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PARTISAN REVIEW
Freud's account, simultaneously rigid, unbending, inflexible,
severe, unforgiving, sadistic, and primitive, and it perseveres in
every one of these qualities. It is one of the places at which society
and culture penetrate into our unconscious minds and permeate
their workings.
Freud has, I believe, shifted the pitch of discourse and has
actively introduced the notion of a collective or transpersonal
superego; and in
Civilization and Its Discontents
he did, to be sure,
assert that "the community, too, evolves a super-ego under whose
influence cultural development proceeds." These two formations
have many points of agreement; chief among them is that both set
up "strict ideal demands, disobedience to which is visited with 'fear
of conscience.' "Freud concluded that "the two processes, that of the
cultural development of the group and that of the cultural
development of the individual, are, as it were, always interlocked.
For that reason some of the manifestations and properties of the
super-ego can be more easily detected in its behavior in the cultural
community than in the separate individual."
I want, in an extremely cursory and foreshortened way, to
bring forward three psychoanalytic contributions made by followers
of Freud. Here I want to examine the contributions made by Abram
Kardiner, Erik Erikson, and Heinz Kohut, and they may be
suggested in the central piece of terminology chosen by each:
Kardiner's notion of "basic personality," Erikson's notion of
"identity," and Kohut's notion of the "self."
Kardiner's pioneering work was done in collaboration with
ethnographers and other social scientists. The "basic personality"
type, he argued, tended to be specific to certain cultural
configurations or institutional constellations, and these two kinds of
entities tended additionally to sustain one another. Kardiner's
investigations focused on the examination within one culture or
another of the relations between childhood experiences and
disciplines as institutions of one order, and religion, folklore, and
social organizations as institutions of another, though related, order.
The hypothesis these analyses were testing out ran to the effect that if
the known "conditions of childhood become consolidated and form a
basis for subsequent projective use, then we can expect to find some
evidence of it in all projective systems" - namely, cultural
institutions. And in his two chief works,
The Individual and His Society
(1939) and
The Psychological Frontiers of Society
(1945), Kardiner
undertook to explore these .correlations.
