Full text of "The Psychology Of Ego Involvements"

See other formats

TEXT FLY WITHIN
THE BOOK ONLY

64361

OSMANIA UNIVERSITY LIBRARY

Call No. / 3 / / a h I Accession No. ^ |
Author

This bookshoul
last marked below.

rettrfned 6n or before the date

The Psychology of
Ego -Involvements

SQCIAL ATTITUDES

fr
IDENTIFICATIONS

MUZAFER SHERIF

•

HADLEY CANTRIL

Princeton University

New Yor*: JOHN WILEY & SONS, Inc.
London: CHAPMAN & HALL, Limited

BY
JOHN WILEY & SONS, INC.

AU Rights Reserved

This book or any part thereof must not
be reproduced in any form without
the written permission of the publisher.

SECOND PRINTING, NOVEMBER, 1947

PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

PREFACE

In this book on the psychology of ego-involvements we are
attacking a problem which it seems crucial to solve if we are ever
to acquire a scientifically defensible account of man's relationship
to the world around him with all its natural laws, its technological
developments, and its social products.

Here we are only able to sketch in bold relief what appears to
be the psychology of ego-involvements. Much more must be added
later to complete the account. But, as we point out in the first
chapter, it seems to us that the broad outline presented here will
accommodate this further work without any major alterations.

Evidence from a wide variety of sources, including studies from
the experimental laboratory, investigations of everyday life be-
havior, public-opinion surveys, observational studies of children and
adolescents, sociological data, and field material of anthropologists
and ethnologists, has almost fallen into place of its own accord.
Although we have cited rather extensive references, our job has
been more one of selection than accumulation of data: in nearly
every chapter, we have had to satisfy ourselves with the inclusion
of only a few of the many reports, observations, or experiments
that might have been mentioned. Those who are familiar with
the various areas we have touched on will know the vast literature
it is possible to tap.

The bulk of chapters 2, 3, and 4 were first published in the Psy-
chological Review in November 1945 and January 1946. These
articles have been slightly elaborated here. The material is re-
published with the permission of the American Psychological As-
sociation. The writers acknowledge the permissions granted by
the various publishers and authors for the quotations used. Great
care has been taken in each instance to provide bibliographical
references by means of which the reader can identify the author
and publisher to whom credit is thereby given.

A State Department fellowship to Princeton University for

vi PREFACE

Shcrif and a contribution from the Marshall Field Foundation to
Princeton University, enabling Cantril to be relieved of some teach-
ing duties and allowing us bibliographical and secretarial assist-
ance, combined to make it possible for us to work closely together.
We acknowledge this assistance most gratefully.

Carolyn Wood Sherif has worked with us since late 1945. She
has greatly aided us in selecting some of the material and in pre-
paring certain chapters.

We gratefully acknowledge the help of Drs. Harold and Mary
Cover Jones of the Institute of Child Welfare of the University of
California for allowing us to go over some of their unpublished
material on adolescence.

We are indebted to Donald Stauff er and Whitney J. Gates of the
Princeton faculty for their apt suggestions of certain of the literary
passages cited in chapter 13. Mildred Strunk also assisted us in the
selection of examples for this chapter.

Elizabeth V. Deyo has ably managed many of the details con-
nected with our work and has prepared the manuscript for pub-
lication,

Dr. Herbert S. Langfeld made a number of editorial suggestions
which improved the manuscript.

M.S.
H.C.

Princeton, N. J.
June 24, 1946.

CONTENTS

CHAPTER PAGE

1 INTRODUCTION 1

2 THE PROBLEM OF ATTITUDES: UNIFIED 9
Recent Attitude Studies and Methodological Considerations

— A Characterization of Attitudes.

3 SOME EXPERIMENTAL FACTS CONCERNING THE BASIS OF

ATTITUDES 29

Frames of Reference in Relation to Structured and Unstruc-
tured Stimulus Situations— Social Factors in Laboratory Situ-
ations.

4 THE ATTITUDE FORMULATION EXTENDED TO CONCRETE

SITUATIONS 60

Experiments Using Everyday Life Material — Stereotypes —
Political Attitudes— Panics— -Social Movements— Frame of
Reference in Some Recent Economic Works.

5 THE PROBLEM AND A GENERAL CHARACTERIZATION OF EGO-

INVOLVEMENTS 92

Misuse of the Concept of "Ego"— Attitudes as Main Consti-
tuents of Ego — Ego a Genetic Formation — Ego Not a Fixed
Entity — Ego-striving is Not Instinctive: No Innate Ego
Drives.

6 EXPERIMENTS ON EGO-INVOLVEMENTS 117
Ego-involvements in Laboratory Tasks — Ego-involvements as

a Set for Learning — Ego-involvements Shown in the Intensity
of Attitudes — Status and Class Identification as Ego-involve-
ments—Some Recent Reviews of Experimental Literature.

7 THE GENETIC FORMATION OF THE EGO 156
A Review of Some Studies on Ego Development— The Ef-
fects of Certain Social Factors on Ego Formation.

8 RE-FORMATION OF THE EGO IN ADOLESCENCE 199
The Problem of Adolescence in a Sociological and Psycho-
logical Setting— Adolescence in Different Cultures and Times.

vii

viii CONTENTS

CHAPTER PAGE

9 RE-FORMATION OF THE EGO IN ADOLESCENCE (Continued) 222
The Developing Ego Rendered Unstable and, at Times, Criti-
cal—The Adolescents' Reactions and Efforts to Re-establish
Themselves to Some Degree of Stability— The Effects of Age-
mate Reference Groups and Membership Groups in the Re-
formation of the Ego-attitudes— Some Implications of the
Foregoing Material for Our Problem.

10 EGO-INVOLVEMENTS AND IDENTIFICATIONS IN GROUP SITUA-

TIONS 280

The Structural Properties of Groups— Individual Members as
Influenced by Group Norms and Identifications— Some Psy-
chological Leads— Some Verifications of the Effects of Group
Situations.

11 EGO-INVOLVEMENTS IN CONCRETE SOCIAL SITUATIONS > 348
"The Apparel Oft Proclaims the Man"— We See Ourselves in

the Movies— "What's in a Name?"— The Martyr— Ego-in-
volvements Determined by Situation— Status within Groups
—Job Satisfaction.

12 BREAKDOWNS OF THE EGO 386
Dissociation of the Ego from the Body— The Ego May Tem-
porarily Dissolve— Breakdowns of the Ego Under Extreme
Deprivation— The Ego May Break Down if Established
Norms Collapse— The Ego May Regress, Dissociate, or Be-
come Re-formed Under Extreme Situations of Stress— Ego-
breakdowns in Abnormal and Pathological Cases.

13 SOME ILLUSTRATIONS FROM LITERATURE 437

14 THE EGO IN PSYCHOANALYSIS 461
\Freud's Formulations— Where Freudian Theory Leads in

Social Psychology— Modifications with Cultural Emphasis-
Why Psychoanalytic Formulations Must Be Rejected-
Summary.

NAME INDEX 509

SUBJECT INDEX 516

CHAPTER 1
INTRODUCTION

Among other problems brought into sharp focus by the impact
of momentous events and changes are the problems of human
beings themselves. A growing sense of dissatisfaction and disillu-
sionment with things as they are today is causing many people to
question traditional conceptions of "human nature'^wfficlt have
tended to be taken for granted. Many social scientists, whos per-
haps feel called upon even more than psychologists to give some
explanation or to find some solution for things as they are, almost
inevitably put forth, concoct, or rehash verdicts concerning human
problems and the role the human factor plays in our complex
world. Often some account of "human nature" is vigorously ad-
vocated as a premise with which to justify the perpetuation or
acceptance of an existing set of human relationships in religious,
social, or economic life.

And certain aspects of these accounts of "human nature" have
important bearings on ego problems. Some people argue that
human beings are self-seeking. Others deny it. Some maintain
that man is endowed with a craving for power. Some find pri-
marily in man's nature the elemental seeds of a need for out-
stripping others. There are those who assume that "human
nature" is the source of all harmony and solidarity. Problems of
"human nature," as related to war and peace, to egotism and altru-
ism, to human self-centeredness or selflessness, are among the cur-
rent topics of hot debate among a good many people within and
without the psychological profession. Such issues touch closely on
the facts that concern us in this book. They indicate that ego
problems are matters of everyday life human relationships; that
they are not mere academic topics to be discussed and argued by
those who can afford the luxury of such an exclusive pastime.

The word "ego" is a much-abused word. It has long suffered

2 INTRODUCTION

scientifically objectionable associations in religious, philosophical,
ethical, and psychological writings. Because of this, it might have
been safer to refer to the mass of material we are handling in this
book by a new term. But psychology today seems to be overflow-
ing with new terms, especially among those who write on topics
concerning social psychology and who create concepts to suit their
personal preferences. So we reluctantly chose to retain the word
ego. But we have taken pains to use it only in factually demon-
strable connections.

For there is great need for such a concept. The differential
character of a tremendous number of reactions observed both in
the laboratory and in everyday life must be designated by some
such concept. The ego is inferred from behavior whether verbal
or nonverbal To be more specific, reactions are modified and
altered to a greater or lesser degree when they are ego-involved.
The ego, as we shall repeat time and time again, is not an entity.
It is not fixed and immutable even after it is formed.

In the following chapters we have preferred to use as much as
possible terms like "ego-involved reactions" instead of "ego." For
expressions such as "ego-involvements" or "ego-involved reactions"
are less tainted with the objectionable associations which "ego"
has suffered historically in the substantive form. The expression
"ego-involvements" and its derivatives have come into use in psy-
chology during the past decade, chiefly in connection with ex-
perimental investigations or theories related to empirical evidence.

An innumerable wealth of hitherto disconnected observations
and facts have all converged to compel us to formulate certain
conclusions concerning the formation and functioning of a con-
stellation in the psychological make-up of the individual which
may be designated as the ego. There are observations on the
genetic development of the integrated person, as well as on the
varieties of disintegration and breakdown. There is a great mass
of data on the effects of collective behavior. There is an impressive
array of experimental facts obtained during the last ten years and
concerned with the differential effects of ego-involvements.

The reason these scientifically collected data lend themselves so
readily to a concise formulation is that they have their concrete

INTRODUCTION 3

counterparts in everyday life. They are so general that it took
almost no effort on our part to find further verifying evidence
from concrete human relationships and from the colorful expres-
sions of personal relationships found in literary works. This con-
verging of facts from so many different sources is, in a nutshell,
the hypothesis the following chapters verify. Dogmatic statements
presented as hypotheses here in the introduction will acquire sub-
stance or remain as mere idle intellectual chatter on the basis of
the evidence we have tried to bring together in this volume.

The ego is not innate in the sense that certain other psychologi-
cal functions, such as perception, are innate. Nor is ego-striving
innate in the sense of an instinct, drive, or need such as the innate
striving for food, water, or a sex object. There is no instinctive
ego drive, no innate need for domination or submission, for suc-
corance or idol worship. Nor is the ego a basic personality pat-
tern, unique and unchangeable in the person. That constellation
in the psychological make-up of the human adult which may be
designated as the ego (or by any other convenient concept) is a
genetic formation. The newborn infant, even though biologically
integrated, has no ego. And no ego would develop in him
through maturation if it were not for two facts. First, the fact
that his psychological functioning — and his alone in the whole
animal kingdom— can take place on a conceptual (symbolic) level.
This enables him to grasp reciprocal relationships and to make
effective use of the accumulation of diverse concepts and symbols.
Second, once man is equipped biologically with the possibility of
functioning psychologically on a conceptual level, he has to live in
a lawfully ordered world of nature where social relationships and
their products impose on him the necessity of regulating and
adapting himself to lawful nature and to the established order of
human relationships. Without these impositions, these restrictions,
resistances, and rewards of nature and especially of the established
social order surrounding him with its material and technological
products, its institutions, its accumulated symbols, values, and
norms, there would be no consistent and continuous ego formation
in the individual.

This is substantiated by the fact that the egos of individual
members of different social orders are shaped in their major

4 INTRODUCTION

features by the image of those social orders. History and ethnol-
ogy convincingly show that these .images may in some cases be
diametrically opposite in character. In accounting for these dia-
metrically opposite variations, descriptions of the ego in terms of
instincts or needs with long and impressive lists of ego drives
utterly fail The logical argument to which instinctive ego drive
theories must resort is to posit the existence of different human
species at different times and in different places.

In brief, the ego consists of many attitudes which from infancy
on are related to the delimited, differentiated and accumulating
"I," "me," "mine" experiences. These attitudes, which may be
designated as ego-attitudes, are constituent components of the ego.
Apart from the constellation of these ego-attitudes, there is no such
entity as the ego. In fact many attitudes are not discrete affairs in
the psychological make-up of individuals. They are attitudes that
define and qualify an individual's relative standing to other persons
or to institutions in some more or less lasting way. They are
attitudes that determine the more or less enduring character of
one's personal identity with the values or norms incorporated in
him. When these attitudes are situationally called for, when they
are at any time consciously or unconsciously involved in a psy-
chological function, we become personally involved. And when
we do become personally involved, then our discrimination, judg-
ment, perception, remembering, thinking, and explicit behavior
are accordingly modified or altered.

Once formed, the ego is by no means rigid and unchangeable.
To a large extent, ego-involvements are situationally determined.
The same words of insult that may be gracefully swallowed in one
situation may lead to violent exhibitionistic reactions in another.
In certain cases the threshold of sensitivity of ego-involvements
may be quite low, in other cases quite high, depending on the
demands of the situation and the psychological condition of the
individual. These thresholds of ego-involvement may be measured
in an empirical way. Since attitudes, the constituents of the ego,
are subject to change and transformation, the ego is also subject to
chaqge and transformation with changing situations of a major
character. Such transformation can be clearly observed in the

INTRODUCTION 5

changing ego of the adolescent boy or girl, especially in times and
in societies where social transition is rapid.

The psychology of the formation and functioning of ego-atti-
tudes is governed essentially by the same principles as the general
psychology of attitudes. The psychology of attitudes is, therefore,
basic to the psychology of the ego. Consequently, we have had to
deal first and at some length with the psychology of attitudes $nd
carry the conclusions reached there to the treatment of ego-in-
volvements. Characterized in broad outlines, an attitude is an
established readiness which has a subject-object relationship of
highly variable content, which is learned (formed), which has
affective properties with various degrees of motivational compo-
nents, which may refer to whatever stimuli are encompassed in
the subject-object relationship, and which determines that an in-
dividual will react to a stimulus in a selective way. Once formed,
an attitude serves as an anchorage to structure or modify subse-
quent experience or response.

This broad characterization of attitudes also holds basically true
in the case of ego-attitudes. Many attitudes and especially ego-
attitudes are formed in relation to and directed towards objects or
persons that satisfy basic needs. Hence the affective and emotional
halo of many ego-strivings that make an individual highly selec-
tive and highly self-centered — sometimes to the point of appearing
deaf and blind to cues in objective situations — spring from such
relationships. Many of the attitudes revealed in everyday life
contacts define an individual's status for him in relation to other
people. Many embody the values a person upholds for himself and
regulate his claims and aspirations in relation to others. These
ego-attitudes are therefore highly charged affective anchorages.

Every individual strives to place or to anchor himself as an
acceptable member in his social milieu or in some social setting,
whatever the particular criteria for acceptance by his group or his
aspired group may be. This is true for any individual in any cul-
ture, whether highly competitive or highly co-operative, whether
primitive or advanced. There is an unmistakable striving on the
part of the individual to belong to his group or -to some aspired
group. Lack of social belongingness and conflicts in belonging-
ness (marginality) are painful. Once the ego is formed to the

6 INTRODUCTION

degree of grasping reciprocal human relationships, this striving to
anchor oneself becomes more compelling because of the emotion-
ally charged character of ego-attitudes.

Yet mere acceptance of an individual by a group in his milieu
or by some group he aspires to will not do forever. The mere
sense of belongingness does not bring lasting satisfaction. A
young man may aspire, as an ideal, to enter a certain college. But
once he gets there, he acquires new ideas and tries to be somebody
as prescribed by the hierarchical arrangement of social relation-
ships in the college. A man may reach his ideal of belonging to
some club. But after admission as a member, he may set his eyes
on some position at the top of the club's social pyramid. In groups
everywhere social life is necessarily hierarchical.

The striving for social acceptance and approval, which at times
reaches intense proportions, does not have to be attributed to the
urges and stresses of some special instinct. All attitudes function
in well-formed frames, in referential settings. If the situation does
not produce its appropriate frame in an individual, he tends con-
sciously or unconsciously to structure the situation, at least pre-
cariously, in a way determined by the stresses of his internal and
internalized desires, deprivations, and anchorages. Experiences of
ambiguity and confusion are tense and unpleasant. Relief from
such experiences becomes even more imperative in connection with
ego-attitudes, for these delimit and define one's sense of personal
security. If ego-attitudes are experienced as relatively stable, then,
psychologically, one's sense of status in relation to other persons,
groups, or institutions is secure. At times, any status, any standing
in a group is preferred to none, even though it may be felt as quite
unsatisfactory by the individual himself. Many a person has pre-
ferred to sweat out his ego problems in a group rather than face
ostracism or break away into uncertainty.

It seems plausible to us to regard individual differences of ego-
striving as due to individual differences in glandular activity and
other temperamental factors, to individual differences in the func-
tioning of basic drives such as those for food and sex, and to
individual differences in general physical vitality and intelligence.
In addition to such basic individual differences, of course, favor-
able or adverse circumstancfes for the satisfaction of basic needs, or

INTRODUCTION /

for the attainment of a secure position, further contribute to differ-
ential ego-strivings. There is no need to assume any differential
ego instinct.

A conservative capitalist and a revolutionary communist may
both defend their respective views with equal intensity. A Repub-
lican and a Democrat may fight one another tooth and nail over
the Administration's foreign policy and may both be frustrated
persons. The millions of people who followed Hitler were surely
not all perverse psychotic creatures. The flourishing post mortem
accounts which attribute fascist barbarism in Germany to the per-
verse complexes of Nazi leaders look ridiculous when one remem-
bers the predictions and warnings made to the world in all earnest-
ness in the early 1930's by those observers who took the situational
determination of social movements seriously.

We are not arguing here that personality characteristics, indi-
vidual frustrations, or elations are not important psychological
facts. Far from it. We have to learn as much as we can about
them. But we do maintain, on the basis of accumulating evidence
in several fields, that, in dealing with the identifications, ego-
involvements, and loyalties of individuals, the social psychologist
(for these are social psychological problems) should start first by
relating the individual to his reference and membership groups
and then proceed to the finer details of personality problems. For
an individual's identifications and ego-involvements, his more or
less lasting loyalties, and the values he does so much to uphold as
his own, have no meaning apart from his reference and member-
ship groups. For the social psychologist, the fact that a person
identifies himself with the Catholic Church or with a revolution-
ary party, or that he is a marginal man and hence has conflicting
loyalties, is at least as important as a knowledge of his measurable
or unique personality traits or of how his toilet habits were handled
in infancy. Once a person is placed situationally in his group
setting, then information concerning his personality characteristics
will further help us account for the< differential character of his
reactions. These two approaches should not be regarded as a
dichotomous antithesis but as different aspects of the work to be
done if the picture of man's ego-strivings is to be complete.

8 INTRODUCTION

In this volume we have tried to give only the broad outlines of
the psychology of ego-involvements. It is, therefore, an incomplete
treatment of the subject. The all important topics of motivation
and personality must be considered in further work. Although
incomplete, still, in our opinion, the main sketch of ego-involve-
ments presented here will not have to be changed to any consider-
able degree when motivational and personality factors are brought
into the picture. For the values one upholds as his personal values,
the goals he sets for himself, do not function in a vacuum or in
abstraction. These values and goals as well as all major ego-atti-
tudes are formed in or in relation to social groups. Investigations
of motivation, personality characteristics, or other differential qual-
ities will more adequately account for an individual's particular
reactions in interpersonal relationships and more accurately predict
his ego-involvements in a given situation if he is studied first in
relation to his reference and membership groups. It seems safe to
say that apart from a person's reference of himself to such groups,
he would not develop the consistent ego which defines his identity
in a more or less continuous way from one day to the next.

CHAPTER 2
THE PROBLEM OF ATTITUDES: UNIFIED

During the past two decades the problem of attitudes has
become central in social psychology. Thus, G. W. Allport writes:

The concept of attitude is probably the most distinctive and indis-
pensable concept in contemporary American social psychology. No
other term appears more frequently in experimental and theoretical
literature. [1, 798] l

Murphy, Murphy, and Newcomb, in their monumental volume
summarizing the state of social psychology in 1937, again empha-
size the point:

Perhaps no single concept within the whole realm of social psy-
chology occupies a more nearly central position than that of attitudes.
[19, 889]

We need not multiply these representative statements from other
sources to demonstrate the important position the concept of atti-
tudes holds in contemporary social psychology.

The study of attitudes is by no means the concern of psycholo-
gists alone. It is significant that sociologists feel as much at home
in the study of attitudes as do psychologists. Some sociologists
have gone so far as to equate social psychology with the study of
attitudes. [5, 11, 27] Attitudes became a focal problem in experi-
mental psychology in the first decade of this century. As a conse-
quence of the introspective analysis of the higher mental processes
at Wiirzburg, descriptions were given in "attitudinal" terms such
as Einstellung and Rewusstseinlagc. [21, 30] With this prominent
start in experimental psychology, attitudes came to stay as an im-
portant concept in that field.

In this book we are proceeding with the conviction that experi-

1 Roman numbers inclosed in brackets indicate the references at the end of each
chapter; italic numbers indicate page numbers in those references.

10 THE PROBLEM OF ATTITUDES: UNIFIED

mental and social studies on attitudes have much to contribute to
each other in bringing about a unified psychology of attitudes.
The psychologist's task is to give an adequate account of the psy-
chological mechanisms involved in the formation of an attitude in
any individual. The formation of a social attitude in the individ-
ual should be essentially the same as the formation of any attitude
if the explanation of this formation is to be psychology at all.
We are here groping in this direction. As we shall see, attitude
studies at present do not give us a unified picture. In fact the
problem of attitudes is in a very confused state. Perhaps the con-
fusion has increased in proportion to the wealth of literature:
different investigators have had different interests and points of
view in approaching the problem.

Attitudes in social life. When we look at any society, whether
primitive or highly developed, whether simple or complicated, we
observe conformities of behavior, within the limits of variations
due to individual differences, on the part of the individual mem-
bers of any society as they carry on the daily business of living —
for example, in regulating instinctive activity, dress, likes or dis-
likes of other groups, or responses to events which have social
significance. When analysis and explanation of these established
conformities are carried to the psychological level, the problem
becomes primarily one of the psychology of attitudes.2

We have used the term "established conformity" very deliber-
ately. For these established conformities result from conformity
to social standards or norms which have come into existence in a
deterministic way as a consequence of the interaction of individ-
uals in the all important business of living. Individual members
within a society come to acquire these established conformities of
experience and behavior within the limits of their individual
differences.3 We may, in fact, say in a summary way that the

2 The question of whether or not the whole of social psychology consists of a
psychology of attitudes is not our problem here. We may only say in passing that
it is our opinion that social psychology does not consist only of the psychology of
attitudes.

8 Without the enormous temperamental differences between individuals being
in any way ignored, a systematic awareness of the fact that temperamental differ-
ences always function within a given social context and set of norms would under-
cut and bring into proper perspective typologies such as those advanced by Jung,
Spranger, and Sheldon, which attempt to explain social behavior by categorizing
personality. [15, 22, 25]

ATTITUDE STUDIES AND METHODOLOGICAL CONSIDERATIONS 11

socialization which occurs when an individual becomes a member
of a group consists mainly in the achievement of conformity ia
experience and behavior to social values, standards, or norms al-
ready established. And the process of achieving conformity is, if
we analyze it closely, nothing more nor less than the formation
of appropriate attitudes in relation to these socially standardized
values or norms or other criteria of conduct.

RECENT ATTITUDE STUDIES AND METHODOLOGICAL CONSIDERATIONS

The approach to the psychology of attitude has been many-sided.
The early work of the Wiirzburg laboratory gave the historical
setting to more recent work on Aufgabe. In 1918 Thomas and
Znaniecki stimulated other sociologists to analyze the concept of
attitude further as a useful tool in the explanation of the phenom-
ena with which they dealt. The work of cultural anthropologists,
such as Boas, Malinowski, and Sapir, and of many contemporary
ethnologists highlights the variation in cultural norms and the
consequent differences in the attitudes of individuals living under
different social systems.

Investigators such as G. W. and F. H. Allport, Daniel Katz,
Bain, Paris and Lasker concerned themselves with the genesis
and nature of attitudes. F. H. Allport, Thurstone, Bogardus,
Likert, Droba, and others worked out procedures for measuring
attitudes. The attitudes of all kinds of people toward almost all
conceivable subjects have by this time been measured. Quite re-
cently, the interest in measuring attitudes has given way to the
measurement of public opinion by the use of stratified samples of
different populations. While the techniques for measuring atti-
tudes and opinion can be usefully employed to gather valuable
information on attitude determinants and properties, and while
the data obtained from such measurement often have a high prac-
tical, strategic, or systematic value, the great bulk of quantitative
research has been designed for the primary purpose of measure-
ment alone, not systematic understanding.

Thomas and Znaniecki held that "every manifestation of con-
scious life, however simple or complex, general or particular, can
be treated as an attitude." [27, 27] In a critical appraisal of their
work, Blumer points out that this blanket use of the term attitude

12 " THE PROBLEM OF ATTITUDES: UNIFIED

makes it "a kind of psychological catchall, since, as the authors
state, it may refer to any psychological process, or item of con-
sciousness. To take as a basic datum anything that includes such
diverse things as appetites, conceptions, feelings, decisions, sensa-
tions, desires, ideas, and sentiments is to operate with a complicated
and indefinite concept." [4, 24 /.] After an exhaustive review of
the literature on the psychology of attitudes, Nelson reports his
impression, shared by others, "of the wide variety of meanings
which are ascribed to this term." [20] He cites 23 rather distinct
characterizations given the term "attitude" by psychologists or
social scientists up to 1939, ranging from "organic drives," "neural
sets," or "trial responses," to "ways of conceiving objects," or sum
totals of "inclinations, feelings, notions, ideas, fears, prejudices,
threats, and convictions about any specific topic." In a recent
paper concerned with the definition and use of "attitude" in social
psychology, Strauss points out that "the concept, despite its key
position, is marked by considerable confusion." [26, 329] He notes
that much of the research on attitudes has little or nothing to do
with attitude theory and that the use of attitude as a "common
sense explanation" rather than as a "genuine causal explanation"
[334] has retarded systematic understanding.

It is therefore not surprising that some strict experimentalists,
dissatisfied with what they may regard as the "practical" or un-
systematic nature of attitude research in social psychology, look
down on it and on social psychology in general as having little
to do with pure science. They may take it as an example of why
the pure scientist must follow Titchener's dictum and stand "apart
from the great majority of his fellow men," disavow interpretation
as something entirely "foreign to him" and move "in the domain
of bare existence." [28, 69 /.]

The laboratory and everyday life. Before proceeding with a
discussion of the psychology of attitudes, it is necessary to clear up
the relationship between pure experimental research and the sys-
tematic study of attitudes in everyday life situations. A psycho-
logical construct, if it is to prove valid and adequate, must be as
valid and adequate in handling the stuff of ordinary human affairs
as in handling the controlled variables of the laboratory experi-
ment. Various writers have fallen into the error of making a dis-

ATTITUDE STUDIES AND METHODOLOGICAL CONSIDERATIONS 13

tinction for one reason or another between "psychology" and
"social psychology." Klineberg, for example, makes such a dis-
tinction "for purposes of convenience" [17, 4], and puts his em-
phasis on a demonstration of "the wealth of social patterning"
rather than on the "constants of human behavior." [8]

Science consists of a set of conceptual constructs which have
high predictive value. If a psychologist is to make any claims that
will have scientific validity, he must obviously be as objective as
possible. This does not mean, however, as Titchener believed,
that a psychologist must be "disinterested and impersonal." The
highbrow superciliousness of those who hold that a true "scientific"
psychologist should not and cannot deal with the concrete realities
of men in their social life comes from their confusion of the fact
that scientific objectivity derives from its methods and not from
the aloofness of its observers. [10] William James long ago
pointed out that psychology is scientific to the extent that it uses
methods which make verification possible, irrespective of the the-
ories, biases, or prejudices of the experimenter. "The most useful
investigator, because the most sensitive observer," said James, "is
always he whose eager interest in one side of the question is
balanced by an equally keen nervousness lest he become deceived."
[14, 21]

Since the scientist's objectivity derives from his methods rather
than from his own interests or from the type of material with
which he deals, and since the psychologist's goal is to understand
the thought and behavior of men in real life situations, the scien-
tific psychologist becomes obligated to formulate concepts that will
stand up both in the laboratory and in everyday life. [7] His task
is, of course, particularly difficult since the determinants of thought
and action in real life are so complicated, the context within which
they function so varied and changing.

If the psychologist becomes fearful of the consequences of cross-
ing a border line which he feels separates his scientific laboratory
research from its application to real life problems, he should re-
member that the concepts of chemistry, physics, and biology have
been developed by frequent crossing back and forth. Theoretical
concepts arrived at in the laboratory have been tested for their
adequacy in normal nonlaboratory contexts. In the history of the

14 THE PROBLEM OF ATTITUDES: UNIFIED

physical sciences, real life situations have forced modifications and
revision and have stimulated further research which has produced
more adequate constructs. Julian Huxley, for example, has
pointed out the interdependence of application and theory in con-
tributing to the advances of the physical sciences. [13] Giving
examples of research on high voltage and its use in the transmis-
sion of electricity, he notes that "sometimes it is not very clear
what is pure and what is applied, or in which direction the current
is flowing."

Fortunately for psychology, most of those now working in the
field are becoming increasingly aware of the challenge which the
explanation of everyday life situations poses for them. We mention
the problem here because it is essential to our argument that any
final conceptualization of the nature of attitudes must make quite
explicit the mutual dependence of data obtained from the labora-
tory and data obtained from real life situations. In other words,
the nature of attitudes is not two problems — one for die laboratory
and one for everyday life— but one single problem.

The concepts or variables thus formulated will eventually make
it possible to construct a psychology of attitudes which can be used
to study any kind of attitude, social or nonsocial, in this or any
other social system. For in spite of cultural diversities, psycho-
logical laws ought to be the same for individuals in any social
system. Otherwise, logically speaking, we should be arguing, even
if we do not mean it, for some sort of "cultural racism," similar to
biological racism. If psychological laws are not the same for all
individuals, then the German Kultur apologists were right in
arguing that the members of their unique Kultur could be under-
stood, not explained, only by die peculiar logic of their Kultur.4

Evaluation of norms. We must make one more prefatory re-
mark before discussing psychological concepts themselves: explain

4 In the field of anthropology an adequate synthesis of the psychology of attitude
should be a guide to more adequate generalizations on the anthropologist's own
level. Anthropological concepts which try to fit cultures into types or which imply
the uniqueness of cultures are for a psychologist quite incomprehensible. From
our point of view, the derivatives of different economic and social organizations
studied by the anthropologist are social norms and values which act as social
stimuli and, as such, have characteristics important for the anthropologist and the
social psychologist to study.

ATTITUDE STUDIES AND METHODOLOGICAL CONSIDERATIONS 15

our position concerning the evaluation of standards, social values,
or norms, since this position has important ideological implica-
tions. We repeat that standards, social values, and norms are the
product of human interaction in the process of living. There is
no finality about them. They are not absolute. In spite of their
inertia after they once come into existence, and in spite of the
efforts of those who for one reason or another are vitally interested
in preserving the established order, we observe in the course of
history that social standards, values, or norms do change as a con-
sequence of new modes of human interaction brought about by
changes in technological and economic conditions.

Any given individual is confronted with the social standards,
values, or norms of his environment. In short, social norms are
first external to the individual or on the stimulus side with respect
to him. As such, social standards, values, or norms are first of all
the data of the social sciences, not of psychology. Strictly speak-
ing, then, the task of the psychologist is to study the formation of
attitudes as a consequence of contact with these social norms
through other individuals or groups or through various products
of the social and economic environment. In spite of the diversity
and variations of social standards, values, or norms in different
societies, human beings do by and large form attitudes in con-
formity to their group.

The psychologist and the social scientist, however, cannot com-
placently stop at this point. They can go further and show the
consequences of the experience and behavior which are regulated
by attitudes developed and prescribed by existing social norms.
On the basis of such studies, they can reach conclusions as to
whether or not the attitudes formed are conducive to a harmonious
and well-adjusted personality or to a contradictory and unadjusted
personality, whether or not the attitudes formed bring about social
solidarity or friction. In short, the psychologist and the social
scientist can reach conclusions concerning the extent to which
attitudes formed from prescribed social norms conform to or are
contradictory to the objective conditions existing at any given
period in a given social system.

Our present tas\. We have seen that in spite of the wealth of
material in the field of attitudes, we still do not have a unified and

16 THE PROBLEM OF ATTITUDES: UNIFIED

established psychology of attitudes. The phenomena covered by
the concept "attitude" vary to a large degree in their specificity and
range. On the one hand we have strict experimental laboratory
investigators interested in the attitude or set to a very limited and
precise stimulus situation in a laboratory setup; on the other hand
we find social psychologists and social scientists working on atti-
tudes of individuals or groups to a whole nation or race, or to
values and concepts which have wide extensions such as the con-
cepts of fascism and democracy. It is no wonder, therefore, that
investigators working on one level of generality often use concepts
which have very little meaning or relevance for investigators
working on a different level of generality.

It is our methodological conviction that attitudes in strict labora-
tory situations and attitudes in the most complicated social situation
have, essentially, the same psychological mechanism at bottom,
that the basic psychological substrata functioning in both instances
are the same in nature. As a result of brilliant experiments still in
progress on the relation of vision to human behavior, Adelbert
Ames of the Dartmouth Eye Institute has concluded in a prelimi-
nary report that "The processes that underlie our perception of our
immediate external world and those that underlie our perception
of social relationships are fundamentally the same. The insights
gained in the study of visual sensation can serve as indispensable
leads to better understanding and more effective handling of the
complexities of social relationships." [2, 7] This is, of course, not
in the least a denial of the rich and complicated motivational,
affective, and cognitive factors involved in social or interpersonal
attitudes. But, in order to develop concepts which have scientific
generality of the kind found in the natural sciences, we must give
up the purely descriptive concepts used by social psychologists and
sociologists and see what functional variables have been well estab-
lished and verified in experimental psychology and other con-
trolled investigation. Once equipped with these well-established
variables or concepts, we can then proceed to see if we can extend
these to the more complicated cases of attitudes which lead the
individual to react in characteristic ways in actual social inter-
action.

Our specific task then becomes self-evident. We shall look for

A CHARACTERIZATION OF ATTITUDES 17

the most essential criteria which can be detected in any attitude—
from the relatively simple case of the laboratory setup to the more
complicated situations in actual social life. We shall proceed with
a minimum of assumptions,

A CHARACTERIZATION OF ATTITUDES 8

Attitudes are among those components of the psychological
make-up of the individual which determine that he shall react,
not in a passive or neutral way, but in a selective and characteristic
way, especially in relation to certain specific stimulus situations.
Attitudes are not, of course, the only psychological components
or states that determine that an individual will react to the envi-
ronment in a selective or characteristic way. When the individual
is hungry, thirsty, or sexually aroused, or in some other emotional
state, or has been recently stimulated by a functional change in
the receptor organ or in the organism at large, he reacts in selec-
tive or characteristic ways to the environment. Attitudes, then,
are among the various psychological factors which determine the
individual's selective reaction to his environment.

In all the representative definitions or characterizations of atti-
tudes, one feature is common: that an attitude, whatever else it
may be, denotes a functional state of readiness which determines
the organism to react in a characteristic way to certain stimuli or
stimulus situations. A glance at some representative definitions
of attitudes, imposes on us the fact that their essential feature is a
functional state of readiness.

The "attitude" is primarily a way of being "set" toward or against
certain things. [Murphy and Murphy, 18]

[Attitude] is readiness for attention, or action, of a definite sort.
[Baldwin, 3]

Attitude — the specific mental disposition toward an incoming (or
arising) experience, whereby that experience is modified, or, a condi-
tion of readiness for a certain type of activity; . . . [Dictionary of
Psychology, Warren, 29]

An attitude is a more or less permanently enduring state of readiness
of mental organization which predisposes an individual to react in a

6 This characterization follows that presented by Sherif in [23] and [24].

18 THE PROBLEM OF ATTITUDES: UNIFIED

characteristic way to any object or situation with which it is related,
[Cantril, 6]

After reviewing these and other representative characterizations
of attitudes, G. W. Allport reaches the conclusion that "the essen-
tial feature of attitude" is "a preparation or readiness for response."
Allport gives his own definition in which this functional state of
readiness is essential:

An attitude is a mental and neural state of readiness, organized
through experience, exerting a directive or dynamic influence upon
the individual's response to all objects and situations with which it is
related. [1]

Whatever other features attitudes may have (and the features of
attitudes do vary according to the degree of complexity), it is
certain that all attitudes have a state of readiness in common.
However, every state of readiness of the organism is not an atti-
tude. There are numerous states of readiness which cannot be
called attitudes. For example, a child of two or three is hardly
ever neutral or passive to his environment. He is apt to be ex-
tremely partial one way or another to the things or persons sur-
rounding him. He is constantly seeking all sorts of satisfaction.
All these momentary tendencies imply states of readiness. But in
spite of all this, we can hardly say that a child of three is full of
attitudes. In fact he has very few (if any) established or stable
attitudes. He may have developed some attitudes toward certain
persons like his mother or certain objects such as types of food.
But a child at this age will even react in a very negative way to
his mother if she proves to be an obstacle in his effort to gain some
satisfaction at the moment. We need not elaborate here other
cases of readiness which cannot properly be labeled as attitudes.

We must conclude therefore that cases of readiness are not
exhausted by all cases of attitudes. The state of readiness of the
organism is a more general term. Attitudes constitute special cases
of readiness. Therefore, we must have some concrete criteria
which single out cases of readiness as attitudes. It seems to us
that the following five criteria are found in cases of readiness
which are labeled as attitudes.

A CHARACTERIZATION OF ATTITUDES 19

1. Attitudes always imply a subject-object relationship. Atti-
tudes are always related to definite stimuli or stimulus situations.
These may be objects stich as home, automobile, souvenir, some
particular eating place; persons such as one's own body, mother,
father, brother, some friend, rival, teacher, sweetheart, wife; or
groups of people such as classmates, playmates, Negroes, the com-
munity; institutions such as the school, college, church, club; or
socially established and standardized concepts, values or norms
such as the flag, the Constitution, democracy. These subject-object
relationships are not innate, are not biologically given. The items
or objects toward which the subject-object relationship is devel-
oped are always first on the stimulus side for the individual. Only
after contact with these outside stimuli, does any relationship
develop between them and the individual.

In various definitions of attitude, the content of an attitude is
often mentioned in such terms as "objects," "social stimuli," "social
objects." [20] But the content of attitudes will depend upon the
particular nature of the subject-object relationship established.
The contents of attitudes are as numerous and as different as the
stimulus situations to which attitudes are related.

2. This means that attitudes are formed and formed in relation
to objects, persons, and values which may or may not have moti-
vational appeal at first. Almost any food may satisfy hunger, but
we may develop a special liking for a special food, even for a
special restaurant, and even a special table in that restaurant.
When these particular likes or dislikes are more or less fixated,
we have formed attitudes in relation to these particular objects.
Almost any average member of the opposite sex will satisfy sexual
need, but when it is fixated, with all its affective overtones, it
becomes an attitude— an attitude toward a particular person.
George Bernard Shaw has aptly defined a lover as a man who
exaggerates the difference between one woman and another.

Since attitudes are not innate states of readiness, inasmuch as
they are formed in relation to particular objects, persons, institu-
tions, and values or norms, the individual has first to come into
contact with them. And coming into contact is a perceptual situa-
tion. This means that the primary stage in the formation of atti-
tudes is a perceptual stage. The presence of a perceptual stage is

20 THE PROBLEM OF ATTITUDES: UNIFIED

of the utmost psychological importance. For certain basic facts
about perceptual situations provide the starting point for the
formation of attitudes, as we shall see in the next chapter.

The perceptual stage in the formation of attitudes is especially
important in cases of attitudes which do not have a motivational
(instinctual) basis.6 As the accumulating investigations in the
field of attitudes show, many social attitudes are formed through
verbal judgments of adults. Indeed the most directive and impor-
tant social attitudes which determine status, social distance, and
the like seem to be formed through verbalized short-cut dictums
or value judgments and through situations which outwardly do
not have any momentary motivational appearance.

The fact that attitudes are not innate but are formed as a result
of the individual's contact with his environment means, of course,
that attitudes are learned or conditioned. Just what the psycho-
logical or physiological mechanisms of this learning may be are
irrelevant to the present discussion. We are concerned here with
demonstrable psychological properties and characteristics of atti-
tudes. Obviously, the more adequate the psychology of learning
or conditioning becomes, the better will we understand the proc-
esses involved in attitude formation. But it is almost inconceivable
that any final adequate account of learning developed in the future
would ever negate the statement that attitudes are formed.

3. Attitudes have affective properties of varying degrees. Estab-
lished attitudes are charged with affective or value properties in
varying degrees. The affective property of attitudes may be due
to motivational (instinctual) origins such as hunger and sex (as
exemplified in cases of attitudes toward a certain food, a certain
restaurant, a sweetheart or wife) or may be due to nonmotivational
sources (noninstinctual).

The affective property of attitudes with instinctual origins is
self-explanatory. The affective property of attitudes with non-
instinctual sources is due to the fact that these attitudes are formed
in relation to social values or norms which in themselves are
standardized affective fixations. They are usually verbalized short-
cut value judgments such as "the home is a sacred institution."

6 We are using the term "motivation" here to denote only drives, needs, or
instincts, which have a definite origin in the organism of the individual.

A CHARACTERIZATION OF ATTITUDES 21

Value judgments are always given in adjectival form. And all
judgments given in terms of adjectives certainly have affective
properties. The social values presented in short-cut dictums, or in
other ways accompanied by praise or blame, naturally are affec-
tively charged. The individual is forced to respect and uphold the
values of the family, school, church, or other institutions he is a
member or would-be member of. If he does not respect and glory
in his flag, he is compelled to. The very fact of membership and
participation in group activity or ceremony makes certain stand-
ardized values or practices sacred, justifiable, right, honorable, or
dutiful in the individual's eyes. Consequently, the attitudes an
individual forms in relation to such activities or practices become
affectively charged.

Another important reason why attitudes are affectively charged
is the fact that many attitudes prescribe the individual's relation-
ship, status, or role with respect to other individuals or groups
(such as teacher, worker, boss, minister, assistant). And experi-
ences connected with status are affectively charged.7

4. Attitudes are more or less enduring states of readiness.
There are states of readiness which are more or less momentary,
depending on the state of the organism and the situation at the
time. For example, we may be very hungry and snatch a loaf of
bread. After we have eaten enough and become satisfied, the loaf
may be pushed aside. At the time of sexual tension, a person
toward whom there is no established attitude but who can satisfy
the sexual need may be passionately seized, but, after the need is
satisfied so that the tension is resolved, one may never look at the
person again. In these cases the state of readiness dissolves as the
satiation point is reached, at least for the time being. But not so
with attitudes. They are more or less enduring states of readiness.
Thus a wounded soldier tries to show his respect to his superior
officer who has really shared the hardships with him. A very
much preferred food may be the subject of praise after the point of
satiation has been reached. A sweetheart still has the sentimental
halo in the eyes of her lover even after sexual satisfaction. A dear

7 Without making a special issue of it at this point, we may note in passing
that attitudes related to role or status are ego-involved. And ego-involved experi-
ences and responses have affective properties (sec chs. 5, 6, 11).

22 THE PROBLEM OF ATTITUDES: UNIFIED

friend is still liked even during moments of minor friction. Some
people in India actually starve to death rather than eat meat which
is "forbidden" by the very rigid norms established and accepted by
Hindus. These examples are sufficient to illustrate the fact that
attitudes, once formed, are more or less enduring states of readi-
ness, quite independent, within limits, of the momentary states of
the organism.

An attitude becomes a more or less enduring state of readiness
because of the cognitive components in its formation. We have
seen that attitudes are not innate entities, that they are formed as
a consequence of contact with objects, persons, or situations to
which they are related. We referred to these contacts as the per-
ceptual stage in the formation of an attitude. It is this perceptual
stage which begins to give an attitude its cognitive component in
the process of formation. Since the first stage in the formation of
an attitude is a perceptual stage, we can begin at once to utilize
the concepts developed to account for perceptual situations. Here
we are on relatively safe ground. The fact that attitudes are more
or less enduring indicates, further, that attitudes are learned.
And the more adequate the account of learning becomes, the bet-
ter will we be able to understand the basis for an attitude's en-
during quality, just as we will better understand the basis of its
formation. And it is also almost inconceivable that any final ex-
planation of learning would alter the statement that attitudes are
more or less enduring.

We should be very clear on one point, however, so as to avoid
misunderstanding. We have said that attitudes are more or less
enduring states of readiness to stimuli, objects, persons, groups,
values, or norms, in relation to which they are formed and which
determine the individual to react in a characteristic way in relation
to them. But attitudes are not absolute fixed states of readiness.
Since they are formed as a consequence of contact with objects,
values, or norms to which they are related, they may change or
disintegrate. For example, good friends may become deadly ene-
mies; a religious person may become an atheist; a conservative
may become radical as a result of contact with new facts and
events.

A CHARACTERIZATION OF ATTITUDES 23

5. Attitudes range in the number and variety of stimuli to which
they are referred. Since attitudes develop as a consequence of
experience, and, since attitudes involve a cognitive component, the
extent or range of stimuli to which an individual will relate an
attitude will vary according to the nature of the source of the
attitude and according to the relationship the individual makes
between an attitude and the stimulus situation he confronts.
Although certain attitudes, especially some of those created in lab-
oratory situations or those of children, may only be evoked by the
situation under which they originally developed, the more usual
process is that an attitude, once established, will be related by the
individual to a variety of objects or situations that have not neces-
sarily been active in its original establishment.

The wide range exhibited by some attitudes is possible because
of the fact that the stimulus situation toward which the attitude
has developed is itself extensive, that is to say, possible of repre-
sentation or expression in many different specific contexts. When
we noted as our first characteristic of attitude that it always im-
plied a subject-object relationship, we pointed out that we could
label institutions, concepts, social values, or norms as "objects" in
this sense. Social attitudes toward such stimulus situations are,
we have said, often derived from the verbal judgments of others.
For example, once an individual has accepted the value judgment
of his group that "Negroes are inferior" and should occupy a
lower status in society, he can and does easily relate his acquired
attitude to innumerable specific situations. As we shall see, a
considerable body of research in the past two decades has shown
that attitudes have a directive effect in specific situations, that a
very general attitude will reveal itself in a wide variety of ways.8

Classifications of attitudes. This approach to the problem of
attitudes renders meaningless various attempts to classify them.
G. W. Allport has summarized the major varieties of classification:

8 In this connection, the experimental work on meaning and association time is
significant, in view of the fact that the upshot of the controversy was that meaning
is more immediate than specific association. (See the experiments of Moore,
Tolman, Weld, and Cantril.) This being the case, the immediate "meaning'*
reaction determines the range rather than specific associations. This is illustrated in
the references, for example, to Kay's study of personal and general frames [16]
and Horowitz's study on the development of race attitudes. [12]

24 THE PROBLEM OF ATTITUDES: UNIFIED

positive and negative, specific and general, public and private,
common and individual attitudes. [1] Since the characteristics of
any attitudes in any individual will vary according to the situation
or circumstances under which the attitude has developed and the
function the attitude serves for the individual, any classification of
attitudes becomes almost as nebulous as any classification of stimu-
lus situations (including objects, persons, groups, values, and
norms) or of personal and societal relationships. Simple dichoto-
mous classifications especially distort and falsify the problem.
Take, for example, the distinction made by Thomas and Znaniecki,
between "common" and "individual" attitudes. Their use of the
word "common" refers to attitudes "common to all conscious
beings," their use of "individual" refers to attitudes "peculiar to
only one individual member of the group." [27, 18] Such a dis-
tinction makes no place for the attitudes of members of small or
large groups, or the attitudes characteristic of a given social sys-
tem, not to mention the elaborate and tenuous classification that
would be necessary to place an attitude according to the subtle
variations it might have for the individual with reference to the
attitudes of other members of the same group or social system.
And just because some attitudes are common to a large enough
number of people to lend themselves to measurement does not
mean that a distinction between "common" and "individual"
attitudes has any more than a loose descriptive value. Classifica-
tions of attitudes, like classifications of personalities, represent a
rigid structural approach which is apt to obscure or be mistaken
for a truly functional analysis.

The psychology of value included in the psychology of attitudes.
We have said previously that attitudes always imply a subject-
object relationship and that attitudes are affectively charged.
Hence the stimulus or object or group to which an attitude is
related is reacted to affectively. In other words, the stimulus,
object, person, group, or norm in relation to which an attitude is
formed has value, either positive or negative and in different
degrees for that individual. We are using the word "value" to
denote these affective qualities. Therefore, the problem of value
as an affective quality is part of the psychology of attitude.

A CHARACTERIZATION OF ATTITUDES 25

We do not mean to say that all attitudes are social attitudes or
that all attitudes are related to social values. An attitude may be
developed toward certain woods in which a person has taken soli-
tary walks, or an attitude may be formed in relation to almost
anything peculiar to the surroundings and experiences of the
individual. And we might mention in passing the abnormal
fixations sometimes made by individuals on queer and unusual
objects.

In spite of this fact, however, the attitudes most important in
daily life are social attitudes — attitudes formed in relation to other
individuals, groups, institutions, tools and technology, standardized
values, or norms. These are the attitudes that really determine an
individual's reaction to other people, other groups, and that map
out for him the main boundaries of his experience and taste.
Most of these social attitudes are transmitted by short-cut verbal
value judgments. Words are the most common medium for both
the formation and the expression of social attitudes. And it is
probably for this reason that some psychologists have character-
ized attitudes as verbalized dispositions. Although we know the
social attitudes of others largely from the words they use, most of
us do have many quite personal attitudes not related to social
values, which we may seldom if ever express — attitudes toward
some loved one, some one we strongly dislike, some personal
keepsake, some house. To be sure, if we are probed concerning
these things, we will be able to express our attitude. But many
attitudes we may have which we may never verbalize are just as
much "attitudes" as those we do verbalize spontaneously. The
point is that all attitudes, whether social or nonsocial, whether
verbalized or nonverbalized, function essentially according to the
same psychological principles, even though there may be differ-
ences of content, richness, compellingness, or endurance.

