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PARTISAN REVIEW
general knowledge about the nature of these symptoms, as well as a
freer upbringing, led to their disappearance.
Today we have a changed society; therefore, we meet new prob–
lems in our patients. But what is perhaps even more important is that
the growing child and adolescent have faced a society in the very
process of changing, which leads to particular difficulties. Any stable
culture, by definition, has achieved a sufficient integration between the
conflicting demands of the individual and the environment.
It
has also
developed means of producing the same integration in the next
generation, in spite of the inevitable struggle between the generations.
Such periods create a certain equilibrium in most people and also, of
course, specific neuroses. A changing society confronts the individual
with a much harder task.
We still have a great number of patients whose childhood within
the family was not much influenced by society outside the family, but
they, too, in adolescence meet among their peers in school and college
the pressure to conform to the present environment and to the almost
irresistible impact of the drug culture. One need only consider the
changed life of the college dormitory, where both sexes now live
together, to see that young people, whatever their upbringing, face
problems not formerly experienced.
To give a brief illustration of such changes: a young girl in
treatment some thirty years ago, ashamed that she had lost her virginity
in a relationship with a lover who then left her before their planned
marriage, married on the rebound. To camouflage the shame and
disgrace of lost virginity and out of fear of losing her husband's respect,
she managed on her wedding night to produce, with the aid of a safety
pin, the expected blood on the sheet. More recently, a young girl in
college was so ashamed to be a virgin and so embarrassed before an
expected encounter with a young man that she broke her hymen with a
shampoo bottle.
Freud's ideas have had a wide influence on society without finding
comparable understanding. Thus, psychoanalysis may have helped
produce some of these cultural changes without intending them. The
causes of these developments are too complex to be explained by
psychology alone; but psychoanalysis can help us to understand some
important causal factors and certainly interpret effects of the cultural
changes on the individual.
Jules Henry, the social scientist and anthropologist, in a brilliant
book,
Culture Against Man
(1963), came to the conclusion that in
today's society "the psychoanalytic metaphor according to which the
child introjects the parent (copies the parent, tries to come up to
