Main trends of research in the social and human ... - unesdoc - Unesco

Psychology 243
common to all individuals - the ‘structures’ in fact - from what each individual
can invent or differentiate as his personal specializations operate, the terms of
the problem were profoundly modified. With current trends, what is involved is
not so much establishing how far the individual is a socialized entity (he is from
the time of his birth until he dies, but according to very different modes) but
rather seeing whether, between organic structures and social structures, there
are structures that are ‘general’ or common to all individual members of society,
but not exclusively or specifically social, and what interactions there are between
the three kinds of reality.
I. There is really no point in harking back to the old arguments as to whether
it is society that forms the individual, which is obvious in the case of speech and
which is what Durkheim maintained in the case of natural logic, moral feelings,
and so on, or whether it is the individual who fashions society through his
‘natural’ or organic tendencies, as Rousseau and common sense would have it
before the discovery of sociology, and as psychoanalysts, who do not subscribe
to the so-called culturalist sub-school of thought, believe along with other au-
thors interested in behavioural tendencies that are little modified by particular
societies. Considering the problem in terms of adult psychology alone, it looks
rather too much like the equally classical question as to which came first, the
chicken or the egg.
But, just as biology gets over this problem by studying the chick and by reduc-
ing simultaneously the chicken and the egg to dynamic structures of a genetic,
ontogenetic and instinctive character, which assumes a co-ordinated study of
hereditary, development and behaviour, and not of behaviour alone, similarly
the study of the relation between individual psychology and social life cannot be
boiled down to the study of mature or adult behaviour. The most specifically
human social phenomenon, as Durkheim realized, is the bringing-up of new
generations by the ones that have gone before - a process that involves external
or educational transmission within a broad definition (ranging from speech to
economic and political factors), and not heredity as in the case of a great many
family or social instincts in animals. Nonetheless, the rising generations already
come into the world with hereditary characteristics, including a nervous system
that is not transmitted by society, and the process of socialization certainly
does not boil down to inscribing impressions on a blank surface. In order to
understand what society gives to the individual it is not enough, then, to note
that nearly everything in the adult is socialized, apart from some reflexes (and
even they are partly trained), a number of perceptive structures (and even then
speech, suggestion, and so on, may influence them), some dreams (and even
then.. .), and so on. On the contraly, it is important to have an exact knowledge
of:
I. The psychological heritage of our species. This is not so simple, since
psychoanalysts are not in agreement - even among themselves - as to whether
‘Oedipean’ tendencies, and so on, are a matter of ‘instinct’ or are to be attrib-
uted to cultural factors, since they still argue about the part that innateness
plays in criminal tendencies, etc., and especially since we still know very little