untroubled even by bashfulness of the occasional type. Quite evidently there still is an underlying something which has to be taken into account before one can fully understand chronic bashfulness.
That something the modern medical psychologist is beginning to believe he has discovered through proceeding on the assumption that bashfulness is far more than a mere innate weakness or character defect; that it is, in reality, a functional nervous trouble, differing only in degree, not in kind, from hysteria and other psychoneuroses. That is to say, the medical psychologist assumes that, as is now believed to be the case in every psychoneurosis, the bashful man is the victim of subconscious memories of distressing incidents in his early life; incidents which, in his case, have had the effect of arousing in an exaggerated degree sentiments of shame or fear.