Although the psychology of values is involved in the psychology
of attitudes, it should be borne in mind that social values, being
first on the stimulus side in relation to the individual, are essen-
tially the data of the social sciences. Social psychologists become
interested in and concerned with social values simply because
social values are part, and an important part, of the stimuli that
surround man and, through stimulation, influence him.

26 THE PROBLEM OF ATTITUDES: UNIFIED

Special cases of attitudes. Various terms such as "set," "stereo-
type," "prejudice," and "opinion" may all be regarded as attitudes
with particular characteristics which have been given certain labels
by common use. The psychological states described by all of these
terms are developed in relation to certain stimuli in the identical
way that attitudes are developed. All are affectively charged in
relation to the stimuli. All are more or less lasting, all are ac-
quired states of readiness determining the individual's character-
istic reactions to the stimuli to which they are related. There are,
of course, differences in the range of stimuli to which each of
these forms of attitudes can be related, and there are differences
in the intensity with which these different types of attitudes are
displayed. There are also differences due to the conformity of
these attitudes to objective conditions, as, for example, the differ-
ence between the attitude of a biologist to the facts of biological
evolution and the attitude of an uneducated Baptist to the same
facts. We repeat, however, that all of these forms of attitudes
follow essentially the sam^pattern in their development.

As commonly used the term "set" is applied to a relatively
restricted temporary attitude, or to momentary states of readiness;
the word "stereotype" is applied to an intense and rigid attitude,
while the word "prejudice" applies to an attitude still more rigid
and intense and one generally based on false information. The
term "opinion" is generally used to describe an attitude that is or
has been expressed and that is based more on objective conditions
than a "stereotype" or "prejudice."

We are mentioning the fact that these terms are special cases of
attitudes for a methodological reason. For some investigators use
one particular term and deal with the problems surrounding it as
if they were separate problems unrelated to the characteristics of
attitude or the conditions which develop attitudes. We strongly
believe that we shall gain much if we unify the concepts which
can be really unified and if we do not use different concepts for
the same problem. Following the rule of scientific parsimony,
we shall try to restrict ourselves to as few concepts as necessary.

In this chapter we have only cleared our way. We have tried
to bring the problem of attitudes into clear focus. Because of the

REFERENCES 27

diverse and disconnected approaches made to the study of attitudes
by psychologists and sociologists, some unification of the problem
is called for. An understanding of attitudes, as well as an under-
standing of values, demands a unification of the problem which
remains the same problem whether handled by psychologists,
sociologists, or any other social scientists.

REFERENCES

1. ALLPORT, G. W., Attitudes, in A Handbook of Social Psychology (C. Murchi-

son, cd.), Worcester: Clark Univ. Press, 1935, ch. 17.

2. AMES, A., JR., Sensations, Their Nature and Origin, Dartmouth Eye Institute,

Hanover, N. H., October 1945.

3. BALDWIN, J. M., Dictionary of Philosophy and Psychology, New York: Mac-

4. BLUMER, H., An Appraisal of Thomas and Znaniecly's The Polish Peasant in

Europe and America t New York: Soc. Science Research Council, 1939,
Bull. 44.

5. BOGARDUS, E. S., Fundamentals of Social Psychology, ^New York: Century, 1931,

2ded.

6. CANTRIL, H., Attitudes in the making, Understanding the Child, 1934, 4, 13-15.

7. The social psychology of everyday life, Psychol. Bull, 1934, 31, 297-330.

8. = A psychological reason for the lag of "nonmaterial" culture traits, Soc.

Forces, 1935, 13, 376-9.

9. The effect of modern technology and organization upon social behavior,

Soc. Forces, 1937, 15, 493-5.

10. : and D. KATZ, Objectivity in the social sciences, in Industrial Conflict: A

Psychological Interpretation (G. [W. Hartmann and T. Newcomb, cds.),
New York: Cordon, 1939, 9-18.

11. FOLSOM, J. K., Social Psychology, New York: Harper, 1931.

12. HOROWITZ, E. L., The development of attitude toward the Negro, Arch. Psy-

chol., 1936, no. 194.

13. HUXLEY, J., Science and its relation to social needs, in Scientific Progress (Sir

Halley Stewart Lecture, 1935), London: Allen & Unwin, 1935, ch. 6.

14. JAMES, W., Will to Believe and Other Essays in Popular Philosophy, New York:

Longmans, Green, 1896.

15. JUNG, C. G., Psychological Types, New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1924.

16. KAY, L. W., Social norms as determinants in the interpretation of personal

experiences, /. Soc. Psychol., 1944, 19, 359-67.

17. KLINEBERG, O., Social Psychology, New York: Holt, 1940.

18. MURPHY, G., and L. B. MURPHY, Experimental Social Psychology, New York:

Harper, copyright 1931.
19. and T. M. NEWCOMB, Experimental Social Psychology, New York:

Harper, copyright 1937.
20. NELSON, E., Attitudes: I. Their nature and development, /. Gen. Psychol., 1939,

21, 367-99.

28 THE PROBLEM OF ATTITUDES: UNIFIED

21. ORTH, J., Gefuhl und Bewusstseinslage, 'Abhand. Geb. Padagog. Psychol. u.

Physiol., 1903.

22. SHELDON, W. H., The Varieties of Temperament, New York: Harper, 1942.

23. SHERIF, M., An experimental approach to the study of attitudes, Sociomctry,

1937, 1, 90-8.

24. Some recent investigations on the psychology of attitudes (in Turkish),

Univ. Ankara Publications, Psychology Series, II, 1944.

25. SPRANGER, E., Lebensformen, Halle: Niemeyer, 1927.

26. STRAUSS, A., The concept of attitude in social psychology, /. Psychol., 1945, 19,

329-39.

27. THOMAS, W. L, and F. ZNANIECKI, The Polish Peasant in Europe and America,

Boston: Badger, 1918, vol. 1.

28. TITCHENER, E. B., Systematic Psychology: Prolegomena, New York: Macmillan,

1929.

29. WARREN, H. C. (cd.), Dictionary of Psychology, Boston: Houghton Mifflin,

30. WATT, H. J., Experimentelle Beitrage zu einer Theorie des Denkens, 'Arch. /. d.

ges. Psychol., 1904, 4, 289-436.

CHAPTER 3

SOME EXPERIMENTAL FACTS CONCERNING THE
BASIS OF ATTITUDES

Attitudes are inferred from the reactions (verbal or nonverbal)
of man. When an individual reacts repeatedly in a characteristic
way (positive or negative) in relation to a certain stimulus object,
we infer that he has an established attitude toward that stimulus.
When a group of individuals react repeatedly in a characteristic
way to a stimulus situation, we infer that the members of the
group have an established social attitude in relation to it. This
characteristic reaction of groups of people is sometimes called
"conforming behavior." These conformities are discriminatory
or selective, as all attitudes are. This means that all attitudinal
reactions are judgmental activities. It is, therefore, not a mere
coincidence that social value judgments reveal themselves in the
psychology of the individual as established attitudes. Whether
these discriminative activities revealing attitudes are verbally ex-
pressed as short-cut judgments of opinion or value, as in logic, or
are expressed only in behavior does not matter a bit psychologically.

As we said in the previous chapter, attitudes always imply a
subject-object (stimulus-organism) relationship. Attitudes al-
ways are related to some object, person, group, or standardized
norm. This relationship is not innate, it is formed. In order for
it to be formed, the individual first has to come into contact with
the object (person, institution, norm). This is a perceptual situa-
tion. Therefore, the first stage in the actual formation of an atti-
tude is a perceptual stage, with the internal factors of the organism
and external (objective) factors of the stimulus situation coming
into play.

The term "attitude" (used in everyday language to denote an
established state of readiness) does not express any specific psy-
chological mechanism. It is a composite term, especially useful

30 EXPERIMENTAL FACTS CONCERNING BASIS OF ATTITUDES

to denote in an empirical way an important common ground be-
tween psychologists and sociologists. When it is characterized
psychologically and traced from the point of view of its formation,
it becomes evident that the psychology of attitudes is intimately
related to the psychology of perception and judgment. This is
true, no matter what the motivational basis or diversity of content
of an attitude may be. In the present approach towards the psy-
chology of attitudes, we shall put our emphasis on perceptual and
judgmental processes and see how far it can carry us. Here we
do not need to take sides in favor of any learning theory. We
have already pointed out that any final adequate psychology of
attitude will someday be linked closely with the psychology of
learning or conditioning, especially in accounting for the more
or less enduring character and for the range of attitudes.

General selectivity of perception. The objective world around
us — rivers, hills, trees, buildings, and the like — is, of course, not
affected by our perception of it. These objects are there objec-
tively, determined by physical laws, whether or not we perceive
or experience them. On the other hand, what we perceive of the
natural and social world around us is highly selective, determined
by biological and psychological laws. Because of this determinis-
tic selectivity, men perceive or experience different aspects of the
world around them. For example, in the Dark Ages, because of
the fact that men were so confined to themselves owing to the
prevailing social and cultural system in which they were living,
they paid little attention to nature. [8] They needed, among
others, a Rousseau, the rebellious child of the bourgeois system
rising against the decaying feudal aristocracy and clergy, to call
attention to his fellowmen that nature was around them in all its
glory. Today, in India, for example, many people are so much
preoccupied with their mystic ways, that they simply are not con-
cerned and, therefore, do not notice the beauties of nature. We
do not have to resort to any typologies to account for these facts,
as Jung does, for example. [25] In a discussion of the "artist's
frame of reference," F. H. Allport [1] has nicely pointed out that
the meaning, the unity, the beauty seen in a picture are determined
by a "psychological frame" and that the psychology of "frame of
reference" "goes back to the simplest principles of human percep-

EXPERIMENTAL FACTS CONCERNING BASIS OF ATTITUDES 31

tion." [5] At the basis of this selectivity is the bipolar nature of
perception: the determination of perceptions by external and
internal factors following certain laws, and the formation of
certain enduring states of readiness.

The selectivity of perception is a universal human phenomenon
not confined to any special cases. As Woodworth puts it in de-
veloping what he terms "situation set/' "the individual is not an
unbiased registering instrument." [55] Anyone can easily cite
numerous cases from daily experience to prove that what he ob-
serves and notices around him is a selective matter: what he sees
in a strange city, what he reads in his newspaper, and so on. It
would be very useful to make longitudinal studies of perception
also and find out through a period of time what actual items a
person does perceive in his surroundings. Such longitudinal
studies would certainly reveal the highly selective nature of our
daily perceptions as determined by external and internal conditions.

Experiments in the psychological laboratory require subjects,
through carefully formulated "instructions," to observe precisely
certain aspects of the stimulus presented and usually made focal
for them in a controlled way. Already some representative labora-
tory studies furnish evidence of the general selectivity of percep-
tion. Here we refer to the long line of investigation started over
40 years ago by Kiilpe when he ventured to study the psychology
of the so<alled higher mental processes against the vigorous pro-
tests of his former teacher, Wundt, who argued for the completion
first of the "mental chemistry" of sensory processes. In Kiilpe's
laboratory it became increasingly evident that the "set" assumed
by the observer as a result of "instructions" was playing an im-
portant role in determining response to the experimental situa-
tion. Kiilpe himself specifically undertook the study of this
problem. [30] In his experiments he tachistoscopically presented
different stimuli, such as printed syllables, about which different as-
pects or "dimensions" could be reported, for example, the number
of letters involved, the locations of the colors, or the total pattern
composed by them. Kiilpe found that more items were noted
and more correct judgments made by the observer about that
aspect of the stimuli which had been emphasized by the "set"
produced as a consequence of the initial instructions; subjects

32 EXPERIMENTAL FACTS CONCERNING BASIS OF ATTITUDES

noticed more fully and in more detail those aspects of the stimulus
field they were set to observe. Two decades later Yokoyama and
then Chapman verified Kiilpe's results. [6, 9]

In the Kiilpe line of experiments, the "set" is produced by the
instructions of the experimenter. But the internal factors ("set"
in this case) need not always be due to instructional set. In more
natural settings some motivational stress, some social pressure, or
some established norm in the individual may and does produce
the "set" or "attitude" with which the stimulus field is observed.
Take, for example, the case of the hungry man looking for bread
or the case of a lover waiting in a crowd for his sweetheart.
Cantril has pointed out that

The literature of experimental psychology is filled with research
which demonstrates conclusively that a frame of reference is an in-
evitable accompaniment of any series of judgments a person may be
asked to make; and that when the situation is unique and specific, as
it is frequently deliberately designed to be in the laboratory, the frame
of reference is a function of the relationships discerned between the
series of stimuli. No matter how hard the experimentalist, especially
the psychophysicist, may try to work on the peripheral level of judg-
ments and side-step central issues, he finds it almost impossible to
avoid in the laboratory the phenomenon we are describing that oc-
curs so constantly in judgments of everyday life. [7, 24]

In his impressive series of experiments carried out over a period
of years (1913-32), Bartlett obtained a well-integrated series of
results on remembering. [2] This classical work breaks down
the artificial classificatory boundaries imposed between the func-
tions of perceiving, remembering, and even imagining. Bartlett
unanswerably demonstrated that the perceiving, imagining, and
remembering of even relatively simple objects are selective —
influenced in an important way by such factors as the interests,
attitudes, temperament, of the observer. He makes his experi-
ments on perceiving the starting point of experiments on remem-
bering, indicating a functional continuity between perception and
memory. In the experiments on perceiving [2, 14-33] he pre-
sented to his observers simple designs and patterns, and complex
pictorial material. His instructions were neutral; that is, he did
not try to produce a "set" or "attitude" in the observers in relation

EXPERIMENTAL FACTS CONCERNING BASIS OF ATTITUDES 33

to any given aspect of the stimulus field; in fact, he was especially
on his guard "against the use of suggestion other than that con-
veyed by the material itself." [17 f.] His results and conclusions
are clear-cut. In his own words:

Very rarely indeed did a subject thus differentiate clearly between
a sensory image set up by the stimulating object and his interpretation
of the object itself. But, though they did not realize it, the observers
were throughout constantly utilizing an imaged setting, or bac\-
ground, for their perceptual reactions. [2, 30, italics ours]

Again,

... to perceive anything is one of the simplest and most immediate,
as it is one of the most fundamental, of all human cognitive reactions.
Yet obviously, in a psychological sense, it is exceedingly complex, and
this is widely recognized. Inextricably mingled with it are imaging,
valuing, and those beginnings of judging which are involved in the
response to plant order of arrangement and construction of presented
material. It is directed by interest and by feeling, and may be domi-
nated by certain crucial features of the objects and scenes dealt with.
[2, 31, italics ours]

The more unstructured and vague the stimulus field is, the more
important is the role of set and other factors not inherent in the
•stimulus itself. In one of a series of experiments utilizing the auto-
kinetic phenomenon, Sherif instructed his subjects that the light
(which was physically stationary, of course) would move to the
right or to the left as the case may be. [41] The subjects with the
"set" produced by the instructions gave results generally in har-
mony with the instructed direction. Proshansky and Murphy
[38] used the autokinetic condition as one of three types of un-
structured stimuli (lines and weights were also used) in a test of
the hypothesis that "perception develops positively in the direction
of reward." [296] Although their "experimental subjects showed
. . . significant shifts in estimates of lines and weights in the
direction of the percepts which had been rewarded," [305] this
conclusion could not be drawn from the autokinetic data. The
authors arc careful to point out, however, that "with the auto-
kinetic effect, it was found during the course of the experiment
that a major source of error was operating." [302] "Such large

34 EXPERIMENTAL FACTS CONCERNING BASIS OF ATTITUDES

and uncontrolled autokinetic effects appeared in the training
series as to vitiate the post-training data." [305] More recently
Haggard and Rose, utilizing the autokinetic technique with a
device of reward or punishment instead of direct instruction of
movement, obtained results similar to Sherif s. [18]

From the facts, of which the foregoing are typical examples, it
is plausible to conclude in a general way that the selectivity of
attitudes is basically imbedded in the selectivity of perception.
But this gives us only our general orientation. We must proceed
further and try to single out more precisely the processes involved
in the formation of an attitude.

A frame of reference is involved in perceptual and judgmental
activity. It is an established fact in psychology that stimuli do not
have an absolute stimulating value. A stimulus is experienced,
perceived, judged, and reacted to in relation to other stimuli, pres-
ent or past, to which it is functionally related. In perception this
relative character of a stimulus emerges from its relationship in
the organized whole [29]; in judgments, from its relationship to
other stimuli (present and past) which are operative at the mo-
ment. The concept of "member character" expresses the relative
nature of the properties of any stimulus to which the organism is
responding at the moment and can be conveniently used to denote
the relative character of any stimulating agent with respect to
simultaneous or preceding stimuli with which it is functionally
related.

The term "frame of reference" is simply used to denote the
functionally related factors (present and past) which operate at
the moment to determine the particular properties of a psycho-
logical phenomenon (such as perception, judgment, affectivity).
In 1935 and 1936 Sherif brought together a good many experi-
mental facts from various major psychological phenomena (in-
cluding perception, judgment, affectivity, memory, personality)
indicating the way in which a "frame of reference" is involved in
each of them. [41, 42] The scale of magnitudes against which
subsequent stimuli of a similar kind are judged, the organized
perceptual whole which determines the particular relative proper-
ties of its parts, the established social status in relation to which
responses to other individuals and groups are shaped are all specific

EXPERIMENTAL FACTS CONCERNING BASIS OF ATTITUDES 35

cases of frames of reference. Unless we have good reasons to argue
that frames of reference involved in various psychological phe-
nomena have nothing to do with one another, but express psycho-
logical tendencies quite different in nature, such a general concept
is needed to denote this whole background of factors which to-
gether determine the relative nature of response. Because frames
of reference are involved in all major phenomena, a more precise
definition of frame of reference cannot be formulated until we
know more about the frames of reference in various specific cases.

Specific cases of frames of reference are most extensively elabo-
rated in the fields of perception and judgment. Gestalt psycholo-
gists worked out in detail the psychology of perceptual frames.
In fact, the whole emphasis of frames of reference in psychology
is mainly derived from them. All our time and space localiza-
tions, magnitude perceptions, form perceptions, perceptions of
melody and harmony are referential affairs. When we say "up"
we mean "up" in relation to something below, when we say "far"
or "near" we say so in relation to a starting point we have in mind.

With the shifts of the reference frames or points, perceptual
relationships are altered. Thus:

A book is small and a man is large. But if a house is large, then a
man is small. And if a book is small and a house is large, then a man
is of medium size. [36, 43]

Years ago Wertheimer demonstrated that a line is experienced as
horizontal or vertical in reference to the position of other things
in the field of stimulation: if the observer's visual field is slanted
by means of a mirror, a similarly slanted object tends to appear
vertical, indicating that the position of an object is perceived in its
relation to the whole organized field. [53]

In our opinion, the psychology of these perceptual frames are
basically related to the psychology of attitudes. The forms, pro-
portions, and magnitudes of things, buildings, tools, and the like,
in the village, town, or city we live in become for us in time
established anchorages. When, subsequently, in some other town
or country we face different proportions, forms, and magnitude?
of things, we perceive them against the whole background of our
established frames or anchorages. Consequently they seem to us

36 EXPERIMENTAL FACTS CONCERNING BASIS OF ATnTUDES

to be too large, too small, queer, or disproportionate as the case
may be.

Extensive evidence of the referential nature of judgmental activi-
ties has accumulated during the past decade. As we shall see later,
the implications of this important finding can be carried on to
more or less complicated social problems. Chapman and Volk-
mann, for example, in a significant study on "A Social Deter-
minant of the Level of Aspiration" start with the general principle
that "the conditions which govern the setting of a level of aspira-
tion (Anspruchsniveau), in the sense of an estimate of one's future
performance in a given task, may be regarded as a special case of
the effect upon a judgment of the frame of reference within
which it is executed." [10, 225] They draw attention to the "gen-
eral fact that all judgmental activities take place within such
referential frameworks." [225] Convenient and concise sum-
maries and discussions of the studies on judgment are found in the
reports of Long [31], Rogers [39], and McGarvey [34]. If we
start with Hollingworth's work on judgment, it becomes increas-
ingly evident that judgment to a stimulus in a series is based on
the whole background of previous judgments belonging to the
series and affected by them in definite ways. [21, 22] For our
present problem, the important fact is that judgments of stimuli
shift according to the background furnished by a related series of
stimuli; the particular directions of these shifts need not concern
our position in this chapter. Here it is sufficient for us to call
attention briefly to certain aspects of Long's and Rogers' represent-
ative studies as they bear on our present problem.

Long studied the effect of preceding stimuli upon the judgments
of succeeding stimuli, using series of auditory intensities. Among
other things he found that

Under certain conditions, stimuli oppose each other in such a way
that a weak stimulus preceded by a strong one is judged weaker than
it actually is, and vice versa. This is referred to as contrast and its
presence has been found in experiments employing a variety of stimuli:
namely, tones and weights in the usual psychophysical experiments;
and colors, tones, and odors in experiments on hedonic tones. Thus
the reality of the phenomenon cannot be doubted, but an explanation
of why contrast operates or what processes (either psychological or

EXPERIMENTAL FACTS CONCERNING BASIS OF ATTITUDES 37

physiological) underlie it, must be postponed until the conditions
under which it occurs, or does not occur, are better known. [31, 55]

The studies on judgment with the method of single stimuli that
have accumulated during the past 15 years furnish unequivocal
evidence in support of the relativity of judgment. In an increasing
number of studies in different sense modalities, it has been shown
that the use of a standard stimulus is not necessary for the observer
to give a judgment about any stimulus in the series. After a few
rounds of presentation of the series, observers spontaneously estab-
lish a scale without being instructed to do so. Any stimulus in
the series is judged or placed in its relative position in the scale.
These experiments in Which no standard stimulus is used yield a
distribution of frequencies of judgment very similar to that ob-
tained by orthodox psychophysical methods using a formal stand-
ard. [37]

Here again we see the same referential nature of response
observed in cases of perception. With the shifts of the reference
frame or scale to which any stimulus is related, a corresponding
shift in judging that stimulus results. Wever and Zener [54]
gave an observer a "light" series of weights, and after this series
had become an "established" scale for the observer they suddenly
introduced a "heavy" series.

The effect of the first series on the judgments of the second was
quite evident for 20 or 25 presentations, i.e. for four or five rounds
judgments of "heavy" predominated for all the stimuli; from this
point on, however, the judgments showed a redistribution conforming
to the second stimulus-series. [54, 476, italics ours]

On the basis of these facts, we may say that the members of a
series of stimuli manifest "member-character" just as parts of an
organized perceptual field manifest "member-character," revealing
"supra-local" qualities from the functional relationship in which
they are found. The member-character of the stimuli in a series
is clearly shown in a keen observation of Wedell in his study of
pitch discriminations. .

It has been said that no judgment is "absolute" unless a long time,
say 12 hours, has intervened since the last hearing of a tone. Follow-
ing this line of reasoning in the present experiment, the only absolute

38 EXPERIMENTAL FACTS CONCERNING BASIS OF ATTITUDES

judgment would be the first one each day. It must be admitted that
there is some basis for this assertion, because some of the subjects
seemed to compare the notes with one another deliberately. In addi-
tion to this, a subject would sometimes correct a previous judgment
by saying, "Oh, that other one must have been [so and so]." [51, 497,
italics ours]

Psychophysical studies dispensing with the presentation of a
formal standard stimulus with every variable stimulus in the series
were first started by Wever and Zener. [54] Because no standard
was used, and each stimulus was presented singly, the method was
designated as the method of "single" or "absolute stimuli/' and the
series of stimulus values as "absolute series." Now it is often
referred to as "absolute scale" and the judgments obtained as
"absolute" judgments. It is clear that the term "absolute" refers
to the method alone. "Absolute" does not refer to judgments or
their distribution. The real psychological fact shown in all these
experiments is that judgments to subsequent stimuli are relative
to preceding stimuli of a similar nature. Referring to the general-
ity of this psychological tendency, McGarvey states in her survey
of literature in 1943 that

The relativity of judgments of lifted weights, tonal pitches, visual
inclinations, etc., is paralleled by the relativitv of affective judgments.
[34, 14]

It is an unfortunate accident to have the term "absolute"
connected with a whole array of facts which definitely reveal the
relativity of judgment, perception, and, in a word, experience in
general. As the term "absolute" is used in a contradictory way to
designate the relative nature of a general psychological tendency,
there is bound to appear a contradiction of terms. Thus Cohen,
in a study following Beebe-Center's research showing the relativity
of hedonic judgments, uses the contradictory title "The Relativity
of Absolute Judgments." [12] The same contradiction of terms
is found in a more recent study by Postman and Miller showing
the relative nature of temporal judgments. The authors state:

An "absolute" judgment of magnitude is, of course, not strictly
absolute, but is formed in relation to other magnitudes that lie within
the immediate universe of attention. [36, 43]

EXPERIMENTAL FACTS CONCERNING BASIS OF ATTITUDES 39

Again,

Such subjective scales have been called absolute scales and perhaps
the term is no more contradictory than the term absolute judgment.
Absolute, in these contexts, means relative to the comparable magni-
tudes that form the immediate context of the judgment. [36, 43, the
last emphasis is ours]

To designate a tendency by a contradictory term does not help to
clarify but only to confuse the issues in question. It may astound
people to see that psychologists designate the same thing as both
"absolute" and "relative."

It seems to us that nothing is gained by stretching the term
"absolute judgment" and "absolute scale" (already used in a con-
tradictory way by the mere accident of naming a method) to study
the relative nature of response in perceptual and social fields. The
relative nature of response in sensory judgments is only a specific
case of a more general tendency. For example, contrast and as-
similation effects which necessarily appear in judgments, are not
effects peculiar to judgments alone. Assimilation and contrast
effects result from simultaneous stimulation (perception) as well
as from successive stimulation, as can be easily found by con-
sulting any psychology textbook. Not only are contrast and
assimilation effects simultaneous as well as successive — but also
they are different according to the place they occupy in the figure
or ground of a perceptual relationship. [4] In view of these facts,
appropriate specific terms should be used to designate specific cases
of reference frames appearing in other major fields of psychology.
For example, "aspiration level" and "ego level" may be used as
such referential terms in cases dealing with the experiences of
success, failure, and status, as Hoppe [23], Frank [16], Gould
[17], and others have done.

In this connection, Rogers' significant study dealing with the
anchoring effect of a preceding stimulus of constant value on a
scale of stimuli is pertinent. His formulation is aptly offered "as
an experimental contribution to the understanding of the frame
of reference." [39] His study is based on a previous investigation
reported by Volkmann in 1936. [48] Volkmann obtained judg-
ments on a series of visual inclinations, using the method of

40 EXPERIMENTAL FACTS CONCERNING BASIS OF ATTITUDES

single stimuli. In the first experiment an "instructed" position
(horizontal) was used as a reference point. As a consequence, the
scale shifted and extended considerably in the direction of the
horizontal. The second experiment demonstrated that in a simi-
lar manner any value which the observer selected and held in
mind could exert an appreciable shift in the scale.

In the first part of his study Rogers discusses frame of reference
and "absolute scale." He almost characterizes the "mental forma-
tion," labeled "absolute scale" in an inconsistent way, as a special
case of frame of reference. ("Mental formation" was originally
used by Wever and Zener to designate the psychological scale
[frame] formed after some rounds of presentation of the stimulus
series in these psychophysical experiments.) Rogers states:

While it might be argued that the absolute scale, in this event, con-
stitutes a frame of reference accessible to experimental manipulation
and investigation, a slightly different view is to be taken here. The
frame of reference, it would seem, may most reasonably be seen as the
product of a number of influences, notably the influences of stimuli
which cannot all be present at any one time. [39, 6]

This is true in a general way, but not quite, because the influence
of past stimuli, not present at the time, may be operative on an
"absolute" scale as well as on any other specific case of a reference
frame. For example, in building up a mental scale ("absolute
scale") using the method of single stimuli, a previously established
scale or anchorage even from daily life may come in to modify
present judgments. The operation of a frame of reference or a
mental scale as a specific case of a frame of reference is detected
from the observable determinations or modifications of reported
judgments and perceptions. This fact is clearly noted by Rogers:

The frame of reference, then, is inaccessible except in terms of overt
responses which it governs. [39, 6]

In the experiments which Rogers conducted, he used the method
of single stimuli. His stimulus series consisted of a scale of visual
inclinations (in the first experiment) and a scale of weights (in
the second experiment). In Rogers' first sessions the usual dis-
tributions of judgments were obtained, and the usual scales (or
frames) were established psychologically. In subsequent sessions,

EXPERIMENTAL FACTS CONCERNING BASIS OF ATTITUDES 41

"an anchoring stimulus" was presented just prior to each presen-
tation of a stimulus to be judged and was designated as the top
category of the series. The anchoring stimulus, at first the same
as the highest stimulus of the range, "was moved progressively
further above the stimulus range, remaining always the same
throughout any single session." This means that the most fre-
quently presented stimulus was the anchoring stimulus: to be pre-
cise, the anchoring stimulus was presented as many times as the
total number of presentations of all the stimuli of the series. In a
few cases, the values of the anchoring stimuli used were within the
upper part of the stimulus range. Rogers' results obtained from
both kinds of stimuli (visual inclinations and weights) are similar.
The anchoring or reference point, experimentally introduced,
produces changes in the scale and in the category thresholds within
the scale. As the anchoring point moves further from the range,
it expands the scale to a certain point, and as it is carried down
into the range it causes the scale to shrink. Briefly stated, the scale
(frame) expands, to a certain point, or shrinks, but in both cases
it is assimilated to the shifts of the anchoring stimulus.

Rogers' investigations constitute a significant contribution to the
systematic experimental study of frames and points of reference
and to the nature of their mutual interdependence. Our daily
perceptions, experiences, relationships with other individuals are
structured or altered to an important degree by the conscious or
unconscious use of intruded anchorages of a social or nonsocial
nature. Thus when we say "early," "late," we say them in relation
to certain reference points, for example, the time of the departure
of a train, an appointment, lunch time. In social life, we shift our
judgments, decisions, and human relationships by self-imposed or
socially given intrusions of value judgments which serve us as
anchorages. In his work on remembering, Bartlett gives vivid
illustrations of how the names of things used at the moment serve
as anchorages in relation to which perceptions and memories are
structured or altered.

A recent study by Tresselt [45] is of special importance for us
in this connection, because it provides a strict laboratory demon-
stration of the fact that the better an anchorage is learned (even
to the extent of being overlearned), the more pronounced is the

42 EXPERIMENTAL FACTS CONCERNING BASIS OF ATTITUDES

tendency for that anchorage to effect subsequent judgments.
Tresselt set out "to determine the effect of experimentally pro-
duced variations in the amount of past experience (with stimulus-
objects similar to the objects to be used as the new task of judg-
ment) upon the speed of agreement with the center of the
stimulus-scale." She used a series of 12 weights, ranging from 11
to 560 grams. Six groups of subjects participated in the experi-
ment. Group I was given one practice trial on each of the four
heaviest weights; group II was given 4 trials on each of the heavi-
est weights; group III was given 8 trials; group IV 12; group V
28; and group VI 12 practice trials on the four lightest weights.
As usual in such experiments, Tresselt found that

By the time the subjects have lifted approximately six weights re-
gardless of the amount of previous experience or kind of previous
experience, the judgments are less widely distributed and it might be
said that the subjects have come to show a greater degree of conformity
about what shall be called "medium." [45]

But she continues:

The larger the period of practice, the more slowly does the scale of
judgment shift to its new position. [45, italics ours]

The more well-established an anchorage is, the better it is learned,
then the more lasting is its influence likely to be.

The shifts and other effects brought about by the introduction
of anchorages into a situation (anchorages lying within or without
the structure) are demonstrated by facts accumulating almost since
the beginnings of experimental psychology. Thus, Henri, work-
ing on skin localizations in 1892-97, found that shifts of localiza-
tions always "are committed in the direction of the points of
reference (points de reptre)" and corresponding shifts took place
with shifts of reference points. [20] What Henri called reference
points (points de reptrc) in 1895 were designated "anchoring
points" by Koffka in 1922 [27], "anchoring agents" by Volkmann
in 1936 [48], and "anchoring points" by Rogers in 1941 [39] in
studying the same effects.

Before proceeding to our next step — the experimental formation
of an attitude— we shall bring together the main points reached so

STRUCTURED AND UNSTRUCTURED STIMULUS SITUATIONS 43

far. The first stage in the formation of an attitude is a perceptual
stage. Because of this and because of the discriminative nature of
attitudes they ate closely linked to the psychology of perception
and judgment. The laboratory studies on one hand and historical
and empirical facts of everyday life on the other reveal that per-
ceptions are selective. Perceptual and judgmental activities take
place in referential frameworks. As a consequence of facing re-
peatedly the proportions, forms, or perceptual objects, scales of
magnitudes (both in a physical and a social sense), these scales
and magnitudes form frames of reference in the individual which
serve as bases by which subsequent situations are perceived and
judged. They need not be consciously formed, deliberately in-
structed, or imposed by others. Once formed they act as anchor-
ages to determine or alter an individual's reactions to subsequent
situations. In this fact is imbedded the basic psychology of an
attitude.

And lest we be accused of too much subjectivity, it should be
mentioned in passing that experiments concerning the referential
nature of judgments involving manual tasks are entirely feasible.
For example, Tresselt reports that in her experiment with Volk-
mann involving lifted weights they gathered data which "show
that one subject who worked in a steel plant held the weights to
be light or medium for the first eight judgments while a college
professor held all the weights to be heavy or medium, except one,
the very lightest." [45] Proshansky and Murphy have pointed
out that "the unity of the organism would suggest . . . that what-
ever principles are of value in the understanding of the laws of
motor response are of some pertinence in understanding the laws
of perception." [38, 295]

FRAMES OF REFERENCE IN RELATION TO STRUCTURED AND
UNSTRUCTURED STIMULUS SITUATIONS

We shall first consider frames of reference in relation to struc-
tured stimulus situations, beginning with the most clear-cut cases
of perception. When the stimulus field is well-structured, the
grouping or organization that follows gives rise to perceptions of
forms, magnitudes, melodies, rhythms, proportions, relationships,

44 EXPERIMENTAL FACTS CONCERNING BASIS OF ATTITUDES

localizations, and so on, that correspond, in general, to the proper-
ties of the objective situations: the perception of a circle, a square,
an appropriately grouped succession of tones typifj? these situations.
In such cases the structure of the psychological frame will cor-
respond closely to the structure of the external field of stimulation,
the figure-ground relationship being determined by the compel-
ling features and salient reference points of the objective situation.
The properties of the different parts are determined by their func-
tional relationship in the structure. This is expressed as the mem-
ber-character of the parts. Factors in the objective field of stimula-
tion (such as proximity and similarity) with such compelling
features have been studied extensively since the outstanding work
of Wertheimer. [52] This member-character relationship holds
true with successive stimulation as is the case in the perception of
melody as well as with simultaneous stimulation. As we have
seen, this seems to be true in the case of judgments as well as of
perceptions.

Well-structured objects or magnitudes have similar effects in
our daily life reactions, as we have already noted. An individual,
wherever he may be, is surrounded by buildings, tools, furniture,
magnitudes, timetables, schedules, or innumerable other types of
well-structured stimulus situations of one kind or another. He is
stimulated by them repeatedly. As a consequence, the particular
structures, magnitudes, and relationships become the established
scales or frames in him. This objective determination, by existing
magnitudes, scales, relationships, of lasting scales or frames in
individuals implies the establishment of lasting norms. These
norms, verbalized or nonverbalized in explicit judgments, are fun-
damental in shaping the mentalities of individuals living in any
social system. They are, in fact, at least as important in shaping
the mentality of members of a society as value judgments, beliefs,
or the whole superstructure of culture. Spiritually inclined culture
apologists have tended to ignore or minimize the effects of this
basic field of determination.

Now we shall consider frames of reference in relation to un-
structured stimulus situations. We have ample evidence that in
cases where the stimulus situation is not well-structured the result-
ing psychological experience is by no means always chaos or an

STRUCTURED AND UNSTRUCTURED STIMULUS SITUATIONS 45

inconsistent hodgepodge of reactions. It seems that a tendency to
organize and group stimuli is a primary psychological fact based,
of course, on underlying properties of the nervous system which
competent physiologists will no doubt someday explain. Even in
cases where the stimulus field is not well-structured and does not
have the properties necessary to impose objectively clear-cut non-
reversible figure-ground relationships, there is usually some sort of
organization. For example, campers in a forest on a dark night
are apt to see or hear different things around them as determined
by their individual attitudes or preoccupations. But in such cases,
internal factors are important in determining the properties of the
resulting organizations.

The margin of possibilities for the contribution of internal fac-
tors allowed by unstructured situations is at the basis of many
studies dealing with the problem of individual peculiarities, per-
sonality differences, abnormal tendencies, and the like. We find
here the basis of the projective devices currently flourishing. The
use of unstructured ink blots for detecting characteristics of the
individual was suggested and used by G. V. Dearborn back in the
end of the 19th century. [13, 14] Others soon followed him.
Bartlett used a series of ink blots in his studies on remembering.
The recent extensive systematic uses of projective methods based
on the Rorschach ink blots or Murray's thematic apperception test
are well known. [26, 35] Voth recently studied personality differ-
ences "as expressed through various forms and amount of auto-
kinetic perception" using autokinesis as an unstructured unstable
stimulus. [49] In more recent studies, Voth has used the auto-
kinetic phenomenon as an index to pathological tendencies and
has found fairly high correlations between indices thus obtained
from his patients and medical diagnosis. [50]

Gradations of structure in the stimulus field. We have con-
sidered cases of structured and unstructured stimulus situations:
in the former cases the resulting psychological outcome is com-
pellingly determined by the objective situation, in the latter cases
a variety of internal or subjective factors come into play to shape
response. Actually, of course, there are all kinds of gradations
between these two extremes of structuration.

Recently Luchins used gradations of structure or ambiguity in

46 EXPERIMENTAL FACTS CONCERNING BASIS OF ATTITUDES

a series of studies on the social influences involved in the percep-
tion of complex drawings. [33] The conclusion that can be drawn
from these studies is that the effects of social influence (the various
devices of suggestion used in the experiment) vary with the de-
gree of ambiguity of stimuli presented. The greater the ambiguity
of the stimulus, the greater is the effect of attempted social influ-
ence. In a previous study in which the stimulus gradations were
too few and too abrupt to allow the possibility of graded compari-
sons, Luchins seems to reach a similar conclusion:

Whether or not subjects were influenced by A's judgment ["A"
being the influencing subject in the experiment] seemed to depend on
the obviousness of the correct answer, i.e., the clarity of the judgment-
situation, on the truth or falsity of A's judgment, and also on the
subjects' attitudes to and interpretations of their task and the experi-
mental situation. [32, 110, italics ours]

Coffin designed an experiment to study the relationship of
suggestibility to the ambiguity of a stimulus situation. The tonal
attributes of pitch, volume, and a fictitious attribute created for
the experiment and labeled "orthosonority" were used as the three
tonal attributes varying in ambiguity. Subjects were given a tonal
stimulus and then, after each tonal dimension had been defined,
were told to equate the succeeding tone heard through their head-
phones with the original stimulus by turning the appropriate dial
which was ostentatiously labeled. Subjects were divided into ex-
perimental and controlled groups. Results showed that the least
ambiguous tonal attribute, pitch, was in most cases not subject to
change by suggestion. Volume, on the other hand, could be
reversed by suggestion with most observers, while judgments of
"orthosonority" invariably followed the experimenter's suggestion.
In other words suggestibility to these attributes increases with their
ambiguity. [11]

In a study dealing with social determinants of the level of
aspiration Chapman and Volkmann produced changes in the
standards of their subjects by introducing into the situation a
hierarchy of standards the truth or falsity of which could not be
objectively tested by the subjects. But in a subsequent experiment,
after the subjects had considerable experience with the task at

STRUCTURED AND UNSTRUCTURED STIMULUS SITUATIONS 47

hand, the introduction of new standards did not shift the standards
of the subjects. With such results in mind, Chapman and Volk-
mann state that "the lability of the judgment, for example, varies
inversely with the determinateness of the frame of reference."
[10, 225] As we shall see later, Asch and his associates got similar
results. CantriFs studies of a panic situation and various social
movements substantiate the implications of these results on a
highly complicated level, [p. 81 /.] Although research is still scanty
which deals directly with the comparative effects on perception
and judgment of gradations of structuration in the stimulus field,
from the meager results obtained thus far we may formulate as a
working hypothesis that, all other things being equal, the role
played by internal and social factors decreases with the stability,
clarity, or structuredness of the stimulus situation and with the
strength of frames or points of reference already established.

As we have remarked in the foregoing, material objects, techno-
logical and other products of human labor, have a compelling
effect in producing corresponding frames in the psychology of
men. If the actual truth of all man's individual and social relation-
ships were compellingly imposed on him in daily life, then he
would not have any lasting and organized false attitudes. But he
actually does have false attitudes about things, especially those he
has never seen for himself or closely scrutinized. He has definite
attitudes about gods, about life hereafter, and imposed attitudes
concerning peoples about whom he really knows nothing.

As formulations and standards have been achieved in science
through the laborious and not infrequently persecuted labors of
scientific workers such as Galileo, science has changed and cor-
rected many obsolete "survival" social norms and corresponding
attitudes. False norms and practices connected with natural events
have been corrected and have yielded their place to scientific for-
mulations in the modern world, although there are exceptions
such as the norms of Christian Science. However, in social and
economic relationships and in the whole superstructure of norms
determined by them, many survivals remain. Until social systems
base their premises and practices on strictly scientific grounds,
"survival" norms and attitudes filtering down from different his-
torical periods and outmoded systems will continue to function.

48 EXPERIMENTAL FACTS CONCERNING BASIS OF ATTITUDES

The social system that erects itself on a scientific basis is still the
exception rather than the rule. In view of this fact, the psycholo-
gist renders a real service when he takes a realistic stand and
studies human nature and social systems as they really are, rather
than basing his arguments on the inherent goodness or evil of
man or the will to truth as Hobbes and Rousseau did in their
times and as the advocates of an unchanging "human nature" are
doing today. The more various interest groups strive to perpetuate
obsolete superstructures of norms, the more important it is to study
social organization objectively. Many a historian and social sci-
entist has observed that unstable, ambiguous, and critical situations
are those which provide especially fertile soil for the formation and
inculcation of social norms.1

In the following paragraphs we shall try to typify experiment-,
ally the basic psychological processes involved in the formation of
frames in unstructured situations. Admittedly, the studies are
carried on in artificial and miniature laboratory situations. In
presenting them we claim only that they are a starting point for
conceptualization, the validity of which will be tested out with
more concrete social material in actual situations.

Formation of a frame in an unstructured situation? In line
with the previous discussion, the psychologist must find an un-
stable unstructured stimulus situation, present it repeatedly to the
individual to see if he will structure it somehow to a framework
of response — proceeding with the hypothesis that psychological
organization or grouping is a primary fact in unstructured as well
as in structured situations. And if stimuli are organized by the
individual, then the further question is, will they be organized by
the members of a group collectively, and will members of a group

1 It might be pointed out here that no realistic purpose is served by conducting
experiments of the type in which the attempt is made, by introducing various
social influences, to have a subject perceive a perfect square as a circle, or a line
two inches long as longer than a line four inches long. In such obvious cases, no
problem is involved, and nothing is gained by declaring as a conclusion in the
face of such a compelling stimulus determination, "Ah ha, people cannot be
influenced to perceive a square as a circle; thus they reveal their inherent will to
truth."

2 When not otherwise specified, the results to be summarized here refer to
Sherif. [41, 42] These references may be consulted for the detailed description
of the experimental situation, procedure, subjects, instructions, and so on.

STRUCTURED AND UNSTRUCTURED STIMULUS SITUATIONS 49

eventually form a frame peculiar to the group? This query lies
at the basis of the psychology of what sociologists such as Durk-
heim, drawing a sharp dichotomy between individual psychology
and social psychology, argue so strongly concerning the supralocal,
suis generis character of collective values or "representations"
which emerge only as a consequence of collective behavior. [15]

The autokinetic phenomenon is one of various experimental
possibilities that conveniently lends itself to a test of frame forma-
tion when the stimulus is unstructured. In a pitch-dark space a
single point of light seems to move and to move in different
directions. It seems to move because there is no frame of reference
to give it a stable localization. With the introduction of other
visible points or objects the point gains stability relative to these
points, since all psychological localizations are relative affairs.
Even the introduction of sounds in the vicinity of the point seems
to affect its stability.

The first experiment in the series studied the formation of a
frame (or scale) in the individual alone, thus starting with the
general psychology of frame formation. The stimulus light was
presented briefly and successively one hundred times in each ex-
perimental session. The time of exposure after the perceived move-
ment started was the same in all presentations. This was true for
all- sessions, individual and group. The observer was asked to
report the extent of the perceived movement. The results un-
equivocally indicate that, even though a scale and reference points
are lacking in the objective situation, in the course of the experi-
mental session individuals spontaneously form a frame and a
central tendency (standard) which may differ from individual to
individual in the absence of a compelling objective range of
stimuli. In other words, in the absence of an objective scale
(frame) and objective standard (reference point) each individual
builds up a scale of his own and a standard within that scale.
The range and reference point established by each individual is
peculiar to himself when he is facing the situation alone.

In the second part of this first experiment it was found that once
a scale is established there is a tendency for the individual to pre-
serve this scale in subsequent sessions (within a week in these
experiments). The introspective data obtained furnish further

50 EXPERIMENTAL FACTS CONCERNING BASIS OF ATTITUDES

evidence of the formation of a frame. Most typical examples of
such introspection are: "Compared with previous distance"; "Judg-
ments are all relative"; "Compared successive judgments"; "First
estimate as standard." Although the subjects do form frames of
reference of their own spontaneously without being instructed to
do so, the lack of an objective frame of reference is experienced.
The following introspections are typical: "Darkness left no guide
for distance"; "Lack of visible neighboring objects"; "No fixed
point from which to judge distance."

SOCIAL FACTORS IN LABORATORY SITUATIONS

We can now proceed to the consideration of attitudes in social
situations. These situations range from laboratory experiments
involving social factors (which we will consider here) to compli-
cated social conditions of everyday life (to be taken up in the next
chapter). In doing so, we should stress again our conviction that,
in spite of the enormous variation in the content of attitudes,
psychological principles of attitude formation are essentially the
same, irrespective of what the attitude is concerned with.

The first stage of attitude formation — in the most complicated
social situation as well as in a restricted laboratory experiment — is
a perceptual stage. The individual must somehow come into con-
tact with the stimulus situation before any attitude is established.
In strict laboratory situations this stimulus situation is generally
neutral, and the frame of reference established lacks the vital
affective and motivational properties so characteristic of social
attitudes: in the laboratory experiment the stimuli may be a series
of magnitudes, such as lines or weights or perceptual structures;
in social life the stimuli may be a person, group, an expressed atti-
tude or prejudice, a threat, or a value judgment (norm) of any
kind. Some of these stimuli in social life may be relatively neutral,
may have only a mild affective property, for example, the color of
a dress, the shape of a house, the characterization of a city, while
some may involve intense, sometimes even traumatic, experiences,
for example, a girl whom one loves at first sight, a scolding
received by a child for cheating, an announcement over the radio
that the Japanese have bombed Pearl Harbor.

SOCIAL FACTORS IN LABORATORY SITUATIONS 51

In dealing with attitudes in social situations, then, we are deal-
ing with stimulus situations rife with affective and motivational
properties, with situations that frequently involve problems of the
individual's status. It might be mentioned in passing that attitudes
to situations involving affective properties seem to be more readily
established (learned), just as Pavlov, Tolman, and others showed
that conditioning was more effective under motivational stress.
Whether the perceptual experience involves direct contact with an
object, person, or group, or whether the perceptual experience
involves the verbal transmission of a social norm by some short-
cut value judgment makes no difference whatever as far as the
basic psychological characteristics of attitude formation are con-
cerned. Both the soldier who has had direct experience with the
enemy and his sister back home who has been subjected to value
judgments concerning the enemy can and often do develop vari-
ous negative attitudes. It is therefore systematically useless to try
to categorize attitudes according to their source or origin. This
is, of course, not a denial of the specific properties of particular
attitudes formed in specific situations.

Experimental formation of a frame in group situations. This
series of experiments was undertaken with the methodological
conviction that the principles formulated and verified in general
psychology are valid principles that operate when individuals par-
ticipate in group action or in collective behavior. Results pro-
duced by group interaction may be, and in fact are, different from
those obtained when a person is alone. They may have all the
earmarks of emergent products. Nevertheless, the psychological
principles involved in the group situation are the same in opera-
tion as those when an individual is not a member of a group.
The emergence of new qualities is not a unique property of group
action alone— perceptions of forms, relationships, and melodies
emerge as unique qualities not found in individual parts. This
emergence of new qualities on different levels — individual as well
as collective levels— has to be stressed constantly because of the
sharp dichotomies drawn by certain schools of thought. For ex-
ample, the dichotomy of psychology into experimental versus
cultural made by the romantic German school represented by
Spranger [44] portrays experimental (individual) psychology as

52 EXPERIMENTAL FACTS CONCERNING BASIS OF ATTITUDES

atomistic and static, and cultural psychology as dynamic and
meaningful with total qualities. Writers of the Durkheim school
of spiritualistic sociology, for example, Blondel [5] and Halb-
wachs [19], and Durkheim [15] himself, argue that new quali-
ties emerge only in collective situations, whereas findings in psy-
chology substantiate the view of dialectical materialism that
emergence takes place in all levels — physical, biological, psycho-
logical and socioeconomic. In a recent study full of implications
for further research in social psychology, Tresselt and Volkmann
experimentally demonstrated the "production of uniform opinion
by non-social stimulation." [47] These investigators express a
general psychological fact when they state that "the mechanism for
judging social stimuli is the same as the mechanism for judging
non-social stimuli." [242]

With this methodological concern in mind, we can turn to the
results of Sherif's group experiments on autokinesis. In the group
situations each subject reported his judgments aloud and naturally
was heard by the other subjects in the group. He in turn heard
their expressed judgments. No primacy effect was introduced
into the situation. A special point was made in the wording of
the instructions to the effect that subjects could report their judg-
ments in any order in any presentation. A subject who gave his
judgment first in a particular presentation, might be the last to
report in the following presentation. The building up of a frame
in group situations is a temporal affair established in the course
of the experimental period— the influence of expressed judgments
is not restricted to judgments given at particular presentations.

