http://worldcat.org/entity/work/id/1138217

Society as the patient; essays on culture and personality

"This book is concerned with new and more fruitful ways of thinking about man and his society which we have been developing within recent years, indicative of the new climate of opinion now emerging in science, philosophy, art, and especially literature. One expression of this reorientation in our thinking we are calling the psychocultural approach, because it utilizes the concepts and findings, the insights and understandings, as well as the methods, of psychiatry, psychoanalysis, and psychology, together with those coming from cultural anthropology and sociology. In terms of culture and personality, we may view the widespread social disorders and conflicts and also the prevalent unhappiness and personality difficulties of individuals as different expressions or symptoms of our disintegrating cultural traditions. This seemingly circular conception replaces the long accepted, but unresolvable dilemma of the individual versus society--and, like modern physics, locates the dynamics of social life in individuals, living in a social and cultural field which they themselves maintain. Perhaps the major gain from this new approach is that it provides a constructive substitute for the increasingly bitter polemics and apologetics and also the growing defeatism and "failure of nerve" of today. If we can see ourselves as carrying on the endless endeavor to develop a human way of life, we will not shrink from accepting the great privilege and immense responsibility of renewing our culture and reorientating our social order, as the task we and our children must undertake. For this task, we have the resources of these new concepts and insights and the guidance of our enduring aspirations toward a democratic social order, dedicated to human dignity and respect for the individual personality. For many years I have been concerned with the development of this psychocultural approach. These essays, written for different journals and on special occasions, present successive efforts to deal with the varied problems of this emerging synthesis of culture and personality. They are offered not as pronouncements but as invitations to new ways of thinking. While earlier exploratory statements have been elaborated and further clarified in later formulations, I hope they will be of value to students now entering this field and also to the general reader who is seeking illumination upon the contemporary scene"--Preface. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2006 APA, all rights reserved).

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