Some groups faced the autokinetic situation without any pre-
vious individual experience. An equal number of groups faced it
after the members had established their individual frames alone in
individual experiments. The members of the groups who first
took part directly in the group situation were therefore naive and
neutral in relation to this unstructured ambiguous situation.

The results are clear. When individuals as members of a group
face the same unstable unstructured situation without any pre-
viously established personal relationship among them, a scale
(frame) and a standard (reference point) within that frame are

SOCIAL FACTORS IN LABORATORY SITUATIONS 53

established in the course of the experimental period.8 When a
member of the group faces the same situation subsequently done,
after the frame is established in the group situation, he experi-
ences the situation in terms of the frame established in the group
situation as a consequence of group interactions.

This result was verified by Asch and Wright in experiments
performed in 1937. We give these results here in Asch's own pre-
ferred terminology.4

The outstanding feature of the investigation of Sherif is the tend-
ency of the subjects in the given experimental situation to reach
mutual agreement. S. E. Asch and B. Wright undertook in a series of
experiments to examine more closely the specific reasons for this
tendency.

Before proceeding with their experimental variations, they first
repeated the main experiment of Sherif with four pairs of subjects.
The arrangement of the experiment was as far as possible identical
with that of Sherif. The main findings of Sherif were confirmed:
a new norm (level of response) developed under the given conditions.
However, the convergence proceeded along different paths in the
different pairs of subjects. For example, some members exercised
more influence on the direction than others. This finding is entirely
consistent with the results of Sherif. [Variations of these experiments
by Asch and Wright will be reported in their appropriate context
later.] 8

In Sherif 's experiments with autokinesis, when individuals first
establish their frames and standards in individual sessions and are

8 Here we shall not digress to indicate some interesting results which revealed
the differential, relative contributions of individual members and which are im-
portant for the psychology of personality.

4 This is a summary statement of investigations, the full account of which will
be reported in a forthcoming publication by Dr. S. Asch. The results reported
here were personally communicated.

5 More recently, in a series of studies dealing with "some social factors in judg-
ment," Schonbar investigated modifications of judgments in "situations of medium
and high structure," respectively. [40] From her results she concludes "our
findings confirm and extend the conclusions arising from Sherif's work on the
autokinetic phenomenon." [729] That the convergence she found in cases of high
structure is almost identical to the convergence found in cases of medium structure
is puzzling, in view of the differentiated results obtained with varied degrees of
structure, and other factors by Asch, Lewis and Hertzman, Coffin, Chapman and
Volkmann, Luchins, and Asch and Wright

54 EXPERIMENTAL FACTS CONCERNING BASIS OF ATTITUDES

then brought into group situations, their judgments tend to con-
verge. But the convergence is not so close as when they first work
in the group situation. When an individual comes into a group
situation, with his own established frames and standards, there is
a tendency to stick to them to some extent: individuals bring into
the situation their own established frames and are no longer naive
in relation to the situation. [41, 31, 41; 42, 104]

In one variation of these experiments, Asch and Wright gave
contradictory instructions in the individual sessions by prescribing
varying ranges of movement.

Under these conditions of contradictory individual norms, no
convergence developed in any of the pairs. Subsequent questioning
revealed that fully one-half of the subjects did not realize that they
were in contradiction with their partners. They interpreted the addi-
tion of the integer 3 (or the dropping of the integer 3) as introduced
for the sake of identifying each of the subjects in the dark room. The
remaining subjects interpreted the existing difference in terms of such
factors as differences of position with regard to the light, differences
in eyesight, etc.

This means that even following individual sessions, with pre-
scribed contradictory instructions and contradictory standards and
norms, half of the subjects converged. The addition or dropping
of the integer "3" (which the subjects thought was introduced as
an experimental device) accounts for statistical but not for psy-
chological nonconvergence as explained by the subjects who "did
not realize that they were in contradiction with their partners."
In a more decisive variation aimed at the complete destruction
of convergence, Asch and Wright performed the following experi-
ment. In Asch's words:

The aim of the following experiment was to alter in a decisive way
the cognitive character of the situation. The subjects were informed
in the individual session concerning the subjective nature of the auto-
kinetic effect (each subject was paired in the present variation with a
"planted" subject whose estimates differed considerably and consist-
ently from the experimental subject's). There were ten subjects in
this experiment. Under these conditions, five subjects showed no
convergence effect whatsoever; the other five did depart significantly
from their previous judgments and in the direction of the "planted"

SOCIAL FACTORS IN LABORATORY SITUATIONS 55

subject. To explain the two forms of reaction, the subjects were
questioned at the conclusion of the investigation. According to the
present results, it seems that the subjects who showed the convergence
effect continued to think of the autokinetic phenomenon as objective
and forgot the preceding instructions. Nevertheless, the change found
in the first half of the group conclusively demonstrates how effective
the alteration of the cognitive character of the situation can be. [italics
ours]

In spite of the fact that the subjects were told beforehand that the
light was not moving at all and in spite of their individually es-
tablished norms before coming into the group situation, it is sur-
prising that there was any degree of convergence at all. We do
not know if the 50 per cent convergence attributed by Asch to
forgetting is in line with current forgetting curves. The lapse of
time between the individual and group sessions cannot be longer
than a few days.

Nevertheless the afore-mentioned variations which introduced
into the situation various degrees of familiarity or objective knowl-
edge of the situation account for the variations in the results
obtained. They are in harmony with Sherifs results which
showed that, once individual frames are established, convergence
or agreement in subsequent group situations is decidedly affected
by them. Likewise, the findings in these variations are in har-
mony with the conclusions of Chapman and Volkmann that pre-
vious familiarity with a situation prevents shifts in the direction
of experimentally introduced standards or norms. Likewise, they
are in harmony with the finding of Luchins that social influence
varies, among other factors, with variations in structural clarity.
And all are in harmony with the formulation reached in the
previous section that the influence of internal and social factors
increases directly with the increase of the unstructuredness or am-
biguity of the situation, and decreases with the degree of the
structuredness or unambiguity of frames and standards already
established by an individual.

Experimental inculcation of a frame. As we stressed previously,
frames are formed in the individual in daily life corresponding to
objects and norms around him which are compelling in their ob-
jective structure. Quite frequently attitudes are formed as a direct

56 EXPERIMENTAL FACTS CONCERNING BASIS OF ATTITUDES

consequence of short-cut verdicts or value judgments of grown-ups,
teachers, and others around us. These value judgments may or
may not be imbedded in the truth of actual relationships. We
are concerned here with the psychological process involved in their
acquisition. The formation of such a frame in a social situation
has been experimentally demonstrated. The experiment was car-
ried out by Sherif in the spring of 1936 at Columbia University
again utilizing the autokinetic technique, [43]

The specific problem in the experiment was to see whether
"naive" subjects could be experimentally inculcated with varying
ranges of prescribed frames and standards. Preliminary experi-
mentation had shown that a partner in this situation (in this case
a partner with considerable prestige) could influence the judg-
ments of the other subject — raise and lower them in his direction.
When the "naive" subject was told exactly what had happened
she became very disturbed, an indication that an individual can
get emotionally upset by being so fooled. [92]

In the main experiment there were seven groups of two mem-
bers each. In each group, one member co-operated with the ex-
perimenter by deliberately distributing his judgments around the
range (scale) and a standard point within that range prescribed
beforehand by the experimenter. The second member (desig-
nated as the "naive" subject) was totally unfamiliar with the situa-
tion. In each case the naive subject was not acquainted either
with the experimenter or the co-operating subject. To be sure
that the conformity was to the prescribed range and standard, a
different range and a different standard were prescribed for each
group. In order to avoid the factor of primacy, the co-operating
subject was instructed to let the "naive" subject express his judg-
ment first at least half the time. The first session was the group
session with both the co-operating and "naive" subjects participat-
ing. In the second session the "naive" subject was alone.

The results indicate considerable convergence to the prescribed
range (scale) and standard in the judgments of the "naive" sub-
jects. The varying convergence in different subjects clearly indi-
cates personality differences. The convergence of the judgments
in the "alone" session, which took place the day following the
group session, was, in general, even greater than that obtained in

REFERENCES 57

the group sessions. Introspections reveal that the subjects became
conscious of the scale and standard formed during the course of
the experiments: Five subjects out of seven reported in their writ-
ten introspections at the end of the experiments that they were
not influenced by the judgments of their partner. This clearly
indicates that a social influence which continues even when the
individual is alone need not be consciously experienced. Schonbar
has recently obtained results which lead to the same conclu-
sion. [40]

It is a significant fact to find convergence greater, in the majority
of cases, when the individual is acting alone. It is not a rare oc-
currence in everyday life to react negatively or hesitatingly on
some topic raised by some person while in his presence, but to
respond positively when he is no longer in the situation. To yield
easily is not a pleasant "ego" experience.

This experiment embodies in itself the rudiments of the psy-
chology of attitude formation: a scale (or frame) is formed under
the influence of the verdicts of another individual in relation to
a definite experimentally controlled stimulus situation. The scale
(frame) is carried from one day to another, has to some extent an
enduring quality which provides an individual with a state of
readiness by means of which he reacts in a characteristic way to
the same stimulus situation. Here we have the main earmarks
of an attitude. We must admit at once that this formation lacks
the affective quality of a real attitude. But we do not believe this
at all invalidates our conceptualization. The investigations of
Beebe-Center [3] and associates, Cohen [12], and Hunt and Volk-
mann [24] all indicate that the mechanisms of affective judg-
ments are not essentially different from those of other judgments.
Besides, as we shall see, there is further evidence to support the
general scheme so far presented.

REFERENCES

1. ALLPORT, F. H., The psychology of the artist's frame of reference, unpublished

talk to Associated Artists, Syracuse, N. Y., April 17, 1945. (Outline of talk
personally communicated to the authors.)

2. BARTLETT, F. C., Remembering: A Study in Experimental and Social Psychol-

58 EXPERIMENTAL FACTS CONCERNING BASIS OF ATTITUDES

3. BEEBE-CENTER, J. G., Pleasantness and Unpleasantness, New York: Van

Nostrand, 1932,

4. DENARY, W., The influence of form on brightness contrast, in A Source Eoo\ of

Gestalt Psychology (W. D. Ellis, ed.), New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1938,
104-08.

5. BLONDEL, C., Introduction a la psychologic collective, Paris: Colin, 1928.

6. BORING, E. G., Attribute and sensation, Am. ]. PsychoL, 1924, 35, 301-04.

7. CANTRIL, H., The Psychology of Social Movements, New York: Wiley, copy-

right 1941.

8. CHANDLER, A. R., Beauty and Human Nature, New York: Appleton-Century,

1934.

9. CHAPMAN, D. W., Relative effects of determinate and indeterminate Aujgaben,

Am. /. PsychoL, 1932, 44, 163-74.

10. and J. VOLKMANN, A social determinant of the level of aspiration, /. Ab-

norm. & Soc. PsychoL, 1939, 34, 225-38.

11. COFFIN, T. E., Some conditions of suggestion and suggestibility: a study of

certain attitudinal and situational factors influencing the process of sugges-
tion, PsychoL Monogr., 1941, no. 241.

12. COHEN, N. E., The relativity of absolute judgments, Am. J. PsychoL, 1937, 49,

93-100.

13. DEARBORN, G. V., Blots of ink in experimental psychology, PsychoL Rev., 1897,

4, 390-1.
14. A study of imaginations, Am. J. PsychoL, 1898, 9, 183-90.

15. DURKHEIM, E., Les Formes elementaires de la vie religieuse, Paris, 1912.

16. FRANK, J. D., Some psychological determinants of the level of aspiration, Am.

L PsychoL, 1935, 47, 285-93.

17. GOULD, R., An experimental analysis of "level of aspiration," Genet. PsychoL

Monogr., 1939,21, 1-116.

18. HAGGARD, E., and G. J. ROSE, Some effects of mental set and active participa-

tion in the conditioning of the autokinetic phenomenon, /. Exp. PsychoL,
1944, 34, 45-59.

19. HALBWACHS, M., Les Cadres sociaux de la memoire, Paris, 1925.

20. HENRI, V., Recherches sur la localisation des sensations tactiles, Annee PsychoL,

1895, 2, 168-92.

21. HOLLINGWORTH, H. L., The inaccuracy of movement, Arch. PsychoL, 1909,

no. 13.
22. The central tendency of judgment, /. Phil., 1910, 7, 461-9.

23. HOPPE, F., Erfolg und Misserfolg, PsychoL Forsch., 1930, 14, 1-62.

24. HUNT, W. A., and J. VOLKMANN, The anchoring of an affective scale, Am. ].

PsychoL, 1937, 49, 88-92.

25. JUNG, C. G., Psychological types, New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1924.

26. KLOPFER, B., and D. M. KELLY, The Rorschach Technique, Yonkers: World

Book, 1942.

27. KOFFKA, K., Perception: an introduction to the Gestalt-Theorie, PsychoL Bull.,

1922, 19, 531-85.
28. Principles of Gestalt Psychology, New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1935.

29. KOHLER, W., Gestalt Psychology, New York: Liveright, 1929.

30. KU'LPE, O., Versuche iiber Abstraktion, Ber. I. Kongr. Exp. PsychoL, 1904,

58-68.

REFERENCES 59

31. LONG, L., A study of the effect of preceding stimuli upon the judgment of

auditory intensities, Arch. PsychoL, 1937, no. 209.

32. LUCHINS, A. S., On agreement with another's judgments, /. Abnorm. & Soc.

PjycAo/., 1944,39,97-111.

33. Social influences on perception of complex drawings, /. Soc. PsychoL,

1945, 21, 257-73.

34. McGARVEY, H. R., Anchoring effects in the absolute judgment of verbal ma-

terials, Arch. PsychoL, 1943, no. 281.

35. MURRAY, H. A., et al.t Explorations in Personality, New York: Oxford, 1938.

36. POSTMAN, L., and G. A. MILLER, Anchoring of temporal judgments, Am. /.

PsychoL, 1945, 58, 43-53.

37. PRATT, C. C., Time-errors in the method of single stimuli, /. Exp. PsychoL,

1933, 16, 798-814.

38. PROSHANSKY, H., and G. MURPHY, The effects of reward and punishment on

perception, /. PsychoL, 1942, 13, 295-305.

39. ROGERS, S., The anchoring of absolute judgments, Arch. PsychoL, 1941, no. 261.

40. SCHONBAR, R. A., Some social factors in judgment: the formation of social

norms in the judgment of structured stimuli and esthetic preference, Ph.D.
thesis, 1945, Columbia Univ. Library.

41. SHERIF, M., A study of some social factors in perception, Arch. Psychol.t 1935,

no. 187.
42. The Psychology of Social Norms, New York: Harper, copyright 1936.

43. An experimental approach to the study of attitudes, Sociometry, 1937, 1,

90-8.

44. SPRANGER, E., Lebensformen, Halle: Niemeyer, 1927.

45. TRESSELT, M. E., The influence of amount of practice upon the formation of

a scale of judgment, to be published in /. Exp. PsychoL
46. The effect of the experiences of contrasted groups upon the formation

of a new scale of judgment, to be published.
47. and J. VOLKMANN, The production of uniform opinion by nonsocial

stimulation, /. Abnorm. & Soc. PsychoL, 1942, 37, 234-43.

48. VOLKMANN, J., The anchoring of absolute scales, PsychoL Bull., 1936, 33, 742-3.

49. VOTH, A., Individual differences in the autokinetic phenomenon, /. Exp.

PsychoL, 1941, 29, 306-22.

50. Psychologist's report, in 33rd biennial report (Topeka State Hospital),

1942, 16-20.

51. WEDELL, C. H., The nature of the absolute judgment of pitch, /. Exp. PsychoL,

1934, 17, 485-503.

52. WERTHEIMER, M., Untersuchungen zur Lehre von der Gestalt, PsychoL Forsch.,

1922, 1, 47-58.
53. DM Abhandlungen zur Gestalttheorie, Erlangen: Phil. Akad., 1925.

54. WEVER, E. G., and K. E. ZENER, The method of absolute judgment in psycho-

physics, PsychoL Rev., 1928, 35, 466-93.

55. WOODWORTH, R. S., Situation-and-goal set, in Am. ]. PsychoL, Golden Jubilee

vol. (K. M. Dallenbach, ed.), 1937, 50, 130-40.

CHAPTER 4

THE ATTITUDE FORMULATION EXTENDED
TO CONCRETE SITUATIONS

The conceptual scheme offered here towards the psychology of
attitudes may appear to be an "artifact'' based only on the results
of laboratory experiments which have no counterparts in real life
situations. So we turn now to some examples of more everyday
life situations which seem to us to confirm the reality of our
formulations. We cite here only a few of the many studies, rang-
ing from relatively simple demonstrations to complex reactions
of daily life, that confirm the conclusions reached in the more
strictly laboratory settings.1

Irrespective of the particular way in which an individual ac-
quires an attitude in social life, the literature of social psychology
is rife with data which support the formulations reached from
our survey of general psychology: that perception and judgment
are selective and occur within a referential framework, that frames
or points of reference are inevitably established if an individual
repeatedly faces the same stimulus situation, that these frames and
points of reference are by no means always confined to consciously
accepted instructions or imposed norms but can become estab-
lished without the individual's realization of it, and that once
established these frames and points of reference serve as anchor-
ages for perception and judgment.

might incidentally call attention here to the fact that most experiments on
fcumans in the psychological laboratory are social situations at least to the extent
that they involve verbal material in the instructions given to subjects. The variety
of possible meanings of stimulus situations persistently gives trouble since meanings
so readily intrude themselves. [38, 76, 94] It is well known that a subject's "set"
or "attitude" can profoundly affect his reactions in psychological experiments.
It may also be remembered that Titchener, in trying to create the "proper" set,
advocated the use of "trained observers." From our present vantage point these
results obtained only from observers trained to rule out objective references seem
highly artificial

ATTITUDE FORMULATION EXTENDED TO CONCRETE SITUATIONS 61

It should be pointed out that, whereas scales and frames are
experimentally constructed in the laboratory, when we are deal-
ing with concrete social material it is generally necessary to select
some range of stimuli which is meaningful in the particular situa-
tion we are concerned with. If some limits were not generally
established by the social organization, it would be much more
difficult than it is in actual practice to isolate the particular scale
we may be interested in. But by and large, because of the rela-
tivity of values or norms in a given milieu at a given time, it is
feasible to construct scales that deal, for example, with attitudes
toward different races, government regulations, religion, occupa-
tional prestige. Likewise, everyday life judgments such as pre-
dictions made concerning the outcome of social conflicts are gen-
erally found to be made within a limited scalable range. [83]

We have already mentioned the fact that attitudes concerned
with a person's position or status in social life are ego-involved and
that such ego-involved experiences have affective properties, (p. 21)
Since many attitudes related to social situations are more or less
enduring affective fixations, they acquire a special importance to
the individual. They become major constituents of the ego. The
relationship between these social attitudes and the ego structure
and the bearing of this relationship to motivation are considered
in the next chapter. The significant fact that most social attitudes
are ego-involved should, however, be borne in mind in connection
with the material reported here.

In his series of experiments (one of which was referred to in the
last chapter) Coffin investigated the psychology of suggestion as
it was related both to attitudinal structure and to stimulus situa-
tions. [31] In his first experiment Coffin studied the relationship
between an individual's attitude and the type of propaganda to
which he was particularly susceptible. He found (in the winter
of 1939 and 1940) significant correlations between pro-Allied atti-
tudes on the one hand and the acceptance of specially prepared
pro-Allied propaganda on the other hand. Conversely, those with
pro-German attitudes accepted pro-German propaganda to a sig-
nificant degree. In a second experiment Coffin used the Rorschach
ink blots as stimuli with little structuration. After his subjects
had rank-ordered a list of ten occupations according to their so-

62 ATTITUDE FORMULATION EXTENDED TO CONCRETE SITUATIONS

cial standing, they were divided into two groups; each group was
told the characteristic response given to the Rorschach ink blots
by professional men, by business men, by skilled laborers, and by
those on WPA, but the various characteristics were attributed to
different occupations in the two experimental groups. The results
clearly showed that, when these ambiguous stimuli were used, the
subjects were highly influenced by the suggestions given which
served as anchorages. They actively structured the imaginative
situation according to the "characteristic reaction" to the blots of
occupational groups they believed had high social standing. In
a third experiment, testing the relationship between suggestibility
and the difficulty of problem solution, Coffin found that, when
mathematical problems were arranged in order of difficulty with
marginal (and usually false) hints (anchorages) beside each prob-
lem as to what procedure might be used in its solution, respondents
more highly trained in mathematics followed the marginal sug-
gestions less: those who knew the most mathematics accepted less
than half as many of the suggestions as those who knew least
mathematics. Those persons, therefore, least able to make suc-
cessful checks for themselves were most susceptible to an imposed
instruction.

We have cited Coffin's experiments here at some length, since
they provide unequivocal evidence of two important conclusions:
(1) If a suggested stimulus is related to and consistent with an
established frame of reference, it is likely to be accepted; and, (2)
if a stimulus situation is ambiguous or relatively meaningless be-
cause of its difficulty, then a frame of reference verbally imposed
by the experimenter is readily accepted as the basis for judgment.

A study by Ruth and Eugene Hartley concerned with poorly
defined situations is particularly significant since it shows how in-
dividuals establish "individually characteristic ranges and refer-
ence points" by means of which they judge a relatively unstruc-
tured social stimulus. [43] The Hartleys had students rate a series
of pictures of completely unknown men. Among other ratings,
the subjects were asked to estimate each man pictured on his "gen-
eral ability" and his "likeliness to succeed." They found a con-
stancy of ranges and central tendencies in the judgments and
conclude that

ATTITUDE FORMULATION EXTENDED TO CONCRETE SITUATIONS 63

In making primary evaluative social responses to people, when little
information is available, individuals tend to manifest characteristic
ranges and central tendencies with reference to which judgments are
made. [43]

The research of McGarvey "was undertaken in order to deter-
mine whether relations similar to those which have been found
to hold with the psychophysical materials would appear also in
judgments of verbal materials along value-dimensions." [66, 26]
In her first experiment, McGarvey had subjects rate the social
prestige attached to a number of occupations. After they had rated
all occupations on a graphic scale, in further experimental sessions
the top or the bottom category of the scale was set by an "anchor-
ing value." In the second experiment the items judged were short
descriptions of various types of social behavior to be evaluated in
terms of their desirability. Again "anchoring stimuli" were in-
troduced at either end of the scale. On the basis of these experi-
ments McGarvey concluded that

... the effect of the anchoring value was that of bringing about an
extension of the absolute scale upward or downward in the direction
of the anchoring value. The extension of the absolute scale involves
not only a displacement of the scale with reference to the range of
values represented by the stimulus-series, but also a widening of the
categories of response, — a finding in complete agreement with the
results obtained with psychophysical material. [66, 78]

In other words, judgment of a given stimulus is found to be deter-
mined by the frame of reference within which that judgment oc-
curred, and the introduction of new anchorages changed the
dimensions of reference frames. This precisely parallels on a social
level the results obtained by Rogers reported in the last chapter.

The close relationship between memory and an individual's
frame of reference was exhaustively shown by Bartlett who con-
cluded that "remembering is 'schematically' determined," [8, 312]
"an imaginative reconstruction, or construction, built out of the
relation of our attitude towards a whole active mass of organized
past reactions or experience, and to a little outstanding detail which
commonly appears in image or in language form." [213]

64 ATTITUDE FORMULATION EXTENDED TO CONCRETE SITUATIONS

The circumstances that arouse memory orientations, whether they
occur in the laboratory or in everyday life, always set up an attitude
that is primarily towards a particular "schematic" organization. [8, 312]

What a person remembers, as well as what a person observes of a
given stimulus situation, was, Bartlett found, clearly influenced by
the particular social origin of the individual's attitude. He showed
how these attitudes, and consequently recall and observation, varied
according to the cultural background of the individual, how they
differed among members of various groups within a given social
system, and how they differed within the same individual when
he was or was not in the actual social presence of other members of
his group.

Various subsequent studies have indicated that material consist-
ent with a person's attitude is much more likely to be remembered
than material not consistent with it. Seeleman, in stating the
problem of her experimental study of memory, says that "these
differences in standards may be expressed as differences in subjec-
tive norms or frames of reference/' [77, 7] She analyzed the in-
fluence of the attitude toward the Negro on the remembrance of
pictures of whites and Negroes to which were attached, in one
experiment, favorable or unfavorable phrases supposedly describ-
ing the individual shown. She found that persons with extremely
unfavorable attitudes toward the Negro recognized fewer indi-
vidual differences between the Negroes shown in the pictures,
recognized correctly fewer Negro than white pictures, assigned to
Negro pictures more unfavorable phrases and remembered these
unfavorable phrases attached to Negro pictures more accurately
than did persons favorable to Negroes. The evidence from these
experiments is, then, that the attitude toward the Negro affects
perception as well as memory.

Wood [93] studied the changes occurring when subjects with
favorable and unfavorable attitudes toward Negroes wrote ab-
stracts of an article concerning differences between Negroes and
whites. She found that subjects omitted and distorted statements
from the article and added new statements in the direction of their
own attitudes. When these somewhat biased and ambiguous ab-
stracts were read and restated by other subjects with similar atti-

ATTITUDE FORMULATION EXTENDED TO CONCRETE SITUATIONS 65

tudes, the extent of change in the direction of the subjects' atti-
tudes was even greater than when the original, more structured,
and objective article was abstracted.

G. W. Allport and Kramer have reported a study in which they
found that persons who were most anti-Semitic were the most
accurate judges of Semitism from pictures, [4] Zillig showed ex-
perimentally that women tend to remember more items favorable
to women, whereas men tend to remember more items favorable
to men. [95] Watson and Hartmann demonstrated that a person's
attitude toward atheism clearly determined what he would re-
member of material concerning atheism and theism. [90] Ed-
wards discovered that the political attitudes of his subjects signifi-
cantly determined their recognition of items contained in a speech
they had previously heard about the New Deal. [34] In another
study Edwards demonstrated the extent to which a person's atti-
tude stimulates him to rationalize his answers to factual statements
with which he disagrees. [35] Levine and Murphy have shown
experimentally that both the learning and the forgetting of pas-
sages favorable or unfavorable to the Soviet Union are significantly
affected by a person's attitude toward Communism. [63]

The psychology of testimony presents many vivid illustrations of
the influence of attitude on observation, judgment, and memory.
Stern's early experiments on Aussage showed the suggestive effect
of leading questions and demonstrated that the effect of such sug-
gestions often became "stabilized" to influence later or allied judg-
ments. He also demonstrated how persons tended to describe
occurrences from the point of view of what was to them the "cus-
tomary" or "usual" way for such occurrences to take place. The
attitude a witness has toward a dispute and a witness' own attitudes
toward situations were apt to have considerable influence on the
testimony of the witness, even though he might be a highly edu-
cated cautious individual. [86, 87]

In an unpublished study by Lazarsfeld and associates of the re-
action of individuals of various nationality and racial backgrounds
to the same motion picture, the effect of attitudes in determining
what will or will not be observed and remembered and what emo-
tional reactions will be aroused in different people by the same
stimulus situation is clearly demonstrated. The film was a short

66 ATTITUDE FORMULATION EXTENDED TO CONCRETE SITUATIONS

British war picture, Naples Is a Battleground, shown to experimen-
tal groups in the early summer of 1944. Native white Americans
tended to see in the film an example of American armed might
and remembered particularly the showing of General Mark Clark;
Negroes in the audience paid special attention to the Negro troops
pictured; while most marked of all were the reactions of first-
generation Italians who were impressed, saddened, or horrified by
the ruins and extent of devastation. The experimenters observed
that

There were certain aspects of this film that stood out for some but
not for others because of their differing mental sets as they watched
it. [61]

A study of rumors made by Knapp in 1942 showed that "rumors
become harmonized with the cultural traditions of the group in
which they circulate." [57, 30] Rumors are given particular twists
as they penetrate groups where characteristic norms are found,
such as a high degree of anti-Semitism, anti-Negro and anti-
British sentiment. He noted, for example, that in the Italian sec-
tion of Boston rumors of enemy submarines outside Boston Harbor
were similar to rumors in other areas of the city except that people
in the Italian section believed the submarines were Italian.

An experiment by George H. Smith [82] comparing the effects
of fact and rumor labels on the credibility of news items has spe-
cial relevance for our problem. Smith prepared as "news items"
26 statements concerning the Soviet Union. Half the statements
were favorable to the Soviet Union, half unfavorable. One third
of all subjects were given the statements as "actual facts" which
had been completely checked, one third received them as "unveri-
fied rumors" for which the experimenter had failed to find factual
support, while the remaining third reacted to statements that had
no label attached. In addition, all subjects checked a scale measur-
ing their attitudes toward the Soviet Union.

Smith found that

The absolute amount of belief an individual places in the "news"
items, under any condition of labeling, almost certainly depends in
part on the initial attitude with which he approaches the items . . .

ATTITUDE FORMULATION EXTENDED TO CONCRETE SITUATIONS 67

the plausibility of statements seems to be judged on the basis of some
established scale. [82]

When a statement was labeled a "fact," judgment was considerably
more altered than when it was labeled a "rumor," although the
"rumor" label did have some effect.

The fact label swings the subjects in the direction of greater belief
and . . . the rumor label edges them toward lesser belief, as compared
with no label at all. [82]

Smith's interpretation is that

The "fact" label provides a tenuous standard of judgment which
helps people to interpret a relatively ambiguous situation; but its
effectiveness varies with its consistency to objective criteria or to
established standards of judgment. ... It [the "fact" label] probably
served as a point of reference in "critical moments" when other factors
were not adequate to lead to a decision. [82]

On the other hand,

The rumor label is similar to no label at all in that it constitutes an
ambiguous stimulus which forces people to interpret, or structure, the
situation for themselves. [82]

Numerous experiments on the level of aspiration have shown
how the same performance can be regarded either as a success or
a failure, depending on the frame of reference in which the per-
formance occurs, (pp. 120 ff.) In the work of Chapman and
Volkmann previously mentioned, the setting of a level of aspiration
was studied under two sets of conditions. [30] In one experiment
involving familiarity with the authors of various literary passages,
each of the different experimental groups was given in advance
of their direct acquaintance with the task involved the score sup-
posedly made by another group. The score attributed to each
group was the same but the groups varied in their prestige: authors
and literary critics, students similar to the subjects, and WPA
workers. Results here show a clear-cut tendency for those com-
paring themselves to a superior group to lower their aspiration
level, those comparing themselves to an inferior group to raise
their aspiration level. In their second experiment, involving a test
of mental ability, all subjects were given a test in two sessions be-

68 ATTITUDE FORMULATION EXTENDED TO CONCRETE SITUATIONS

fore any attempt was made to change their aspiration level by com-
paring their performance to inferior or superior groups. Under
these conditions, no significant change in the level of aspiration
was produced; "the subjects' own previous scores provided the
most effective anchoring." [235] In the conditions of the first
experiment, the stimulus situation is unstructured, and an imposed
norm is accepted as a frame of reference; in the conditions of the
second experiment, the stimulus situation has become structured
through experience, and imposed norms are ineffectual.

Asch, Block, and Hertzman showed that judgments concern-
ing the characteristics of different professional groups tend to be
considerably modified when an evaluation from an authoritative
source is introduced. [6] A close relationship was found between
judgments on different characteristics of various professions, indi-
cating that most of the judgments seemed to derive from under-
lying attitudes. They conclude that "the judgments of a single
situation are related to each other by a person in accordance with
an underlying attitude of acceptance or rejection" [248], that "a
standard having an authoritative source tends to alter an individ-
ual's judgments in its direction" [249], that relationship in judg-
ment becomes most clearly established "for situations which are
not well-defined objectively" [257], and that "the observer, in the
absence of objective criteria, and in the face of the necessity of
reaching some conclusions, proceeds to arrange a scale of prefer-
ence in terms of some generally favorable or unfavorable impres-
sion." [229]

Kay's study of the relationship between personal frames of refer-
ence and social judgments indicates that an individual's evaluation
of various occupations is considerably more affected by accepted
social norms relating to those occupations than by an individual's
own preference for an occupation or his experience with it. [54]
In other words, the social norms concerning the value and charac-
teristics of common occupations are rather uncritically taken over
by individuals as personal frames of reference by means of which
specific judgments are made. Analyzing her data further accord-
ing to the source of information concerning the various occupa-
tions rated, Kay found that for a third of the occupations "cultural"
sources were mentioned most frequently, whereas the "personal**

ATTITUDE FORMULATION EXTENDED TO CONCRETE SITUATIONS 69

sources uncovered in the interviews were interpreted or reacted to
on the basis of "personal frames of reference" and "in the light
of existing social norms" rather than on the basis of the "objective
quality of the experiences themselves." [55, 363] This interpreta-
tion confirms Davis' study on the attitudes of children in Soviet
Russia with its finding that Russian children rated laboring people
high and lawyers and bankers low. [32] In their examination of
the basis of prestige judgments of various occupational groups,
Osgood and Stagner demonstrated that the "decisions about char-
acteristics of occupational stereotypes tend to conform closely to
a framework which is based on the relative prestige of occupa-
tions." [75, 287] They conclude that

... the mere presentation of a set of occupational stereotypes for a
series of judgments caused our subjects spontaneously to establish a
prestige framework which then determined in a highly reliable man-
ner judgments on the specific traits listed. [75, 289]

Asch found that an individual's judgment of relatively ill-defined
and unclear situations could be changed when the imputed judg-
ment of congenial groups was introduced as a reference. [7] On
the other hand, subjects tended to reject the judgment of antago-
nistic groups. Here we have evidence that an individual tends to
accept an imposed norm as his own frame of reference for judg-
ing a situation when that situation is itself unclear or when he has
no pre-existing, sure, or ego-involved frame of reference of his own.
An analysis of radio listeners who followed a particular commen-
tator indicated that the chief function of a news commentator is
to provide frames of reference by means of which listeners can
judge the plethora of events going on around them. [22] The less
people know about objective conditions, die more they depend on
a commentator to tell them what these events mean and to help
them select items to read in their newspapers.

One of the most penetrating studies of the development of preva-
lent attitudes in our social system is that of Horowitz on the
genesis of attitudes toward the Negro. [45] He demonstrated un-
equivocally that this attitude is imposed bodily and uncritically
without any basis in experience or knowledge. He concludes "that
attitudes toward Negroes are now chiefly determined not by con-

70 ATTITUDE FORMULATION EXTENDED TO CONCRETE SITUATIONS

tact with Negroes, but by contact with the prevalent attitude to-
ward Negroes." [35] Horowitz developed a series of ingenious
tests to measure attitudes toward the Negro objectively. These
tests were administered to children and adolescents in a variety of
social groups — children in the rural and urban South, all white
groups in New York City, mixed groups in New York City, and
a group of New York Communist children. His tests showed
that children in New York City were just as prejudiced as the
children in the South, that children in mixed schools were as
prejudiced as those in all white schools, that contact with popular
Negro children had no effect on attitudes, and that the only group
of children tested who had no prejudice against the Negro were
children of Communist parents — people devoid of racial prejudices
which they would pass on to their children. Furthermore, Horo-
witz found that Negro boys in mixed schools tended to accept
some of the racial attitudes of the white majority of their group.2
His findings confirm the earlier conclusions of Lasker's well-
known study that race attitudes in children are due chiefly to "the
absorption of adult attitudes," [60, 371] and that contacts between
children of different races are almost invariably influenced by the
"adult-made environment." [371] G. W. Allport and Kramer
found that if this adult environment contains institutionalized re-
ligious training a young person is more likely to be prejudiced
against minority groups than if such institutionalized religious
training is absent. [4] Such findings as these indicate once more
that, when rigidly established norms are accepted by an individual,
his thinking on and reaction to related situations is highly in-
flexible. [65]

In a significant study concerned with the development of stereo-
types toward the Negro, Blake and Dennis [12] had students from
grades 4 through 11 in a southern school compare whites and Ne-
groes on 60 characteristics. Their results showed that there was
less agreement among the younger children who had a "relatively
undifferentiated" attitude unfavorable to the Negro. They con-
clude that

2 This is reminiscent of the fact that in the days of slavery in the United States
there was a sizable number of freed Negro slaves who, when they acquired land
of their own, retained Negro slaves to work it [39]

ATTITUDE FORMULATION EXTENDED TO CONCRETE SITUATIONS 71

. . . the young white child acquires first of all a generally unfavor-
able attitude toward the Negro, which makes him unwilling to at-
tribute to the Negro any "good" traits. With increased age and
experience, the child gradually learns to apply the adult stereotypes, a
few of which are complimentary. [12, 531]

The extent to which the accepted attitude toward the Negro affects
judgment and goes against all evidence has been illustrated by
a public opinion survey made in 1944 on a nationwide sample of
the adult white population in the United States. A majority of
those with opinions believe that Negroes are not as intelligent as
white people and cannot learn as well if they are given the same
education. And a third of our white population believes that
Negro blood somehow differs from white blood, a third of the
people believe it is the same, and a third say they don't know. [72]
Murphy and Likert concluded from their study of attitudes to-
ward minority groups that

. . . the individual usually acquires his prejudices against a minor-
ity group not primarily from contact with this minority group but
chiefly from contact with the prevailing attitude toward this minority
group. [70, 136]

The acceptance of attitudes is further confirmed by studies which
have shown the ease with which people characterize various na-
tionality groups, irrespective of their lack of knowledge about or
experience with these groups. Katz and Braly found that the
preferential ranking of students for various nationality and racial
groups closely followed a weighted ranking of the judgment of a
comparable group of students on the stereotype of these same
groups. [52] Public opinion surveys have shown that less than
10 per cent of the American population feel unable to select from
a list of adjectives those that best describe various nationality groups
and that people in our culture have generally similar stereotypes
concerning the characteristics of major nationality and racial
groups. [15]

Particularly significant as an indication of the way in which
even minority groups accept the values of the larger macrocosm
is the comparison that can be made between the characterizations
of various racial groups by white and Negro Americans. For

72 ATTITUDE FORMULATION EXTENDED TO CONCRETE SITUATIONS

example, Meenes's results [68] on the Katz-Braly list of racial
characteristics when used with Negro students are by and large
consistent with those obtained on white students in 1933. [51]
White students at Princeton and Negro students at Howard had
essentially similar stereotypes concerning such peoples as the Jews,
English, Irish, Turks. This is quite in keeping with Horowitz'
finding previously mentioned concerning the acceptance of white
attitudes by Negro children in mixed schools. The single notable
exception in Meenes's study is the tendency of the Negro students
to judge their own racial group on the basis of a different frame
and hence to assign to it fewer uncomplimentary adjectives, such
as "lazy" or "ignorant."

The extent to which stereotypes influence judgment has been
clearly demonstrated experimentally. Sherif, for example, showed
that college students both in the United States and in Turkey were
significantly affected in their rating of a literary passage by the
name of the author attributed to that passage. [80] The passages
used in the United States were all by one author, those used in
Turkey were all by another author. The judgments of these pas-
sages, then, were made largely in terms of established values.
These results are similar to earlier demonstrations of everyday
stereotypes shown by Zillig [95] among others and were confirmed
later on still another type of material, [19]

It is obvious that the whole psychology of fads and fashions is
to be explained largely in terms of accepted norms and values that
provide standards of judgment for style, correctness, and certain
criteria for status, beauty, significance, and the like (pp. 348#.).
In a note "concerning scientific progress" at the end of his Sensa-
tion and Perception in the History of Experimental Psychology,
Boring shows that even scientists, including psychologists, tend to
conform to the Zeitgeist and are retarded by habits of thought
currently fashionable or by "laboratory atmosphere." [13] It
should be pointed out in this connection, however, that atmos-
pheres of psychological laboratories, as well as more common fads
and fashions, sooner or later change with new factors imposed by
objective conditions or by the accumulation of evidence. The
dresses women have for everyday wear in the western world can
no longer be styled without reference to the demands of the ma-

ATTITUDE FORMULATION EXTENDED TO CONCRETE SITUATIONS 73

chine age in which they live; the Titchenerian influence could not
remain unaffected by the results of Wiirzburg. As facts pile up in
psychology or any other science, laboratory atmospheres and
"schools of thought" become increasingly tenuous.

Newcomb measured the change of attitude* of students in a
small college community where nonconservative attitudes were
considered to be more "proper" and to carry more prestige than
conservative attitudes. [71] He found that this "community frame
of reference" [151] significantly influenced the attitudes of students
in the liberal direction during their four years, irrespective of the
courses studied in college. Newcomb describes this shift of atti-
tude as general rather than as a shift of a series of specific atti-
tudes toward specific issues. When events or new proposals were
reacted to, the more advanced students more consistently reacted to
them in a liberal way.

The way in which an individual's own present income provides
a reference point for judging financial needs and aspiration has
been demonstrated by Centers and Cantril. [29] In a nationwide
survey concerned with the relationship of present income to satis-
faction and wants, they found that, among those people dissatis-
fied with their present income, the larger the income is, the more
additional money is wanted. An analysis of judgments made by
persons in different income groups of the income tax people in
various income brackets should pay shows that those in the low
income groups have such inadequate standards for judging the
incomes of people in high income brackets that they tend to find
such judgments difficult or impossible to make. Furthermore,
when judgments are made by persons in the lower income groups
of the tax which those in the highest brackets should pay, the
figure given is significantly less than the tax upper income groups
think should be paid by the rich, illustrating again the way in
which judgment is anchored in individual frames of reference. [40]

From his investigation of the effect of the monetary value of ob-
jects on the perception of number, Ansbacher [5] whose research
follows Brunswik's [17] concluded that "monetary value through
familiarity does influence perception under certain circumstances."
[56] Ansbacher used stamps of different denominations in his
experiment. To study the variable of familiarity, both Canadian

74 ATTITUDE FORMULATION EXTENDED TO CONCRETE SITUATIONS

and American stamps were shown to Canadian and American
observers. Subjects were asked to compare the number of stamps
of one denomination in one group of stamps with the number of
another denomination in another group. Under other instructions
comparisons were made of the value represented by the two groups
of stamps. A controlled psychophysical series, using stamps of the
same denomination, was introduced in the experimental sessions.
Ansbacher found that the judgment of the number of stamps of
different denominations "is more variable than a comparable psy-
chophysical judgment, viz., where both standard and variable
groups consist of the same stamps." [83] A constant error ap-
peared, similar to that found on judgments of size.

In familiar stamps we find after psychophysical judgments a slight
tendency to underestimate the more valuable group with respect to
number [83] . . . value through familiarity does affect perception.
[84]

Especially significant for us is Ansbacher 's finding that the greater
variability in the number judgments disappears "if the number
judgment is preceded by a psychophysical judgment . . . preced-
ing psychophysical judgments seem to strengthen the number as-
pect at the expense of all incidental objects." [83] In other words,
if the subjects are able to establish a scale by repeated exposure to
the series of stimuli, that scale, rather than one influenced by an
imposed norm is used for reference.

In a series of interesting experiments where coins were used as
stimuli, Bruner and associates [1, 42] have recently studied "the
influence of social value and social need upon the perception of
objects under ambiguous and unambiguous conditions." [16, 241]
They investigated the hypotheses that

... (a) the greater the social value of an object, the more will it
undergo perceptual distortion away from "objective" size, color,
weight, etc., (b) the stronger the individual need for such valued ob-
jects, the greater will be the distorting effect of value, (c) ambiguity
in the perceptual field will either facilitate or reduce value distortion
depending upon whether it favors or opposes the prominence of
value cues. [241]

ATTITUDE FORMULATION EXTENDED TO CONCRETE SITUATIONS 75

In the first experiment, children from two groups with widely
differing economic status (from a private school and a settlement
house) were asked to judge the size of coins from a penny to a
half dollar.

For both groups, the greater the value of the coin, the greater the
constant error of overestimation. Pennies were seen as 10 per cent
larger than actual size, half dollars 35 per cent larger. The tendency
of overestimation is significantly more marked among poor than
among rich children. [241]

When the same experiment was repeated with adults, judgments
continued to show a distortion but one that was more discrimina-
tive. The adults judged pennies, nickels, and dimes as smaller
than their actual size; quarters and half-dollars as larger. Further
experiments with adults using "made" money, showed that sym-
bols with the highest value (dollars) produced greatest overesti-
mation, that a meaningful but not highly valued symbol (swas-
tika) produced less overestimation, while a meaningless symbol
produced still less.8 As the investigators point out, these results
"suggest principles going beyond Weber's Law and Hollingworth's
central tendency effect." [241} And they are entirely consistent
with the findings of Bartlett, Coffin, and others already reported.
Kornhauser's investigations of the class attitudes of various socio-
economic groups have shown that in our American social system
"logically opposed interests" do not by any means lead to uni-
formly opposed class attitudes. [58, 59] Kornhauser did find, how-
ever, that those persons within each economic group who were
most dissatisfied in terms of their present status and opportunity
did accept less frequently than others the traditional status quo as
measured by attitudes concerning labor, government control, and
the like. And although the attitudes of income and occupational
groups were not diametrically opposed, still significant differences
appeared between the attitudes of these groups on a number of
social and political issues. In other words, objective conditions did
not fit currently accepted economic and social norms. Particularly
significant for our purposes are Kornhauser's reports of the in-

8 The results of this second experiment were personally communicated to the
writers by J. S. Bruner in May 1946.

76 ATTITUDE FORMULATION EXTENDED TO CONCRETE SITUATIONS

stances where no significant differences are found between the
attitudes of different economic groups. These attitudes, accepted
rather uniformly, were those which reflected the traditional Ameri-
can ideology concerning individual opportunity either for the per-
son himself or for his children. In chapter 6 we consider in more
detail the current relationship among class identifications, status,
and attitudes in the United States.

That the attitudes toward labels describing different political
systems are by and large uncritically accepted without any real
knowledge of the principles or implications of those political sys-
tems has been established in a number of different studies, Stag-
ner demonstrated, for example, that people will have a distinctly
unfavorable attitude toward Fascism but at the same time will ac-
cept certain fascist doctrines. [84] Menefee comes to the same
conclusion in his studies which reveal that if the statement of a
political or economic principle is labeled as "fascist" it will call
forth a much more negative reaction than it will without the label.
[69] Edwards concludes from his investigations that

Some college students have a far greater degree of sympathy for
certain fascist principles than might be expected from their otherwise
antagonistic reaction to the fascist label. [36, 580]

Significantly enough, Edwards found that those persons who
labeled themselves politically as "independents" were considerably
more critical of statements of fascist principles than those who
called themselves Democrats or Republicans. Katz and Cantril
found that the attitude toward Fascism or Communism bore little
relationship to the knowledge of Fascism or Communism among
college students in 1939. [53] Their study also shows that, al-
though there was an overwhelming rejection of the terms "Fas-
cism" and "Communism," the majority of students felt at the time
(before World War II had brought the implications of Fascism
into clearer focus) that Fascism was a good thing for Germany
and Italy but would be a bad thing for the United States, whereas
Communism was a good thing for Russia but would be a bad
thing for Germany and Italy and especially for the United States.
In testing the effect of the labels "Communism," "Fascism,"
"liberal," and "reactionary," on passages that very obviously

ATTITUDE FORMULATION EXTENDED TO CONCRETE SITUATIONS 77

stated a point of view, Birch found that "even a well-structured
attitude is affected to some degree by the application of a so-
cially disapproved label." [11, 310] The fact that Birch was able
to shift the degree of support given a statement when different
labels were applied to it but was unsuccessful in shifting support
from one statement to another, only emphasizes our contention
that if a stimulus situation is in sharp contrast to a well-established
frame to which it is easily related, no reversals in judgment should
be expected. "Prestige" labeling is effective in determining a frame
in proportion to the ambiguity of the stimulus situation. As we
have said before, no realistic purpose is served by trying to have
a person see a square as a circle. The investigations already cited
show that broad symbols do tend to be accepted in social life with-
out objective reference since objective reference is often not com-
pellingly introduced in the stimulus situation. Those who use
prestige labeling for propaganda purposes are, of course, eager to
shift attention from any objective references that might contradict
the frame they are attempting to build up.

Analyses of political attitudes have indicated clearly that for the
vast majority of modern Americans the way in which they vote
is determined chiefly by the political attitude they have accepted
rather than by any analysis of different party platforms or candi-
dates. Hartmann has shown that individuals frequently accept
the stated principles of political parties they strongly disapprove
of so long as they are unaware that these principles have the en-
dorsement of those parties. [44] Cantril and Harding discovered
that over half of the voting population in the United States were
completely unable to tell what the differences were between the
major political parties even though the overwhelming majority
of these same people voted consistently for one or the other of
the major political parties. [25] Their analysis of the U. S. Con-
gressional election of 1942 shows that the overwhelming propor-
tion of the major issues of the day which might logically be
thought to have some relationship to the way a person voted and
which were discussed during the election campaign as partisan
issues actually had little or no importance in determining vote.
They also showed how people rationalize their accepted attitude
by claiming that they usually vote for the candidate rather than

78 ATTITUDE FORMULATION EXTENDED TO CONCREffe SITUATIONS

for the party that candidate represents. At least two thirds of
the people who vote a straight party ticket claim that they vote
for the man rather than the party. Even the minority of voters
who classify themselves as "independents" appear, on closer scru-
tiny, to be considerably less independent than they claim. At
least half of the "independents" vote a straight party ticket and
well over half of the "independents" vote according to their
father's political affiliation.

Lazarsfeld, Berelson, and Gaudet have shown that a fairly re-
liable index of "political predisposition" can be constructed for an
individual from a knowledge of three social factors: religious affil-
iation, economic status, and place of residence. [62] They found
that cross pressures of these three social factors tended to delay
a person's decision as to how he would vote. Relatively few vot-
ers were sufficiently affected by political propaganda to change
their political predisposition. Persons tend to expose themselves
mainly to the political propaganda of their own party, but those
whose predisposition is toward one of the major parties and who
expose themselves more than others of their persuasion to opposi-
tion propaganda do tend to vote more than others for the opposi-
tion party. The less structured a person's political attitude is, be-
cause of either lack of interest or social pressures, the greater is
the variability of voting behavior and the greater is the influence
of propaganda from various media or the effect of personal con-
tact.

Breslaw concluded from his detailed interviews concerned with
the development of political attitudes that political attitudes can
more appropriately be described as an "orientation" or "bias" than
a "point of view" logically arrived at. [14]

Attitudes emerge from the particular social life which happens to
surround the individual. [14, 65]

An attitude

... is an end product with no necessary relationship to the particu-
lar components of that stimulation. An attitude is something that
becomes implanted — as fear of the dark becomes implanted — in many
different ways. [14, 66]

ATTITUDE FORMULATION EXTENDED TO CONCRETE SITUATIONS 79

The consistency with which an individual's attitude determines
his reactions to situations to which he relates the attitude has been
shown in a number of different studies. Vetter found that a per-
son who was radical or conservative tended to be radical or con-
servative in his reaction to a wide variety of social, political, and
ethical situations. [88] Katz and F. H. Allport noted the "con-
sistency with which different attitudes seem to fit together in their
respective patterns." [50, 48] Cantril demonstrated that an atti-
tude has a directive influence on numerous specific reactions to
which it is related, that an attitude tends to be enduring and con-
stant even though the situations which evoke it may fluctuate, and
that an attitude can be quite independent of the particular experi-
ences which may have established it. [18] Stagner found that
persons who are intensely chauvinistic tend to react consistently
and unfavorably to a wide variety of issues such as tariff reduction,
labor unions, or government ownership. [85]

In a study of the reaction of the American people to World
War II, we find that, while the religious frame of Catholics previ-
ous to Pearl Harbor affected their attitude toward U. S. interven-
tion in the European war, it did not affect their attitude toward
U. S. intervention in the Pacific war — in the latter case there was
no conflict between religious and nationalistic attitudes influencing
the judgments of a stimulus situation. [27] The conflict of atti-
tudes in German-American and Italian-American citizens result-
ing from U. S. intervention in World War II and the effect of this
conflict in voting behavior is revealed by the findings of Bean,
Mosteller, and Williams that these two groups significantly shifted
their vote away from Roosevelt in the 1940 election. [9]

Analysis of data obtained from public opinion polls shows that
major events are judged in terms of frames of reference which
enable people to relate these events to their own self-interest.
Hence public opinion on specific issues is highly sensitive to
events, [26] Polls further show that, once the vast majority of
individuals become aware that a social, economic, or political
problem exists, they do develop attitudes toward that problem:
the proportion of people who remain neutral or who have no
opinion about an issue they are aware of is very small indeed.

80 ATTITUDE FORMULATION EXTENDED TO CONCRETE SITUATIONS

Studies on the prediction of social events have indicated the
enormous extent to which attitudes direct the way in which the
future is projected. [21, 67, 83] A person's attitude toward social-
ism, for example, largely determines his picture of future economic
trends. But the more highly structured and clear-cut the forces
determining the resolution of an issue appear to be, the less is an
individual's prediction determined by his own attitude. Predic-
tions are especially influenced by frames or points of reference
when the issue judged is ambiguous or unstructured because of
the variety and apparent inconsistency of direction of the variables
concerned.

Although the bulk of our attitudes do seem to be derived from
the norms that surround us, the fact remains that — all other things
being ^^/—individuals do acquire attitudes based on knowledge
and reasoned analysis. Murphy and Likert found, for example,
that, next to parental influence, a student's reading habits and
scholarship tended more than other factors to affect his atti-
tudes. [70] It has been shown that there was a tremendous differ-
ence between enlightened and unenlightened Americans in their
pre-Pearl Harbor attitudes toward U. S. intervention in the war —
with enlightenment being based on general knowledge and a
feeling of a clear idea of what the war is all about. [27] Differ-
ences of opinion according to the degree of "enlightenment" were
found within all income groups and were considerably greater
than differences of opinion between income groups themselves.
Evidence from public opinion polls shows that well-informed
people accept less readily than uninformed persons many of the
common stereotypes of the day, the facts they know serving as
reference points for discrimination. [91] For example, Walsh
[89] analyzed the relationship between the amount of information
the American people had about the Soviet Union and their con-
fidence in Russian postwar co-operation. Information appeared
as a much more decisive determinant of opinion than did eco-
nomic status or religion. He found that, in the fall of 1944, 73
per cent of those who were best informed trusted Russia to co-
operate with the United States, whereas only 30 per cent of those
least informed trusted Russia. More highly educated people
appear better able to see the implications of a point of view they

ATTITUDE FORMULATION EXTENDED TO CONCRETE SITUATIONS 81

hold and are more consistent in their attitudes than are less edu-
cated persons. A study of American attitudes toward freedom of
speech, made during the critical summer of 1940, indicated that,
although well-educated people were somewhat more opposed to
free speech at that time than less well-educated persons, among all
those who did favor free speech the well-educated were more
willing

... to extend their tolerance to the logical conclusion of allowing
Fascists and Communists to speak. Such a finding seems to indicate
that these people are more burdened by the intellectual demand for
consistency than are persons who have had less educational oppor-
tunity. [27, 183 f.]

Informed people are better able than uninformed to see the
implications to their own self-interest of events and proposals.
They show considerably more concern, for example, with interna-
tional affairs as contrasted to relatively uninformed persons whose
predominant concern is with strictly domestic problems. [28]
The uninformed group generally has a comparatively higher "no
opinion" reaction to most public questions. Differences of opinion
according to the amount of information a person has do not
appear, however, with respect to issues where wish fulfillment is
clearly involved. For example, a study of the relative importance
of education and economic status in determining opinion showed
that education was more important than income only in situations
where greater knowledge gives an insight into the effect of certain
events or proposals that do not deal with an individual's financial
return in any clear-cut way. [92] Diven's analysis of aesthetic
appreciation indicates that— all other things being equal— if a well-
informed and an uninformed person hold the same attitude with
equal intensity the essential difference between them is that the
informed man will be better able to rationalize his point of view,
supporting it with what seems to him sound evidence. [33]

A study of the nationwide panic in the United States resulting
from Orson Welles's broadcast, "War of the Worlds," showed that
when individuals are faced with a critical and apparently danger-
ous situation they readily accept any interpretation offered them
as a basis for judgment if they have no appropriate and sure

82 ATTITUDE FORMULATION EXTENDED TO CONCRETE SITUATIONS

standards by means of which to evaluate the situation. [23] Those
frightened by the broadcast were highly suggestible, believing
what they heard to be true and being unable themselves to make
any external or internal checks of the reports. Furthermore, for
most of those who became panicked, the story was credible since
it fitted into pre-existing attitudes such as the belief that God
would someday destroy our planet, or an attack by a foreign
power, or fanciful notions concerning the possibilities of science.
People who lacked appropriate standards to interpret the broad-
cast properly were found particularly among those who had neither
the opportunity nor the ability to acquire information or training
that would have protected them with relevant points of reference.
This broadcast occurred in the fall of 1938 when vast numbers of
the population were unusually bewildered by the prolonged eco-
nomic insecurity they had experienced and by the precarious and
delicate state of world affairs following the Munich settlement.
In commenting on the panic, Heywood Broun tersely and aptly
summarized this effect of general, social, and political unrest by
saying that "jitters have come to roost." Current norms were
somehow proving inadequate to account for objective conditions;
the whole course of recent history created a relatively ambiguous
and unstructured situation conducive to high suggestibility.

And just as critical conditions provide fertile soil for panics, so
too do they provide the optimum conditions for rumor or for
individual reorientation by means of slogans or simple appeals,
Knapp concludes, for example, from his study of rumors that "in
proportion as the cognitive world is ambiguous or ill defined and
the motivation intense, rumors will find life," [57, 31] F. H.
Allport and Lepkin in their study of rumors point out that

The more "outer" facts, or true reports of facts, the individual has
within his grasp, and the more he is stimulated to weigh this evidence
objectively, the more nearly the picture he forms "in his mind" will
conform to the true reality, and the less altered it will be through the
effect of emotion and impulse. [3, 14]

And Sherif points out, from his analysis of slogans,

. . . that slogans are short-cut expressions arising in confused and
critical situations ... the more correctly and the more objectively a

FRAME OF REFERENCE IN SOME RECENT ECONOMIC WORKS 83

set of slogans expresses the underlying forces in a critical situation, the
more vital and lasting they will prove to be. [81, 461]

In a more recent study of slogans, Bellak reaches the same conclu-
sion with special emphasis on the role of motivational factors. [10]
Since slogans can only be expected to take hold in critical times
when they give meaning to or point a way out of confused situa-
tions, it is not surprising that the judgments of slogans in die
laboratory are unaffected by conflicting standards, as in the experi-
ment of Asch, Block, and Hertzman [6], or Block's later study
where only restricted shifts were found in the ratings of slogans
when authoritative standards were imposed under laboratory con-
ditions. [64] The leaders of any mass movement or revolution
show sound psychology when, during a critical situation where
old norms have lost their hold, they try first of all to get control of
the mass media of communication so they can issue new instruc-
tions, spread slogans, and otherwise try to restructure people's
thinking.

Analysis of the rise of various social movements shows how
persons dissatisfied with their status or the fulfillment of their
needs tend to accept new frames of reference provided by a leader
or nuclear group which seem to them to "explain" their situation
more appropriately and to offer an apparently more effective course
of action than did adherence to the more commonly accepted
norms of the social system. [24] The suggestibility of a person to
new norms was found to be proportional to the inadequacy of
existing standards for the interpretation of particular situations,
to his desire for a more adequate interpretation, or to the ease with
which the norms of a new movement could be related to estab-
lished frames.

FRAME OF REFERENCE IN SOME RECENT ECONOMIC WORKS

Since the 1930's, economists in capitalistic countries have been
introducing psychological concepts into their construction of a
"dynamic" economic theory, as contrasted to the more "timeless"
classical economics. They are bringing out into the open for close
scrutiny what had only been implicit assumptions of more static

84 ATOTUDE FORMULATION EXTENDED TO CONCRETE SITUATIONS

theories: assumptions centering around the concept of "expecta-
tions." And the expectations discussed by modern economists are
frames of reference that determine or may in some way affect
response to economic conditions.

The English economist, Shackle, in his Expectations, Invest-
ment, and Income [78] writes that

The task of dynamic economics is to describe the inherent character
of an economy in such a way that, given the particular situation exist-
ing at one moment, as to the conceptions of the future held by differ-
ent individuals and the composition of the material equipment, it is
possible to deduce the situation which will ensue, if there are no
abnormal extra-economic impacts, after some arbitrary interval. At
any one moment the expectations of a business man, which deter-
mine the decision he makes at this moment as to his action in the
immediate future, are given. The totality of action by all business
men in a short interval depends, if we take this interval short enough,
on new decisions taken or old decisions left in force at the beginning
of this interval. The totality of action in such an interval thus depends
on the sets of expectations held by different business men at the
beginning of the interval, and these are given. [78, 1]

Keynes made the concept of expectations central in his The
General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money which had
such a profound influence on contemporary economic thinking.

All production is for the purpose of ultimately satisfying a consumer.
Time usually elapses, however — and sometimes much time — between
the incurring of costs by the producer (with the consumer in view)
and the purchase of the output by the ultimate consumer. Meanwhile
the entrepreneur (including both the producer and the investor in this
description) has to form the best expectations he can as to what the
consumers will be prepared to pay when he is ready to supply them
(directly or indirectly) after the lapse of what may be a lengthy
period; and he has no choice but to be guided by these expectations,
if he is to oroduce at all by processes which occupy time. [56, 46, italics
ours]

After distinguishing between two groups of expectations, short-
term and long-term, Keynes points out that "express reference to
long-term expectations can seldom be avoided." [50] These long-

FRAME OF REFERENCE IN SOME RECENT ECONOMIC WORKS 85

term expectations are based on whatever data are available as well
as on the confidence with which any forecast is made.4

The referential nature of these expectations is clearly recognized.
Shackle [78], for example, writes that

Before we can use Mr. Keynes* system to explain the economic
pattern which emerges with the passage of time, we must release
expectations from their status as a datum, and make them depend, at
any moment, on the comparison which we may suppose business men
to make between their expectations of a slightly earlier moment and
what has actually happened in the interval. [78, 2]

And Shackle points out in a later article that it is necessary to
"study the psychology of expectations as a process of the individual
mind." [79, 99]

This concept of expectation is not confined merely to economic
theory. It finds its place in concrete affairs of everyday life as is
illustrated in the report of a Presidential fact-finding board set up
to review the General Motors' strike in the United States in
1946. [73] The report contains such phrases as these:

On balance, we thin\ it reasonable to ex feet that in the early months
of the new period productivity will be somewhat less than in 1941.
. . . We thin\ it reasonable to suppose that in the year 1946, once this
strike is settled and production begins again . . . [73]

And the President of General Motors, commenting on the report
of the fact-finding board, said that the wage recommendation
made "is based on certain assumptions which in the opinion of
General Motors are unsound." [74]

The Federal Government of the United States in trying to for-
mulate some of its policies is relying more and more on controlled
investigations of expectations so policy makers will have some
idea of what the future behavior of certain segments of the popu-

4Keynes's clear awareness of the fact that the economic behavior of men in
bourgeois society occurs within a limited frame of reference they may be quite
unaware of is reflected in a closing passage of his "General Theory*': "Practical
men, who believe themselves to be quite exempt from any intellectual influences,
are usually the slaves of some defunct economist Madmen in authority, who hear
voices in the air, are distilling their frenzy from some academic scribbler of a few
years back. I am sure that the power of vested interests is vasdy exaggerated
compared with the gradual encroachment of ideas." [56, 383]

86 ATTITUDE FORMULATION EXTENDED TO CONCRETE SITUATIONS

lation may be. For example, in 1942 and 1943, public expectations
concerning price control were studied for the Office of Price
Administration [48]; the Board of Governors of the Federal
Reserve System used public opinion surveys because, as they say,

It is particularly important to know something about the attitudes
taken by liquid asset holders toward their liquid assets. [37]

And the U. S. Department of Agriculture makes periodic checks
on farmers' expectations, because

It is evident that the planning of postwar farm programs must
depend greatly on what farmers themselves want and feel they must
have. [2, ij

Thus government officials concerned with predictions explicitly
recognize the fact that behavior can be predicted only if the frame
of reference within which it occurs is understood.

This relationship between the concept of expectations as used by
economists and the psychological concept of frame of reference
has been made explicit by George Katona. [46, 47, 49] He has
pointed out that "the frame of reference of important economic
groups" plays a large part "in determining economic decisions and
actions." [47, 340] He notes the importance of determining
whether expectations are based on rumors or on facts and empha-
sizes that the understanding and prediction of economic behavior
can be precise only if the frame of reference used is sufficiently
encompassing to take into account new problems and situations
brought about by events.

In 1938, in a study of a specific social movement prominent at
the time (the kingdom of Father Divine), we indicated how this
cult could be regarded as a microcosm within the larger world
macrocosm, how conflicts between the values of the two were
inevitable and how either microcosms must "be patterned to fit
the needs of an individual living in our modern world, or the
conditions in the larger macrocosm must be changed to provide
the satisfactions and meanings now artificially derived in the
microcosms." [20, 166] It is significant to see the same distinction
made by modern economists and to read that if economic analysis

FRAME OF REFERENCE IN SOME RECENT ECONOMIC WORKS 87

is to be "truly dynamic," the relationship of a "section of the huge
economic mechanism" must be related to "fluctuations of the whole
economic system taken in its entirety." Frisch wrote in 1933:

When we approach the study of a business cycle with the intention
of carrying through an analysis that is truly dynamic ... we are
naturally led to distinguish between two types of analyses: the micro-
dynamic and the macro-dynamic types. The micro-dynamic analysis
is an analysis by which we try to explain in some detail the behaviour
of a certain section of the huge economic mechanism, taking for
granted that certain general parameters are given. Obviously it may
well be that we obtain more or less cyclical fluctuations in such sub-
systems, even though the general parameters are given. The essence
of this type of analysis is to show the details of the evolution of a
given specific market, the behaviour of a given type of consumers,
and so on.

The macro-dynamic analysis, on the other hand, tries to give an
account of the fluctuations of the whole economic system taken in its
entirety. Obviously in this case it is impossible to carry through the
analysis in great detail. [41, 772]

All of the representative studies cited indicate that only by means
of some frame or anchorage can and does the individual judge and
react to social stimuli. Individuals in social life cannot long re-
main normally adjusted if they are in a state of indecision. Sooner
or later they must and do make some appropriate judgment or
reaction to a stimulus, place it in some way meaningful to them.
The psychological process they use to make such judgments and
give meaning to their social environment is to refer the stimuli
around them to some frame of reference or anchorage they acquire
and which is a readiness for reaction. These frames or anchorages
which regulate everyday social judgments to an important degree,
like frames or anchorages discovered in laboratory experiments,
inevitably develop with repeated exposure to the same stimuli
(objects, persons, groups, values, or norms) and individuals are by
no means always aware that frames or anchorages have become
established. Furthermore, as we indicate in later chapters, social
attitudes are among the major components of the ego. Hence the
psychology of ego-involvement and its relation to motivation can

88 ATTITUDE FORMULATION EXTENDED TO CONCRETE SITUATIONS

only be clearly understood with reference to the basic properties
of frame formation and the implications this has for :udgment and
action.

REFERENCES

1. ABROMSON, F., Perception: Further Evidence for a Tri factorial Theory, Honor's

Thesis, Harvard Univ., Dcpt. Psychol., 1946.

2. AGRICULTURE, U. S. DEPARTMENT OF, Farmers View the Postwar World, Bur.

Agricultural Economics, September 25, 1944.

3. ALLPORT, F. H., and M. LEPKIN, Wartime rumors of waste and special privi-

lege, /. Abnorm. and Soc. Psychol.. 1945, 40, 3-36.

4. ALLPORT, G. W., and B. M. KRAMER, Some roots of prejudices, /. Psychol. ,

1946, 22, 9-39.

5. ANSBACHER, H., Perception of number as affected by the monetary value of the

objects: a critical study of the method used in the extended constancy phe-
nomenon, Arch. Psychol., 1937, 30, no. 215.

6. ASCH, S. E., H. BLOCK, and M. HERTZMAN, Studies in the principles of judg-

ments and attitudes: I. Two basic principles of judgment, /. Psychol., 1938,
5, 219-51.

7. ASCH, S. E., Studies in the principles of judgments and attitudes: II. Determi-

nation of judgments by group and by ego standards, /. Soc. Psychol., 1940,
12, 433-65.

8. BARTLETT, F. C., Remembering: a study in experimental and social psychology,

9. BEAN, L. H., F. MOSTELLER, and F. WILLIAMS, Nationalities and 1944, PubL

Opin. Quart., 1944, 8, 368-75.

10. BELLAK, L., The nature of slogans, /. Abnorm. & Soc. Psychol., 1942, 37,

496-510.

11. BIRCH, H. G., The effect of socially disapproved labeling upon a well-structured

attitude, /. Abnorm. & Soc. Psychol., 1945, 40, 301-10.

12. BLAKE, R., and W. DENNIS, The development of stereotypes concerning the

Negro, /. Abnorm. & Soc. Psychol., 1943, 38, 525-31.

13. BORING, E. G., Sensation and Perception in the History of Experimental Psy-

chology, New York: Appleton-Century, 1942.

14. BRESLAW, B. J., The development of a socio-economic attitude, Arch. Psychol.,

1938, no. 226.

15. BRUNER, J. S., Mandate from the People, New York: Duell, Sloan & Pearce,

1944.

16. Social value and need as organizing factors in perception, Amer. Psy-
chologist, 1946, 1, 241.

17. BRUNSWIK, E., Wahrnehmung und Gegcnstandswclt, Leipzig: Deuticke, 1934.

18. CANTRIL, H., General and specific attitudes, Psychol. Monogr., 1932, no. 192.
19. -• Experimental studies of prestige suggestion, Psychol. Bull., 1937, 34, 528.

20. : and M. SHERIF, The kingdom of Father Divine, /. Abnorm. & Sac.

PsychoL, 1938, 33, 147-67,

21. ! The prediction of social events, /. Abnorm. & Soc. Psychol, 1938, 33,

364-89.

REFERENCES 89

22. CANTRIL, H., The role of the radio commentator, Publ. Opin. Quart^ 1939, 3,
654-62.

23. The Invasion from Mars, Princeton: Univ. Press, 1940.

24. The Psychology of Social Movements, New York: Wiley, 1941.

25. and J. HARDING, The 1942 elections: a case study in political psychology,

Publ. Opin. Quart., 1943, 7, 222-41.

26. The use of trends, in Gauging Public Opinion (H. Cantril, ed.), Prince-
ton: Univ. Press, 1944, ch. 16.

27. The use of breakdowns, in Gauging Public Opinion (H. Cantril, ed.),

Princeton: Univ. Press, 1944, ch. 13.

28. — • — The issues — as seen by the American people, Publ. Opin. Quart., 1944,

8, 331-47.

29. CENTERS, R., and H. CANTRIL, Income satisfaction and income aspiration,

/. Abnorm. & Soc. Psychol.f 1946, 41, 64-9.

30. CHAPMAN, D. W., and J. VOLKMANN, A social determinant of the level of

aspiration, /. Abnorm. 6- Soc. Psychol., 1939, 34, 225-38.

31. COFFIN, T. E., Some conditions of suggestion and suggestibility: a study of

some attitudinal and situational factors influencing the process of suggestion,
Psychol. Monogr., 1941, no. 241.

32. DAVIS, J., Testing the social attitudes of children in the government schools in

Russia, Am. J. Sociolf 1927, 32, 947-52.

33. DIVEN, K., Aesthetic appreciation test, in Explorations in Personality (H. A.

Murray et al.), New York: Oxford, 1938, 447-53.

34. EDWARDS, A. L., Political frames of reference as a factor influencing recogni-

tion, /. Abnorm. & Soc. Psychol., 1941, 36, 34-50.
35. Rationalization in recognition as a result of a political frame of reference,

/. Abnorm. & Soc. Psychol., 1941, 36, 224-35.
36. Unlabeled fascist attitudes, /. Abnorm. & Soc. Psychol., 1941, 36, 575-82,

37. FEDERAL RESERVE SYSTEM, Surveys of Liquid Asset Holdings, Board of Gov-

ernors, September 1945.

38. FERNBERGER, S. W., Instructions and the psychophysical limen, Am. J. Psychol.,

1931,43,361-76.

39. FRANKLIN, J. H., The Free Negro in North Carolina, 1790-1860, Chapel Hill:

40. FRIED, E., and H. CANTRIL, The meaning of questions, in Gauging Publ. Opin.

(H. Cantril, ed.), Princeton: Univ. Press, 1944, ch. 1.

41. FRISCH, R., Propagation problems and impulse problems in dynamic economics,

in Economic Essays in Honour of Gustav Cassel, London: Allen and Unwin,
copyright 1933.

42. GOODMAN, C. C., Perception: Evidence for a Trifactorial Theory, Honor's

Thesis, Harvard Univ., Dept. Psychol., 1946.

43. HARTLEY, R., and E. HARTLEY, Analysis of the judgment of pictures of people

in a poorly defined situation, to be published.

44. HARTMANN, G. W., The contradiction between the feeling-tone of political

party names and public response to their platforms, /. Soc. Psychol. f 1936, 7,
336-57,

45. HOROWITZ, E. L., The development of attitude toward the Negro, 'Arch.

Psychol., 1936, no. 194.

46. KATONA, G., War Without Inflation, New York: Columbia Univ., 1942.

90 ATTITUDE FORMULATION EXTENDED TO CONCRETE SITUATIONS

47. KATONA, G., The role of the frame of reference in war and post-war economy,
Am. I Social, 1944, 49, 340-7.

48. Price Control and Business, Bloomington, Ind.: Principia Press, 1945.

49. Psychological analysis of business decisions and expectations, Am. Econ.

Rev., 1946, 36, 44-62.

50. KATZ, D., and F. H. ALLPORT, Students' Attitudes, Syracuse: Craftsman, 1931.

51. and K. BRALY, Racial stereotypes of one hundred college students, /. Ab-

norm. & Soc. Psychol., 1933, 28, 280-90.

52. Racial prejudice and racial stereotypes, /. Abnorm. & Soc. Psychol.,

1935, 30, 175-93.

53. and H. CANTRIL, An analysis of attitudes toward fascism and com-
munism, /. Abnorm. & Soc. Psychol., 1940, 35, 356-66.

54. KAY, L. W., The relation of personal frames of reference to social judgments,

Arch. Psychol., 1943, no. 283.

55. Social norms as determinants in the interpretation of personal experi-
ences, /. Soc. Psychol., 1944, 19, 359-67.

56. KEYNES, J. M., The General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money, New

57. KNAPP, R., A psychology of rumor, Publ. Opin. Quart., 1944, 8, 22-37.

58. KORNHAUSER, A. W., Attitudes of economic groups, Publ. Opin. Quart., 1938,

2, 260-8.

59. Analysis of "class" structure of contemporary American society — psycho-
logical bases of class divisions, in Industrial Conflict: A Psychological Inter-
pretation (G. W. Hartmann and T. Newcomb, eds.), New York: Cordon,
1939, 199-264.

60. LASKER, B., Race Attitudes in Children, New York: Holt, 1929.

61. LAZARSFELD, P. F., Report on "Naples is a battleground," unpublished, June

1944.

62. B. BERELSON, and H. GAUDET, The People's Choice: How the Voter

Ma\es Up His Mind in a Presidential Campaign, New York: Duell, Sloan &
Pearce, 1944.

63. LEVINE, J. M., and G. MURPHY, The learning and forgetting of controversial

material, /. Abnorm. & Soc. Psychol., 1943, 38, 507-17.

64. LEWIS, H. B., Studies in the principles of judgments and attitudes: II. The

influence of political attitude on the organization and stability of judgments,
/. Soc. Psychol., 1940, 11, 121-46.

65. LIPPMANN, W., Public Opinion, New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1922.

66. MCGARVEY, H. R., Anchoring effects in the absolute judgment of verbal ma-

terials, Arch. Psychol., 1943, no. 281.

67. MCGREGOR, D., The major determinants of the prediction of social events, /.

Abnorm. & Soc. Psychol., 1938, 33, 179-204.

68. MEENES, M., A comparison of racial stereotypes of 1935 and 1942, /. Soc.

Psychol., 1943, 17, 327-36.

69. MENEFEE, S. C., The effect of stereotyped words on political judgments, Am.

Sociol. Rev., 1936, 1, 614-21.

70. MURPHY, G., and R. LIKERT, Public Opinion and the Individual, New York:

Harper, 1938.

71. NEWCOMB, T. M., Personality and Social Change, New York: Dryden, 1943.

72. NATIONAL OPINION RESEARCH CENTER, Survey, May 1944.

REFERENCES 91

73. New Yor{ Times, January 11, 1946.

74. New York. Times, January 13, 1946.

75. OSGOOD, C. E., and R. STAGNER, Analysis of a prestige frame of reference by a

gradient technique, /. Appl. PsychoL, 1941, 25, 275-90.

76. ROGERS, S., The anchoring of absolute judgments, Arch. PsychoL, 1941, no. 261.

77. SEELEMAN, V., The influence of attitude upon the remembering of pictorial

material, Arch. PsychoL, 1940, no. 258.

78. SHACKLE, G. L., Expectations, Investment, and Income, London: Oxford Univ.

79. The expectational dynamics of the individual, Economica, 1943, 10, 99.

80. SHERIF, M., A study of some social factors in perception, Arch. PsychoL, 1935,

no. 187.

81. The psychology of slogans, /, Abnorm. & Soc. PsychoL, 1937, 32, 450-61.

82. SMITH, G. H., The effects of fact and rumor labels on the belief in unverified

"news" statements, to be published in /. Abnorm. & Soc. PsychoL, 1947.

83. An analysis of panel predictions, to be published.

84. STACKER, R., Fascist attitudes: an exploratory study, /. Soc. PsychoL, 1936, 7,

309-19.
85. A correlational analysis of nationalistic opinions, /. Soc. PsychoL, 1940,

12, 197-212.

86. STERN, W., Zur Psychologic der Aussage, Berlin, 1902.
87. The psychology of testimony, /. Abnorm. & Soc. PsychoL, 1939, 34, 3-20.

88. VETTER, G. B., Measurement of social and political attitudes and the related

personality factors, /. Abnorm. & Soc. PsychoL, 1930, 25, 149-89.

89. WALSH, W. B., What the American people think of Russia, Publ. Opin. Quart.,

1944, 8, 513-22.

90. WATSON, W. S., and G. W. HARTMANN, Rigidity of a basic attitudinal frame,

/. Abnorm. &• Soc. PsychoL, 1939, 34, 314-36.

91. WILLIAMS, F. W., Information as a determinant of opinion, in Gauging Public

Opinion (H. Cantril, ed.), Princeton: Univ. Press, 1944, ch. 15.

92. and F. MOSTELLER, Education and economic status as determinants of

opinion, in Gauging Public Opinion (H. Cantril, ed.), Princeton: Univ.
Press, 1944, ch. 14.

93. WOOD, C., An analysis of changes occurring in successive stages of verbal ab-

stracting, Master's thesis on file in the library of the State Univ., Iowa, 1944.

94. WOODWORTH, R. S., Situation-and-goal set, in Am. /. PsychoL, Golden Jubilee

vol. (K. M. Dallenbach, ed.), 1937, 50, 13(MO.

95. ZILLIG, M., Einstellung und Aussage, Z. PsychoL, 1928, 106, 58-106.

CHAPTER 5

THE PROBLEM AND A GENERAL CHARACTERIZATION
OF EGO-INVOLVEMENTS

In this chapter we briefly sketch the problem and give a general
characterization of ego-involvements. Our characterization here
necessarily consists of rather arbitrary statements. These will stand
or fall in the light of evidence presented in succeeding chapters.

As we said in the introduction, we are using the word "ego"
reluctantly. For the term has acquired many scientifically objec-
tionable connotations, especially in the hands of certain philoso-
phers and mystically inclined writers. The "pure ego" posited by
William James, for example, is one of these connotations which
has no psychological meaning for us, even though James did in
other respects discuss the problem of the ego in naturalistic terms.
Nor is the word "self" devoid of these objectionable associations.
And inasmuch as some religiously inclined psychologists are cur-
rently grasping the term "ego" as a substitute for "soul," there
might be some advantage for scientific psychology if the concept
were designated by Greek symbols. But we have preferred not to
do this and have contented ourselves by using "ego" in a strictly
demonstrable way on the basis of the observed facts of experience
and behavior.

As will become evident in the chapters to follow, what is called
the "ego" consists, in the last analysis, of a constellation of attitudes
which can be designated as ego-attitudes. Since scientific studies
on ego-involvements are still in their initial stages, we are not yet
ready in this book on ego-involvements to give a clear-cut defini-
tion of the ego. But as we go along we shall give concrete and
specific cases of constellations of ego-attitudes. And in passing we
may point again to the fact, elaborated later, that the ego is not a
fixed and immutable entity. It is formed during the genetic
development of the individual (ch. 7); it is subject to transforma-

THE PROBLEM OF EGO-INVOLVEMENTS 93

tion (see especially ch. 9) and to disintegration under the stress of
diverse factors (ch. 12).

We can perhaps take as a matter of everyday experience the fact
that most of the affective fixations (attitudes) which determine,
delimit, focus, and shape the selectivity of experience and response
to various stimulus situations are connected with the individuals,
situations, or institutions to which a person is in some way related.
Attitudes are toward my parents, my school, my gang, my church,
my nation, my boss, my friend; toward my friend's rival, my
father's competitor, my country's enemy, and so on. Most atti-
tudes have the characteristic of belonging to me, as being part of
me, as psychologically experienced. In short, they are, to repeat
Koffka's term, "Ego-attitudes." x [6, 562]

The personal world of every individual thus becomes centered
around himself, as William Stern has pointed out. [19] Without
in any way subscribing to the implications of Stern's personalistic
psychology, we should call attention to his observations that in
making judgments of "space" and "time" the individual inevitably
uses himself as a central point of reference. This holds for what
we regard as "inside" and "outside" of ourselves, what we regard

xln his Principles of Gestah Psychology [6] published in 1935, Koffka intro-
duced the ego as "the hero of the play." [319] Following the line of general
Gestah psychology, Koffka conceived of the ego "as a field object.** [319] In his
phenomenological analysis of the sensory experiences that segregate the ego from
the rest of the environment, Koffka made out his case for "the reality of the ego."
In this and in later chapters (6 and 12) we refer to some of Koffka's keen obser-
vations and to some of his fresh interpretations of the experimental psychology he
knew so well. However, Koffka's formulation of the ego seems to us quite inade-
quate for systematic psychology and especially for social psychology, largely because
of his neglect of the characteristics of attitudes, especially those concerned with
social behavior, and the functional relationship of attitudes to the ego. He re-
garded attitudes as "forces which have their origin not in the surrounding field
at all, but in the ego of the observer" [149, italics ours] ; an "attitude is a force
which starts in the ego." [206, italics ours] This tendency to reify the ego and
to conceive of it as an entity which somehow generates and propels attitudes is
incompatible with our own position and seems to us to make for unnecessary
obscurity and confusion. And Koffka did not stress either the fact or the
implications of the fact that the ego is a genetic development.

In chapter 14 we indicate why we cannot accept the psychoanalytic interpretation
of the ego. .We also indicate there why Adler's conception of the ego as an end
result of the universal "feeling of inferiority** arid the compensating "longing for
superiority" seems to us invalid.

94 THE PROBLEM OF EGO-INVOLVEMENTS

as "above" and "below," as "before" and "behind," as "left" or
"right," as "future" or "past." [97-97] What Stern calls a person's
"introceptible world" is for him "the cosmos of individualized
carriers of significance and value, and of claims that become re-
lated to the person's center." [88]

We have considered the psychology of attitudes in some detail
in the three previous chapters because attitudes are the main con-
stituents of the ego. Most attitudes are not discrete and isolated
entities in the psychological make-up of the individual. Once
formed, they provide the major components of which the ego is
built. And so before considering the problem of the ego itself and
the characteristics of ego functioning, we have tried to make sure
that our conception of these ego components rested on a solid basis
of fact. For this reason we examined experimental evidence from
the psychological laboratory and evidence from more concrete
situations. The basic psychology of ego formation is essentially
the psychology of the formation of attitudes. But we must wait
for the accumulation of more factual evidence before we are in a
position to delineate and define adequately the constellation of ego-
attitudes in the psychological make-up of the individual. For the
constellation of ego-attitudes is not coextensive with the whole
field of psychology.

The characteristics of attitudes have already been indicated in
previous chapters. Here we can give only a rough indication of
the implications of these characteristics for the psychology of ego-
involvement. More elaborate treatments of these implications as
based on factual data are contained in later chapters. In chapter 2
we pointed out that attitudes have a more or less enduring quality.
The first stage in the actual formation of an attitude, being a per-
ceptual stage and involving both internal and external factors,
implies that attitude formation is a cognitive process, that attitudes
are learned. This fact takes on special significance as we consider
the relationship between attitudes and the ego. For it means that
the characteristic feeling of continuity and permanence the indi-
vidual has about himself as revealed by the constellation of ego-
attitudes is derived in large part from the enduring quality of the
many social and personal attitudes which become ego components.

This does not imply, as we have noted before, that attitudes are

THE PROBLEM OF EGO-INVOLVEMENTS 95

fixed and unchangeable and, as a consequence, that the ego is fixed
and unchangeable. The ego is definitely not a solidified structure,
permanent once it is formed. Henri Wallon, in his excellent study
Lcs Qrigmes du caractere chez lf enfant [20], points out with abun-
dant evidence the changing nature of the small child's ego relation-
ships as he becomes involved in different situations. "Personality
remains as it were connected with the situation." (La personnalite
reste comme adherente a la situation. [247]) He cites, for ex-
ample, the case of a three-year-old girl who had spent several
weeks in the country with her mother. When her father arrived
from Vienna and asked if she recognized him, she said that her
other father was in Vienna. When the father told her he was her
daddy from Vienna, she asked if he came on the train. Wallon
indicates that the child needed to recall her own trip, the change
it had brought about in her own situation, before she could bring
the two fathers into focus and "resolve in this way the incompati-
bility of the situations in which they appeared to her in the present
and in the past" (resoudre par ce moyen rincompatibilite des
situations ou ils lui apparaissaient actuellement et dans le passe
[247]).

We shall also see that ego-attitudes manifested in different situa-
tions can be quite contradictory. As Healy and Bronner have
indicated on the basis of their studies of delinquent children, what
we call "conscience," though universally found, "plays various and
partial roles in determining or motivating behavior." [3, 12]

Conscience may cover only certain areas in the field of conduct. In
one case of our series a young boy evidently had a strong conscience
about being mannerly and doing his school work well, while stealing
seemed really to mean nothing to him except as he might be caught
for it. And we have noted in some instances that lying was quite
condoned by conscience while stealing was a sin, and that in other
cases this was exactly reversed. [3, 12]

Later we find ample evidence that the constellation of ego-atti-
tudes can and does change in a given individual under the impact
of compelling situations (chs. 9-11). When we consider the prob-
lem of ego-breakdowns, we shall see that an individual's charac-
teristic ego structure may become completely dissociated, may

96 THE PROBLEM OF EGO-INVOLVEMENTS

entirely collapse under cases of extreme stress or pathological con-
ditions (ch. 12). Other attitudes may be only momentary affairs,
but may still involve the ego. The accumulating experiments
related to ego-involvements show that even under artificial lab-
oratory conditions judgment and reaction are temporarily altered
in situations to which the ego is linked experimentally (ch. 6).

Ego-attitudes may be formed (learned) in relation to objects,
persons, situations, or groups that somehow satisfy or frustrate
those basic tensions, needs, drives, or instincts that do have a defi-
nitely assignable locus in the organism. As we pointed out in
chapter 2, the need for food or the sexual drive as such might be
satisfied by an individual in any culture by almost any kind of food
or any person of the opposite sex. But in everyday life this is by
no means the usual state of affairs. We acquire tastes for special
foods, and we are selective in our choice of a mate. Under or-
dinary circumstances, the satisfaction of our instinctual urges takes
place within an acquired frame of reference which is built up
through experience and carries definite affective overtones as our
needs are satisfied or thwarted. It is these ego-involved attitudes
that, to a large extent under usual conditions, determine and direct
the particular way in which the individual goes about releasing his
instinctual tendencies and drives.

And since the particular manner in which an individual satisfies
his instinctual urges becomes in most societies an indicator of
status, behavior which has its roots in biological and localizable
functions of the organism becomes inextricably interwoven with
complex ego-attitudes learned from society. A particular food —
its variety, quality, fashionableness, where and how it is eaten—
can be and is used as a mark of a person's position in life. We see
later that clothing, in addition to the function it serves in protect-
ing the body, also assumes in most cultures a status-distinguishing
role (ch. 11). We will indicate the enormous consequences for
behavior when the ego-attitudes that normally direct and deter-
mine the way in which an individual will satisfy instinctual urges
break down in conditions of extreme stress or deprivation (ch. 12).

All attitudes that define a person's status or that give him some
relative role with respect to other individuals, groups, or institu-
tions are ego-involved. Whether these attitudes stem from some

THE PROBLEM OF EGO-INVOLVEMENTS 97

biological drive or whether they are derived from some non-
instinctual source (from some social value or norm), any attitude
is ego linked which functions to shape, delimit, or point to our
relative position. In the United States, for example, the individual
derives and experiences a general status from such reference groups
as white or Negro; native or foreign born; upper, middle, or
working class; worker, employer, or independent; Catholic or
Protestant. And one derives and experiences a more specific status
from his relative position in membership groups, that is, as the
father of a family, a newcomer in a gang, an active member of his
union, a key skilled worker in a factory. Directories such as
Who's Who, compiled for the purpose of making it possible "to
place" a person, describe individuals entirely in terms of their
reference and membership characters.2 And these attitudes, which
define our relative position and status, determine and regulate
experience and action in a major way in all those situations we
relate to them.

In addition to the evidence already presented, we will see in
nearly all of die succeeding chapters how these ego-involved atti-
tudes—in youth and maturity, in everyday life and in the labora-
tory— guide our thoughts and actions as we try to maintain or
improve our status or as we may try to shift it with changing
conditions. Our satisfaction with ourselves, our aspirations and
ambitions, our failures and disappointments, our fears and anxie-
ties are all relative affairs, relative in the sense that we inevitably
use ourselves, our position, our accomplishments, as reference
points against the scale of values of our reference and membership
groups.

Since the ego is a genetic formation, the particular attitudes that
become its major components will vary according to the situations
to which an individual is exposed, the particular constellation of
social values or norms which have served as stimulus situations.
As a result, then, the ego will have different components for indi-

2 We are not ignoring the fact that we also think of ourselves in terms of
certain temperamental characteristics or abilities we may possess or wish we
possessed. A discussion of these personality characteristics and their place in social
psychology is much too complicated to be treated here and must be reserved for
a later volume.

98 THE PROBLEM OF EGO-INVOLVEMENTS

viduals living in different social systems or cultures. Observations
of anthropologists reveal the enormous variety of established values
or norms that become major ego constituents for individuals
brought up in different cultures. As a result of these different ego
identifications, very diverse loyalties and allegiances exist. Further-
more, individuals or groups or classes of individuals within the
same society may have quite conflicting or opposing values. The
ego components of some individuals may conflict because of basic
conflicts they reflect in objective social conditions (chs. 10, 11).
For example, those who find themselves members of a minority
group in a larger macrocosm, those who occupy marginal positions
in a society, are likely to form contrasting and conflicting ego
identifications. Ego components for other individuals may be
more overlapping and integrated, owing to the more harmonious
consistent relationship of the norms of a society.

By no means all of the values incorporated are social values in
the sense that they are widely accepted norms. Relatively or en-
tirely unique personal values derived from our own distinctive
experience may and often do become important components of
the ego. In stressing the fact that major e&o-attitudes for most
individuals seem to be acquired by the direct acquisition of social
values or norms, we do not mean to ignore or in any way to
minimize the fact that for some people or groups of people ego-
attitudes can be and are derived from the analysis of objective
situations, from facts, and from other direct experiences which
they have with the objects, persons, institutions, and such, which
become the content of attitudes. If this were not the case, it would
be more difficult than it is to account for the political radical, the
creative musician, artist, or scientist. These two facts — namely
that the content of ego-attitudes need not be always derived from
widely held values or norms and that they may be built up through
the direct observation, experience, and synthesis of specific facts,
specific objective relationships — help us further to account for the
enormous individual differences we see in man's ego-strivings, for
the different definitions people give to "self-interest,"

Group allegiances can and do direct a person into behavior
which appears to be deviant from that of society at large. We
shall see how the complete consistency of that behavior can only

THE PROBLEM OF EGO-INVOLVEMENTS 99

be understood in terms of the individual's group identifications
(ch. 10). There is unequivocal evidence that the adolescent strives
to anchor himself with some reference group that will give him
general status or with some particular membership group in which
the ego can be anchored more specifically (ch. 9).

We will also show in later chapters what variety, change, and
shifting about there may be in the ego components of the same
individuals under different situations, particularly those situations
which have the elements of crisis or conflict. As Koffka has
pointed out, and as becomes increasingly clear, the ego is complex
[6, 333], not a unidimensional structure. Koffka noted that under
varying conditions the ego will "shrink," "contract," "expand,"
and so on. Illustrations of this variability are found in concrete
social situations (ch. 11). This constellation of ego components,
shifting under different situations, has been recognized by novelists
and playwrights (ch. 13).

A characteristic fact that holds for any individual in any culture
is that experiences related to ego-attitudes, ego experiences, are felt
by the individual with a peculiar warmth and familiarity. This
was pointed out by Katzaroff in 1911 [5] :

One may therefore assume that the feeling of familiarity (sentiment
dc familier), deja vu, which accompanies a repeated sensation results
from the fact that this sensation, when it passed through our con-
sciousness for the first time became associated with the very feeling of
our "Ego" (s'est associee au sentiment lui-meme de notre "moi") and
was, so to speak, enveloped by it.8 [5, 78]

In a passage referring to Freud's concept of narcissism, Murphy,
Murphy, and Newcomb have indicated their own belief that an
individual's perception of continuous stimuli contributes to the
emergence of a new value, the self:

As the primitive, vague, ill-defined awareness of personal identity
gives place to a more well-defined experience, as the individual learns
where his own existence stops and the rest of the world begins, the
self in the accepted narrow sense is born and becomes an empirical
object toward which the attitudes of the organism are built up, just as

8 The reference to this observation and the English translation are given by
Koffka. [6, 594]

100 THE PROBLEM OF EGO-INVOLVEMENTS

attitudes are built up toward anything else ... the thing known as
the self is a selection and organization of its experiences involving the
visceral tensions, muscular strains, the sound of one's name, one's
mirror image, and so on; and the thing which knows this pattern is
simply the organism as a whole. If this is correct, it is easy to see that
the self, being a primary source of many satisfactions, must inevitably
become a value. The self is something which we like and from which
we expect much. [13, 209 f.]

It is also the constant ego reference of so much of our experience
that gives us our sense of continuous individuality. We are con-
stantly reacting to stimuli on the basis of our attitudes. We are
continually enjoying or suffering the consequences of our judg-
ments and actions. And it is by means of the constellation of our
attitudes that we experience and react to the welter of external
stimulation in a more or less consistent way, unlike children lack-
ing stable ego-attitudes. The consistency thus established defines
our role in a more or less lasting way in relation to the persons,
situations, and institutions we face. It sets the boundaries of our
personal psychological world, a world in which our egos act as a
major reference point. The physicist, Schrodinger, after his bril-
liant review of modern developments in physics and biology and
the implications they have for the answer to the question he poses
in his little book, What Is Life?, comes to the conclusion: "Yet
each of us has the undisputable impression that the sum total
of his own experience and memory forms a unit, quite distinct
from that of any other person. He refers to it as 'I.'" [16, 90]

The particular glow of individuality, the sense of "me-ness"
consciously or unconsciously accompanying experience with an
ego reference, assumes for the individual a special and unique
value. In one way or another we all try to feel good about our-
selves. In our various personal and social relationships, we try to
place ourselves (our egos) securely and appropriately in our own
eyes. We try somehow to orient ourselves in the concrete world
we live in until the "place" we think we occupy is satisfactory to
us. In this process we do what we can to protect our egos against
any onslaughts from the external world which we feel might hurt
us. If our ego is injured we resort to all kinds of rationalizations,
to protective adjustments, to selective modes of reasoning and

EGO-STRIVING IS NOT INSTINCTIVE: NO INNATE EGO DRIVES 101

behavior in which we manipulate things, persons, memories, or
ideas, in a highly selective way.

These strivings related to our ego assume very different direc-
tions, proportions, and intensities for different individuals, not only
in different cultures, but in the same culture or the same small
group. And, furthermore, the ego-striving of any given person
can and does assume very different intensities and proportions at
different times, depending upon the nature of the situation in
which the individual finds himself and upon internal physiological
or psychological processes.

EGO-STRIVING Is NOT INSTINCTIVE: No INNATE EGO DRIVES

The constellation of ego-attitudes which may be referred to as
the ego of the individual is a genetic formation (ch. 7). But this
fact does not mean that ego-attitudes are mere cognitive forma-
tions devoid of strong affective or purposive properties prompting
the individual to diverse strivings. As we shall see in the relevant
studies on child and adolescent behavior, on group and gang for-
mations, in the experimental laboratory as well as in concrete
situations of everyday life, the individual strives in one way or
another to maintain or to enhance his ego. And in order to learn
something about these unmistakable signs of striving related to
the ego and to take them into account (as we must) in any ade-
quate and scientific formulation of psychology we cannot resort to
the easy solution of positing some innate ego drive, ego instincts,
or ego needs. We have already pointed out that what we regard
as primary drives (instincts or needs) are those which have some
definite and localizable anatomical or physiological place in the
organism. Such instincts or drives, which, like hunger, appear at
birth or, like sex, appear at a later stage of organic development,
are innate. In this sense, therefore, any position which implies
that there is an ego drive comparable to other primary drives is
quite untenable. [17, 184f.] Since it is so important that the psy-
chology of ego-involvements be clearly divorced from any meta-
physical or spiritualistic interpretation, we shall list here a few of
the reasons for our conclusion that there is no primary ego drive.

1. Ego-striving in what seems to us the only justifiable use of

102 THE PROBLEM OF EGO-INVOLVEMENTS

the term is possible only after an individual has acquired (learned)
the complex and variously differentiated patterns of human
(social) relationships that surround him. The process involved
in grasping these relationships is essentially coincident with that
of ego development. Prior to the delineation of the baby's body
from his surroundings and the formation of other ego-attitudes,
ego-involvements cannot occur. For example, social distances
(which can be expressed in terms of psychological variables as
ego distances), social prejudices toward human groups and their
individual members are found to operate only after a certain de-
gree of ego development, that is, the degree that makes it possible
for the child to experience established reciprocal group relation-
ships such as "we" and "they."

Evidence that complex social relationships, along with appropri-
ate values and norms of experience and behavior, are not innately
experienced but are learned is seen from the fact that these rela-
tionships vary greatly from society to society and from time to
time within a society. Even that important range of intimate
personal relationships prescribed by kinship constellations does not
always fit into the biological proximity of consanguinity. It even
varies widely within the ranges of consanguineous relationships.
In fact, the relative proximity of the ego links represented in kin-
ship relationships, in spite of their biologically workable lineage
based on consanguinity, can serve as a crucial piece of evidence that
ego links are not innately experienced ties.

Kinship, family ties, the relative proximity of relatives, the
affective components, loyalties, and responsibilities attached to
them change with variations in the social organizations of different
societies as determined by the character of their socioeconomic
level of development and functioning. Here we can cite only a
few examples. The thesis is well developed by such substantial
authorities as Morgan [12], Engels [2], Rivers [15] and others.
A person who cannot conceive of any other kinship relationships
than the ones he is brought up to experience may be surprised to
find such diverse types of kinship systems and to learn from a
brief general discussion such as Lowie's that in some societies
kindred may be "grouped, for example, according to generation

EGO-STRIVING IS NOT INSTINCTIVE: NO INNATE EGO DRIVES 103

or age level as well as to differences between direct and collateral
lines of descent." [9, 568]

For the last 80 years anthropologists have piled up many ex-
amples of variations in kinship relationships. In different cultures
and at different periods in the same cultures, kinship relationships
present such a diverse and complex picture that many an anthro-
pologist has attempted to formulate intricate classificatory schemes
with the aim of presenting them in some sort of order. Such
attempts were found necessary, for, as Radcliffe-Brown [14]
points out,

If you will take time to study two or three hundred kinship systems
from all parts of the world you will be impressed, I think, by the
great diversity that they exhibit. [14, 17]

A few concluding statements illustrated by examples from an
anthropologist will clarify our point. Radcliffe-Brown notes the
various ranges of kinship relationships and their psychological
implications in terms of rights and duties:

A most important character of a kinship system is its range. In a
narrow range system, such as the English system of the present days,
only a limited number of relatives are recognized as such in any way
that entails any special behaviour or any specific rights and duties. In
ancient times in England the range was wider, since a fifth cousin
had a claim to a share of wergild when a man was killed. In systems
of very wide range, such as are found in some non-European societies,
a man may recognize many hundreds of relatives, toward each of
whom his behaviour is qualified by the existence of the relation-
ship. [14, 2]

And again:

A kinship system also includes the existence of definite social groups.
The first of these is the domestic family, which is a group of persons
who at a particular time are living together in one dwelling, or collec-
tion of dwellings, with some sort of economic arrangement that we
may call joint housekeeping. There are many varieties of the domestic
family, varying in their form, their size, and the manner of their
common life. A domestic family may consist of a single elementary
family, or it may be a group including a hundred or more persons,
such as the zadruga of the Southern Slavs, or the taravad of the Nayar.

104 THE PROBLEM OF EGO-INVOLVEMENTS

Important in some societies is what may be called a local cluster of
domestic families. In many kinship systems unilinear groups of
kindred-lineage groups, clans and moieties play an important part. By
a kinship system, then, I mean a network of social relations of the kind
just defined, which thus constitute part of that total network of social
relations that I call social structure. The rights and duties of relatives
to one another and the social usages that they observe in their social
contacts, since it is by these that the relations are described, are part
of the system. [14, 2]

Such variations in kinship systems and family relationships are
not peculiarities of geographically distant cultures alone. Changes
in kinship and family relationships have come with socioeconomic
changes and changes reached in the level of development. As we
have seen previously, Radcliffe-Brown cites a concrete case of the
changes brought about historically in the British kinship system.
From the same European area, he gives the case of a kinship system
which is contrary to that of the British system:

In Montenegro, on the contrary, to take another European system,
the father's brothers constitute one category and the mother's brothers
another. These relatives are distinguished by different terms, and so
are their respective wives, and the social relations in which a man
stands to his two kinds of uncles show marked differences. [14, 7]

Stern [18] has recently made a concise and intensive review of
the changes of the status of women which took place in the family
and in life in general as a consequence of modern technological
and social changes. For example, the 17th century wife's concep-
tion of herself as given in the following quotation is quite different
from a modern New York wife's conception of herself:

The dutie of the husband is to travel abroad to seeke living: and
the wives dutie is to keepe the house. The dutie of the husband is to
get money and provision; and the wives, not vainly to spend it. The
dutie of the husband is to deale with many men : and of the wives, to
talke with few. The dutie of the husband is, to be entermedling: and
of the wife, to be solitairie and withdrawne. The dutie of the man is,
to be skilfull in talke: and of the wife, to boast of silence. The dutie
of the husband is, to be a giver: and of the wife, to be a saver , . .

EGO-STRIVING IS NOT INSTINCTIVE: NQ INNATE EGO DRIVES 105

Now where the husband and wife performed! the duties in their
house we may call it College of Qyietness: the house wherein they
are neglected we may term it a hell.4

2. Analysis of different cultures and different social systems, or,
in some social systems, the analysis of different groups within that
social system, reveals that the ego-striving of individuals may be
directed to diametrically opposite ends and goals. Some Christian
saints strove to satisfy their egos by dispensing with all material
things, a sharp contrast to the behavior of some "acquisitively
minded" individuals in most contemporary bourgeois societies.
People in some cultures seek ego-gratifications through co-opera-
tive, relatively submissive behavior, whereas people in other so-
cieties obtain their gratifications through competitive relatively
ascendant behavior. The ego-satisfaction obtained by a Stahkanov-
ite in socialist competition is of a far different sort in its significance
to the individual from the type of satisfaction it is possible for a
skilled worker to obtain under capitalist competition (ch. 11).

Likewise, statuses aspired to by individuals change according to
different hierarchical status organizations in societies. As Linton
[7] puts it:

In all societies certain things are selected as reference points for the
ascription of status. [7, 115]

Consequently, with shifts of reference points of status in different
societies and with major changes in the same society at different
times, the directions of strivings for status shift. The fact that
reference points of status do shift is particularly important for the
psychology of ego-attitudes which are the psychological counter-
part of social status.

Similarly, the co-operative and competitive behavior shown by
different personalities are indications of nothing other than the
inculcation of appropriate ego-attitudes. These contrasting forms
of behavior are culturally determined and are not the marks of
innate ego drives of assertiveness or submissiveness. For example,
in a series of studies representing different cultures from widely
scattered geographical areas, it has been impressively demonstrated
that individuals show predominately competitive, or co-operative,

4 Stern quotes this passage from [10, #/?/.].

106 THE PROBLEM OF EGO-INVOLVEMENTS

or individualistic behavior which is in harmony with the behavior
characteristics commended in their respective cultures. [11] Thus,
individuals in Manus, Kwakiutl, Ifugao societies tend to exhibit
rather competitive behavior; whereas individuals of Iroquois,
Samoa, Zuni, Bathonga, Dakota, and Maori societies tend to show
rather co-operative behavior— all following the characteristics on
which the prevailing norms of their respective societies put a
premium.

3. Certainly there are individual differences in the degree and
intensity of ego-strivings. These individual differences, in our
opinion, can be accounted for by a complex of factors such as
primary drives for food, sex, and the like; individual bodily condi-
tions; individual differences in glandular functioning; tempera-
ment; ability; and other variations that may be largely hereditary;
together with the direction these factors will take and the signifi-
cance they will have for the individual within the frameworJ^ of
the attitudes acquired from his particular constellation of social
relationships. This fact is clearly brought out by the biologist
Julian Huxley who writes:

Let us remind ourselves that superposed upon this purely biolog-
ical or genetic variability is the even greater amount of variability due
to differences of upbringing, profession, and personal tastes. The final
result is a degree of variation that would be staggering if it were not
so familiar. It would be fair to say that, in respect to mind and out-
look, individual human beings are separated by differences as profound
as those which distinguish the major groups of the animal kingdom.
[4, 8, italics ours]

It should be noted again in passing that the constellation of these
factors may be and usually is quite different for different individ-
uals and that it will vary within the same individual with biological
changes (for example, those that come about with increasing age),
with the relative satisfaction of his basic needs, and with the
opportunity afforded by the situation or the environment for the
maintenance or enhancement of his position. Sudden and appar-
ently inconsistent shifts in the direction a person's efforts will take
can become meaningful only when these pursuits, these derived

EGO-STRIVING IS NOT INSTINCTIVE: NO INNATE EGO DRIVES 107

drives, are related to learned ego-involved values. [1, 41-52]
Chapter 10, dealing with ego-involvements in group situations, is
filled with data that point to this conclusion.

4. Subnormal individuals, such as imbeciles, have ego structures
that can be demonstrated to be extremely narrow and confined.
To borrow a phrase used by Huxley in another connection, the
difference between such a subnormal person as might be found in
almost any state institution for the feeble-minded and an intelli-
gent adult vigorously trying to achieve certain desired ends, is
"comparable in extent with that between a sponge and a higher
mammal." [4, 8] However, both the subnormal individual we
might select at random and an intelligent individual displaying a
continuous and complex ego-striving would more than likely be
found to have similar good appetites for food, similar needs for
sexual satisfactions, and so on.

5. Under certain conditions, either physiological, pathological,
or situational, the ego may break down, dissolve, apparently dis-
appear for either a shorter or a longer time. This is not true of
innate or biologically given instincts or drives which, by almost
any definition, are constantly, and recurrently, or periodically
manifested. We discuss later in some detail instances of ego-break-
down, ranging from the ungentlemanly behavior of individuals
when they are drunk, the unladylike behavior of socially refined
women when they are desperate for food, the resort to prostitutes
of men in love when their sex needs become extreme, to more
complicated and enduring dissociations brought about by extreme
prolonged situations or by pathological conditions (ch. 12). In all
these cases established ego-attitudes become separated from judg-
ment and behavior. A person does not act like "his normal self."

6. We should include in our list the point previously emphasized
that there is no evidence for the existence of an ego drive in the
sense that this drive, like primary drives for food and sex, has a
definitely assignable locus in the individual organism. We are, of
course, not at all denying the fact that psychological phenomena
and experiences, such as ego-involvements, are due to complex
chemical or physical reactions within the organism. As Schro-
dinger says:

108 THE PROBLEM OF EGO-INVOLVEMENTS

My body functions as a pure mechanism according to the Laws of
Nature. [16, 87]

It is not at all impossible or improbable that in the unforeseeable
future the physical scientist may work out some intricate and valid
formulas to describe those processes in the organism that are expe-
rienced as ego-involvements. But if and when this is accomplished,
the qualitative differences between such formulations and our
current relatively precise knowledge concerning the physical basis
of primary drives such as hunger and sex will almost surely be so
vast that they cannot possibly be classified together.

7. There is no ego formation, no ego-involvement, in animals
in the sense of reciprocal interpersonal relationships and group
relationships on a conceptual level. There is no animal culture
comparable to that of man. Ego formation and ego-involvement
require that the organism shall be capable of functioning on a
conceptual or symbolic level. The values, standards, or norms of
social relationship to which the human being relates and identifies
himself are possible only because he is able to grasp these values,
standards, or norms conceptually. There can obviously be no
involvement or identification with let us say, class, nationality, or
occupational groups, unless the meaning and significance of a
"class," a "nation," or an "occupation" can be conceived on a con-
ceptual level. And in turn, of course, social groupings, organiza-
tions and institutions characteristic of human society would be
impossible without the interconnections, loyalties, and traditions
that are based on conceptual thinking.

This fact is of the utmost importance. For it means that find-
ings concerned with social behavior on the subhuman level may
by no means be applicable to the human level when reciprocal
human relationships or the conceptual level of human interaction
is in question. It means that in the psychology of ego-involve-
ments we are dealing with a unique human characteristic, an
emergent that is qualitatively different from other evolutionary
products, an emergent that follows the dialectic process. What
we observe as animal aggressiveness and animal affective fixations
are determined by momentary situations, by relative physical
strength, by brute force, or by fixations built up through the

EGO-STRIVING IS NOT INSTINCTIVE: NO INNATE EGO DRIVES 109

process of conditioning which docs not involve reciprocal relation-
ships on the conceptual level.

The uniqueness of human culture and its dependence upon
language (concept) formation are nicely brought out and well-
documented by Warden, an outstanding comparative psychologist,
in his The Emergence of Human Culture. [21] He writes that

. . . the simple truth seems to be that man's primary claim to
distinction rests upon the fact that he alone possesses a genuine cul-
ture. [21, 3]

The transition from the humanoid level to the first human type was
coincident with the emergence of the cultural order. [21, 99]

After surveying the social life of insects, birds, and mammals, he
states bluntly that "even the rudiments of culture do not exist
among sub-human organisms." [65]
Our human culture, then, is "an emergent," [23] and

An emergent system has new properties and new modes of organiza-
tion that seem to bear no definite relation to the old order from which
it arose. [21, 24]

In describing this emergent, human culture, Warden points out
that

This new type of social integration was unique in that it reached
above the purely biosocial level. For the first time, invention, effective
communication within the group, and the social habituation of the
young became possible. The activities of the individual were no longer
limited to the instinctive repertory of the species. New skills could be
invented by the superior individual and passed along to the other
members of the group by means of language. Simple folkways could
now develop out of the greater variety and intimacy of social contacts.
These new ways of doing and acting, as accepted by the group, could
be impressed upon the young through language and imitation. Such
of the skills and folkways as survived from generation to generation
comprised a rude tradition. This new mode of social integration was
cultural rather than biosocial. [21, 105 /.]

Throughout his book, Warden emphasizes the fact that

The cultural order was unique because the presence of language
made possible a new and most important type of social integration.
[108]

110 THE PROBLEM OF EGO-INVOLVEMENTS

Communication, invention, and social habituation he regards as
the three "basic mechanisms" that make the human cultural order
possible. [21] Concerning communication he states that

It seems altogether unlikely that a culture could emerge and main-
tain itself without the support of a well-developed capacity for vocal
language. [22] ... Language ^becomes an important instrument for
the broadening of cultural contacts. The child now learns to express
its own desires effectively and to understand and heed those of others.
It learns to recognize such social distinctions as attach to age, rank,
and other tribal relationships. It comes to play games according to
rule and custom. The channels of thought are marked out by the
folklore and ideas of current conversation. The attitudes and beliefs
of the group gradually become those of the child. [7/.J . . . Moral
sentiments are inculcated and many additional duties and obligations
are imposed. Conformity with group norms of conduct takes on a
new importance because of its relation to personal success and pres-
tige. [21, 8]

The point has also been fully recognized by outstanding biolo-
gists of our day. For example, Julian Huxley, in a chapter, "The
Uniqueness of Man," in his Man Stands Alone [4] writes:

... let us remind ourselves that the gap between human and animal
thought is much greater than is usually supposed. The tendency to
project familiar human qualities into animals is very strong, and col-
ours the ideas of nearly all people who have not special familiarity
both with animal behavior and scientific method. [19] . . . In point
of fact, the great majority of man's activities and characteristics are
by-products of his primary distinctive characteristics, and therefore,
life them, biologically unique. On the one hand, conversation, or-
ganized games, education, sport, paid work, gardening, the theatre;
on the other, conscience, duty, sin, humiliation, vice, penitence — these
are all such unique by-products. The trouble, indeed, is to find any
human activities which are not unique. Even the fundamental bio-
logical attributes such as eating, sleeping, and mating have been tricked
out by man with all \inds of unique frills and peculiarities. [29, italics
ours]

The first and most obviously unique characteristic of man is his
capacity for conceptual thought; if you prefer objective terms, you will
say his employment of true speech, but that is only another way of
saying the same thing. True speech involves the use o£ verbal signs

EGO-STRIVING IS NOT INSTINCTIVE: NO INNATE EGO DRIVES 111

for objects, not merely for feelings. Plenty of animals can express the
fact that they are hungry; but none except man can ask for an egg or
a banana. [3, italics ours]

Words are tools which automatically carve concepts out of experi-
ence. The faculty of recognizing objects as members of a class pro-
vides the potential basis for the concept; the use of words at once
actualizes the potentiality. This basic human property has had many
consequences. The most important was the development of a cumu-
lative tradition. The beginnings of tradition, by which experience is
transmitted from one generation to the next, are to be seen in many
higher animals. But in no case is the tradition cumulative. Offspring
learn from parents, but they learn the same kind and quantity of
lessons as they, in turn, impart: the transmission of experience never
bridges more than one generation. In man, however, tradition is an
independent and potentially permanent activity, capable of indefinite
improvement in quality and increase in quantity. It constitutes a new
accessory process of heredity in evolution, running side by side with
the biological process, a heredity of experience to supplement the uni-
versal heredity of living substance. The existence of a cumulative
tradition has as its chief consequence — or if you prefer, its chief
objective manifestation — the progressive improvement of human tools
and machinery. Many animals employ tools; but they are always
crude tools employed in a crude way. Elaborate tools and skilled
technique can develop only with the aid of speech and tradition. [3f.]
. . . Speech, tradition, and tools have led to many other unique prop-
erties of man. These are, for the most part, obvious and well known,
and I propose to leave them aside until I have dealt with some less
familiar human characteristics. [5]

The essential character of man as a dominant organism is con~
ceptual thought. And conceptual thought could have arisen only in a
multicellular animal, an animal with bilateral symmetry, head and
blood system, a vertebrate as against a mollusc or an arthropod, a
land vertebrate among vertebrates, a mammal among land vertebrates.
Finally, it could have arisen only in a mammalian line which was
gregarious, which produced one young at birth instead of several, and
which had recently become terrestrial after a long period of arboreal
life. There is only one group of animals which fulfils these conditions
— a terrestrial offshoot of the higher Primates. Thus not merely has
conceptual thought been evolved only in man: it could not have been
evolved except in man. There is but one path of unlimited progress
through the evolutionary maze. The course of human evolution is as

112 THE PROBLEM OF EGO-INVOLVEMENTS

unique as its result. It is unique not in the trivial sense of being a
different course from that of any other organism, but in the pro-
founder sense of being the only path that could have achieved the
essential characters of man. Conceptual thought on this planet is
inevitably associated with a particular type of Primate body and
Primate brain. [4, 15 /., italics ours]

Another biologist, Leo Loeb, writing in 1945 on the Biological
Basis of Individuality [8] shows the necessity of concept forma-
tion for man's unique individuality. He uses this fact as a stepping
stone for his own formulation, in his own terminology, of the
way in which the ego (the "I") emerges in man as a distinctive
characteristic. And he goes still further in his book to indicate
the implications this emergence has for man's identifications and
social relationships.

According to Loeb, the ability to form concepts, to think ab-
stractly and synthetically, has come about suddenly and appears
only with the development of man.

There has ... taken place an evolution of two types of individu-
ality. The first is connected with the differentiation of the organ
differentials and with the evolution of the individuality differential
and its manifestations, from a very primitive character to the state of
great refinement reached in mammals. The second is connected with
the evolution of the psychical-social factors, leading to the gradual
creation and refinement of the individual in the psychical-social sense.
This second evolutionary process is related only indirectly to the
development of the individuality differentials; it depends directly upon
the increasing complexity and refinement of certain organ differentials,
especially of the nervous system. There is, therefore, no perfect
parallelism between these two evolutionary processes. While in the
first process a gradual, step-by-step development of the individuality
differential occurs, in the second process the most important, jar-
reaching change has ta\en place suddenly in the transition from an-
thropoid apes to man. [8, 654, italics ours]

He finds no evidence of these higher thought processes even in
anthropoid apes.

Proceeding now from the other higher mammals to man, very pro-
nounced complications in the modes of reactions are observed. Not
only does the environment, which acts on us through our sense organs,

EGO-STRIVING IS NOT INSTINCTIVE: NO INNATE EGO DRIVES 113

induce changes which have a much more varied and also more lasting
effect on our behavior than in other mammals, but abstraction and
synthesis, in which the elements in the environment are separated and
then re-arranged in new combinations, become very prominent.
Thoughts develop, in which the constituents of the environment may
appear in combinations different from those in which they occur under
natural conditions; through shifting of these constituents new concepts
are formed. [8, 619]

As a consequence of man's unique mental capacities and his
interaction with both the natural and social environment, the "I"
concept is developed.

As a result partly of rational thought, but largely also because of
the friction, antagonism and pain developing in the social and natural
struggle, the concept of the "I" as contrasted with the concept of
others and of the surrounding world, develops. The "I" is the indi-
viduality in the psychical-social sense. [8, 620, italics ours]

8. The changes in ego relationships that result from lobotomy
and lobectomy demonstrate in a crucial way the close functional
relationship between ego formation and ego functioning on the
one hand, and, on the other hand, psychological functioning on
a conceptual level. Further evidence of the dependence of ego
formation on psychological functioning at the conceptual level is
found in observations of persons who have lost both their ego
relationships and their abstract (conceptual) functioning follow-
ing certain injuries to the frontal lobes whose tremendous devel-
opment in the human species gives man his unique ability to
function psychologically on an abstract conceptual level. Evi-
dence concerning these two points is found later in Chapter 12
on pages 425 ff. and 431 ff.

How to account for ego-striving. If ego-strivings do not have
an instinctive basis in the sense of hunger and sex needs or drives,
how are psychologists to account for these ego-strivings with all
their rich affective halo, their emotional warmth, and their vary-
ing intensity? As we indicated in the introduction, a detailed
account of motivation as it relates to social psychology cannot be
treated here. And the more precise role of ego-striving in the
whole network of instinctive behavior, reflexes, habits, primary

114 THE PROBLEM OF EGO-INVOLVEMENTS

and derived drives, personality traits, frustrations, and the like,
is being deliberately reserved for later discussion. In this book we
are concerned chiefly with the place of the ego in systematic social
psychology.

We have already indicated the main outline of our position.
We can summarize it briefly again here. The evidence we have
already presented, together with that to follow, gives us some-
what the following picture: our major psychological activities
— our perception, judgment, remembering, and so on — take place
in referential frameworks. The ego is no exception to this general
rule. We learn (or sometimes determine) what values, goals,
standards, or norms are desirable for us. These become incorpo-
rated as our values, our goals. The referential framework of the
ego is therefore these values, goals, standards, or norms which have
become our major attitudes, which have become so large a part
of what we refer to as me. These values, goals, standards, or
norms which become our attitudes are represented by, set by, or
created by group activities and social situations that form the con-
stellation of social relationships with which we come in contact.
Major attitudes are thus derived from groups to which we learn
to relate ourselves or which we regard ourselves as members of:
reference groups, membership groups. My identification and
allegiances, my status and position are determined with respect to
these reference and membership groups. If I can relate myself
securely to these reference groups, 7 feel secure in my general
status, insofar as the values of the reference groups themselves are
compatible. If I can anchor myself securely in a membership
group, / feel secure in my more specific membership position.
Although we may have a very clear knowledge of what the norms
of the larger society or of more specific groups are, mere knowl-
edge of these norms does not necessarily in itself induce identifica-
tions. When we discuss the "deviant" behavior of gang members
we shall find clear evidence that norms must serve the function of
helping us place ourselves in social relationships, must offer us the
possibility (consciously or unconsciously) of acquiring, maintain-
ing, or enhancing our status before they become ours (ch. 10).

These reference and membership groups not only set for us the
values or norms that become our attitudes: they further make con-

REFERENCES 115

stant demands on our loyalties as time goes on. Some of these
loyalties change with age as we shift our identifications. This will
be most strikingly brought out when we discuss ego formation and
re-formation in adolescents (ch. 9). Other loyalties change under
the impact of new situations (chs. 10, 11). But whoever a person
may be and whatever social milieu surrounds him, what he learns
to regard as his loyalty, his purpose, his ambition, his striving to
gratify basic needs or drives is affected, regulated, or directed in a
major way by the referential framework that has become so large
a part of him in the course of his social development. Ego-striv-
ing, then, is the individual's effort to place himself securely in
those constellations of human relationships that represent for him
desirable values, that will make his status or position secure.

Owing to individual differences in characteristics such as tem-
perament, ability, or energy there are enormous and important
differences in the manner, persistence, and intensity in which ego-
striving proceeds. And the relative position which will be re-
garded as personally satisfying to an individual is determined by
such individual differences, as well as by the specific values he has
learned. However, the important fact for social psychologists to
remember is that these individual differences all function within
the framework of norms prescribed by the reference or member-
ship groups. Equally healthy, energetic, intelligent, resourceful
people, endowed with similar temperamental characteristics and
with similar glandular structure would inevitably manifest differ-
ent, perhaps quite opposite, ego-strivings according to the differing
or contrasting referential frameworks in which their strivings took
place.

REFERENCES

1. CANTRIL, H., The Psychology of Social Movements, New York: Wiley, 1941.

2. ENGELS, F., The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State, New

York: International, 1942, first published 1884.

3. HEALY, W., and A. F. BRONNER, New Light on Delinquency and Its Treatment,

5. KATZAROFF, D., Contribution a Petude de la recognition, Arch, de Psych., 11,

1911, 1-78.

6. KOFFKA, K., Principles of Gestalt Psychology, New York: Harcourt, grace, 1935.

116 THE PROBLEM OF EGO-INVOLVEMENTS

7. LINTON, R., The Study of Man: An Introduction, New York: Applcton-Century,

8. LOEB, L., The Biological Basis of Individuality, Springfield: Thomas, copyright

1945.

9. LOWIE, R. H., Kinship, in Encyclopaedia of the Social Sciences, New York:

Macmillan, 1932, 8, 568-72.

10. LUMPKIN, K. DuP., The Family: A Study of Member Roles, Chapel Hill:

11. MEAD, M. (ed.), Cooperation and. Competition among Primitive Peoples, New

York: McGraw-Hill, 1937.

12. MORGAN, L. H., Ancient Society or Researches in the Lines of Human Progress

from Savagery through Barbarism to Civilization, New York: Holt, 1877.

13. MURPHY, G., L. B. MURPHY, and T. NEWCOMB, Experimental Social Psychol-

14. RADCLIFFE-BROWN, A. R., The study of kinship systems, Presidential Address,

/. Roy. Anthropol Inst. of Great Britain and Ireland, 1941, 71, parts I and II.

15. RIVERS, W. H. R., History of Melanesian Society, Cambridge, England: Univ.

Press, 1914, vols. I and EL

17. SHERIF, M., The Psychology of Social Norms, New York: Harper, 1936.

18. STERN, B. J., The family and cultural change, Am. Sociol. Rev., copyright

1939, 4, 199-208.

19. STERN, W., General Psychology, Prom the Personalistic Standpoint, trans, by

H. D. Spoerl, New York: Macmillan, 1938.

20. WALLON, H., Les Origines du caractere chez I' enfant, Paris: Presses Universi-

taires de France, 1933.

21. WARDEN, C, J,, The Emergence of Human Culture, New York: Macmillan,

CHAPTER 6
EXPERIMENTS ON EGO-INVOLVEMENTS

We have said that what an individual comes to regard as himself
is a genetic development, a product of learning. In the normal
course of affairs, the components of the ego include the individual's
body and physical characteristics; the things he learns belong to
him, such as his clothes, his toys, his keepsakes, his room, his hut,
his house, his mother, his sweetheart, his children; together with
a whole host of social values he also learns and with which he
identifies himself — his country, his politics, his language, his man-
ner of dressing, the characteristics of his particular society.

In spite of the relative similarity of the norms to which an
individual in a given society or a group may be exposed, the con-
tent of any single individual's ego, what he regards as himself, is
a rather distinct constellation of social and personal values that
vary not only in their number and nature but also in the intensity
with which they are held. Within the range of individual differ-
ences due to variations in instinctual drive, ability, and tempera-
ment, the similarity of the content of individual egos will increase,
of course, with the uniformity of the situations, experiences., or
norms to which an individual is exposed.

These contents of the ego, these things, persons, ways of con-
ducting oneself, social norms of various kinds, provide for the
individual the standards of judgment or frames of reference which
determine to such an important degree his social behavior and
reactions. And when any stimulus or situation is consciously or
unconsciously related to them by the individual, we can say there
is "ego-involvement." Thus, the ego in its various capacities enters
in as an important determinant which may color, modify, or alter
our experiences and behavior in almost any situation. For our
standards, our values, our goals and ambitions, our ways of doing

things have become involved. We feel elated, restricted, gratified,

117

118 EXPERIMENTS ON EGO-INVOLVEMENTS

supported, disturbed, or insecure, in these ego-involving situations.

This ego-involvement can and does range from what may be a
temporary moderate involvement in a laboratory experiment with
some task to be performed where we feel that somehow our
capacities or abilities are at stake, to complex social situations in
which we feel involved, because of some threat to, or enhance-
ment of, our position as a member of some gang, group, or class
we identify ourselves with.

In recent years the fact of ego-involvements has been demon-
strated experimentally in the laboratory and in other controlled
investigations concerned with more everyday life situations. We
are citing some of these studies here to show that the concept of
ego-involvement can be and has been successfully verified under
the rigorous controls imposed by scientific method.1

EGO-INVOLVEMENTS IN LABORATORY TASKS

In one of his characteristic insights as a psychologist, James
pointed out in his Principles (1890) that our "self -feeling" is de-
termined by the "ratio of our actualities to our supposed poten-
tialities." [35]

I, who for the time have staked my all on being a psychologist, am
mortified if others know much more psychology than I. But I am
contented to wallow in the grossest ignorance of Greek. My defi-
ciencies there give me no sense of personal humiliation at all. Had I
"pretensions" to be a linguist, it would have been just the reverse.
So we have the paradox of a man shamed to death because he is only
the second pugilist or the second oarsman in the world. That he is
able to beat the whole population of the globe minus one is nothing;
he has "pitted" himself to beat that one; and as long as he doesn't do
that nothing else counts. He is to his own regard as if he were not,
indeed he is not.

Yonder puny fellow, however, whom every one can beat, suffers no
chagrin about it, for he has long ago abandoned the attempt to "carry
that line," as the merchants say, of self at all. With no attempt there
can be no failure; with no failure no humiliation. So our self-feeling

1 A comparatively early and important recognition of the fact of ego-involve-
ment was made by Murphy, Murphy, and Newcomb when in 1937 they grouped
a number of different experiments together in their discussion of the ego. [50]

EGO-INVOLVEMENTS IN LABORATORY TASKS 119

in this world depends entirely on what we bac\ ourselves to be and do.
It is determined by the ratio of our actualities to our supposed poten-
tialities; a fraction of which our pretensions are the denominator and

the numerator our success: thus, Self-esteem = - : — . Such a

Pretensions

fraction may be increased as well by diminishing the denominator as
by increasing the numerator. To give up pretensions is as blessed a
relief as to get them gratified. . . . [35, 310 f.]

Baldwin, writing in 1897, noted that a man's "opinion of others
must be referred to the same standards by which he judges him-
self" [5, 79], whereas Cooley, in 1902, acknowledging his debt to
James and Baldwin, wrote that

The thing that moves us to pride or shame is not the mere mechani-
cal reflection of ourselves, but an imputed sentiment, the imagined
effect of this reflection upon another's mind. This is evident from
the fact that the character and weight of that other, in whose mind
we see ourselves, makes all the difference with our feeling. We are
ashamed to seem evasive in the presence of a straightforward man,
cowardly in the presence of a brave one, gross in the eyes of a refined
one, and so on. [15, 184]

In other words, James, Baldwin, and Cooley, in the comparatively
early days of psychology, saw the referential nature of judgments,
recognized that these were anchored in the ego.

These early observations are of more than mere historical inter-
est. Contemporary psychoanalysts explicitly relate their modern
formulations of neuroses to James's descriptions of the "social self."
For example, Karen Horney, writing in 1939, states that

To some extent everyone living in an organized community must
keep up appearances. To some extent every one of us has imbibed
the standards of the environment. To some extent we are all depend-
ent on the regard others have for us. [32, 216 f.]

And she notes that

William James has said that to give up pretensions is as blessed a
relief as to have them gratified; judging from observations in analysis
the relief resulting from giving them up seems to be the greater of
the two. [32, 231]

120 EXPERIMENTS ON EGO-INVOLVEMENTS

And the considerable experimentation conducted in the past 15
years on what has become known as the level of aspiration is given
a theoretical framework by these earlier writers.

In Hoppe's [31] experiment on the level of aspiration (1930)
we have a demonstration that levels of aspiration are essentially
ego-involving frames of reference or anchoring points. Success
and failure are determined with respect to subjectively established
scales: subjects adjust their level of aspiration according to the
degree of success on previous performances; if the level of per-
formance is outside the range of the level of aspiration (either
above or below it), there is no experience of success or failure.
The systematic implication that the level of aspiration can and
must be regarded as an instance of a frame of reference within
which ego levels are set was not made in Hoppe's original formu-
lation, but further evidence for such an interpretation has accumu-
lated with subsequent work.

Frank has demonstrated that when the level of aspiration is set
within a frame of reference clearly involving the ego it is likely
to differ from non-ego-involving levels of aspiration by being con-
sistently higher than the level of past performance.

Changes in the level of performance in one task affect the first level
of aspiration in another even when the level of aspiration is solely an
objective estimate, but can affect the remaining levels of aspiration
only when the ego-level is involved in both tasks. [19, 170]

Frank suggests that

The size of the difference between the average level of aspiration
and the median level of past performance is due to the involvement of
the ego-level of the individual in the task, as shown by self-competi-
tion or social pressure. [20, 293]

He notes, too, in his 1941 summary, that, for some people,

The level of aspiration may be used to help protect the ego from
the effects of failure by being kept resolutely high despite poor per-
formance. [21, 224]

He further states:

The level of aspiration situation is usually a threat to the subject's
self-esteem in that he must not only exhibit his ability for some one

EGO-INVOLVEMENTS IN LABORATORY TASKS 121

else, but must openly commit himself as to his expectation of future
achievement. . . . Involvement of the subject's self-esteem may often
be inferred from tension, obvious effort to do well, acute awareness of
the experimenter, and other signs that he regards his own "worth" as
involved. [21, 223]

A notable contribution to the conceptualization of the meaning
of the term "level of aspiration" was made by Chapman and Volk-
mann when they pointed out, as we mentioned earlier, that

The conditions which govern the setting of a level of aspiration
(Anspruchsniveau) , in the sense of an estimate of one's future per-
formance in a given task, may be regarded as a special case of the
effect upon a judgment of the frame of reference within which it is
executed. [13,225]

In chapter 4 we described their experiment in another connec-
tion. It may be recalled that some of their experimental groups
were given in advance of the task (recognition of various authors
of literary passages) the score supposedly made by other groups
which varied in their prestige such as literary critics and WPA
workers. The result here was that those who compared them-
selves to a superior group lowered their aspiration level, while
those who compared themselves to an inferior group raised their
aspiration level. In the second experiment the subjects were
allowed two performances on a mental test before any attempt
was made to change their level of aspiration by comparison of their
results with those of various other groups. Under these condi-
tions, there was no significant change in the level of aspiration.

The subject's own previous scores provided the most effective an-
choring. [13, 235]

In addition to the information these experiments provide con-
cerning the relative acceptance of imposed norms when the stimu-
lus situation is variously structured, they demonstrate that whether
a level of aspiration is socially imposed as it was in their first
experiment, or whether it is based on some definite anchoring
from past experience, it must be regarded as an ego-involving
frame of reference. In the first experiment, a subject compares
himself with others of a superior or inferior position, using his

122 EXPERIMENTS ON EGO-INVOLVEMENTS

own status as an anchoring point. In the second experiment,
where judgments of future performance were based on past ex-
perience, the individual identifies himself with his own past per-
formance and, as the authors point out:

What the subject has himself accomplished with labor is likely to
have "ego value"; it means more to him than does the verbally re-
ported accomplishment of someone else. The subject accepts his own
work with satisfaction if it seems to be of high grade; he may still
accept it, under the protection of some rationalization, if it seems to be
of low grade. In the second place, the subject's previous scores pro-
vide the most objective basis for predicting his future ones, and the
subject will use this basis if he values objectivity. [13, 235]

Since the subjects were college graduates and students in extension
courses in psychology, the authors' assumption that objective esti-
mates will have some ego value seems entirely plausible.

In 1940 Sears went farther than anyone had to date in making
explicit what lay beyond the "level of aspiration" and why it in-
volved the ego. After noting Frank's observations that ego-in-
volvement may be either a matter of "self-competition" where the
individual attempts to maintain his status or due to "an aware-
ness of social pressure," and after calling attention to Gould's in-
vestigations [23] which pointed out the importance of knowing
an individual's attitudes and the different meanings tasks might
have for different individuals or for the same individual in dif-
ferent situations, Sears formulates her problem in such a way as
to bring these variables together systematically and to relate them
to social norms which can and do become interiorized as ego-
involving frames of reference.

Such differences in the individual's perception of the task in relation
to himself may be considered to have been built up in somewhat the
following fashion: the child is informed, by example and precept of
prestigeful persons, as to what are the valued activities in the particular
culture or subculture of which he is a member. These values, incor-
porated in the ego, become reference points for self-judgments of
success or failure; that is, the child cannot succeed or fail in an activ-
ity which has for him no ego value. In those activities in which he
has ego-involvement, he can, and does, succeed and fail [57, 499]

EGO-INVOLVEMENTS IN LABORATORY TASKS 123

Scars set out to test the "reasonable assumption" that "differences
in success will influence the individual's anticipation of future
gratification in the further performance" of tasks possessing ego
value.

She chose as her subjects children of fourth, fifth, and sixth
grade standing where "cultural pressures toward achievement are
exerted on the child from all sides in this field." [500] Or, as
Sears puts it, a child in the age range of 9 to 12 has "had sufficient
experience in school to form definite attitudes with respect to his
excellence of performance in the academic work." Her experi-
mental group consisted of a "success" group of children who had
had uniformly high academic standing, a "failure" group, and a
"differential" group composed of children who had been suc-
cessful in reading and unsuccessful in arithmetic. Reading and
arithmetic tasks were assigned and were given as speed tests.
There were three experimental conditions: the first a rieutral one,
the second a "success-conditioned" where children were highly
praised for their work no matter what it was objectively, and the
third a "failure-conditioned" where children, irrespective of their
performances, were told they had made many mistakes and gone
very slowly with respect to other members of the group.

She found that

Self-confident, successful children react to the level of aspiration
situation in a similar way, whereas unsuccessful children, lacking in
confidence, may adopt one of a number of different behavior tech-
niques in this situation. Furthermore, experimentally induced success
brings the reactions of all subjects in regard to level of aspiration into
a more homogeneous distribution than do the neutral conditions of
stimulation. [57, 526]

Experimentally induced success provides social norms for the indi-
vidual which induce him to believe that he has been and is performing
much better than the average . . . similarly, experimentally induced
failure provides a condition of insecurity for the subjects of all groups.
[57,552/.]

Sears points out the link made by Chapman and Volkmann be-
tween the level of aspiration and the effect of a frame of refer-

124 EXPERIMENTS ON EGO-INVOLVEMENTS

cnce on judgment and goes on to show that the level of aspiration
is set with respect to "the perceived social norms." [529] She con-
cludes that

The cultural pressure to excel and to keep the performance improv-
ing, plus the cognizance of the position of the self relative to social
norms, seem to account for most of the results obtained in the present
investigation. [57, 528]

The earlier studies of Greenberg in 1932 [25] and Rosenzweig
in 1933 [55] furnish experimental evidence that the level of aspira-
tion with its involvement of the ego does not appear genetically
until the child has formed some conception of his "self," has de-
veloped a sense of "pride," or of status which he feels he must
maintain within a group. "Success" and "failure" in the accom-
plishment of various assigned tasks are meaningless until the ego
is sufficiently developed to serve as a basic anchorage. Anderson
and Brandt [3] studied the levels of aspiration of fifth grade
children for performances when each child knew his own pre-
vious score, his standing in the group, and the group norm.
Since no child knew the scores made by any other specific child,
direct "social pressure" and "competition" were minimal. In this
situation, the explicit norm of the group served as an anchorage
for judgments of future performances. The investigators report
that "the goals or levels of aspiration of these children tended to
converge on what for the group was mediocrity." [231] Other
results were contrary to Frank's definition of failure as a level of
performance below the level of aspiration "regardless of its abso-
lute goodness." The children in this study who won scores in
the lower quartile tended to set their goals "considerably above
their achievement, whereas in the upper ranks of performance
the tendency is just the reverse." [220] As the authors concluded:
"The goals of these children are related to the 'goodness' of past
achievement." [225] And, as we have seen, they are also related
to the past achievement of the group. The average performance
of this group of children improved significantly more during a
series of trials than did those of a control group who knew
neither their own score nor their ranking in the group.

In their study of the effect of relative standing in an experimen-

EGO-INVOLVEMENTS IN LABORATORY TASKS 125

tal social group to the level of aspiration, Hilgard, Sait, and
Magaret [28] found a tendency for those whose performance was
above the group norm to estimate their future performance too
low, whereas those whose performances were lower than the group
norm tended to overestimate their future performance. Since the
estimates of future performances of one subject were not known
to the other subject, the experimenters conclude that "group pres-
sure can be used to explain the tendency to estimate towards the
mean of the group only if the desire for social conformity is some-
how internalized." [421]

Several studies have been reported which show that unless and
until there is some ego-involvement no level of aspiration is set
and the individual has no concern about his own status. Only
when an individual judges his own performance in terms of a
standard he wants to maintain or achieve, does any generality in
levels of aspiration appear with respect to various tasks. Klein
and Schoenfeld [41] found that, when their subjects were in a
neutral non-ego-involving atmosphere, the confidence they had in
their ability to perform various tasks depended almost entirely on
the nature and difficulty of the tasks themselves, whereas in defi-
nitely ego-involving situations (where subjects were told their
scores would be sent to the personnel bureau of the college) a
"generality of confidence" appeared. That the subjects did actu-
ally feel personally involved in the second part of the experiment
is indicated by the report that in the second situation they exerted
greater effort and experienced considerable anxiety. In this ex-
periment the person obviously becomes involved because perform-
ance of the task is believed to have relevance to a value already
interiorized as part of the ego, namely, attendance and gradua-
tion from college and a respectable standing with college author-
ities.

Holt [30] found that, if his subjects had any ego-involvement
in the abilities needed to perform his experimental task, the esti-
mates thus made of their performances were determined signifi-
cantly less by the objective situational variables than when there
was little ego-involvement. If there is less ego-involvement, "a
level of aspiration is of a piece with the total response to the situa-
tion of the experiment; in that sense it is more specific, more

126 EXPERIMENTS ON EGO-INVOLVEMENTS

peripheral and responsive to outer environmental forces." [314]
Heathers' [26] study of generality in the level of aspiration points
to the same conclusion. In a study of saturation with tasks after
repeated performance, Karsten discovered in 1928 [37] that her
subjects became more rapidly saturated (annoyed, impatient, emo-
tionally upset) with tasks judged to be very pleasant or very un-
pleasant than with indifferent tasks or those only mildly pleasant
or unpleasant. As Koffka concludes from this experiment "the
relation of the task to the Ego is the decisive factor. In the indif-
ferent task the Ego is not 'engaged/ with the result that Ego ten-
sions are less easily produced." [42, 412]

In an ingenious experiment where pairs of subjects worked to-
gether, one performing a task and estimating his performance
ahead of time, the other estimating what his partner would do,
McGehee [49] found considerably less variability among the levels
of aspiration of those actually involved in the task than in the
estimates of the observers. McGehee concludes that this difference
"seems to lie in the fact that the ego-levels of the subjects are more
involved in the erection of levels of aspiration than in making a
judgment." [14] This distinction between level of aspiration and
judgment obscures the relationship between them and violates
what we know of the process of judgment itself, namely, that all
judgments take place within some frame of reference. The esti-
mates of McGehee's subjects who were actually engaged in the
tasks are obviously just as much judgments as the estimates of the
observers. But, whereas one set of judgments is based upon frames
or anchorages that are ego-involved, the other set of judgments
is based on non-ego-involved frames or anchorages and is there-
fore more determined by immediate past performance of the par-
ticipating partner or other variables in the situation itself.

EGO-INVOLVEMENTS AS A SET FOR LEARNING

In chapter 4 we cited some of the studies that show the close
relationship between memory and frame of reference. In all these
studies dealing with everyday life material, it is clear that the in-
vestigators were concerned with ego-involving attitudes — attitudes
that have been learned, largely as social values; that the individual

EGO-INVOLVEMENTS AS A SET FOR LEARNING 127

identifies himself with, and makes a part of himself; and that have
affective properties of varying degrees of intensity. Thus, the
effect Seeleman [58] found of the attitude toward the Negro on
the memory of pictures of whites and Negroes clearly provokes
a value judgment with which most Americans at the present time
identify themselves in one way or another and in different degrees
of intensity. Zillig's well known study [66] of the differential
ability of men and women to recall items favorable to their own
sex implicitly involves or reflects sex differences in ego composi-
tion as learned. Edwards [17, 18] showed the superior recogni-
tion of items favorable to a political point of view which the
individual espouses and the extent to which an individual ration-
alizes answers to factual statements not in harmony with his atti-
tude, implicitly demonstrating what is common knowledge,
namely, that in the contemporary United States, an individual
regards the party he votes for as his party, party platforms as his
expressed point of view, and party candidates as his candidates.
Similarly, the results of Levine and Murphy [43] showed that
both the learning and forgetting of material favorable to or against
the Soviet Union is affected by one's attitude toward Communism,
is most definitely concerned with ego-involved attitudes, as any-
one can testify who observes the identification an individual Com-
munist makes with Marxism or the Communist Party, or who
has seen the emotional involvement of those who oppose Com-
munism as something which threatens "all that they hold dear."
Birch [6] also noted the definite tendency for his subjects who
approved a statement labeled "communist" to write more com-
ments than usual, dissociating themselves from Communism as
such or otherwise qualifying their answers.

Wallen's experiments in 1941 [63, 64] yielded clear-cut evidence
that the selective forgetting of ego-involved material differs sig-
nificantly from the selective forgetting of material unrelated to
the ego. Subjects were given a list of adjectives on which they
made self -evaluations. They were then divided into two groups:
one group was later given orally a list of bogus ratings on the
same adjectives supposedly made by some acquaintance on the
subject; the other group was later given bogus ratings but were
told these were ratings on unidentified people. His results showed

128 EXPERIMENTS ON EGO-INVOLVEMENTS

that the recall of the former group was significantly higher than
the latter. In the former group bogus ratings which agreed with
the subject's own evaluation were considerably better remembered
than others, whereas in the second group no such tendency oc-
curred: those who had bogus ratings on themselves recalled de-
sirable ratings more accurately than those they regarded as un-
desirable, so much so that the final recall was actually much more
like the original list of self-evaluations than the material actually
presented for recall. Wallen believed that "the difference in in-
structions for the two groups can be cogently interpreted only in
ego terms" [64, 36] and that "some assumption regarding an ego
is needed in interpreting our results." [36] A later experiment
by Shaw and Spooner [59], again involving a list of adjectives on
which a specified person was to be rated, bogus ratings, and de-
layed recall, found superior recall of the adjectives in line with the
subject's own initial characterization or judgments.

These results are comparable in their implications to the con-
clusions reached by Wolff [65] and Huntley [33] in their studies
of judgments of expressive behavior (voice recording, handwrit-
ing, profiles, and the like). They found their subjects generally
made much more favorable judgments of samples of their own
expressive behavior and that in nearly all cases judgments of one's
own behavior or features took on the characteristics of an extreme
reaction, even though few of the subjects consciously recognized
which behavior or feature presented was their own. Such experi-
ments demonstrate in a significant way that an individual's body
and his physical personal characteristics constitute an integral part
of his ego.

In a study of repression, Rosenzweig [56] set up his experiment
so that one group would be "aroused in a personal way" whereas
the other group was in a relatively neutral situation. Both groups
were asked to recall tasks they had been assigned, only half of
which they had been allowed to complete. Differences in recall
were clear-cut: those who had become personally involved remem-
bering more finished tasks, those not involved more unfinished.
Similar findings were later reported by Lewis and Franklin. [45]
Alper's results [2] show very neatly that retention and recall are
considerably different for subjects who are or are not ego-involved

EGO-INVOLVEMENTS AS A SET FOR LEARNING 129

(she uses the terms "ego-oriented" and "task-oriented") and that
the three "classical" laws of learning she analyzed can be said to
hold only when there is no ego-involvement.2

In his study of recognition, published in 1911, Claparede pointed
out that "One must distinguish between two sorts of connections:
those which establish themselves eventually between ideas, and
those which establish themselves between the ideas and that which
constitutes the Ego, the personality. In the case of purely passive
or reflex association of ideas the first kind of connections will
function alone; in the case of voluntary recall or of recognition,
where the Ego is involved, the second kind would play its part." 8
[14, 56] Koffka relates how he refused to take Claparede's for-
mulations seriously in his own early thinking because the problem
of the Ego was not prominent in psychology. After praising
Claparede's insight and reviewing Claparede's theory as it related
to his own conception of trace systems and the Ego, Koffka con-
cludes that

... in the structure of the behavioural environment there are things
close to and remote from the Ego and even some that have practically
no Ego-connection. According to the theory, and to all appearances in
conformity with the facts, the former are better recognized than the
latter. In many cases the Ego-object relationship will be, at least
partly, due to the interests and attitudes of the Ego. Thus whatever
has interested us, attracted our attention, is relatively easily recognized.
[42,595/J

And Koffka goes on to quote Maccurdy's contention that "The
things we deny ever having done, in the face of ample testimony

2 Alper concludes that ego-involved performances go beyond Ebbinghaus* three
laws, whereas Bruner states that his results go beyond Weber's law (p. 75).
Variations in other psychological functions (such as "social perception") are being
obtained which go beyond classical laws in those fields. All these "going be-
yonds" can be accounted for in a conceptual scheme if they are taken as special
cases of referential frameworks with different factors (anchorages) coming into
play to modify experiences one way or another. Likewise, the apparently contra-
dictory variations sometimes obtained in level of aspiration experiments done
under different conditions can be easily explained if they are seen as so many
special cases of referential frames and different anchorages coming into play to
produce the results. This point has been nicely formulated by Chapman and
Volkmann (p. 121) and Pauline Sears (p. 122).

8 This translated Quotation is taken from Koffka. [42, 5951

130 EXPERIMENTS ON EGO-INVOLVEMENTS

from honest observers, are acts performed 'absent-mindedly,' auto-
matically. Automatic behavior has no me-ness attached to it." [46,
124]

Those who try to account for learning on the basis of some
relatively static conception may object that the differential learn-
ing found in ego- versus non-ego-involved situations represents
nothing more than the operation of different conditions of learn-
ing, and that the introduction of "ego-involved" situations is there-
fore quite unnecessary. We have emphasized that we regard the
ego as a product of learning. And when the psychology of learn-
ing is fully understood, we shall have much more precise knowl-
edge of the ego's development than we do now. What the ex-
periments on ego-involvement and memory show is the necessity
of recognizing the fact that the learning situation is differently
organized for the individual when he feels that he is somehow
involved and that this organization, this interest determination or
interest setting as Bartlett calls it, affects what will be learned and
how learning will take place.

EGO-INVOLVEMENTS SHOWN IN THE INTENSITY OF ATTITUDES

In previous chapters we established the fact that attitudes are
learned either as the result of direct contact with a person or a
group or by means of transmission of social norms through short-
cut verbal value judgments. We also pointed out that most atti-
tudes of everyday life concerned with concrete social situations
have affective and motivational properties of varying degrees.
And we cited numerous studies which showed the effect of these
attitudes on perception, judgment, and behavior. We pointed out
that the affective properties of attitudes derived from noninstinc-
tual sources is due to the fact that these attitudes were formed in
relation to social values or norms which in themselves are stand-
ardized affective fixations, (p. 20/.)

We were careful throughout our earlier discussion of the prop-
erties of attitudes to state that affect or emotional involvement was
of varying degrees. It is obvious that a sophisticated Negro who
has suffered job discrimination will follow the course of fair em-
ployment legislation much more anxiously than a white person

EGO-INVOLVEMENTS SHOWN IN THE INTENSITY OF ATTITUDES 131

or another Negro who has only a mild hope that something can
be, done to improve the status of Negroes. We know that, by and
large, a big employer or major stockholder is more likely to take
some overt action to counter union demands for higher wages
than some relatively disinterested person whose attitude toward
the union may, however, be just as unfavorable when judged from
conversation or measured by an ordinary attitude scale. We have
seen since the end of World War II how the Jews in the United
States have taken the initiative in forming committees or groups
of one kind or another to seek some kind of government or inter-
governmental help for the tortured and displaced Jews of Europe,
while many other Americans whose attitudes toward the European
Jews may have been just as favorable as that of some of their Jew-
ish countrymen did nothing more than read with a sigh accounts
about these efforts of assistance. In such cases we say that "self-
interest" is involved. And we mean by this that individuals iden-
tify themselves with different degrees of intensity to various social
causes, principles, ideals. In other words, the intensity with which
we hold those attitudes formed in relation to social values or those
personal attitudes formed in relation to particular surroundings
or experiences depends on the degree to which those attitudes are
ego-involved. Bruner's finding that poor children overestimated
the size of coins more than rich children (p. 75) points to the
fact that the value of coins as perceptual objects was clearly de-
termined by ego-involving attitudes which varied in their intensity
for the two groups of children.

Studies concerned with the intensity of attitude and the relation
of intensity to the content or direction of attitude can, it seems
to us, only be interpreted by regarding the reference scale by means
of which a person judges the relative importance to him of the
attitudes he holds as ego-involved. This degree of ego-involve-
ment, this intensity of attitudes, will determine in large part which
attitudes he will cling to, how annoyed or frustrated he will feel
when his attitudes are opposed, what action (within the range of
his individual temperament and ability) he will take to further
his point of view.

In an attempt to draw a distinction between the intensity of an
attitude and its direction and to determine the relationship of

132 EXPERIMENTS ON EGO-INVOLVEMENTS

these two variables, Cantril [11] constructed two simple attitude
scales, involving several alternatives which were rated by judges
as to the place each alternative statement should occupy on an
attitude continuum which ranged from most favorable to most
unfavorable attitude. Two scales, one dealing with the attitude
toward the Negro and the other with government regulation of
business, were included in separate nationwide samples of 1200
adult white people in the United States. After an individual had
indicated the statement that best expressed his own point of view,
he was asked how strongly he held this opinion— very strongly,
fairly strongly, or not caring much one way or the other.

The results, shown in Charts 1 and 2, indicate that, the more
extreme an attitude is in its direction, the more intensely it is
likely to be held.

Comparable results have been reported by Stouffer and his asso-
ciates in their work with the Information and Education Division
of the Army Service Forces [61]. These investigators used a bat-
tery of different questions to construct a scale on the "content"
of an attitude and then measured the intensity (or certainty) of
opinion. These scales were administered to Army populations.
Their results, too, show that intensity is highly correlated with the
extremity of an attitude. "A series of questions which form both
a content and an intensity scale, will produce an invariant U-shaped
curve." [4] This U-shaped curve, seen in the charts, may tend to
err on the conservative side, in view of the fact that the results
were obtained by the usual interviewing method where the inter-
viewer asks the respondent his opinion. From comparisons of
opinions obtained with comparable samples when "secret," as op-
posed to "nonsecret," ballots are used, we know that there is a
tendency for people to answer in the direction of what they re-
gard as the socially approved norm when asked their opinion on
nonsecret ballots dealing with controversial issues. This tendency
to conformity on the nonsecret ballot is itself obviously a further
demonstration of the fact that individuals feel themselves per-
sonally involved in expressions of their opinions and seek to raise
their status in the eyes of the interviewer. This tendency was
significantly revealed, for example, in the finding that 13 per cent

EGO-INVOLVEMENTS SHOWN IN THE INTENSITY OF ATnTUDES 133

\J6*

21%,

0123456789 10
Unfavorable Favorable

CHART 1. Direction and intensity of opinion toward the Negro.

,23%

0123456789 10
Unfavorable Favorable

CHART 2. Direction and intensity of opinion toward Government ownership.

134 EXPERIMENTS ON EQO-INVOLVEMENTS

more of the secret ballot group than of the interviewed group
stated that they Jiad no schooling. [62]

It is the intensity with which an attitude is held, the degree of
ego-involvement it has for the individual, that in large part de-
termines the consistency of opinion, the tendency to discern the
relationship of a variety of specific issues to some basic frame of
reference. Katz' analysis [39] of public opinion poll results ob-
tained before Pearl Harbor shows that those Americans who
strongly believed we should help England even at the risk of
getting into the war ourselves were more consistent in other re-
lated attitudes than those who shared this opinion but did not
hold it so intensely. A scale constructed to measure the intensity
of political interest rather sharply distinguished voters from non-
voters and aided in the prediction of the political behavior of
various groups. [10, 191 f.] Postman and Zimmerman [53] have
shown that, the more intensely an attitude is held, the shorter is
the decision time of judgments based on that attitude.

STATUS AND CLASS IDENTIFICATION AS EGO-INVOLVEMENTS

We have stated that one important reason why attitudes are
affectively charged is the fact that many attitudes prescribe the
individual's relationship, status, or role with respect to other in-
dividuals or groups (such as teacher, worker, boss, minister, assist-
ant). And experiences connected with status are affectively
charged (p. 21). We pointed out further that attitudes related
to role or status are ego-involved.

In his discussion of the "social" self, James made it quite clear
that status identification often determines behavior in everyday
life. It is a man's

. . , image in the eyes of his own "set," which exalts or condemns
him as he conforms or not to certain requirements that may not be
made of one in another walk of life. Thus a layman may abandon a
city infected with cholera; but a priest or doctor would think such an
act incompatible with his honor. A soldier's honor requires him to
fight or to die under circumstances where another man can apologize

STATUS AND CLASS IDENTIFICATION AS EGO-INVOLVEMENTS 135

or run away with no stain upon his social self. . . . The thief must
not steal from other thieves; the gambler must pay his gambling debts,
though he pay no other debts in the world. [35, 294 /.]

In later chapters we will see how an individual identifies him-
self with and regards as a part of himself the particular constella-
tion of values he learns from his environment. On the basis of
this learning the individual defines his own role or status: he
learns what group or groups he belongs to; what other groups
are regarded as "higher" or "lower" than his own; what groups
are to be regarded as enemies, antagonists, or competitors; what
as allies, helpers, or friends. For example, the behavior of the
American GJ. abroad during and after World War II often em-
phasized in striking fashion to people in foreign countries the
status roles defined by their own norms. Hilgard has reported
some of his observations made during the spring of 1946, of the
effect of G.I. behavior on the Japanese:

Japanese etiquette requires courtesy to those above you in status,
and does not demand much consideration between equals. . . . The
lack of regard for status, foreign to the Japanese, is admired. GJ.'s
like to ride in rickshaws, for the novelty of the experience, but they
are just as likely to have a little fun pulling one. This sort of be-
havior would be unheard of among Japanese, but it is not found
repugnant. [29, 347]

The same American GJ.'s would, of course, probably find their
ideas of status violated by any behavior on their own home ground
that deviated from discrimination concerning race, class, or sex
prescribed by norms of their own.

We have already mentioned a number of experiments concerned
with the effect an individual's place in a group has on his level
of aspiration. A considerable body of data has by now accumu-
lated from other controlled studies which further emphasize the
fact that a person defines his role, his status, his class, on the basis
of the anchorage provided him by values which he has made part
of himself. By means of these anchorages he makes relevant
judgments both of his own place in society and the place of
others.

136 EXPERIMENTS ON EGO-INVOLVEMENTS

An especially revealing demonstration of such an anchorage is
the study of Marks [48] on Negro judgments of skin color and
personal attractiveness. Following up by controlled experimenta-
tion Johnson's field observations [36] that the judgments of Negro
youth on the skin colors of other Negroes tended to depend upon
the rater's own skin color and his observation that more favorable
characteristics tended to be associated with lighter colors, Marks
had each student in his class (all Negroes) rate every other student
on certain characteristics including skin color, personal charm,
desire to know the person well, on an eight-point scale. He found
a high correlation between ratings on lightness of skin color and
ratings on personal charm and "a tendency to displace the ratings
of subjects considered attractive in the direction of the preferred
color." [48, 376] Particularly important for our purposes here is
the finding that the reference scale by means of which each sub-
ject judged skin color was relatively

. , . independent of the subjects rated but not of the rater's own
past experience. It appears further that each judge's rating scale tends
to be egocentric, Le.t a subject is seen as darker or lighter than the rater
and judgments are made accordingly. In such a scale the relative
position of each subject will be the same for the different raters but
the absolute position of a given subject will vary from rater to rater.
[48, 374, italics ours]

Marks further points out that

The relation between the judge's own skin color and his rating of
others seems to have particular importance for the theory of social
perception. The "egocentricity" of the reference scale of skin color
judgments may well apply to judgments of any characteristic to which
social value is attached, [375]

The goal of neutral emotional content frequently involves a re-
structuring of our social perceptual field. The individual minimizes
his own deviation (slight or great) from the "normal" by displacing
his perception of other individuals so that they are seen as above or
below average in terms of their difference from himself, [48, 375]

The subjects in these groups, Marks believed, were in large part
striving to conform to an average or group norm in an attempt
to regard themselves as inconspicuous, to achieve a "neutral emo-

STATUS AND CLASS IDENTIFICATION AS EGO-INVOLVEMENTS 137

tional content" as discovered from their own past experience in
the process of socialization.

This investigation confirms in a particularly clear-cut way two
points we should again emphasize: (1) in the process of genetic
development the individual's physical body and its characteristics
constitute an early and important part of the ego. Judgments of
the physical characteristics of others (such as their height, their
stoutness, their strength, their beauty) become, therefore, ego-
involving judgments in which an individual uses himself or his
own characteristics as a central point of reference (ch. 7). (2) If
the stimulus field is relatively well-structured, has certain discern-
ible and compelling objective properties, an individual's frame or
scale is almost bound to be determined in part by them. Thus, as
Marks indicates:

The very dark individual cannot conceive himself as "neutral" in
color because his social environment insists upon the "objective" facts.
A compromise results, in which the deviation may be minimized
(perceived as less extreme by the individual than it is by others) but is
not ignored. [48, 375 f.]

A significant study on the psychology of status is that of Hyman.
[34] After learning from an intensive interview of each of his
subjects something of the meaning, genesis, criteria of, and satis-
faction with status, he constructed scales to measure subjective
status along several dimensions: general status, economic, intel-
lectual, cultural, social, and physical attractiveness. Subjects were
also asked to indicate their subjective status with reference to
different groups: the total adult population in the United States,
friends and acquaintances, and their occupational group. He
found that "within each status dimension an individual's judg-
ment of his status shifts when reference groups are changed." [49]
Among other results reported, the following are particularly sig-
nificant for our purposes here: individuals strive for status with
respect to those accomplishments or characteristics which they
most highly value; when an individual's status is approximately
similar to die status of the group he is using as a basis for com-
parison, then he shows no particular concern for his own status,
no great drive to achieve a higher status; persons who regard the

138 EXPERIMENTS ON EGO-INVOLVEMENTS

difference between their own status and a reference group as being
determined by a social system they disapprove of also show little
dissatisfaction with their own status.

Hyman emphasizes the contrast between subjective and objec-
tive status:

The variables of status are mediated through an individual who
acts selectively in his choice of reference group, who strives selec-
tively for status, whose personal values affect the composition of
status and the emotional concomitants of a given status, whose con-
ceptualization of a reference group may be different from its actual
character, who is not affected by all aspects of the culture nor by all
references in the environment. This essentially personal aspect of
status cannot be ignored. We cannot deal with these variables inde-
pendent of their meaning to individuals. [34, 80]

This study clearly indicates that an individual's conception of his
own status or the status of his group invariably depends upon the
other groups to which he compares himself or his own group. In
other words, he uses himself or his group as the anchoring point,
and his own subjective status varies according to the scale pro-
vided.

In chapter 4 we learned from several independent investigations
[4, 40, 52] that individuals easily characterize various occupational
groups and rank them according to a hierarchy based on the ac-
cepted social norms established in our social organization. We
saw from Davis' study [16] how children in Soviet Russia ranked
occupations in quite a different way from the manner they are
usually ranked in the United States: lawyers and bankers were
rated low in Russia and skilled workers high.

Gould and Lewis [24] found that an individual defines success
differently when comparing himself to the supposed performance
of college professors than when comparing himself with the sup-
posed performance of WPA workers. Similar results were ob-
tained by Hertzman and Festinger [27]. The experiment of
Preston and Bayton [54] revealed that, although there was no
difference in the level of aspiration of Negro college men when
the experimental group was told it was competing with white
men and the control group told it was competing with Negroes

STATUS AND CLASS IDENTIFICATION AS EGO-INVOLVEMENTS 139

in other colleges, there was a clear indication that those who
thought they were being compared with whites had considerably
less confidence in themselves with respect either to the mainte-
nance of past performance or the attainment of higher scores in
the future. The ego-disturbance or ego-insecurity found here
among those Negroes who believed their past performance was
equal to that of a group generally regarded as "superior" is com-
parable to the feeling of inferiority so commonly found in every-
day life among those who, objectively, are as able, as good-looking,
or as successful as certain other individuals with whom they com-
pare themselves but who, in their eyes, seem superior because of
various status affiliations. In a complementary study, Macintosh
[47] found that when white subjects compared themselves with
the hypothetical scores of Negroes they tended to raise their own
estimates and showed greater confidence in their own abilities.

Psychologists have only recently begun to study the problem of
class identification in contemporary America. We have already
referred to Kornhauser's pioneering attempt to compare the atti-
tudes of individuals whose class placement might be inferred from
the amount and source of their income or from their occupation
(p. 75). Certain differences between the attitudes of members
of the upper, middle, or lower class, as defined by objective cri-
teria, did appear with respect to some social and political issues.
But differences did not show up with reference to those attitudes
which reflected in the 1930's the traditional American ideology of
individual opportunity.

In Cantril's study [9], based on a nationwide survey made in
1941, a sample of the American adult population was asked the
following two direct questions: "Which income group in our
country do you feel that you are a member of — the middle income
group, the upper income group, or the lower income group?" and
"To what social class in this country do you feel you belong —
middle class, or upper, or lower?" Only 3 per cent of over 3,000
people interviewed were unable to place themselves in some social
class, and only 1 per cent could not fit themselves into an economic
class. That these questions were meaningful is further indicated
by the reports of the interviewers who stated that they had no
difficulty at all in getting the answers to the questions.

140 EXPERIMENTS ON EGO-INVOLVEMENTS

The results showed that at that time, and with only these three
alternatives provided for answers, almost nine tenths of the Ameri-
can people identified themselves with the great middle class. This
middle class tradition and ideology has its roots in frontier in-
dividualism and in the relatively high standard of living provided
in this country by natural resources and technological develop-
ments and regarded as a middle class standard. Even 70 per cent
of those who feel they are members of the lower income group
still call themselves members of the middle social group. There
is a strict correspondence between the two class identifications —
social and economic — among only 54 per cent of the representa-
tive population. As Veblen pointed out so strikingly in his Theory
of the Leisure Class, there is a definite tendency for individuals to
regard their social class within a frame of reference provided by
the norms of their social system and frequently unsupported by
the income necessary to solidify their own positions objectively in
the social level they accept as their own. The greatest disparity
between income and social identification is found among the low
income groups, while those who placed themselves higher in the
social scale tended to base their identification less on strictly eco-
nomic criteria, using in addition to income such commonly ac-
cepted values as family background, education, and professional
accomplishments. It is clear from this preliminary study that
nearly every adult American easily thinks of himself as a member
of a class, that the great majority of Americans at that time rather
uncritically identified themselves with the middle class which has
for so long been the traditional bulwark of American ideology.
Because of this middle class identification it is not surprising that
Kornhauser found many inconsistencies in the attitudes people
"logically" should have as members of different economic or occu-
pational groups and the attitudes they actually do have.

The most thorough psychological analysis to date of class struc-
ture in America is that of Centers [12]. He carefully designed
a questionnaire which would reveal subjective class identification,
attitudes toward major economic and social issues, adherence to
certain traditional conceptions of American ideology (for example,
that this is a land of freedom and opportunity), occupation, re-
ligious affiliation, nationality background, and the like. The ques-

STATUS AND CLASS IDENTIFICATION AS EGO-INVOLVEMENTS 141

tionnaire was used in a public opinion survey in the summer of
1945. Approximately 1,100 representative adult white men in the
United States were personally interviewed. It should be remem-
bered that Centers' survey was made before the end of World
War II, that is, while both labor and management were still by
and large submerging their differences in the interests of the war
effort.

The question used by Centers to reveal subjective class identifi-
cation included the additional category of "working" class. This
wording makes possible a more accurate and objective class dif-
ferentiation (and one apparently understandable by the popula-
tion) in terms of relationship to the processes of production and
exchange in contemporary society.4 Centers' over-all national re-
sults on class identification are as follows, to the question: "If you
were asked to use one of these four names for your social class,
which would you say you belonged in: the middle class, lower
class, working class, or upper class?"

Upper 3%

Middle 43

Working 51

Lower 1

Don't know 1

Don't believe in classes 1

This subjective identification with one of the four classes de-
scribed correlates highly with an individual's economic status as
judged by the interviewer (see Table 1). It is possible, then, to
make a prediction of some reliability concerning class identifica-
tion from an individual's income or standard of living. That
those who identify themselves with the working class realize the

4 The difference between Centers' findings and those already reported by Cantril,
as well as other results of the same type found in surveys of the American
Institute of Public Opinion and the Fortune poll provide an excellent example of
the effect of the wording of questions on results obtained in public opinion surveys
and the consequent need for caution in interpretation until issues or groupings
have been variously sliced. In Centers' survey for example (had sufficient funds
been available) it would have been revealing to substitute on a comparable sample
of the population the word "laboring" for "working" class. Other obvious pos-
sibilities also come to mind — the use of categories such as "management," "white
collar," "professional."

142 EXPERIMENTS ON EGO-INVOLVEMENTS

relative uncertainty and precariousness of their jobs is revealed by
Centers' finding that when asked which kind of job they would
choose, those who put themselves in the working class gave as
their most frequent reply "a job which you were absolutely sure
of keeping," whereas those who put themselves in the middle class
gave as their most frequent reply "a job where you could express
your feelings, ideas, talent, or skill."

TABLE i

[CLASS IDENTIFICATION BY ECONOMIC STATUS

Don't

Don't Believe

Economic Status

Upper

Middle

Working

Lower

Know

in Class

Total

Above average

75%

14%

0.5%

100%

Avcracc

100

4 X V Wl <*£W

Below avcracc

100

Particularly striking is the relationship found by Centers be-
tween subjective class identification and objective status as defined
by occupation. As Chart 3 shows, approximately three quarters of
all manual workers, whether skilled, semiskilled, or unskilled, feel
they belong to the wording class.5 On the other hand approxi-
mately the same proportion of business owners and managers and
of professional people put themselves in the middle class. White
collar workers, farm owners, and managers appear to have a
somewhat more ambivalent position. The chart shows beyond
any shadow of doubt that the American people do identify them-
selves with a social class and that this identification is highly cor-
related with the particular role they play in our highly indus-
trialized society.

A special study of foremen in American factories made by the
Opinion Research Corporation in 1945 [51] shows that the ma-
jority of them identify themselves with management rather than
with the workers. Furthermore, of particular significance is the
fact that, the longer the foremanship tenure, the greater is the
tendency to identify with management rather than with labor.
The study also shows that foremen who were former union mem-
bers identify themselves with management almost as much as

5 These charts were designed by Richard Centers.

STATUS AND CLASS IDENTIFICATION AS EGO-INVOLVEMENTS H3

3 =

144 EXPERIMENTS ON EGO-INVOLVEMENTS

those who had not been union members (57 per cent compared
to 62 per cent). Foremen clearly occupy an ambivalent member-
ship position in our social organization. What identification they
may once have had with workers tends to disappear; their loyalties
become relatively mixed; they are not part of management, yet
they tend to identify themselves with those in the "top" positions
of authority and control.6 Table 2 shows the answers given by
764 foremen to the question: "There are several views as to the
place that foremen occupy in relation to management and the

TABLE 2
FOREMAN IDENTIFICATION BY LENGTH OF FORBMANSHIP TENURE

Neither,

Foremanskip Tenure

Casts

Management

Workers

in Between

Don't Know

Under 2 years

227

49%

22%

26%

2-5 years

169

Over 5 years

365

No answer

Total 764 59% 20% 20% 1%

workers. Would you say that foremen are a part of management,
or that they are more like workers?"

The various occupational groups that members of the working
and middle classes assign to their own class in Centers' study are
shown in Charts 4 and 5. Charts 6 and 7 indicate some very
significant aspects of class identification. Here there is a compari-
son of the definitions given to the two major classes, middle and
working, by each of two objectively different occupational strata.
A striking fact is that though people may differ greatly in their
objective status they define the class with which they identify
themselves in essentially similar fashion. Middle class and work-
ing class apparently means about the same thing to one stratum as
to another. Yet it is noteworthy that the discrepancies that do
occur in the contrasting conceptions of a given class are systemati-
cally biased in favor of inclusion in the class of "members" of the
individual's own occupational group.

°For a more detailed discussion of the status of foremen see [22].

STATUS AND CLASS IDENTIFICATION AS EGO-INVOLVEMENTS 145

As would be expected, reliable differences appear between the
attitudes of working class and middle class members with respect
to attitudes concerned with basic socioeconomic issues. Centers
constructed a scale of radicalism-conservatism from six separate
questions (such as giving the working people more power and
influence in government, government ownership of industry,
sympathy with workers versus employers in strikes). As Table 3
indicates, those who are middle class are considerably more con-
servative than the working class. Differences of opinion between

TABLE 3

CLASS IDENTIFICATION BY RADICALISM-CONSERVATISM
Class Identification

Attitude Position
Radical
Conservative
Indeterminate

Middle

Working

Per

cent

Cases

cent

Cases

177

314

201

186

100 467 100 564

the working and middle class found by Centers are probably con-
servative, in view of the facts that most public opinion interviewers
are themselves members of the middle class, and we know from
Katz' study [38] opinions reported by working class interviewers
tended to be definitely more radical than those reported by middle
class interviewers on working people.

It is significant that, although the percentage of working class
people who are defined in Centers' scale as conservatives is only
about half as great as those defined as conservative in the middle
class, there are still more working class people in the conservative
than in the radical group. This demonstrates that class conscious-
ness does not rapidly and spontaneously arise. It requires leader-
ship and organization to transform a loose numerical class into a
compact psychological class. It is therefore important to bear in
mind the distinction between objective and subjective class differ-
entiation. As of 1945, although a plurality of American men
identified themselves with the working class, they can by no means

146

EXPERIMENTS ON EGO-INVOLVEMENTS

be regarded as highly "class-conscious." A breakdown of radi-
calism-conservatism by occupational groups shows, however, a
clear tendency for conservatism to decrease and radicalism to in-
crease as one goes "down" the occupational ladder (Chart 8). It

Big business ownership
and management

Doctors and lawyers

Small business ownership
and management

Store and factory managers

Salesmen

Office workers

Farmers

Factory workers

Laborers

Waiters and bartenders

Servants

0-2%

38%

| 48%

?l& 82%

53%

I 55%

CHART 4. Occupational composition of the working class based on working-class
specifications of the occupational membership.

is also noteworthy that the size of the undecided category increases
as occupational status is lowered. Centers' data further show that
within each occupational category, those who call themselves
members of the working class are less conservative than those who
identify themselves with the middle class.

In brief, we have in Centers' study a demonstration of the fact
that individuals in contemporary America do identify themselves

SOME RECENT REVIEWS OF EXPERIMENTAL LITERATURE

147

with a social class, that this identification is largely determined by
the objective relation or status they have with respect to the means
of production and exchange in an industrial society, and that this
identification tends to be accompanied by characteristic attitudes

Big business ownership
and management

Doctors and lawyers

Small business ownership
and management

Store and factory managers

Salesmen

Office workers

Farmers

Factory workers

Laborers

Waiters and bartenders

Servants

13%

I 40%

1 81%

163%

154%

153%

24%

18%

CHART 5. Occupational composition of the middle class according to the speci-
fications of the middle class.

related to the social organization which has imposed on people
the particular role they have within it.

SOME RECENT REVIEWS OF EXPERIMENTAL LITERATURE

In order to make our position quite clear, we cite some examples
of the conclusions drawn by others who have recently reviewed
the experimental literature on ego-involvement.

148

EXPERIMENTS ON EGO-INVOLVEMENTS

In his discussion of The Ego in Contemporary Psychology
(1943), G. W. Allport [1] brought together much of the recent

100

I I

I i .9-

i- i f .

— .

Business/ professional, ' /
and white collar -W
working class definition /

/
/

/ Manual workers
/*- working class
/ definition

"*"-^

! ! I

.«>£E B^i^^^ls

CD Q 00 0700Ol2l2-35<7»

CHART 6. Comparison of two definitions of working class.

experimental work and reaffirmed the validity of the concept of
ego for modern psychology. But Allport's eclectic approach seems
to us to have somewhat obscured the systematic psychological

SOME RECENT REVIEWS OF EXPERIMENTAL LITERATURE

149

meaning the term should have. He distinguished eight differ*
ent conceptions of the ego as held by psychologists and believes

100

70
60
50
40
30
20
10
0

/ I / Manual workers
/ IK middle class
/ I/ definition

Business, professional,

and white collar
middle class definition

CHART 7. Comparison of two definitions of middle class.

that there is experimental support for all eight of the capacities
of the ego he reviewed, even though among the eight are such
divergent and conflicting characterizations as "the ego as primitive

150

EXPERIMENTS ON EGO-INVOLVEMENTS

selfishness," "the ego as dominance-drive," "the ego as a passive
organization of mental processes," and "the ego as the subjective
organization of culture." In criticizing our earlier discussion of
the ego, he contended that the ego for us is "nothing but 'the
social in man.' " [458] Although we have always maintained and

Large business ownership
and management

Professional

Small business ownership
and management

8796

11% 296

71%

19% 10%

7596

1796 896

5496

3896

35%

2196

White collar workers
Skilled manual workers
Semiskilled manual workers

Unskilled manual workers

Legend
Conservative
Indeterminate
•• Radical

CHART 8. Radicalism-conservatism by occupation.

still do maintain that social values constitute the major portion of
the normal individual's ego, we have not equated the ego with
nothing but social values. We have pointed out in previous
publications that what can be described as "personal" values, as
contrasted with "social" values can and often do constitute an
important part of the egos of different individuals.

For example, Sherif, in 1936, described personal fixations and
evaluations. [60, 120 ff.] In his summary discussion of the ego he
stated:

Values are the chief constituents of the ego. Among these, social
values, which are socially established affective fixations, form the

SOME RECENT REVIEWS OF EXPERIMENTAL LITERATURE 151

major (directive) part. These values are the social in man. [60, 185,
italics not in original]

Cantril [7] wrote in 1940 that the "ego of an individual is essen-
tially composed of the many social and personal values he has
accepted." [197 /.] And again, in 1941 [8], that

Although we do conform in large measure to the common values
of society and do desire a certain amount of social recognition, in
addition to this — and often much more important in terms of felt
significance — we cherish certain values which may be shared by our
family circle, a few professional colleagues, a local community group,
or a political party. And sometimes we cherish, as most important of
all, those values which we have worked out for ourselves and thin\ of
as our own. ... In such instances, we care about recognition only
from a very few people, or the status we may want is status only in
our own eyes. [8, 45f italics not in original statements]

Although Allport is critical of the interpretation of the "ego as
the subjective organization of culture," still, in the last analysis,
the weight of evidence brings him close to our position. He
writes, for example, that "what an individual regards as himself
is undeniably, in large part, socially determined." [1, 458] He
states further that for the normal individual the "ego-system is
made up of the ordinary values which spell out the significance
of life to the individual." [470]

Allport states further that values which cannot be characterized
as "social" must be called "egoistic."

If the ego is nothing but the "social in man," one wonders what to
call all the anti-social impulses and the solitary strivings that are nor-
mally called egoistic? [1, 458]

This is more an ethical than a psychological characterization. And
a mixture of ethics and psychology makes it difficult for psycholo-
gists who want to use the term "ego" in a precise psychological
way to show their colleagues they are not trying once more to
bring into the discipline some modern version of the soul. The
tendency to mix psychology and ethics, to relate the "self in some
way to "selfish" interests, was criticized by Baldwin and Cooley

152 EXPERIMENTS ON EGO-INVOLVEMENTS

around the turn of the century. Baldwin felt that any attempted
equation was "quite beside the mark.'* [5] Cooley pointed out
in 1902 that

Self and other do not exist as mutually exclusive social facts, and
phraseology which implies that they do, like the antithesis egoism
versus altruism, is open to the objection of vagueness, if not of falsity.
It seems to me that the classification of impulses as altruistic and
egoistic, with or without a third class called, perhaps, ego-altruistic, is
empty; and I do not see how any other conclusion can result from a
concrete study of the matter. [15, 126 f.]

Lewis also defines "ego" needs as "selfish" needs [44]. But she
found from her own experiments on co-operative effort that such
a definition was too limited, that subjects working together identi-
fied themselves with one another so that each got satisfaction if
the job at hand was satisfactorily completed, whether by one's
self or one's partner. To interpret this finding, as Lewis has, as
"task orientation" rather than "ego orientation" overlooks and con^
tradicts her own statements that in these co-operative situations
" 'ego-boundaries' may include the needs of other selves or 'egos,'
of groups, of ideals." [45, 214} Her experiment demonstrates
nicely that there can be and is ego-involvement in co-operative
effort as well as in restricted individualistic pursuits,

A somewhat more recent review of experimental literature by
Holt (1945) [30] shows the confusion that results from the at-
tempt to get away from a formulation merely by creating a new
terminology. Holt maintains that the common denominator of
most meanings of ego-involvements is "self-esteem." But he goes
on to say that he cannot use the term "self-esteem involvement"
because it is too narrow to define all the functions that "comprise
the ego."

In summary, the experiments and controlled investigations re-
ported all add up to substantiate further the position that the ego
is a genetic formation made up of a host of personal and social
values and that these values serve the individual as frames of ref-
erence by means of which he makes those judgments that affect
him; that define for him success and failure; that determine his
loyalties and allegiances; that spell out what he conceives to be his

REFERENCES 153

role, his status, his class. Judgments and behavior resulting from
this identification of oneself with a certain constellation of values
we can properly term "ego-involved." "Ego-involvement" is a
general descriptive term that can have many specific and more
precise meanings (such as "ego-enhancement," "ego-gratification,"
"ego-frustration," "ego-support," "ego-misplacement," "ego-expan-
sion," "ego-breakdown"), depending on the particular set of
circumstances in which the ego is involved.

REFERENCES

1. ALLPORT, G. W., The ego in contemporary psychology, Psychol. Rev., 1943,

50, 451-78.

2. ALPER, T. G., Task-orientation vs. ego-orientation in learning and retention,

Am. J. Psychol., 1946, 59, 236-48.

3. ANDERSON, H. H., and H. F. BRANDT, A study of motivation involving self-

announced goals of fifth grade children and the concept of level of aspira-
tion, /. Soc. Psychol., 1939, 10, 209-32.

4. ASCH, S. E., H. BLOCK, and M. HERTZMAN, Studies in the principles of judg-

ments and attitudes: I. Two basic principles of judgment, /. Psychol., 1938,
5, 219-51.

5. BALDWIN, J. M., Social and Ethical Interpretations in Mental Development,

New York: Macmillan, copyright 1897.

6. BIRCH, H. G., The effect of socially disapproved labeling upon a well-structured

attitude, /. Abnorm. 6- Soc. Psychol., 1945, 40, 301-10.

7. CANTRIL, H., The Invasion from Mars, Princeton: Univ. Press, 1940.

9. Identification with social and economic class, /. Abnorm. & Soc. Psychol.,

1943, 38, 74-80.

10. The use of breakdowns, in Gauging Public Opinion (H. Cantril, ed.),

Princeton: Univ. Press, 1944, ch. 13.
11. The intensity of an attitude, / Abnorm. & Soc. Psychol., 1946, 41, 129-

35.

12. CENTERS, R., Psychological Aspects of Socio-economic Stratification: an Enquiry

into the Nature of Class, Princeton Univ., to be published.

13. CHAPMAN, D. W., and J. VOLKMANN, A social determinant of the level of aspi-

ration, /. Abnorm. 6- Soc. Psychol., 1939, 34, 225-38.

14. CLAPAREDE, E., Recognition et Moiite, Arch, de Psych., 1911, 11.

15. COOLEY, C. H., Human Nature and the Social Order, New York: Scribner's,

16. DAVIS, J., Testing the social attitudes of children in the government schools in

Russia, Am. /. Sociol, 1927, 32, 947-52.

17. EDWARDS, A. L., Political frames of reference as a factor influencing recognition,

/. Abnorm. & Soc. Psychol., 1941, 36, 34-50.

18. Rationalization in recognition as a result of a political frame of reference,

/. Abnorm. & Soc. Psychol, 1941, 36, 224-35.

154 EXPERIMENTS ON EGO-INVOLVEMENTS

19. FRANK, J. D., The influence of the level of performance in one task on the level
of aspiration in another, /. Exp. PsychoL, 1935, 18, 159-71.

20. Some psychological determinants of the level of aspiration, Am. J. Psy-

chol, 1935, 47, 285-93.

21. Recent studies of the level of aspiration, PsychoL Bull, 1941, 38, 218-26.

22. GOLDEN, C. S., and H. J. RUTTENBERG, The Dynamics of Industrial Democracy,

New York: Harper, 1942.

23. GOULD, R., An experimental analysis of "level of aspiration," Genet. PsychoL

Monogr., 1939,21, 1-116.

24. and H, B. LEWIS, An experimental investigation of changes in the mean-
ing of level of aspiration, /. Exp. PsychoL, 1940, 27, 422-38.

25. GREENBERG, P. J., Competition in children, Am. J. PsychoL, 1932, 44, 22 1-48.

26. HEATHERS, L. B., Factors producing generality in the level of aspiration, /. Exp.

PsychoL, 1942, 30, 392-406.

27. HERTZMAN, M., and L. FESTINGER, Shifts in explicit goals in a level of aspira-

tion experiment, /. Exp. PsychoL, 1940, 27, 439-52.

28. HILGARD, E. R., E. M. SAIT, and G. A. MAGARET, Level of aspiration as affected

by relative standing in an experimental social group, /. Exp. PsychoL, 1940,
27,411-21.

29. The enigma of Japanese friendliness, Publ. Opin. Quart., 1946, 10,

343-8.

30. HOLT, R. R., Effects of ego-involvement upon levels of aspiration, Psychiatry:

J. BioL & Path. Interpers. Relations, 1945, 3, 299-317.

31. HOPPE, F., Erfolg und Misserfolg, PsychoL Forsch., 1930, 14, 1-62.

33. HUNTLEY, C. W., Judgments of self based upon records of expressive behavior,

/. Abnorm. & Soc. PsychoL, 1940, 35, 398-427.

34. HYMAN, H. H., The psychology of status, Arch. PsychoL, 1942, no. 269.

35. JAMES, W., The Principles of Psychology, New York: Holt, copyright 1890.

36. JOHNSON, C. S., Growing Up in the BlacJ^ Belt, Washington: Am. Council on

Education, 1941.

37. KARSTEN, A., Psychische Sattigung, Psych. Forsch., 1928, 10, 142-254.

38. KATZ, D., Do interviewers bias poll results?, Publ. Opin. Quart., 1942, 6,

248-68.

39. The measurement of intensity, in Gauging Public Opinion (H. Cantril,

ed.), Princeton: Univ. Press, 1944, ch. 3.

40. KAY, L. W., The relation of personal frames of reference to social judgments,

Arch. PsychoL, 1943, no. 283.

41. KLEIN, G. S., and N. SCHOENFELD, The influence of ego-involvement on con-

fidence, /. Abnorm. & Soc. PsychoL, 1941, 36, 249-58.

42. KOFFKA, K., Principles of Gestalt Psychology, New York: Harcourt, Brace,

43. LEVINE, J. M., and G. MURPHY, The learning and forgetting of controversial

material, /. Abnorm. & Soc. PsychoL, 1943, 38, 507-17.

44. LEWIS, H. B., An experimental study of the role of the ego in work: I. The role

of the ego in cooperative work, /. Exp. PsychoL, 1944, 34, 113-26.

45. : and M. FRANKLIN, An experimental study of the role of the ego in work:

II. The significance of task-orientation in work, /. Exp. PsychoL, 1944, 34,
195-215.

REFERENCES 155

46. MACCURDY, J. T., Common Principles in Psychology and Physiology, Cambridge

(England) : Univ. Press, 1928.

47. MACINTOSH, A., Differential effect of the status of the competing group upon

the levels of aspiration, Am. J. PsychoL, 1942, 55, 546-54.

48. MARKS, E., Skin color judgments of Negro college students, /. Abnorm. 6*

Soc. PsychoL, 1943, 38, 370-6.

49. McGEHEE, W., Judgment and the level of aspiration, /. Gen. PsychoL, 1940, 22,

3-15.

50. MURPHY, G., L. B. MURPHY, and T. M. NEWCOMB, Experimental Social Psy-

chology, New York: Harper, 1937.

51. OPINION RESEARCH CORPORATION, Foremen Thinking Today, a .survey made by

the Public Opinion Index for Industry, March 1946.

52. OSGOOD, C. E., and R. STAGNER, Analysis of a prestige frame of reference by a

gradient technique, /. Appl PsychoL, 1941, 25, 275-90.

53. POSTMAN, L., arid C. ZIMMERMAN, Intensity of attitude as a determinant of

decision time, Am. /. PsychoL, 1945, 58, 510-18.

54. PRESTON, M. G., and J. A. BAYTON, Differential effect of a social variable upon

three levels of aspiration, /. Exp. PsychoL, 1941, 29, 351-69.

55. ROSENZWEIG, S., Preferences in the repetition of successful and unsuccessful

activities as a function of age and personality, /. Genet. PsychoL, 1933, 42,
423-41.

56. An experimental study of "Repression" with special reference to need-
persistent and ego-defensive reactions to frustration, /. Exp. PsychoL, 1943,
32, 64-74.

57. SEARS, P. S., Levels of aspiration in academically successful and unsuccessful

children, /. Abnorm. & Soc. PsychoL, 1940, 35, 498-536.

58. SEELEMAN, V., The influence of attitude upon the remembering of pictorial

material, Arch. Psychol., 1940, no. 258.

59. SHAW, F. }., and A. SPOONER, Selective forgetting when the subject is not "ego-

involved," /. Exp. PsychoL, 1945, 35, 242-7.

60. SHERIF, M., The Psychology of Social Norms, New York: Harper, copyright

1936.

61. STOUFFER, S., and associates, Experiments on the measurement of intensity

function and zero-point in attitude analysis, Headquarters, Army Service
Forces, Information and Education Division, Report No. D-l.

62. TURNBULL, W., Secret vs. nonsecret ballots, in Gauging Public Opinion (H,

Cantril, ed.), Princeton: Univ. Press, 1944, ch. 5.

63. WALLEN, R. W., The selective forgetting of material related to subjects' esti-

mates of their own personality traits, Abstracts of Doctoral Dissertations,
1941, no. 35.

64. Ego-involvement as a determinant of selective forgetting, /. Abnorm. &

Soc. PsychoL, 1942, 37, 20-39.

65. WOLFF, W., Selbstbeurteilung und Fremdbeurteilung im wissentlichen und un-

wissentlichen Versuch, PsychoL Forsch., 1932, 16, 251-328.

66. ZILLIG, M., Einstellung und Aussage, Z. PsychoL, 1928, 106, 58-106.

CHAPTER 7
THE GENETIC FORMATION OF THE EGO

We pointed out in chapter 5 that an individual's major attitudes
are not discrete items in his psychological make-up. Attitudes
define a person's identifications and status; determine to an im-
portant degree his conformities and loyalties to his surroundings,
to social groups and institutions. To a great extent, therefore, a
person's experience of himself is related to these attitudinal ex-
periences. In other words, the most important attitudes formed
in relation to one's body, to surrounding objects, persons, institu-
tions, and groups, are ego-attitudes. Inevitably one becomes some-
how ego-involved when his intimate friends, his superior, his
inferior, his family, his school, his church, or his flag are in ques-
tion. Gratifications and frustrations connected with such persons,
groups, or institutions are felt as ego-gratifications and ego-frus-
trations. Attitudes which direct a person to try to outdo others in
everything (competitiveness) or to live and work in harmony as a
group member (co-operativeness) are ego-attitudes, developed by
the norms of the social system in which he lives.1 Whatever we
can learn about these ego-attitudes should contribute to a real
understanding of the "human nature" about which social scientists
and politicians make hasty assumptions in an effort to justify their
theories and practices.

The more we study, the more we find that the ego (the self)
consists mainly of those attitudes formed during the course of
genetic development: attitudes related to one's body, parents,
family, school, church, profession, property, class, and the like.
As attitudes are formed (learned) in the course of genetic develop-
ment, the ego is formed. Starting with the delimitation of one's

1 We are not ignoring the fact that the intensity and expression of attitudes are,
within limits, subject to individual variations.

156

THE GENETIC FORMATION OF THE EGO 157

own body from surrounding objects, ego formation rapidly ex-
pands by the learning of attitudes related to it (ego-attitudes),
particularly after the acquisition of communicable language. This
is repeatedly verified by empirical observations of child develop-
ment, from the earliest to the most recent studies. Ego formation
is not a mystic process. It can be readily detected in the behavior
of the growing child. The social development a child has attained
by the time he reaches school age is not the result of an automatic
blossoming forth of some inherent natural endowment. In view
of the persistence of philosophical speculations concerning the ego,
it is gratifying to find this verification in fact. Indeed the psy-
chology of the early period of ego formation seems to be one of
the firmly established principles in the whole field of psychology.
This is especially significant when we remember that the relevant
observations were collected over a period of many years by ob-
servers who were geographically separated and who had different
theoretical inclinations.

If this fact of ego formation, so well verified in almost every
study on ego development, were given its due place in general
books on child psychology and if its important implications for the
process of socialization of the child were pointed out, it would be
unnecessary for us to review here the ever-accumulating evidence
concerning ego formation in a book on social psychology. But
since the implications have not been systematically brought to-
gether, we shall summarize here some representative studies, from
Tiedemann, Preyer, and Shinn to those of present-day psycholo-
gists. In reviewing these representative observations with a spe-
cific purpose in mind, we shall not ignore variations of the
particular components of a child's developing ego or the factors
which function in such a way as to accelerate or retard develop-
ment. Briefly, it will be seen that both the components of the
developing ego and the speed of its development will vary in terms
of the limitations of the physical surroundings: the kind of treat-
ment (care, resistances, and encouragements) received from adults,
opportunities for language development, contact with cultural
products, symbols, norms, associations with age mates, and so on.
We are interested in the fundamental observations which show

158 THE GENETIC FORMATION OF THE EGO

that a trend in development does occur. And we shall see that, in
spite of variations, the general trend of ego development revealed
in these investigations is essentially similar,

A REVIEW OF SOME STUDIES ON EGO DEVELOPMENT

As early as 1787, long before the appearance of experimental
psychology, Dietrich Tiedemann [46] published his observations
on his son from birth through the third year.2 Many of his reports
are relevant to the problem of ego formation. When the child was
slightly over a month old, Tiedemann wrote that

... the boy did not beat or scratch himself with his hands as
frequently as before; so it seemed that painful, oft repeated experience
had taught him to draw some distinction between himself and foreign
bodies. [46, 210]

One year and four months later:

His power of judgment was even more clearly evident on January
11, 1783, when he recognized his own image in the mirror. . . . Chil-
dren are often held up to the mirror from earliest infancy, and thus
they learn by repeated experience that the image is their own. [46,
222]

When the child was 20 months old, we find a picture far different
from that of the baby beating his own body:

On the 27th of March he could already pronounce words of two
syllables, and knew almost all the external parts of his body, which
he pointed out correctly when their names were mentioned to
him; . . . [46, 225]

In the same year, Tiedemann observed:

The boy did not approve of seeing his sister sitting in his chair of
wearing his clothes; he called these things his things. [46, 227]

Here, the italicized pronoun is evidence of the widening ego for
mation with language development.

2 The records were translated into French a few years later and into English
in 1927.

A REVIEW OF SOME STUDIES ON EGO DEVELOPMENT 159

A new impetus was given to genetic studies with the theory of
evolution and with modern experimental psychology. Charles
Darwin [14] published A Biographical Sketch of an Infant in
1877. His influence is clearly reflected a few years later in the
work of Preyer, who, as we shall see, actually repeated some of
Darwin's methods in observing his own child. At the turn of the
century, genetic studies were made in every country where the
new evolutionary theories spread.8

Early in this period, Preyer observed the growth of his son in
Germany. He wrote:

Before the child is in a condition to recognize as belonging to him
the parts of his body that he can feel and see, he must have had a
great number of experiences, which are for the most part associated
with painful feelings. How little is gained for the development of
the notion of the "I" by means of the first movements of the hands,
which the infant early carries to the mouth, and which must give him,
when he sucks them, a different feeling from that given by sucking
the finger of another person, or other suitable objects, appears from
the fact that, e.g., my child for months tugged at his fingers as if he
wanted to pull them off, and struck his own head with his hand by
way of experiment. At the close of the first year he had a fancy for
striking hard substances against his teeth, and made a regular play of
gnashing the teeth. When on the four hundred and ninth day he
stood up straight in bed, holding on to the railing of it with his hands,
he bit himself on his bare arm, and that the upper arm, so that he
immediately cried out with pain. The marks of the incisors were to
be seen long afterward. The child did not a second time bite himself
in the arm, but only bit his fingers, and inadvertently his tongue.
[57, 189]

Thus, at a time when the attention to what is around is already very
far developed, one's own person may not be distinguished from the
environment. . . . Nay, even in the nineteenth month it is not yet
clear how much belongs to one's own body. The child had lost a
shoe. I said, "Give the shoe." He stooped, seized it, and gave it to
me. Then, when I said to the child, as he was standing upright on
the floor, "Give the foot," ... he grasped at it with both hands, and
labored hard to get it and hand it to me. [190]

* For summaries of the work of this period see [42].

160 THE GENETIC FORMATION OF THE EGO

Another important factor is the perception of a change produced by
one's own activity in all sorts of familiar objects that can be taken
hold of in the neighborhood; and the most remarkable day, from a
psycho-genetic point of view, in any case an extremely significant day
in the life of the infant, is the one in which he first experiences the
connection of a movement executed by himself with a sense-impression
following upon it. [191 j.]

The child that at first merely played like a cat, being amused with
color, form, and movement, has become a causative being. Herewith
the development of the "I" -feeling enters upon a new phase. [57, 193]

As noted earlier, Preyer was inspired by Darwin's work. He
included the following comments and quotations from Darwin:

Darwin recorded of one of his sons, that in the fifth month he
repeatedly smiled at his father's image and his own in a mirror and
took them for real objects; but he was surprised that his father's
voice sounded from behind him (the child). "Like all infants, he
much enjoyed thus looking at himself, and in less than two months
perfectly understood that it was an image, for if I made quite silently
any odd grimace, he would suddenly turn around to look at me.
. . . The higher apes which I tried with a small looking-glass behaved
differently. They placed their hands behind the glass, and in doing
so showed their sense; but, far from taking pleasure in looking at
themselves, they got angry and would look no more." [57, 796]

Preyer found that his child also failed to recognize his own
image at first:

In the fifty-seventh week, however, I held a small-hand mirror close
to the face of the child. He looked at his image and then passed his
hand behind the glass. . . . Then he took the mirror himself and
looked at it and felt of it on both sides. [57, 198]

Thus, Preyer's child initially behaved similarly to Darwin's apes,
only later learning that the image was a reflection of himself.
Preyer further recognized the emergence of the ego at the human
level as a result of learning when he wrote:

More important for the development of the child's ego than are the
observation of the shadow and of the image in the glass is the learning
of speech. ... By means of speech the conceptual distinction of the

A REVIEW OF SOME STUDIES ON EGO DEVELOPMENT 161

"I," the self, the mine, is first made exact; the development, not the
origin, of the "F-feeling is simply favored. [57, 201 /.]

A few years after Preyer's work (1895), J. M. Baldwin [2]
came to similar conclusions concerning ego formation. His obser-
vations were casual and principally of his own children. Without
subscribing to certain theoretical extensions of Baldwin's basic
position (for example, the recapitulation theory), we include some
of his generalizations which later investigations have substantiated.4
Baldwin notes that

... for a long time the child's sense of self includes too much. . . ,
It includes the infant's mother, and little brother, and nurse, in a literal
sense; ... To be separated from his mother is to lose a part of him-
self, as much so as to be separated from a hand or foot. [2, 338 f.]

However, through the infant's interaction with objects and persons
in the environment, his "sense of self" becomes more clearly
defined:

The ego and the alter are thus born together. Both are crude and
unreflective, largely organic, an aggregate of sensations, prime among
which are efforts, pushes, strains, physical pleasures and pains. . . .
My sense of myself grows by imitation of you, and my sense of your-
self grows in terms of my sense of myself. Both ego and alter are thus
essentially social. [2, 338]

Baldwin also touched upon the problem of the moral behavior
of the young child, later systematically developed by Piaget. At
first, the child's moral behavior is a copy of the adult's, followed
with some confusion and without understanding, but finally
learned.

It is its aim— so may the child say to himself [of this code] ... to
have me obey it, act like it, think like it, be like it in all respects.
It is not I, but I am to become it. [2, 345]

The fact that Baldwin early related the problem of ego forma-
tion to that of moral development is especially significant as we
shall see later on.

4 The theoretical work of Baldwin in 1895 has been elaborated by C. H. Cooley
[12] and George Mead [44] who were probably also influenced by James.

162 THE GENETIC FORMATION OF THE EGO

Shinn's studies [59] are among the classics in the child psychol-
ogy of this period. Beginning in 1893, she carefully recorded the
daily behavior of a child for three years. Her faithful records
were published in 1899. More interested in empirical discovery
than in the grand theorizing of her time, such as that of James
and Baldwin, Shinn did not publish a theoretical formulation of
her work until eight years later. She conceived of ego develop-
ment as a constant process proceeding from undiflferentiated
awareness of bodily movements to increasing differentiation and
localization of bodily experiences, which emerge as "the large and
complex consciousness of the somatic self." [vol. 2, 133] Shinn
cites many examples of experiences which were important for the
separation of the child's "self" from its external surroundings.
For example, on the 132d day she wrote:

She was sitting in a horse collar on the floor, and bent herself over
the back of it till the back of her head touched the floor. She righted
herself and tried again, with her head turned sidewise as if to see what
touched her. In this position, she failed to reach the floor; she ...
tried again a full dozen times. . . . Finally ... her mother took her
up. She kept up the same experiment for some days. [59, vol. 1, 143]

In a similar way, the "double sensations" involved in touching
parts of her own body lead to delineation of what is "me" and

"not-mc."

The 181st day her hand came into contact with her ear; she became
at once very serious, and felt it and pulled it hard; losing it, she felt
around her cheek for it, but when her mother put her hand back, she
became interested in the cheek and wished to keep on feeling that.
... To the end of the year, she would . . . feel over her head, neck,
hair, and ears; the hair she discovered in the eighth month, 222d day,
while feeling for her ear, and felt it over and pulled it with great
curiosity. [59, vol. 1, 143]

The child makes other "experiments," as Shinn calls them, after
accidental contact with twigs and household objects, [vol. 1, 144]
Still, a clear notion of "self" develops slowly.

It is possible that even pain is late in clear reference to the bodily
self. Mrs. Beatly's boy, at 10 months old, crying over a bump, called

A REVIEW OF SOME STUDIES ON EGO DEVELOPMENT 163

attention to it by pointing his finger to the wall where he had struck
his head, not at the injured spot. [vol. 2, 115]

In using sign language, in the second year, babies always indicate
the mouth, I think, not the stomach region to express hunger. My
niece at 18 months seems hardly to understand the word "eat" as
distinguished from putting into the mouth, and even confused it with
"kiss." [59, vol. 2, 140]

However, a particularly severe pain was located and remembered.

In the middle of the fourteenth month, 408th day, she burned her
tongue, seizing too hastily upon her potato . . . three days later when
conditions were repeated, the potato before her again ... I asked,
"Doesn't Ruth remember where the potato burned her?" and she
nodded and put her finger to her mouth to indicate the spot. As late
as the 446th day, hearing someone speak of burns, she put her finger
to her mouth with a rueful sound. [59, vol. 1, 151]

We see one of the many ways adult behavior figured in the early
development of this child's ego when "in the fourteenth week, I
kissed her hand suddenly and it flew up as if by reflex, while her
face showed surprise." [vol. 1, 139]

As Preyer noted, the development of language greatly "favors"
the process of ego formation. In the following incident reported
by Shinn, the baby's development of a particular attitude toward
her own body is indicated. This attitude clearly depends upon the
segregation of the physical self from the environment. The in-
fant's use of her own name is particularly interesting in view of
later work on the use of personal pronouns.

The first instance I note of her finding kisses annoying is in the
nineteenth month, when twice she cried, "Way!" (Go away) as I
was about to kiss her; but during the twenty-second month, she often
showed annoyance at them, and I have noted sundry protests as,
"Don't kiss Ruth,-hurts!" [59, vol. 1, 739]

Moore [45] studied her child at the same time as Shinn with
the intent of substantiating the psychological theories of Wundt.
She carefully noted the child's development week by week. For
example:

Twenty-fourth wee\:—Ht did not notice, nor did he appear to see,
a baby, but he smiled at the woman who held her. [47]

164 THE GENETIC FORMATION OF THE EGO

Fiftieth wee\:—TAt stood before a mirror and made grimaces at his
own reflection. He stopped the performance upon perceiving in the
mirror that he was observed. [48]

Fifty-first weefc—He observed another baby with interest. [50]
Fifty-eighth weekj— ... He observed other children closely. [50]
Seventy-seventh wee\:-- ... he at once recognized his own reflec-
tion as that of a "baby." [45, 62]

So this child, by a variety of experience, not all of which are
recorded or included here, not only learned to identify himself,
but learned in addition that others in his world, occupying a
similar status, were somehow like himself.

Moore also contributed observations which show how the
development of communicable language aids in the conceptual
delineations of the ego.

As early as the eighteenth week, he was able to distinguish between
mine and yours, and you and /. It was not until the ninety-sixth week
that he began to use them. In the ninety-seventh week he substituted
/ for Warren and later learned to speak of himself as he probably
because he heard himself thus spoken of. [45, 129]

As we shall see, this general picture has been found later by those
who have investigated the development of language.

In England during this same period, James Sully [62] was
concerned with the development of the "self." His theorizing was
based on a father's diary written two years before Preyer's, on
records made by mothers, as well as on autobiographical material.
His conclusions agree essentially with those of Preyer, Baldwin,
and Shinn. Sully pointed out that the child functions as an
organism before he has any psychological experience of "self," a
fact emphasized much later by Piaget and Susan Isaacs:

The most distant acquaintance with the first years of human life
tells us that young children have much in common with the lower
animals. Their characteristic passions and impulses are centred in self
and the satisfaction of its wants. [62, 231]

Resistances from physical objects help the child experience "this
consciousness of self in its antagonism to a not-self." [235]

A REVIEW OF SOME STUDIES ON EGO DEVELOPMENT 165

The child's entrance into social life through a growing consciousness
of the existence of others is marked by much fierce opposition to their
wishes. [231]

The acquisition of clearer ideas about self and others has been
touched on in connexion with the growth of the boy's language. The
first use of "I" and the contemporaneous first use of "you" (end of
third month) [of second year of life] seem to point to a new awaken-
ing of the intelligence to the mystery of self, and of its unique position
in relation to other things. [444]

By the end of the fourth month [of the second year] we read that
"I" was growing less shy, not merely coming on the scene in familiar
and safe verbal companionship, as in expressions like "I can," but
boldly pushing its way alone or in new combinations. By the sixth
month (two and a half) the name Ningi may be said to have dis-
appeared from his [child's] vocabulary. His rejection of it was for-
mally announced at the age of two years seven and a half months.
On being asked at this date whether he was Ningi he answered,
"No, my name Kiffie [Cliffie]." He then added, "Ningi name of
another little boy." [62, 445]

All these observations are important for our theme. We see that
the child's behavior is first governed by biological needs. By en-
countering resistances of various sorts, this "consciousness of self,
in its antagonism to a not-self" begins to form. During this period,
the "corporeal reference" of self is clearly manifested. [426] But
with the growth of language, the ego formation becomes at the
same time more precise and complex, for the conceptualization of
"self" thus afforded is accompanied by notions (attitudes) of self
in relation to others, as we saw in Sully's illustrations when Cliffie
renounced his baby name.

Still during this elaboration of the ego, confusion as to the
limitations of "I" does occur, particularly when the child encoun-
ters new experiences. Sully reports from George Sand's account
of her childhood an incident that occurred when she was four
years old:

It was at Madrid that she first made acquaintance with one of
Nature's most fascinating mysteries, the echo.

"I studied this phenomenon with an extreme pleasure. What struck
me as most strange was to hear my own name repeated by my own
voice. Then there occurred to me an odd explanation. I thought

166 THE GENETIC FORMATION OF THE EGO

that I 'was double, and that there was round about me another T
whom I could not sec, but who always saw me, since he always an-
swered me."

She spent days in trying to get sight of her double. Her mother
. . . told her it was echo, "the voice in the air!" [62, 496]

The observations relevant to the development of the ego were
sufficiently well-known and in agreement to be summarized in
1909 by Tracy and Stimpfl [63] in their text. In a section entitled
"The Idea of Self," the authors speak of

The phenomena which accompany and indicate the gradual emer-
gence into clear consciousness, of what Taine calls the "unextended
centre," the "mathematical point," by relation to which all the "other"
is defined and which each of us calls "I," or "me." [63, 70]

As we have pointed out in chapter 5, ego components do indeed
function as reference points or anchorages in terms of which the
individual relates himself to his immediate environment and to the
social milieu.

It should be mentioned in passing that some sociologists of the
early 1900's were also concerned with ego genesis. In 1908, Cooley
[13] studied the use of "self words" by a child to see "how far
and in what sense the self-idea is a social conception." [339] He
found the use of personal pronouns, as of all communicable lan-
guage, inextricably bound with social interaction. He concluded:

"7" is a differentiation in a vague body of personal ideas1 which is
either self-consciousness or social consciousness, as you please to loof(
at it. [13, 342 f italics ours]

William Stern [60] referred to the process of ego formation
when he wrote:

At first, however, there is no ego-consciousness, no objective con-
sciousness, but only the very first germs, entirely undifferentiated of
both. [60, 76]

These "very first germs" Stern calls "sense emotional states." [75]
It is not our purpose here to speculate upon the "consciousness" of
an infant. However, it is significant that Stern too concluded
from his own study and those of early investigators (for example,
Preyer and Shinn) that differentiation between the ego and the

A REVIEW OF SOME STUDIES ON EGO DEVELOPMENT 167

outside world ("objective consciousness") occurs in the course of
development and is not present at birth. Stern also wrote that the
child's

. . . life-circle, of which his ego is the very centre, extends at first
only by slow degrees; at first he has to get a sure and firm footing
before he is capable of entering into living relations with his environ-
ment and the strange aims it presents to him. Hence the desires and
impulses that first develop are above all of an egoistic nature. [60,
493]

Stern's material concerning play and fantasy in early childhood
is also revealing:

When we see the child's absolute absorption as he listens to a fairy-
tale and tells an imaginary tale of his own, how earnestly he carries on
his games, and his despair at any interruption, then we recognize that
the illusion of reality is here complete indeed, or very nearly so. ...
And yet the child begins fairly early to feel dimly that other stern
idea of reality possessed by us adults. He notices that many of his
conscious experiences cannot be ended or changed in accordance with
his fancy, but that they force themselves upon him and make their
consequences felt; in short, he begins to realize his dependence on
things outside himself and to endeavour to adapt himself to them.
[60, 283 f.f italics ours]

The classic work of Piaget and his collaborators gives invaluable
information on the development of the ego. In fact, Piaget
[52-56] systematically links the major psychological functions
of infant mentality with the initial lack of and the progressive
development of the ego. On the basis of actual material collected
over a period of years, Piaget concludes that "the younger the
child, the less sense he has of his own ego." [55, 86] In early in-
fancy, "the child does not distinguish between external and inter-
nal, subjective and objective." [86] *

The infant psychologically first floats "about in an undiflferen-
tiated absolute." [54, 128] In this undiflferentiated absolute there
are no psychological boundaries between one's own body and other
objects, between reality and phantasy. Thus a distinct ego experi-

5 See also [53, 197} and [54, 130].

168 THE GENETIC FORMATION OF THE EGO

cnce is the "result of a gradual and progressive dissociation, and
not a primitive intuition." [128] The dominant principle regulat-
ing the orientation of this initial "undifferentiated absolute" is the
satisfaction of the momentary needs or wishes as they arise. Be-
cause child mentality and behavior are governed by the "pleasure
principle," to use the term Piaget borrowed from psychoanalysis,
the child reacts differently to the same objects when his needs or
wishes change. The infant may react positively toward a person
or object at one instant, negatively a little later. He has as yet
established no consistent role and status relationships with other
individuals because consistent ego links are lacking. From the
point of view of adult logic, such behavior is characterized by
contradictions. However, this so-called inconsistency is consistent
in that it follows (or is regulated by) the variations in needs or
wishes as they momentarily arise. This is the stage of pure autism,
and autism "knows of no adaptation to reality, because pleasure is
its only spring of action." [53, 244] As we shall see later, this
undifferentiated state is important in understanding the systematic
extensions of Piaget's theory to ethical and social fields.

Because of the resistances met in the external world, the child
adapts to reality. But in order to adapt, he must begin to make
distinctions between what is himself and what is not. In this
process, logical consistency dawns and gradually develops through
the stages of "egocentrism" and logical thinking. In this "ego-
centric" period, the child talks and acts as if he were the center of
reference of the whole world. There is not much logical consist-
ency, for this can be achieved only when some well-established
premise is followed step by step. In the process of ego develop-
ment, differentiation takes place. Realization of the reciprocal
relations between oneself and other people evolves as one learns
that there are other points of view besides one's own absolutism.
In order to grasp this, the child must be able to separate himself
from the external world.

Although the age locations of these stages, the situations in
which the highest and lowest coefficients of "egocentrism" may be
obtained, the factors influencing the duration or overlapping of
"egocentric" and "logical" stages are important problems for child
and developmental psychology, they are not our present concern.

A REVIEW OF SOME STUDIES ON EGO DEVELOPMENT 169

As we shall see, social, material (economic), and physical condi-
tions in different social systems and classes in which the child
grows may accelerate or retard the appearance of various stages.
Even the particular peculiarities, economic and personal, of a spe-
cific family might produce differential timing. The value of
Piaget's work for us lies chiefly in the demonstration of the general
trend of a child's developing mentality, starting from an undiffer-
entiated absolute dominated by autism, governed chiefly by the
satisfaction of momentary needs or wishes, through the gradual
adaptation to reality as the child meets external resistances. Dur-
ing this process the ego develops.

In the impressive work of Henri Wallon, Les Origines du carae-
tire chez I* enfant [64], which consists chiefly of lectures delivered
at the Sorbonne from 1929 to 1931, we find descriptions of the
affective reactions of the newborn child as well as a detailed ac-
count of the progressive development of the experience and differ-
entiation of one's own body [155-210] and a consciousness of the
ego. [210-265] This latter section of Wallon's work is particularly
important for our present problem. For he brings together here
the diverse factors in genetic development which contribute to the
formation of the ego. Starting with the conception that the ego
is not innately given as a unitary experience at birth, he shows step
by step how the experience of the self is achieved as something
distinct from the surrounding objects and persons as the child
encounters them in the course of his development. This distinc-
tion is achieved only after a progressive and laborious process of
assimilation and identification.6

Moral character appears only as a consequence of the child's
differentiation of himself from other individuals and his aware-

6 "La conscience de soi n'est pas essentielle et primitive, comme le postulent
ceux qui en font I'instrument de la psychologic. Elle est un produit deja tres
differencie de Pactivite psychique. C'est seulement a partir de trois ans que Penfant
commence a se conduire et a se connaitre en sujet distinct d'autrui. Et pour qu'il
arrive a s'analyser, a chercher les formules a Paide desquelles il tentera d'exprimer
son individualite subjective, il lui faut subir une evolution qui le mene jusqu'a
Fadolescence ou a Page adulte et dont les degres et les formes varient conside-
rablement d'une personne a Pautre." [209] "Petit a petit cependant, par un long
travail d'identification et d'assimilation, il apprend simultanement a dechiffrer,
dans ses impressions, le monde qui s'oppose a lui et a s'attribuer comme sien ce
qui va le rendre capable d'opposer a autrui les exigences de sa personne.*' [210]

170 THE GENETIC FORMATION OF THE EGO

ness of the reciprocal relationship he has with others. [205, 221 ff.]
Wallon notes clearly that the notions and values attached to the
developing ego and personality will vary according to the particu-
lar material and social circumstances that surround the particular
child in question.7

Susan Isaacs [31, 32], with her psychoanalytic approach, places
less emphasis on the social factors in development and criticizes
Piaget's systematic presentation on several counts. Without enter-
ing into controversies, we see that Isaacs' results nevertheless sub-
stantiate the general conclusions reached by other investigators
reviewed, including Piaget. Her work again shows that the ego
is not a primitive perception but appears in the course of contacts
with the external world. She remarks that

The first value which the physical world has for the child is as a
canvas upon which to project his personal wishes and anxieties, and
his first form of interest in it is one of dramatic representation. [31,
101]

To him, his wishes, desires or urges, call them what we will, together
with their outcome in emotions, are the one reality. [32, 286]

There is as yet no differentiated ego. Isaacs gives a vivid picture
of early child mentality in which the ego is not yet formed:

In the same way, things "inside" himself literally mean to the child
ir\^ide Ms body. And when the child takes the parents as a controlling
agent, it seems to him that they are thereafter inside his actual body.
They become identified with internal body processes such as intes-
tinal movements, stomach pains, breathing, arid so on; and even with
actual body substances, for example, faeces and urine. [32, 295]

With frustrations of the child's instincts (resistances from his en-
vironment, including that of parents and other persons) starts the
"appreciation of the external world." [288]

7 "En particulier, dans la periode qui suit, clle va s'intcgrer plus ou moms
e'troitement a la notion qui developpera chez Penfant la conscience de sa per-
sonnalite morale vis-a-vis d'autrui. Elle ne peut manquer aussi d'etre plus ou
moins a Pimage des representations suivant lesquelles il apprend dc Padulte a
clefinir scs rapports avcc le milieu physique ct social. Et clle se trouve ainsi
modelee par les conditions dc vie ct dc pcnsec ou le placent les techniques dc
rcxistence, les formes du language, les usages, croyances, connaissances, etc.,
propre a son epoque. Ces variations ne semblent pas avoir d'autre limite quc la
diversite possible des civilisations." [205 f.]

A REVIEW OF SOME STUDIES ON EGO DEVELOPMENT 171

Lewin [39, 40] portrays the developing ego in line with the
Gestalt understanding of the problem.8 The ego is referred to as
a "system or complex of systems, a functional part region within
(the) psychological totality." [40, 56] The development of the
ego is traced from the "undifferentiated absolute." When the
child meets the resistances of inanimate objects, and the opposi-
tions offered by other people, such as parents or nurses, he has to
distinguish between himself and external things. [175]

Analogous to this relatively slight delimitation among the various
inner psychological systems, the functional firmness of the boundary
between his own person and the psychological environment is also
in general less with the child than with the adult. This is expressed,
for example, by the fact, that "I" or self is only gradually formed,
perhaps in the second or third year. [39, 121]

And the slighter "firmness of the boundary" between self and en-
vironment has a direct bearing upon the slighter separation of real
from unreal strata.

As we have seen and shall consider in more detail later, segrega-
tion of the ego from the persons and objects in the child's environ-
ment, language development, and the formation of attitudes to-
wards himself and others are necessary for the child's grasp of
reciprocal relationships. As Charlotte Biihler [7, 8] wrote:

The child is a part of his mother before he becomes an individual
for himself and is part of a definite group for a long time before he
can enter and join any group actively. [7, 380]

Although some of Buhler's observations would seem to throw light
on the problem of ego formation, she refers to it only in passing:

Unfortunately, we know as yet very little about the entire genesis
of the sense of ego in the child. [8, 74]

Horowitz' study [27] on "localization" of the ego is very much
to the point in our review of investigations indicating that the ego
is a genetic formation. The problem in this study was to find at

8 Sec Kohler's Gestalt Psychology [38] and Koffka's Principles of Gestalt Psy-
chology [37].

172 THE GENETIC FORMATION OF THE EGO

what point in the body each individual subject located the "self."
Horowitz varied the procedure to suit the ages of the subjects,
small children and college students. The results show that differ-
ent subjects located themselves in different parts of the body, for
example, head, face, brain, heart, genitals, chest. Horowitz con-
cluded from the results that

The localization of the self as is reported in the literature quoted,
in the responses on our questionnaire, in informal discussion, in the
investigation of children, is not the basic phenomenon one might hope
for to ease an analysis of the structure of the self and personality.
The more or less stable and constant association of the self-concept
with the particular body regions, functions, or external objects or
conditions serves chiefly as a reference point for the individual as a
whole in the situation. [27, 386]

No adequate survey of representative observations relevant to
the problem of ego formation could be written without use of the
vast data accumulated over many years by Gesell and his asso-
ciates. [19-22] In their 1943 publication, Gesell and Ilg sum-
marize these observations as "behavior norms." However, as early
as 1934, Gesell and Thompson included observations of ego forma-
tion. For example, the babies' behavior before a mirror was noted:

At 40 weeks ... the responses tend to be somewhat delayed and
even restrained and sober. [21, 242]

At 56 weeks, on the contrary, social, outgoing response to the image
is characteristically prompt and prominent. The infant seems to be
completely deceived and he acts as though he were in full social
commerce with another child. [241]

It is doubtful whether the infant identifies himself in any way with
the image. Even at the age of 5 years a pair of twin girls made
misinterpretations of their mirror images. Each considered the image
not a self-image, but called it by the name of the cotwin. [21, 241]

In the latter example, the peculiar situation of having a live "self-
image" caused confusion in one aspect of delineating the ego from
what was outside the ego. In 1938, "mirror behavior" was included
among other "behavior norms."

In 1940, the description of the first five years of life is rich with
observations such as these:

A REVIEW OF SOME STUDIES ON EGO DEVELOPMENT 173

The 1-year-old infant is not very articulate. . . . Much of his emo-
tional expression is highly egocentric. He makes very meager dis-
tinction between himself and others. His vocalizations are only
beginning to have a social reference. [19, 31 /.]

[At eighteen months:] His social insights are not much more bril-
liant than his perception of eliminative functions. He is self -en grossed
(not selfish) because he does not perceive other persons as individuals
life himself. \33, italics ours]

[At two years of age:] Pronouns, mine, me, you, and / are coming
into use approximately in the order just given. While his sense of
self is not as totalitarian as it was at eighteen months, it is by no means
sufficiently defined for conceptual verbalization. He is much more
prone to call himself by his given name: "Peter slide down," instead
of "I slide down." [37]

You can bargain with Three. He knows with a clarity that was
quite wanting at Two that he is a person and that you are a person,
and he negotiates reciprocal trade agreements. [44]

He must have a sense of self and of status because he somewhat
disdains such a simple, babyish commission as, "Show me, where is
your nose!" [44]

[The four-year-old] is even beginning to sense himself as one among
many. He is less circumscribed than Three. He has a definite
consciousness of kind, of his own kind. Once during a psychological
examination he asked, "Do you spank children who don't finish?"
A revealing question, which discloses that the 4-year-old realizes his
equivalence with other children who come to the Clinic under similar
circumstances. [19, 48]

These generalizations based on observations conducted under
conditions similar to strict laboratory controls elaborate the general
picture given by earlier investigators. With the realization that
particular behavior at particular times is affected in a major way
by the circumstances of development and learning, both large and
small, we can review the summary of Gesell and Ilg [20] on ego
development "in the culture of today."

The newborn infant has no "clear sense of self-identity."

But as he grows up he must disengage himself from this univer-
sality, and become a well-defined individual. By the time he is five
or six years old he must see himself for what he is. [20, 334]

174 THE GENETIC FORMATION OF THE EGO

As he grows, he must separate himself from his environment by
"experience which sometimes is bitter." Step by step, he under-
goes

... a progressive differentiation which disengages him more fully
from the culture in which he is so deeply involved. Paradoxically this
very disengagement also identifies him more fully with his culture;
he transforms from a mere ward to a working member. [ 334 /.]

At 4 weekjs of age, the baby's face is generally impassive. By
8 wee\s it breaks into a spontaneous social smile at the sight of
another person's face . . . this double reference is at the basis of the
child's socialization and personalization. At 16 weefy the social smile
is spontaneous or self-induced. ... By 25 wee\s he already reacts
differently to a stranger's face. [335]

By 40 wee\s or a year he has made significant advances in self-
discovery. Whether sitting up or lying down, his arms and hands
now have more freedom of movement, and he uses them to explore
his own physical self. At 16 weeks they were at his mouth; at 20
weeks they engaged above his chest. Following the head to foot trend
which is characteristic of development, the hands at 40 weeks (and
later) come down to the thighs. Just as he used to indulge in mutual
fingering, he now makes contact with his genitals when not clothed.
(336}

In the period from 1 to 2 years there is an increasing amount of
social reference. Although the infant-child is capable of long stretches
of self-absorbed activity, he is also given to numerous social advances.
... He extends a toy to a person; he holds out his arm for the sleeve;
he says "ta-ta"; he hands the empty cereal dish to his mother; . . .
By all these tokens and devices, he builds up a vast body of specific
perceptual experience which ultimately enables him to draw the
momentous conclusion that there are other persons in the world more
or less like himself. [336]

Two years is a transitional period when the child both clings to
moorings and cuts from them. Johnny is his name, and in his in-
articulate psychology, the spoken word Johnny which he hears is
nothing more or less than he himself! His name is Johnny as a
person. He will soon use the pronouns you, me, and /, — a further
indication of a fundamental change in the psychology of his self.
[337, italics ours]

"Even by the age of 3 years, the child has attained a well-balanced
sense of self. ... He knows his own sex with assurance. His inter-

A REVIEW OF SOME STUDIES ON EGO DEVELOPMENT 175

est in human anatomy remains strong; he talks freely and naturally
about differences which he has observed. [20, 338 /.]

At four years, Gesell notes: "On occasion, with bravado, he
would like to be a man of the world; but he really is still closely
bound to his mother. He cites her as authority in cases of dispute.
MY mommie s^ys so!" [339] Here, and in the following quota-
tion from Gesell, we see how the child reifies the dictums of
grownups:

Between 5 and 6 years the child ... has lost some of the sopho-
moric traits of 4 year oldness, and has more sense o£ status and pro-
priety. He has a better appreciation of the folkways of culture. He
shows the conservatism of youth in deferring to them, and citing them
to his parents for their consideration. He does not want to be
different from humanity. [20, 340]

Another observation, valuable for our discussion, is, that at about
72 months the child begins "setting up standards for himself,"
forming value judgments about his own behavior.

We have not tried in this review to discover all the details of the
progressive development of the ego. The variety of experiences,
objects, and persons important for different children in different
situations is impressive. From the observations of both early and
more recent investigators, it has become evident, however, that the
ego is not given at birth but is a genetic formation. The infant at
first makes no differentiation between his body and its surround-
ings. When resistances (especially unpleasant ones) are met from
the surroundings (objects and persons), the gradual process of
segregating "self" from "not self" is furthered. As the child ma-
tures and as communicable language is learned, the ego becomes
more precisely defined and is extended by the child with his own
conceptions (attitudes) about the body and other objects, persons,
and situations. This general trend has been repeatedly observed
even though the process of ego formation does show variable
aspects when different children are viewed under different condi-
tions. As we noted previously, these facts and their important
implications for the socialization of the child have not been system-
atically brought out in general books on child psychology. How-
ever, the facts have contributed to the formulations of some

176 THE GENETIC FORMATION OF THE EGO

developmental psychologists and are almost taken for granted.
For example, in her recent book (1945), Goodenough notes that
goals and values can be established and plans for the future can be
made only after a certain development of the ego. [24]

Nothing is more important for the child's future than the level and
type of the goals he sets for himself. And because these goals are not
clearly realized until after the crystallizing effect of verbal formulation
has taken place and the distinction between the self and the not-self
has become sufficiently advanced to give form and pattern to the
child's social attitudes, the period of middle childhood takes on special
importance, for it is then that the child for the first time faces his
future. [24, 423, italics ours]

Such considerations should be paramount in dealing with the
problems of attitude formation in general and ego differentiation
in particular.

Language development and ego formation. Several investiga-
tors (for example, Preyer, Moore, Cooley and Gesell) have stressed
the fact that ego formation is accelerated and expanded as the
child acquires a more effective use of language. Since language
development looms so important in the genetic formation of the
ego, at least a few paragraphs emphasizing its role are necessary.

A number of investigations of language development have
accumulated in recent years. We can refer here to only a few of
them to show what valuable information they furnish concerning
the conceptualization of the self. Since, as we shall see later, the
results of most child study are, to a greater or lesser degree, de-
pendent upon the particular situations under which observation is
made, it is not our problem here to consider the exact percentages
of any language behavior in question found at different age levels
and under different conditions. The relevance of all these results
to the present discussion is the consistent trend reported.

McCarthy [43] observed children when they were in familiar
situations. Her analysis revealed that pronouns "represent about
10 per cent of the total number of words used by the eighteen-
month-old children, and they increase to approximately 20 per cent
of the words used by the fifty-four-month-old children." [725]
Pronouns, of course, serve as conceptualizations of the self and

A REVIEW OF SOME STUDIES ON EGO DEVELOPMENT 177

others. Fisher's observations [17] of children from 18 to 60 months
of age in nursery school situations also show a progressive increase
in the use of pronouns in relation to one's self and others with age.
She found "a significant positive relationship between use of we,
our, and us and chronological age." [74] No child used these
pronouns before the first half of the third year. In Fisher's words,
this increase with age suggests "a gradually increasing awareness
of membership in a larger group." [56]

The almost traditional interest of some sociologists in the process
of ego formation is shown again by Bain's observations on his
child. [1] Noting that his study agreed with those of Preyer,
Shinn, and Cooley, he wrote "that infants learn the names of
others before they learn their own." The following excerpts from
his records give some idea of the development of the conceptual
"I" in Bain's child. Referring to herself first as "baby," then as
"See" (Sheila), the child used "I" only after some confusion.

Months
and Days

14-8. S distinguishes "daddy's ear" from "your car."

16-0. When told to say "Sheila Bain" she says "Baby!"

16-12. S says "baby" when told to say her own name and also whenever

she sees another baby, doll, child, or picture of any of them.

17-18. Posscssives arc quite well established: "See's Dadda, See's Mama"

20-17. Used "my" for "I"— -"My see you."

26-18. Tonight S said "I want to! I want to!" R [her mother] said,
"Who is I?" S said "I is me!" [1]

Thus we find, four decades later, substantiation of Mdore's obser-
vation that the child refers to himself with his own name before
he uses "I" or "me," a fact by now familiar to all students of child
psychology. When the "I" emerges clearly, a step forward is taken
in the complex process of forming attitudes toward the self and
others.

Using the careful techniques of modern child study, Good-
enough [23] observed children in two situations, one free play and
one alone with the experimenter, and recorded their use of pro-
nouns. She also found gradual increases in the use of pronouns
with age. However, Goodenough further observed that

178 THE GENETIC FORMATION OF THE EGO

Pronouns of the first person singular occur with far greater fre-
quency during free play with other children than in the controlled
situation where the child presumably feels less need to assert himself.
The same trend is shown in the use of the possessives, my and mine.
[23, 337]

Here we see the striking influence of factors coming from specific
situations upon behavior regulated by the ego. Although we shall
consider this topic in greater detail later in this chapter, it should
be noted here that the results of functional analyses of behavior
such as those suggested by Piaget (for example, coefficients of
"egocentric" behavior) will surely vary, within limits, according
to the situation in which the child is behaving.

THE EFFECTS OF CERTAIN SOCIAL FACTORS ON EGO FORMATION

In this section, we shall call attention to some representative
studies which deal specifically with the effects of age-mate groups.
This subject has been badly neglected by some sociologists who
maintain that all ego-values are handed down only by the well-
established order of the adult generation at any given period.
Without attempting to give a comprehensive summary of work in
this field, we cite these studies to illustrate the influence of age-
mate contacts on the process of ego formation. In some of the
studies on the early collective behavior and play group activities
of children, there are indications that the situation often can and
does determine such interpersonal characteristics as aggressive or
co-operative behavior, referred to by some psychologists as "per-
sonality traits." In the studies of Lois Murphy [47] and Jersild
[34], to be summarized, we find, for example, evidence that these
"personality traits" are neither absolute and unchanging properties
of the individual, nor fixed characteristics formed in early infancy.
Any theory of personality will gain much breadth, in our opinion,
if the situational determinations and fluctuations, within certain
limits, of course, are given the consideration they deserve. Con-
temporary child psychologists have stressed the importance of
situational factors. Thus Stoddard and Wellman [61], summariz-
ing certain considerations involved in observing the social behavior
of children, comment that one is forced "to accept the conclusion

THE EFFECTS OF CERTAIN SOCIAL FACTORS ON EGO FORMATION 179

that the amount of behavior exhibited may be so contingent upon
particularized conditions that consistency from day to day or from
week to week is unusual." [257] Of course, some situations, such
as games continuing from day to day, perhaps for weeks, or rela-
tive roles taken by adolescent boys or girls in clique situations, may
leave their imprint on the individual members to a greater or
lesser degree.

We shall also refer here briefly to the effect of values or norms
of the established social order usually handed down in the form of
short-cut dictums. Investigators like Wallon, Salusky, and Davis
have called attention with accumulating evidence to the effect of
material and technological surroundings on the developing iden-
tity of the individual. The general technological level of the
milieu, the amount and kind of toys and games, the size of living
space, the kind and amount of nourishment, the kinds of material
opportunities, and the like, as well as particular values or norms
are all important parts of the child's outside world. In the next
three chapters we shall consider further the effect of such factors
in determining or influencing group identifications and loyalties.

Some effects of age-mate groups. Especially since the classical
work of Piaget on children's play, many studies have been con-
cerned with the implications of the child's participation in collec-
tive activities. These activities, of course, require the observance
of certain rules and the conformity to specific roles relative to
other individuals. From these studies we see that there is a pro-
gressive development in the social participation of the child with
other children. This progressive development is observed in the
child's increased capacity to take part in play and to join as a
member of an age-mate group. The development is also revealed
by the increasing duration of collective activity, the increasing size
of the group (that is, the number of participants), and the increas-
ing complexity of the rules to be observed in particular group
situations. All of these reciprocal relationships imply that the
growing child has to learn that he has definite relationships to
other children and persons.

It is only after a child learns his own position relative to other
individuals around him that he can successfully participate in
group activities. And only after such a realization can the child

180 THE GENETIC FORMATION OF THE EGO

carry on the more or less consistent behavior demanded by lasting
social relationships which involve definite status, values, loyalties,
responsibilities. Important implications for ego development can
be derived from investigations of age-mate groups. With the in-
creased interest in the development of the social behavior of chil-
dren, significant formulations concerned with the implications of
studies of group participation are beginning to appear in general
textbooks on child psychology.

For example, Goodenough [24], in her Developmental Psy-
chology (1945), traces the social development of the child from the
rather solitary play activities of early childhood to the stage when
he is absorbed in group games with age mates with whom he
identifies himself:

The four-year-old still says, "I want someone to play with me"
But a year or so later comes the dawn of a new social concept. Now
we more often hear, "I want to go and play with the other children!'
The child no longer sees himself purely as an individual but is
beginning to identify himself with the group. [24, 394 /., italics in last
sentence ours]

Again, Hurlock [30], in Child Development (1942), gives a
similar picture:

After the child has entered school and has come in contact with
other children, he loses interest in playing around the house, alone,
or with one or two companions. He likewise now considers it a bore
and not a treat to accompany his parents on picnics, parties, or family
gatherings. At the same time, interest in individual games gives way
to group games, and play without companions loses its charm. The
child has entered the "gang age," an age when social consciousness
develops very rapidly.

The child's gang is a result of a spontaneous effort on the part of
the child to create a society adequate to meet his needs. . . . Through
gang influences, the child receives important training in social be-
havior that could not be obtained with comparable success under
conditions imposed by adult society. There is an awakening of social
consciousness at this time which is fundamental to all social behavior.
[30,233]

Without taking sides as to whether or not there is a "gang age,"
a brief investigation of the formation of age-mate groups and the

THE EFFECTS OF CERTAIN SOCIAL FACTORS ON EGO FORMATION 181

frequently reported absorption of children in such groups may
lead us to a better understanding of the function of values merely
imposed from above and those generated in situations of active
participation. During the years 1926 and 1927, Parten [49-51]
conducted extensive studies on the development of social behavior
in children from two to five years of age in free play situations.
Classifying children's play behavior into the categories "unoccu-
pied behavior," "onlooker behavior," "solitary play," "parallel
play," "associative group play," and "cooperative group play," she
found that only 25 per cent of the behavior fell into unsocial
categories (the first three) ; all the other observations were of social
behavior (the last three types). Even more important for our
present consideration is the close relationship between the type of
play activity and age of the children. She found that

All the correlations between age and the unsocial play types are
high and negative, and all those between age and socially organized
play are high and positive. . . . Only the youngest children, those
from two to three years, were found unoccupied during the sixty
observations. Solitary play was most common at two and one-half
years but there is a decided decline in the importance of solitary play
at three and again at four years. Onlookers were most prevalent
among the two-and-one-half to three-year-olds. . . . The oldest chil-
dren do not engage in onlooking behavior frequently. If an activity
interests them they want to participate in it. They know all the
techniques of securing entrance into a group, so do not remain ob-
servers for any noticeable length of time. Parallel play groups were
observed most often among the two-year-olds, and least often among
the children from three to four. As children became older, they
invariably conversed with one another about their activities, and be-
came interested in their associates. Associative group play increased
in popularity as the children became older, and was most frequent
in the oldest group. There is a marked increase in organized sup-
plementary play beginning with the third year. This sudden interest
in cooperative^play is perhaps accounted for by the popularity of the
activity of "play house" among the three-year-olds. Since the young
children lac\ the power of expressing themselves with language, they
have difficulty in playing in cooperative groups. [49, 265 /., italics
ours]

182 THE GENETIC FORMATION OF THE EGO

Because co-operative group play is found so predominantly
among older children, and because its appearance is so closely
associated with the development of leaders, it is important that
we examine Parten's description of these groups more closely.
Such groups are organized for the purpose of making something,
dramatizing situations, playing formal games, and so on.

There is a marked sense of belonging or of not belonging to the
group. The control of the group situation is in the hands of one or
two of the members who direct the activity of the others. [49, 251,
italics ours]

Different roles are taken by the various group members, and the
activity is organized "so that the efforts of one child are supple-
mented by those of another." [257] Before a child can participate
in such a group, a certain degree of ego development must take
place so that the child can see himself in some definite relationship
to the other children as required by the group situation. Parten
[50] found that, although in the older age groups some children
had a more or less lasting leadership role even with "gang" or-
ganization, most of the children engaged in both directing and
following activity. Leadership, then, was seen to be a function of
the group and its activities as well as a junction of the individual
child. She also found that as the year in nursery school went on,
more leadership behavior occurred. During the last two thirds of
the year, individual differences in leadership became more out-
standing.

Apparently the middle period was one in which the children found
their places, and cumulative experience in these positions enabled each
child to hold his place as a leader or follower thereafter with a mini-
mum of effort and resistance from others. [50, 440, italics ours]

Consistent with the foregoing results was the finding that the
size of the groups in which children participated tended to increase
with age. Older children had learned definite ways of gaining
entrance to a group, with remarks such as "Can*! play too?" or
"Shall I be the little brother?", while the group members also
sometimes invited a child to join them. [51, 137]

'As notions of the child's self in relation to other children develop
progressively with age, a corresponding change is seen in his

THE EFFECTS OF CERTAIN SOCIAL FACTORS ON EGO FORMATION 183

manipulation of and interest in toys and other play material. The
favorite activities and toys of older children tended to be ones
involving the interaction of several children. Also, "younger and
older children differ in the manner in which they play with toys
and hence in the social values the toy has for them." [147] For
example, a young child's play in the sandpile seldom involved
social intercourse, however, whereas the older children more often
played in the sand together constructing houses, roads, and such.

Bridges' investigations [6] also show the necessity of ego de-
velopment for the understanding of the reciprocal relationships
required for participation in age-mate groups. She concluded
that qualitative differences between the social development of
young and older preschool children were best explained in terms
of their consideration of themselves in relation to the other chil-
dren.

Two-year-olds usually play or work by themselves with little refer-
ence to others except to claim their toys or otherwise interfere with
them. [82]

Older children engage more often in group play than younger ones
and seldom play alone. . . . They usually wait their turn for little
treats and duties in contrast to the two-year-olds who always want to
be first. ... In short, between the ages of two and five years children
in nursery school progress from being socially indifferent infants,
through the stages of self-assertiveness and interference with the liber-
ties of others, to a stage in which they show consideration, sympathy
and kindness for others. [6, 85]

In Lois Murphy's observations of child behavior, we have one
more index of the development of the experiences of one's self in
relation to others. From the developmental point of view, Murphy
summarizes her findings as follows:

Statistical analysis clothes in more definite terms the impression we
recorded earlier, that among children from two to four years of age
in a nursery-school situation, sympathetic behavior increases with
chronological age, with mental age, and with intelligence measured
in terms of LQ. Bridges' descriptions of the behavior of children in
a Toronto nursery school anticipated this, and there are no data from
any other investigation which could lead us to question this conclu-
sion. [47, 171]

184 THE GENETIC FORMATION OF THE EGO

It should be noted that correlations of sympathetic behavior with
mental age were substantially lower than those with chronological
age. As Murphy observes, the investigations of Bridges, Parten,
and Beaver clearly indicated that

The beginning of social response in groups like these frequently
takes the form of merely watching, then later of playing alongside
another child. Neither of these stages involves overt give and take;
this begins sometimes with physical contact and sometimes with verbal
contact, depending on the resources of the child. [47, 51]

In other words, in the early entrance into situations with other
children, reciprocal relationships are infrequently observed. In
terms of sympathetic behavior, the focal point of Murphy's inves-
tigation, she finds that the

. . . sequence of responses, appearing from one age to another, seems
to be: (1) staring (paying attention to the distress of another child);
(2) asking about, commenting on, and so forth (except in the case
of markedly nonverbal children); (3) active responses of comfort,
help, defense, and the like. [47, 152]

Clearly, the child recognizes another child to be a person like
himself before the latter type of response occurs.

In this connection, Murphy points out that a very young child
will respond emotionally to attacks on his mother or other persons
who are close to him, but that at this early stage such behavior is
not chiefly due to identification with that other person but to "lack
of discrimination between self and others, or between self and the
rest of the world." [296] This is confirmation 40 years later of
Baldwin's observation that the small child's ego "includes too
much."

After differentiation "between self and others'* is clear, sympa-
thetic behavior occurs "in varying degree in response to different
individuals and is affected by variations in threshold due to differ-
ences in identifications with different individuals," [303] For
example:

In Group P we have commented upon episodes of response within
a small gang, of which Louis was the leader and Stephen, the young-
est, was the most gang-conscious member. Stephen's concern for

THE EFFECTS OF CERTAIN SOCIAL FACTORS ON EGO FORMATION 185

Louis and Henry was dependable, although he seldom shared concern
for any other child. George was usually more sympathetic with his
twin brother than with anyone at issue with the brother. [47, 314]

Further indication that sympathetic responses occur in terms of
the child's relation to other children in the group is found, for
example, in Murphy's comment that

Friends, younger children, favorites of the group, are most likely to
receive a relatively large number of sympathetic responses. [47, 159,
italics ours]

Sympathetic behavior was also seen to be dependent upon the
relative stability and the character of reciprocal relationships
within the group.

One of the most interesting illustrations of the possibility of a quick
shift of attitude and expression in reaction to a shift in ego-status,
appeared in a sad drama of hurt egos, where Janet's usual consistent
friendliness and sympathy turned to aggressive retaliation, after she
felt she had been intentionally injured by Heidi, one of her closest
friends. [47, 180, italics ours]

In the subsequent protocol, it is clear that restoration of the usual
group activity was achieved not merely by the two children in-
volved, but through the intervention and comfort of other group
members. This is just one example in which "sympathetic re-
sponses, which ordinarily appear in certain situations, are inhib-
ited when the ego of the potentially responsive child is threat-
ened." [181] The investigation also indicated that a child might
not react positively to a situation quite amusing to others when he
(or his things) were highly involved in the "joke." [87]

We would not be doing justice to Murphy's results if we over-
looked her emphasis on the influence of material and social fac-
tors from the grown-up world on the development and frequency
of sympathetic and co-operative behavior. For example, conflict
was found to be greater if less play space and fewer toys were
available; somewhat more sympathetic responses were found for
children of lower socioeconomic status; and adult values and
norms were seen as potent influences on the children's social be-
havior.

186 THE GENETIC FORMATION OF THE EGO

Murphy's report of the influence on behavior of relationships
within a group leads to a further inquiry into the relationships of
children to their age mates. Generally speaking, investigations of
factors related to friendship or companionship among young chil-
dren have been relatively unprofitable, since they have usually
attempted only to correlate characteristics, abilities, and similar
traits of young friends and have overlooked group factors. Little
relationship between the intelligence, physical development, and
similar traits of childhood friends has been found. However,
Furfey's study [18] indicates that proximity, that is, being in the
same neighborhood or the same classroom, is an important factor
in the friendship of young children. Similarly, Hagman [26]
found that preschool children who associated outside of as well
as in school tended to be close companions. As a criterion of
friendship among preschool children, Challman [9] used the num-
ber of times a child was in a group containing another given child.
With this criterion, higher relationships than usual were found
between the chronological ages and ratings of sociality of friends.

Studies of the "popularity" of young children in the eyes of
their age mates are somewhat more revealing as indications of the
relationship of one child to others. Some of the significant find-
ings of such studies are: one's ideas of one's self seem to be more
closely related to the opinions of age mates than to those of adults
(teachers in this case) [41]; less "popular" children tend to be
less sure of their relationships to others in the group [36]; and
relative status (popularity), once established, tends to be more or
less lasting while the group is together. [5]

Returning now to studies of the social behavior of young chil-
dren in general, we find several which illustrate the progressive
development of children's social relationships with age mates.
Berne [4] found significant differences between older children
(three- and four-year-olds) and younger children (two-year-olds)
on a "social behavior rating scale" for such items as "interested in
the group," "socially conformant," "sociable," "irresponsible for
self," "irresponsible for others." In the latter items the older chil-
dren were rated more responsible than the younger. These dif-
ferences were also observed in experimental situations. For ex-
ample, Berne measured co-operation by placing two children in

THE EFFECTS OF CERTAIN SOCIAL FACTORS ON EGO FORMATION 187

a room with one group of toys. Co-operation was scored in terms
of the amount of time spent playing with the other child. Co-
operative behavior, as so measured, tended to increase with age.
Evidence that children's social relationships become increasingly
complex with age is found also in studies of social contacts, such
as those of Beaver [3] who observed that the number of social
contacts in play situations tends to increase with age. Green [25]
found that the time spent in group play and the size of the group
involved tended to increase with age.

To stress the fact that children's participation in group games
increases progressively with age in terms of the duration of the
play activity and the size of the group may seem to be stressing
a truism of common sense. However, in view of the emphasis
sometimes placed on "sociability," extraversion, and intraversion,
as inherent personality traits, the implications of the ^ progressive
development of participation in group activities are important.
These participations may serve as an index of developing sociabil-
ity to which situational factors contribute so significantly. And
such facts as these must be emphasized if we are to get an accurate
picture of the way a person acquires his sense of social identity.
For example, reversals in the characteristics of social behavior have
been experimentally demonstrated. Jack [33] investigated "as-
cendant" behavior in preschool children, ascendant behavior being
defined in terms of the pursuit of a certain activity even against
the interference and directing behavior of others and attempts to
control the behavior of others. Finding that "self-confidence" or
lack of it seemed to be the most outstanding difference between
the most ascendant and nonascendant children, Jack trained the
five most nonascendant children by giving them information about
and chances to use the play materials. When again placed in the
experimental situation, these subjects showed large and signifi-
cant gains in the amount of ascendant behavior. A similar study
was made by Page [48] using Jack's methods. Page summarizes
her principal findings as follows:

The data which have been presented offer proof of the modifiability
of ascendant behavior in nonascendant and moderately ascendant
three- and four-year-old children. This was accomplished by training

188 THE GENETIC FORMATION OF THE EGO

designed to increase feelings of self-confidence. Tentative, but strongly
suggestive, evidence is given that the effects of these training proce-
dures are transferred to ordinary preschool situations. [48, 50]

The investigations reviewed indicate further that the develop-
ment of social behavior seems also to be dependent upon the
amount and kind of contact with age mates. The results of Jer-
sild and Fite [35] show that "children who have had previous
nursery school experience enter into a decidedly larger average
number of social contacts than do children who have not pre-
viously attended nursery school." [100] This was found even
when contacts made by children in the "old" group with their
special companions were discounted. However, during the year,
the "new" children increased their social contacts from only 54
per cent as many as those of the "old" to 80 per cent as many con-
tacts as made by the "old" group. "The opportunities for social
participation afforded by the nursery school do not, according to
the present findings, have the effect of submerging the child's own
individuality." [108] Pointing to the necessity of appraising such
data "in terms of its context" or situation, the authors describe
the behavior of several children. These examples indicate that
an increase or decrease in social contact is closely related to ego
experiences coming from the stimulation of the group.

One of the children in question made a very low score on social
contacts in the fall. About half of these contacts were aggressive:
the child "went after" other children, and conflicts ensued. His spring
records showed a threefold increase in social contacts, evidences of
greater security and enjoyment of the company of other children and
of the nursery school situation, and a decided drop in the frequency
of his conflicts. Another child likewise made a low score in social
contacts in the fall, and was involved in scarcely any conflicts at all.
She was withdrawn and yielding. In the spring, she showed a sixfold
increase in social contacts, greater security and enjoyment of the com-
pany of other children, and, with this, an increase in frequency of
conflicts. Her conflicts took the form of protecting her own interests
and play activities, and of warding off the attentions of a child who
previously had sought to dominate her. The child's improved socia-
bility, in this case, was accompanied by, and to some extent facilitated

THE EFFECTS OF CERTAIN SOCIAL FACTORS ON EGO FORMATION 189

by, her readiness to rise to her own defense in carrying out her
interests and in joining in the play of several children. In the third
case, a boy who entered into a large number of social contacts in the
fall exhibited a decrease in social contacts in the spring, and with this
decrease there was an increase in relative frequency of fighting. This
boy . . . had lost his hold on a child whom he had dominated in the
fall; his records reveal that this loss was followed by signs of insecurity
and loss of self-confidence. . . . [35, 103]

A study carried out in the Soviet Union by Salusky [58] reveals
the same general trend of social development through increased
group contacts and participations. This study typifies the appli-
cation of dialectical method and is particularly important because
of the clue it gives for the study of any grouping (or collective)
on the human level as contrasted to the study of interactions on
inorganic or organic levels. Defining the collective as "a group
of persons between whom is observed an interaction, a group
which reacts as a whole to a given situation" [365], Salusky com-
ments that interactions "of a social order have their own specific
qualities, distinguishing them both from the interaction of un-
organic particles and from the interaction of organic systems and
organic elements." [375]

In human associations we observe the interaction of the highest type.
The best way of observing their genesis is in observation of children's
collectives. [58, 368]

Collectives may be spontaneous as in associations for play when
the games originate with the children, or they may be organized,
as in the case of daily meetings of homeless children. In either
case, they may be of longer or shorter duration. Salusky believes
that all types of such associations must be studied with a single
systematic plan.

For our present discussion and that to follow, Salusky's classifi-
cation of stimuli is particularly important. Behavior in the col-
lectives is determined by exogenous as well as endogenous stimuli,
the former coining from the environment, the latter from the
children and within the group itself. Mentioning first some im-
portant endogenous stimuli, Salusky reports results of studies made
in three districts of Ukrania. He finds a "basic tendency" that

190 THE GENETIC FORMATION OF THE EGO

"associations of older children are of longer life than associations
of younger children. It is only a tendency, not a general law."
[371] The duration of collectives depends

. . . largely upon the character of the game. The latter is deter-
mined by the child's stock of experience and by the degree of forma-
tion of his anatomic and physiological development. [58, 370]

These factors are dependent to a large extent upon his age, but
are also influenced by the milieu. Salusky noted a tendency for the
number of children associated in collectives to increase with age.
[371] However, as American studies have also shown, association
in larger groups does occur, for a time at least, in the younger
years.

Finally, Salusky shows the influence of the milieu upon chil-
dren's collectives. Two kindergartens in Kiev were observed.
One group of children came chiefly from homes of qualified work-
ers who lived a modern mode of life in an industrial area, were
socially active, read newspapers and books. The second group
came chiefly from parents who were "unskilled workers, small
tradesmen, and in general, the proletariat" where the old mode
of life prevailed. Salusky shows the difference in the kind of
games played by children from these two environments. Whereas
nearly half of the children in the second group participated in
games representing the old mode of life, only about six per cent
of the children in the first group participated in such games. A
good share of the children coming from modern homes played
games dramatizing the new way of life and modern technological
developments, whereas children who lived the old way of life did
not participate at all in such games.

This study illustrates, in Salusky's words, that

The behavior of the collective is determined by the children's
environment and by the source of their experience. The stimuli of a
situation act as the exciters. [58, 576]

This point will help us in understanding the character and direc-
tion of the activities of spontaneously formed boys' gangs to be
discussed in chapter 10.

THE EFFECTS OF CERTAIN SOCIAL FACTORS ON EGO FORMATION 191

Ego constituents derived from established society. As a result
of participation in age-mate groups, children incorporate into
themselves certain values which form their appropriate attitudes.
We have previously pointed out the special importance of those
attitudes produced by the inculcation of values by grown-ups,
usually in the form of short-cut dictums. For these eventually
form attitudes that define in a more or less lasting way the status
and position of the individual in his community, in his class, in
a "race" or nationality group, or, in short, in society at large.
Such values pertaining to interfamily and class relationships,
handed down by parents and other grown-ups in the immediate
surroundings of the child, result in attitudes which are certainly
not discrete unrelated items in the psychological make-up of the
individual, but which become important constituents of the ego.

Further experimental evidence can be mentioned here to sub-
stantiate this point. For example, the studies of Ruth Horowitz
[28, 29] and M. K. and K. B. Clark [10, 11] show that racial
identifications and values, developing into lasting attitudes, are
handed down by adults; and, further, that, if the child is to grasp
the realistic grim meaning of these values to be incorporated as
lasting attitudes, an appropriate degree of ego development is re-
quired. Such development must precede the child's grasp of the
realistic (as contrasted to the earlier autistic) scheme of social re-
lationships, whatever this scheme may be in a particular society.
In this connection, we add, with larger society in view, that the
grown-ups involved in this process are usually transmitting the
values or norms which prevail in society at large, or in their par-
ticular section of society.

Horowitz investigated 24 children in a public nursery school,
ranging in age from two to five years. [28] Some of the children
were white, some Negro. In Horowitz' words, the study

... is limited to children's emergent awareness of themselves, with
reference to a specific social grouping. It deals with the beginnings
of race-consciousness conceived as a function of ego-development. [28,
91]

Various pictures of white and Negro children were shown, and
the child was then asked to tell which child in the picture was

192 THE GENETIC FORMATION OF THE EGO

himself. Horowitz found that, on the average, over 60 per cent
of the Negro children and about 40 per cent of the white children
made color divisions in their choices. Commenting on this differ-
ence, she says' that, for the Negro children,

It is as if the contrast there presented is a lesson well learned and
perceived immediately in terms of its pertinent elements. [28]

She traces this "lesson well learned" to the "constriction of the
adult environment" in the homes of the Negro children.

In this same study, the girls were asked to identify both them-
selves and their brothers or playmates. Finding that the girls
adhered to color divisions considerably less in the latter case, the
investigator suggests:

One is evidently clearer about one's own role and distinguishing
characteristics than about those of another person. [28, 98]

Her conclusion is that

These data seem to point to the concept of group consciousness and
group identification as an intrinsic aspect of ego-development and basic
to the understanding of the dynamics of attitude function in the adult
personality. Before the ego has been completely formed, in the very
process of becoming, we find it subtly appropriating a visible symbol
that has been socially institutionalized to aid it in its work of marking
itself off from all the not-self of which until such demarcation has
been established it partakes. This may mean, however, that the self
is defined in terms that make successive demarcations necessary, since
in the perception of a difference an assertion of identification is in-
volved. The individual's attitude toward his group evidently is an
integral part of himself, in terms of which he is fashioned, under
some circumstances of life. [28, 99]

Horowitz [29] has also attempted by the picture technique to
study other identifications of preschool children, for example, age,
size, sex, familial position or status, economic status. The most
correct identifications were found in terms of sex and familial
position. Other referents produced some confusion, for interest-
ing reasons. For example, in using the pictures of children of
different sizes, Horowitz found that the choice depended greatly
on whom the child related to himself. If he related himself to

THE EFFECTS OF CERTAIN SOCIAL FACTORS ON EGO FORMATION 193

"little brother," he, of course, chose the larger of the children as
himself, while, if to a "big boy," he chose the smaller. The other
pictures proved to be somewhat ambiguous for the children in one
way or another.

Before leaving these studies, we should report an observation
which illustrates the relative value self-identifications may have
for a young child. A little girl who had beautiful curly hair made
color distinctions in her choices rather consistently until she saw
a picture in which the Negro child had curly hair. Although she
had given clear evidence of recognizing the skin differences pre-
viously, this child, whose hair had undoubtedly often been ad-
mired, would not admit any skin difference in this case and clung
to her choice of the curly haired child.

Continuing along the lines of Horowitz' provocative study,
K. B. and M. K. Clark [10] studied 150 Negro children in segre-
gated nursery schools. Fifty children were in each of the three-,
four-, and five-year age groups. The technique used was essen-
tially the same as Horowitz'. Some of the pictures included ani-
mals. These investigators also found that boys adhered to color
divisions more consistently in choosing their own picture than did
girls who were asked to choose their brothers or playmates. The
resulting choices for boys showed an increase in the percentage
of choices of Negro children from 31.5 per cent at age three to
63 per cent at age five. In the three-year-old group, 17.6 per cent
of the choices were of animals. Such choices did not occur after
three years of age. Some five-year-olds refused to make choices,
remarking, "I'm not in that picture," or "This is a white boy; this
is a colored boy; this is a lion," and so on.

Later, these same investigators conducted an ingenious study
[11] using as subjects children of the same age groups, 33 of whom
were of light coloring, 66 of medium coloring, and 54 of dark
coloring. As they stated:

An investigation of the factors inherent in the genesis of racial
identification would obviously lead to an understanding of the dy-
namics of self -consciousness and its social determinants. [11, 159]

The picture technique was employed again. The results showed
that the light children chose a Negro child in the pictures in 36.5

194 THE GENETIC FORMATION OF THE EGO

per cent of their total choices, the medium children in 52.6 per
cent, and the dark children in 56.4 per cent. The percentage of
choices of Negro children increased for the color groups with age.
In the case of the light group, the increase was only 34.6 per cent
at three years to 38.8 per cent at five years. The dark group, on
the other hand, increased from 52,3 per cent at three years to 70.1
per cent at five. These results are comparable to those obtained
by Marks in his study of the judgments of adult Negroes of vary-
ing complexions, (pp. 136 /.) On the basis of these results, the
Clarks concluded:

It may be stated that consciousness of self as different from others
on the basis of observed skin color precedes any consciousness of self
in terms of socially defined group differences in these Negro children.
[11, 161]

At this stage it appears that concepts of self gleaned from the con-
crete physical characteristics of perceived self become modified by
social factors, taking on a new definition in the light of these social
factors. [11, 168]

We have already pointed out that prejudices are not so much the
outcome of direct personal contacts with the groups toward which
the prejudice is directed, but generally are, rather, the result of
contacts with the attitudes others have toward these groups. The
fact has been recently confirmed by Jersild [34] who emphasizes
the influence of in-group identifications on the formation of these
attitudes which become so important in defining personal identity.
Jersild believes that everyday experiences are not so important in
the acceptance of certain attitudes toward various groups as "the
influences that come at second hand, the prejudices passed on to
the child by his elders, the attitudes that he comes to adopt through
precept and example in the culture that surrounds him." [424]

Frequently, prejudice thus has its inception in the home, even
though neither of the two parents openly displays any antipathy for
another group. The child may acquire an attitude of distrust simply
by being exposed to family and cultural traditions which set the child
and his people off from others. The very fact that a child is made
aware of the national origin of his parents means that he is being
influenced to identify himself with one group rather than another.
[34, 425, italics ours]

THE EFFECTS OF CERTAIN SOCIAL FACTORS ON EGO FORMATION 195

Extensive studies by Davis [15, 16] furnish ample evidence that
children's attitudes are derived from the material conditions and
social environments in which they develop. These attitudes in-
clude their relative standing and distance with regard to other
children of different classes, their lasting likes and dislikes, and
their views on major issues that confront them; all of which con-
tribute to the formation of their egos. Davis' generalizations,
based on the rich material at his command, neatly summarize the
influence of established society upon the developing ego:

The number of class controls and dogmas which a child must learn
and struggle continually to maintain, in order to meet his family's
status demands as a class unit, is great. Class training of the child
ranges all the way from the control of the manner and ritual by which
he eats his food to the control of his choice of playmates and of his
educational and occupational goals. The times and places for his
recreation, the chores required of him by his family, the rooms and
articles in the house which he may use, the wearing of certain clothes
at certain times, the amount of studying required of him, the economic
controls to which he is subjected by his parents, indeed his very con-
ceptions of right and wrong, all vary according to the social class of
the child in question. Our knowledge of social-class training and of
the biological and psychological differentials in child development as
between class environments is now sufficient to enable us to say that
no studies can henceforth generalize about "the child." We shall
always have to ask, "A child of what class, in what environment?"
[15,6B9/.]

In this chapter we have reviewed some of the evidence which
so firmly establishes the fact that die ego is formed in the course
of genetic development. In the next chapters, dealing with ado-
lescence, we shall see how the ego can and does become re-formed
during the individual's crucial transition from child to adult. And
in a later chapter we review some of the evidence which establishes
the further fact that the ego can be de-formed, can and does break
down and disintegrate under the stress of situational and patho-
logical conditions (ch. 12). This formation, re-formation, and
possible de-formation of the ego completely belie any notion that
the ego is an innate entity.

196 THE GENETIC FORMATION OF THE EGO

REFERENCES

1. BAIN, R., The self-and-other words of a child, 'Am. J. Social, 1936, 41, 767-75.

2. BALDWIN, J. M., Mental Development in the Child and the Race, New York:

Macmillan, copyright 1895.

3. BEAVER, A. P., The initiation of social contacts by preschool children: A study

of technique in recording social behavior, Child. Develop. Monogr., Columbia
Univ.: Teachers College, 1932, 7.

4. BERNE, E. V. C., An experimental investigation of social behavior patterns in

young children, Univ. Iowa Stud. : Stud, in Child Welfare, 1930, 4, no. 3.

5. BONNEY, M. E., A study of social status on the second grade level, /. Genet.

PsychoL, 1942, 60, 271-305.

6. BRIDGES, K. M. B., The Social and Emotional Development of the Pre-School

7. BUHLER, C., The social behavior of the child, in The Handbook °f Child Psy-

8. From Birth to Maturity, London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trubner, copy-
right 1935.

9. CHALLMAN, R. C., Factors influencing friendships among preschool children,

Child Develop., 1932, 3, 146-58.
10. CLARK, K. B., and M. K. CLARK, The development of consciousness of self and

the emergence of racial identification in Negro preschool children, /. Soc.

PsychoL, 1939, 10, 591-9.
11. Skin color as a factor in racial identification of Negro preschool

children, /. Soc. PsychoL, 1940, 11, 159-69.

12. COOLEY, C. H., Human Nature and the Social Order, New York: Scribner's,

1902.

13. A study of the early use of self-words by a child, PsychoL Rev., 1908, 15,

339-57.

14. DARWIN, C., Biographical sketch of an infant, Mind, 1877, 2, 285-94.

15. DAVIS, A., Child training and social class, in Child Behavior and Development

(R. G. Barker, J. S. Kounin, H. F. Wright, eds.), New York: McGraw-Hill,
copyright 1943, ch. 34.

16. and J. DOLLARD, Children of Bondage, Washington: Am. Council on

Education, 1940.

17. FISHER, M. S., Language Patterns of Preschool Children, New York: Columbia

Univ., Teachers College, Bur. Publications, 1934.

18. FURFEY, P. H., Some factors influencing the selection of boys' chums, /. Appl.

PsychoL, 1927, 11, 47-51.

19. GESELL, A., et aL, The First Five Years of Life, New York: Harper, copy-

right 1940.

20. and F. L. ILG, Infant and Child in the Culture of Today, New York:

21. and H. THOMPSON, Infant Behavior, New York: McGraw-Hill, copyright

1934.

22. The Psychology of Early Growth, New York: Macmillan, 1938.

23. GOODENOUGH, F. L., The use of pronouns by young children: A note on the

development of self-awareness, /. Genet. PsychoL, 1938, 52, 333-46.

REFERENCES ~ 197

24. GOODENOUGH, F. L., Developmental Psychology: An Introduction to the Study

25. GREEN, E. H., Group play and quarreling among preschool children, Child

Develop., 1933, 4, 302-07.

26. HAGMAN, E. P., The companionships of preschool children, Univ. Iowa Stud.:

Stud, in Child Welfare, 1933, 7, no. 4.

27. HOROWITZ, E. L., Spatial localization of the self, /. Soc. PsychoL, 1935, 6,

379-87.

28. HOROWITZ, R. E., Racial aspects of self-identification in nursery school children,

/. Psychol., 1939, 7, 91-9.

29. A pictorial method for study of self-identification in preschool children,

/. Genet. Psychol., 1943, 62, 135-48.

30. HURLOCK, E. B., Child Development, New York: McGraw-Hill, copyright

1942.

31. ISAACS, S., Intellectual Growth in Young Children, London: Routledge, copy-

right 1930.

32. Social Development in Young Children, London: Routledge, copyright

J933.

33. JACK, L. M., An experimental study of ascendant behavior in preschool children,

Univ. Iowa Stud.: Stud, in Child Welfare, 1934, 9, no. 3.

35. and M. D. FITE, The Influence of Nursery School Experience on Chil-.

dren's Social Adjustments, New York: Columbia Univ., Teachers College,
Bur. Publications, 1939.

36. KOCH, H. L., Popularity in preschool children: Some related factors and a

technique for its measurement, Child Develop., 1933, 4, 164-75.

37. KOFFKA, K., Principles of Gestalt Psychology, New York: Harcourt, Brace,

1935.

39. LEWIN, K., Environmental forces in child behavior and development, in The

Handbook^ of Child Psychology (C. Murchison, ed.), Worcester: Clark Univ.,
1931, 94-127.
40. Dynamic Theory of Personality, New York: McGraw-Hill, 1935.

41. MACFARLANE, J. W., M. P. HONZIK, M. H. DAVIS, Reputation differences among

young school children, /. Educ. PsychoL, 1937, 28, 161-75.

42. MATEER, R, Child Behavior, Boston: Gorham Press, 1918.

43. MCCARTHY, D., Language development of the preschool child, in Child Be-

havior and Development (R. G. Barker, J. S. Kounin, H. F. Wright, eds.),
New York: McGraw-Hill, 1943, ch. 7.

44. MEAD, G. H., Mind, Self and Society, Chicago: Univ. Chicago Press, 1934.

45. MOORE, K. C., The mental development of a child, PsychoL Rev. Monogr.

SuppL, 1896, October, 1, no. 3.

46. MURCHISON, C., and S. LANGER, Tiedemann's observations on the development

of the mental faculties of children, /. Genet. PsychoL, 1927, 34, 205r30.

47. MURPHY, L. B., Social Behavior and Child Personality, New York: Columbia

48. PAGE, M. L., The modification of ascendant behavior in preschool children,

Univ, Iowa Stud.; Stud, in Child Welfare, 1936, 12, no. 3.

198 THE GENETIC FORMATION OF THE EGO

49. PARTEN, M. B., Social participation among preschool children, /. 'Abnorm. &

Soc. Psychol., 1932, 27, 243-69.
50. Leadership among preschool children, /. Abnorm. & Soc. Psychol., 1933,

28, 430-40.
51. Social play among pre-school children, /. Abnorm. & Soc. Psychol. , 1933,

28, 136-47.
52. PIAGET, J., Language and Thought of the Child, London: Kegan Paul, 1926.

53. Judgment and Reasoning in the Child, New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1928.

54. Child's Conception of Physical Causality, New York: Harcourt, Brace,

1930.

55. Moral Judgment of the Child, London: Kegan Paul, 1932.

56. Children's philosophies, in The Handbook of Child Psychology (C.

Murchison, ed.), Worcester: Clark Univ., 1933, ch. 12.

57. PREYER, W., The Mind of the Child, Part II: The Development of the Intellect,

New York: Appleton, copyright 1890.

58. SALUSXY, A. S., Collective behavior of children at a preschool age, /. Soc.

Psychol. 1930, 1, 367-78.

59. SHINN, M. W., Notes on the Development of a Child, Berkeley: Univ. Press,

Univ. Calif., Publications in Education, vol. 1, 1898; vol. 2, 1907.

61. STODDARD, G. D., and B. L. WELLMAN, Child Psychology, New York: Mac-

millan, 1934.

62. SULLY, J., Studies of Childhood, New York: Appleton, copyright 1895.

63. TRACY, R, and J. STIMPFL, The Psychology of Childhood, Boston: Heath,

64. WALLON, H., Les Origines du caractere chez lf enfant, Paris: Presses Universi-

taires de France, 1933.

CHAPTER 8
RE-FORMATION OF THE EGO IN ADOLESCENCE

In the last chapter we found that an impressive array of studies,
accumulated over several decades, all point to the fact that the ego
is a genetic formation, developing from the child's contact with
his physical and social surroundings. We saw what diverse fac-
tors and conditions contribute to ego formation. The infant
learns, for example, to delineate his own body as his; he learns
that he has a name and around this name or personal pronouns
he gathers many characteristics that define his psychological iden-
tity. With the acquisition of language, ego-expansion evolves at
a more rapid pace, encompassing the surrounding standardized
human relationships and social norms. When a child is able to
grasp reciprocal relationships extending beyond momentary needs
and immediate perceptual reactions, ego development is affected
in an important way by his absorbed participation in age-mate
groups.

Yet no matter how important these factors may be, even
throughout the whole life of an individual, any account of ego
development as it functions on the adult level will suffer major
deficiencies if the ego problems encountered during adolescence
are neglected. For there are certain facts, almost truisms, which
make the period of genetic development from early to late ado-
lescence crucial for the psychology of ego formation.

THE PROBLEM OF ADOLESCENCE IN A SOCIOLOGICAL AND
PSYCHOLOGICAL SETTING

By the time the child reaches puberty, he has become a mem-
ber of a family, a social class, a nation; he is part of the constella-
tions formed by his school, by his neighborhood friends, or by
discriminations based on sex. All of these situations carry their

199

200 RE-FORMATION OP THE EGO IN ADOLESCENCE

prevailing values which determine subsequent attitudes. But the
youngster still has to acquire or be ascribed a full-fledged adult
male or female status with its particular adult rights, privileges,
and responsibilities. After maturing sexually as a full-fledged
male or female, ready to function physiologically, almost over-
flowing, he thus faces norms and serious regulations in his sur-
roundings which postpone, deny, or regulate his sex activities.

Whatever the effects of infantile sexuality may be up to puberty
(a point orthodox psychoanalysts have been so concerned about-
sec chapter 14) a whole host of norms, expectations, and regula-
tions relating to femininity and masculinity now have to be faced.

In some societies, the individual is initiated into economic life
during the adolescent period. In other societies, he at least seri-
ously starts to look forward or to prepare for some trade or pro-
fession. He may have to enter into the economic work of the
adult world before he is fully matured physiologically, as is still
the case in countries at the feudal economic level, and as was strik-
ingly seen during the period of ruthless child labor in the last few
centuries. Or the adolescent may have to assume economic re-
sponsibilities owing to the poverty of his family. Situations such
as these will contribute to the early development and sharpening
of the ego, while in other respects the youngster may lag behind.
This is likely to result in an out-of-phase development which pro-
duces its own problems. In various societies, adolescents may be
ascribed a definite adult status in earlier or later adolescence. And
the status is, of course, circumscribed in a major way by the eco-
nomic class and the social position of his family.

In short, the years covered by adolescence are usually a period
of transition from childhood to adult status with all its economic,
social, and sexual aspects. From the point of view of ego develop-
ment, a period during which status changes in so many important
aspects of life should be of crucial significance. For shifts in
objective status are reflected as ego-shifts in the psychology of the
individual. Psychologically speaking, it is especially in the ego
of the individual that any status problem finds its echo.

When societies are in a period of rapid transition, the resulting
confusions in status create added problems for adolescents who are
themselves in a stage of transition as they strive for adult status.

ADOLESCENCE IN DIFFERENT CULTURES AND TIMES 201

Today almost all the countries of the world are in such a state of
transition. Even the patterns of culture of less developed peoples
are no exception, for to some degree they are affected by the
inescapable impact of the technology and imperialisms of ad-
vanced Western societies. In addition, the contradictory economic
and social norms which antagonistic groups attempt to perpetuate
contribute their share in making status problems (ego problems)
more complicated, even conflicting, especially for adolescents.
The adolescent's plight is still further complicated by the alternat-
ing treatment he receives from adults: at times he is treated as
a grown-up, at other times as a child.

The flux and crisis situations adolescents have to go through,
at times unsuccessfully, in their strivings for a secure social status,
provide excellent opportunity for the study of many problems
concerned with the psychology of the ego and ego-involvements.
Changes brought about by sexual maturity, by significant bodily
developments with their accompanying serious effects on attitudes
of masculinity and femininity, shifts (or preparation for shifts)
in economic roles, and actual or more seriously anticipated shifts
in social status, all make the period of adolescence a crucial stage
of psychological transition involving ego problems. We have de-
liberately referred to this further development of the ego as a
period of re-formation. In view of the complexity, many-sided-
ness, and interrelatedness of the problems encountered at this
stage, they should be considered from many angles: physiological,
economic, sociological, and others. In this and the following chap-
ter, we can consider only those features of adolescence directly
related to the main conceptual scheme of this book.

ADOLESCENCE IN DIFFERENT CULTURES AND TIMES

In dealing with problems of social psychology, there is almost
always the danger of generalizing on the basis of behavior seen in
one particular culture. Many social psychologists, as well as other
social scientists, have fallen into the pitfalls of their diverse com-
munity centrisms. The comparative studies of different cultures
and different times made by ethnologists and sociologists help us
to acquire the distance necessary to relate events with a realistic

202 RE-FORMATION OF THE EGO IN ADOLESCENCE

perspective. For example, G. Stanley Hall's [8] colorful drama-
tizations of adolescence as a universal period of "storm and stress"
and characterizations of primitive societies as "adolescent" are
challenged on the basis of comparative observations. The pre-
vailing romanticism in Europe during the last century which
made for the immense popularity among youth of books like
Werther with their pessimistic sentimentalism is almost a dead
issue today for the descendants of these very youngsters. The
Wagnerian heroics and ruthless arrogance displayed in no uncer-
tain terms by many German adolescents who under the well-
organized tutelage of Hitler-Jugend even spied on their own par-
ents, seems to have faded. German youth today presents a "pic-
ture of inconsistency and confusion." [18, 4]

Observations found in diverse studies of different cultures and
times lead us to the conclusion that the special problems of ado-
lescence, the ease or difficulty, and the duration of youths' transi-
tion to a settled adult status will vary with the economic and
social circumstances and the values of particular cultures. In com-
paratively simple and undifferentiated societies, the transition to
adulthood may be achieved through various sorts of initiation
ceremonies. At the completion of these ceremonies, which vary
from culture to culture in duration, phase, and the ordeals en-
tailed, the young person may find himself ascribed with adult
status, privileges, and responsibilities with their unmistakable and
serious psychological consequences. [19, 28, 30] The more or less
stable and integrated nature of social organization and cultural
norms displayed in these cultures (more so formerly than now)
are important factors which reduce the perplexities and confusions
that face a youth in his transition to adulthood. In some cultures,
the transition to adulthood may be so clearly and definitely recog-
nized that the boy or girl may be designated by new names at
these initiation ceremonies. For example, the Andamanese girl
acquires a "flower name" at the beginning of menstruation [3,
119]i the Arunta boy who goes through the laborious initiation
ceremonies gets different names at different phases of initiation.
[24, 85 /.] In one of the Melanesian groups, in which marriage
takes place at a fairly youthful age, both parties relinquish their
former names for a new common name. [25, 347]

ADOLESCENCE IN DIFFERENT CULTURES AND TIMES 203

Diverse and not infrequently contradictory economic and social
status problems; complicated marriage requirements, considera-
tions, and norms of highly differentiated Western societies usually
prolong the transition stage with various kinds of conflict situa-
tions and suspensions. In these societies, therefore, it is not hard
to find cases of restless old maids or eccentric bachelors who dis-
play fantasies and other unsettled modes of behavior more or less
peculiar to adolescents.

A glance at the observations of the adolescent period from stud-
ies of primitive cultures reveals diverse types of adolescent transi-
tions. Some transitions are rapid, some prolonged. Some are full
of painful ordeals; others are comparatively easy. In these and
other respects, different gradations, as determined by the economic
and cultural characteristics of diverse cultures, can easily be found
in the welter of ethnological literature. The social and cultural
norms regulating the activities of adolescent boys or girls may
considerably reduce puzzling adolescent problems and difficulties.
On the basis of Mead's studies, Klineberg [11] generalizes:

Margaret Mead . . . who has studied Samoan society from this
point of view, writes that there the adolescent girl differs from the
non-adolescent only in the fact of bodily changes; there is no conflict,
no revolt, no mental disturbance or neurosis; only an easy transition
to a new status. There are several reasons for this, as Miss Mead
points out. The problem of sex, which in one form or another creates
difficulties for almost every adolescent in our society, is practically
nonexistent. Samoan society permits premarital intimacies, and shortly
after puberty almost every young boy and girl enters into a series of
"affairs." These can hardly be called "love affairs," because love in
the romantic sense in which we know it rarely enters; but they are
for that reason no less able to satisfy an urge which in our society is
probably the most important single source of torment and disturbance.
[11, 308]

But in view of certain facts that Margaret Mead herself reports
[20], adolescent girls even in Samoa seem to face some problems
and conflicting situations, unless the psychological principles that
operate in them are altogether different from those of other human
beings. Thus:

204 RE-FORMATION OF THE EGO IN ADOLESCENCE

The first attitude which a little girl learns towards boys is one of
avoidance and antagonism. . . . After a little girl is eight or nine years
of age she has learned never to approach a group of older boys. [20,
86]

Again,

Not until she is an old married woman with several children will
the Samoan girl again regard the opposite sex so quietly. [20, 86]

Following a custom of Samoa, the young man sends "a confidant
and ambassador whom he calls a soa" to secure intimacy with a
girl. [89 f.]

But if he chooses a handsome and expert wooer who knows just
how "to speak softly and walk gently," then as likely as not the girl
will prefer the second to the principal. This difficulty is occasionally
anticipated by employing two or three soas and setting them to spy on
each other. But such a lack of trust is likely to inspire a similar atti-
tude in the agents, and as one overcautious and disappointed lover told
me ruefully, "I had five soas, one was true and four were false." [20,
90]

Consequently,

The most violent antagonisms in the young people's groups are not
between ex-lovers, arise not from the venom of the deserted nor the
smarting pride of the jilted, but occur between the boy and the soa
who has betrayed him, or a lover and the friend of his beloved who
has in any way blocked his suit. [20, 97]

It would be surprising if, in these intrigues in sexual affairs, even
though they may be of short duration, the girl, too, does not face
some complications. Also, as Klineberg [12] later indicated:

Certain problems of interpretation in connection with the Samoan
material still remain. There is, for instance, the fact that the adoles-
cent girls do not engage in sex activity immediately after puberty;
usually there is an interval of two or three years. [12, 493]

In view of some other observations reported by Mead to the
effect that the wives of titled men derive "their status from their
husbands" [20, 77], that "a girl's chances of marriage are badly
damaged if it gets about the village that she is lazy and inept in

ADOLESCENCE IN DIFFERENT CULTURES AND TIMES 205

domestic tasks" [33], and that a premium is put on virginity for
marriage [98f.]> it seems safe to say that girls who are expected to
conform to these norms do have to face at least a few adolescent
problems in their transition to adulthood.

In other studies of adolescence in primitive societies, Mead's ma-
terial indicates that this period, while not universally a period of
"storm and stress," does involve problems varying both in inten-
sity and kind in different cultures, depending upon their socio-
economic structure and the superstructure of norms regulating
behavior. Another society in which the period might be consid-
ered relatively less difficult than in others is that of the Arapesh
of New Guinea [22]. Among them certain norms deem "that
all human beings, male and female, are naturally unaggressive,
self-denying, lightly sexed, comfortably domestic, concerned with
growing food to feed growing children." [19, xix} In spite of
the fact, as Mead reports it, that children of seven or eight have
acquired a happy and confident attitude toward life, a warm
affection toward their fellows, and respectful unaggressive treat-
ment of them, the adolescent period involves the formation of
new attitudes and entrance into new economic and social rela-
tionships. At this time, Arapesh children are for the first time
"made culturally self-conscious of the physiology of sex." [22, 62]
The parents have been held responsible for the child's growth
until then. Now the boy is held to be "the responsible custodian
of his own growth." [62] This involves taboos relating to his
genitals, including "disciplinary and hygienic use of stinging net-
tles and actual bleeding with a sharpened bamboo instrument."
[62] When the adolescent boy is initiated, he gains important
secrets of the tribe, is segregated from women, observes certain
food taboos, and is incised.

They are subjected to a divinatory ceremony to find out whether
they have been experimenting with sex or not, something that they
know is forbidden because it will stunt natural growth. [22, 75]

The punishment for the guilty boy involves the "deeply felt" hu-
miliation of publicly violating an important taboo. The boy must
also stop the oral play in which he has engaged since childhood.
On the other hand, certain aspects of these ceremonies are wholly

206 RE-FORMATION OF THE EGO IN ADOLESCENCE

pleasant. The boys are well-fed and usually emerge "almost
plump." They now assume many of their fathers' economic and
social responsibilities.

When an Arapesh girl is seven or eight, she is engaged to a boy
about six years her senior, and lives in his family's home. Here
she lives until puberty as she would with her own family. As
she "approaches puberty, her parents-in-law increase supervision
of her" to prevent premarital sex activities. An elaborate cere-
mony occurs at the girl's first menstruation, much of the ritual
being designed "to cut out the girl's connexion with her past." [93]
She fasts for five or six days, takes part in public ceremonies.
However, after the ceremonies, "the betrothed girl's life goes on
as before." She now comes to think of her betrothed in the role
of a future husband rather than in the big-brother role to which
she has become accustomed. There is a period of waiting before
the actual marriage.

Observations on the Tchambuli [22] are also pertinent for our
discussion of ego problems among adolescents of diverse cultures.
For among them, according to Mead, there is a variation in the
intensity and kind of adolescent problems encountered by the
two sexes. In Mead's words:

The Tchambuli attempt to standardize the personality of the sexes
in contrasting ways — they expect men to be responsive, interested in
the arts, women to be bold, initiating, economically more responsible.
[19,**]

The situation is made more complicated by the continuation of

. . . patriarchal forms combined with personalities more appropriate
to matriarchy. . „ . Such mixed and badly co-ordinated elements
cause a good deal of confusion and functional maladjustment, espe-
cially in the young men. [19, xxi]

Tchambuli women raise the food, weave the mosquito bags
which are valuable both for use and trade, and are in charge of
property, although men are the nominal owners. Men, on the
other hand, spend their time in art work and preparing for elabo-
rate ceremonials. Until just before adolescence, the boy is cared
for lavishly by women. After initiation ceremonies,

ADOLESCENCE IN DIFFERENT CULTURES AND TIMES 207

He is supposed to spend more time in the men's house, but he still
takes refuge among the women whenever possible. He grows grad-
ually into young manhood; his father and elder brothers watching
jealously his attitude towards their younger wives and suspecting him
if he walks about upon the women's road. [22, 257]

In order to engage in sexual activities, he must be chosen by a
woman. But in order to marry, he must get a marriage price
from his male relatives. If he is attractive, versed in the dance,
soft-spoken, and resourceful, he may be chosen by more than one
woman. On the other hand, the older men watch the boys jeal-
ously and try their best "to shame and disgrace them before the
women." [259]

Although Mead gives less information about the girls, it is evi-
dent that adolescent Tchambuli girls have different and decidedly
less pressing problems, since from birth they grow up more and
more a part of the solid group of women, whose activities are
characterized by "comradeship, efficient, happy work" [252] and
comparatively little quarreling.

In contrast to the Samoans and Arapesh, the Manus adolescent
faces the difficult task of entering an adult world as a strikingly
different person from his childhood self. The Manus of the Ad-
miralty Islands are characterized by Mead [21] as

. . . driven by a harsh competitive system, hard working and with
little tolerance for pleasure or art; each man worked for himself and
for his own household; the future economic security of one's children
was a principal goal. But the children had no part in this adult world
of money values and hard work; they were left free to play all day
in a pleasant co-operative world where there was no property and no
possessiveness. . . . And yet, when they passed adolescence, the gener-
ous gay co-operative Manus children turned into grasping competitive
Manus adults. [19, xii]

From the time the Manus children are three, they are made
"ashamed of their bodies, ashamed of excretion, ashamed of their
sex organs." [21, 205] When a girl or boy is engaged, she or he
can no longer be seen in the presence of relatives of the betrothed.
The breach of this taboo involves as much shame as that learned
in connection with the body.

208 RE-FORMATION OF THE EGO IN ADOLESCENCE

Puberty for girls means the beginning of adult life and responsibil-
ity, the end of play, careless companionship, happy hours of desultory
ranging through the village. [21, 775]

Because of the taboos, there are few friends available to die ado-
lescent girl and her childhood play groups break up.

She makes no new friends, but she sees less and less of her old
friends. [775]

At menstruation the girl's pact with her sex is sealed forever. She
learns that not only must she endure first menstruation, but the strange
fact, the fact that no man in all Manus knows, that she will menstru-
ate every moon and must hide all trace or knowledge of her condition
from everyone. [21, 757 /.]

This fact "is locked away in the girl's mind as a guilty and shame-
ful secret." [184] For several months, the ceremonies attending
this event drag on, during which time the girl must stay indoors.

Past puberty, betrothed, tabu, and respectable, the girl is expected to
settle down peacefully to her labours, to submit silently to eternal
supervision. The slightest breath of scandal means a public scene and
exaggerated ignominy. . . . No girl can manage a long career of
rebellion. While she sins, all of her kin, her betrothed's kin, her
betrothed, her partner-in-sin, she herself, are in danger of death from
the ever observant spirits. [21, 185]

She is not yet a full-fledged member of society. Ordinarily,

These years are not years of storm and stress, nor are they years of
placid unfolding of the personality. They are years of waiting, years
which are an uninteresting and not too exacting bridge between the
free play of childhood and the obligations of marriage. [21, 189]

During these boring years as a "very much inhibited spectator,"
"she gets the culture by heart." [189] Some girls rebel.

When Manus boys reach puberty, their gay play is interrupted
for a few weeks to have their ears pierced and to take part in a'
feast. Then they return to their play. However, by this time, the
girls of their age have retired, and the play group is composed onlv
of younger children and male age mates.

The boys form closer friendships, go about more in pairs, make
more of the casual homosexuality current in childhood. There is

ADOLESCENCE IN DIFFERENT CULTURES AND TIMES 209

much roughhouse, arm linking, whispered conferences, sharing of
secret caches of tobacco. [21, 193]

Because of this absorption in his age-mate group, the boy rebels
actively if his parents decide upon his initiation before most of his
age mates have theirs.

A year or so later, "all Manus boys go away to work— two years,
five years, sometimes seven years — for the white man." [196]
During this time, the boy may be "lonely and homesick, over-
worked, hungry, sulky, shrinking and afraid," or he may have
strange and absorbing new experiences and friendships. However,
in either case, his experiences in no way prepare him for adult
life in his village, "of which he has a fundamental dread." [200]

"Now comes the time when the young man must marry." [206]
Since he is in no way prepared, he must plunge heavily into debt
for household and work equipment which no Manus boy pos-
sesses. His life undergoes a radical change. He becomes utterly
shamefacedly dependent on his backers. Before him lies the op-
portunity of regaining self-respect in his society by "hard dealing,
close-fisted methods, stinginess, saving, ruthlessness" or continued
dependence and shame. [208 /.]

If ... childhood had never been, if every father had set about
making his newborn son into a sober, anxious, calculating, bad tem-
pered little businessman, he could hardl" have succeeded more per-
fectly. [21, 210]

In another tribe studied by Mead [22], the Mundugumors, ado-
lescence is so frequently a period of intensified struggle and pas-
sion, that we shall mention only a few of the problems met there.

They [the Mundugumors] assume that all children, male and
female, are naturally aggressive and hostile. [19, xx]

As a result of a Spartan-like childhood,

Pre-adolescent Mundugumor children have an appearance of harsh
maturity and, aside from sex-experience, are virtually assimilated to
the individualistic patterns of their society by the time they are twelve
or thirteen. Initiation comes to girls as somewhat of a privilege
granted to them in proportion as they are aggressive and demanding,
to boys as a penalty they cannot escape. . . . [22, 212]

210 RE-FORMATION OF THE EGO IN ADOLESCENCE

Under such circumstances, the acquisition of adult status could
hardly be expected to be a pleasant process for the Mundugumor
adolescent.

There is a premium upon virginity, and a vigorous, positively sexed
group of young girls who plan their own affairs in spite of a restrictive
chaperonage. There is a social standard which prescribes that the
sister is used in payment for her brother's wife, and a continuous
flouting of this standard by her father, her brother, and the sisterless
lover who attempts to abduct her. [22, 222 f.]

As a result of these practices, the adolescent girl or boy may find
himself married to a boy or girl literally years younger than he
or she. Even after marriage, the struggle to satisfy basic needs
and to gain satisfactory adult status continues.

In his account of the adolescent period of the Kwomas of New
Guinea, Whiting writes:

Next to the weaning period, adolescence is the most turbulent time
in the life of a Kwoma individual, a period marked by the learning of
many new habits and the facing of many new problems. [31, 65]

Kwoma boys enter adolescence formally with their initiation into
the first age-grade group, whereas girls undergo rites at the time
of their first menstruation. The period is closed formally at a
ceremony in which the boy or girl is cicatrized, at about the age
of sixteen or seventeen. The ceremonies for adolescent boys and
girls include a period of seclusion for about two months, while
the boys undergo painful trials, dancing, and other tests. On this
occasion, sexual license is permitted to all except the youngest
initiates (pubescent boys). Since the age-grade ceremony for the
boys occurs only once every five years, the formal period of ado-
lescence for boys may last from one to three years and may cor-
respond only roughly to his pubescent period. Because these rites
give a boy "privileges and immunities which Kwoma culture
grants to persons in this category" [67], the disparity between
physiological development and status in the group resulting from
the infrequency of the ceremonies would presumably be trying
for the boy who develops between ceremonies or shortly after a
ceremony. The initiation does, in fact, give the adolescent "a de-

ADOLESCENCE IN DIFFERENT CULTURES AND TIMES 211

fined status superior to those of his brothers who have not yet
undergone them. Whereas during childhood a command-obey
relationship had to be fought out, and was usually established on
the basis of size and age, now the relationship is culturally de-
termined." [92]

Economically, the boy or girl now becomes an asset, engaging
in tasks prescribed for members of his sex. The adequate per-
formance of these new tasks has a direct bearing on the status of
the adolescent, for

One of the criteria by which a girl chooses a man for a lover or a
husband is his ability as a worker. Other things equal, the more
industrious a boy is, the more he is sought after by the girls. Lazy
lads are shunned. . . . Industriousness on the part of the girl is an
even more important criterion of attractiveness than for a boy. [72]

However, full participation in the economic and social life is not
yet possible. Restrictions are put on such acts as the performance
of certain tasks, on approaches to members of the opposite sex, ex-
posure of certain parts of the body. Philandering before marriage
does occur, but it is frequently accompanied by anxiety since the
boy faces danger from the girl's relatives, and the girl is under
pressure from her brothers who fear that if her reputation is poor
"her value as a potential wife" will be decreased.

The Kwoma adolescent suffers certain contradictions in status
since, at this time, when he thinks of himself and fulfills the activi-
ties of a near-adult, he must continue "to behave towards his par-
ents and his paternal uncles and aunts as he did in childhood."
Sometimes the adolescent may revolt against this continued au-
thority of elders. An adolescent boy may also retaliate against
what he feels as unjust treatment by breaking or threatening to
break "his relationship with any adult or adolescent relative." [94]

As another cultural variation of adolescent problems, we sum-
marize briefly a few points from the case of an American Indian.
The anthropologist Paul Radin secured and published the auto-
biography of a Winnebago Indian [23]. This intimate life history,
presented in longitudinal sequence, is especially valuable in re-
vealing the reciprocal effects of the impact of culture and the
counteracting adolescent impulses. The Winnebago adolescent is

212 RE-FORMATION OF THE EGO IN ADOLESCENCE

required to fast in seclusion for days so that he may be blessed by
the spirits. We see in the autobiography how conflicts between
cultural norms and the urge for eating take place under the stress
of hunger and how the dictates of hunger prevail. Likewise, a
psychological situation arising from a Winnebago sexual taboo is
interesting. Among the Winnebago,

Any contact with menstruating women, or even with objects in any
way connected with them, will, it is believed, destroy the power of
sacred objects or individuals temporarily sacred. [23, 387]

Hence menstruating girls are secluded in lodges. This particular
Winnebago Indian gives detailed accounts of how he and other
boys took advantage of this seclusion of girls to approach them
and of the careful planning and hardships they had to go through
to enter the lodges secretly at night.

In a memorable chapter on "The Crises of Life and Transition
Rites," Radin [24], who is more concerned with the recurrent
human and socioeconomic implications of his material than with
exotic presentations, gives a penetrating synthesis of these transition
rites.

Two distinct sets of circumstances, one physiological, the other eco-
nomic-social, thus conspired to make of puberty one outstanding
focus which was to serve as the prototype for all other periods inter-
preted as transitional. [24, 79]

In short, these rites mark definite shifts in the social and economic
status of the individual and the "passing of an individual from
the position of an economic liability to that of an economic and
social asset." [79] This new status generates new ego-attitudes
related to work, to the opposite sex, and to other persons. Taking
as his examples the Arunta of Australia, the Selknam of Tierra
del Fuego, the New Caledonians, the Ashanti of West Africa, and
the Thonga of South Africa, Radin shows variations in transition
as determined by the socioeconomic organization and the deriva-
tive cultural norms existing in each of these cultures. The relative
ease or difficulty and duration of the transition in each case is
especially dependent on the particular socioeconomic circumstances
of society. To cite another variation from Radin's material, among

ADOLESCENCE IN DIFFERENT CULTURES AND TIMES 213

the Ashanti of West Africa (unlike many other cultures), "only
the girls go through a puberty ceremony." [94] The girls are
"carried at certain parts of the ritual" because at this period "they
are newly born and cannot walk." [94]

Radin maintains that, in spite of all of the variations displayed
as steps of transition from adolescence to adulthood, their basic
function, the "basic formula," is the same in all of them, that is,
rendering the child "an economic and social asset" from a state of
dependence and liability. The existence of puberty rites for girls
alone among the Ashanti of West Africa is no exception to the
basic formula.

In the case of women the physiological facts — the first menstruation,
pregnancy, and childbirth — at first dwarfed the social-economic
factors; in the case of men the social-economic factors from the very
beginning dwarfed the physiological. This was natural enough at a
period in man's existence where woman's position was at best undif-
ferentiated, politically and economically. The social-economic im-
plications of this situation thus being so much more important for the
man, it is not surprising that the puberty rites for him have always
remained far more complex and differentiated than those for the
woman. The latter became progressively more complex as her eco-
nomic functions became more important, after the introduction of
agriculture, for instance. Occasionally, as in some West African
tribes, puberty rites exist for her only. [24, 83]

Psychologically, all of these steps, trials— ceremonies and preach-
ings—which achieve the transition of the adolescent to the adult
status mean formation of attitudes related to his new relative role
in society, his conformity in respecting the property and sex rights
of elders and interest groups, his settling down in the place as-
signed him by the established authority of his society.

But we do not even have to go to Western Africa or the distant
Pacific islands to achieve perspective. The social psychologist can
also acquire it if he has won a historical sense with respect to his
culture. Here is a concrete illustration of this lack of perspective.
G. Stanley Hall in 1904 devoted a chapter of 82 pages to the prob-
lems of religious conversions connected with adolescence. [8, vol.
2, ch. 14] With respect to religious conversions, Hall states, for
instance:

^H RE-FORMATION OF THE EGO IN ADOLESCENCE

In its most fundamental sense, conversion is a natural, normal,
universal, and necessary process at the stage when life pivots over
from an autocentric to an heterocentric basis. [8, vol. 2, 301]

Four decades later, in the same country, Harold Jones [10], one of
the outstanding authorities in the field of adolescence, has to
correct in more modest terms what Hall had held to be a universal
fact.

As a symptom of adolescence, religious "conversion" is probably
less common now than in the generation of which G. Stanley Hall
wrote. Sometimes, indeed we note the opposite of conversion, in an
adolescent revolt which leads to an active repudiation of religious
concepts and practices. [10, 108]

This trend is substantiated by others. For instance, a "Boy Survey"
by Middletown's Optimist Club of 3,771 boys in the county indi-
cated that only 39 per cent of boys from 8 to 16 years of age were
church members. [14, 304] A more recent substantiation comes
in a survey made by Weaver [29], himself a professor of religion.
Weaver asked high school principals, judges, chairmen of church
and school boards, and active laymen "in many urban centers" to
guess "what percentage of boys and girls in your community 14-18
years of age have an appreciable relationship with the church,
church school, or church young people's societies ? By 'appreciable'
I mean something less than regular attendance but something
more than 'just Easter and Christmas.'" The guesses ranged
"from 15 per cent to 30 per cent of the youth population." [159]
On the basis of this and other surveys he reviewed, Weaver con-
cludes:

Youth are less interested and less active in organized religion than
in any other major institution of our culture. [29, 756]

Until recently, it was almost customary, especially in elite circles,
to think of young Russian intellectuals as highly introspective and
pessimistic, something like the Dostoievsky character, Roskolnikov.
But in reality, the behavior of the young Comsomols as observed,
for example, by Frankwood Williams [32] even in the early 1930's,
and the majority of artistic expressions of Soviet novels and films,
such as The Road to Ufa the New Gulliver, Zoya, and Simonov's

ADOLESCENCE IN DIFFERENT CULTURES AND TIMES 215

Days and Nights, reflect an abounding optimism and good-natured
striving. In fact, the Russian generations brought up under the
Soviet system reflect characteristics which are almost the exact
opposite of morbid introspection, self-pity, or self-justification.

In a highly developed, highly differentiated, and changing social
system in which cultural norms of past centuries exist side by side
with new norms brought about chiefly by technological develop-
ments, adolescents face conflicting values which make their transi-
tion to settled adult life more difficult. In their penetrating analysis
of Middletown in Transition, the Lynds write:

Today, in the presence of such rigorous tenacity to the "old, tried
ways" by part of the population, the range of sanctioned choices con-
fronting Middletown youth is wider, the definition of the one "right
way" less clear. That this is the normal situation in the process we
call "social change" does not lessen the confusion it entails. ... If the
child up to high-school age associates, by reason of the assignment of
each child to a grade school on the basis of residential propinquity,
with other children from somewhat similar subcultural backgrounds,
this homogeneity of sorts is lost when the children pour from all
quarters into Central High School. Here the whole range of cultural
tolerances and intolerances grind against each other; the child of
parents who think it "cute" and "attractive" for a daughter to enamel
her nails, use rouge, have a crisp "permanent," and "learn to handle
boys" sits next to the daughter of a family in which the parents are
engaged in a quiet but determined campaign to circumvent the influ-
ence of the movies and to keep their daughter "simple," "unaffected,"
and "healthy-minded." This widening of contacts with unevenly
sanctioned choices, supported not by outlaw individuals but by groups,
means under these circumstances for both parents and children un-
certainty and tension. [14, 775]

To get out of these conflicting situations, in some cases, young
people in high school may try to find security in early marriages.

It is, as noted above, a less uncommon occurrence in these 1930's
than it was ten years ago for high school students to marry and thus
to seek to hew a path of freedom out of the cultural conflicts, un-
certainties, and stubborn parental restraints in which they find them-
selves. [14, 17 5 f.]

In other cases, the difficult economic situations delay marriages.
As the Lynds note, during the depression in Middletown, young

216 RE-FORMATION OF THE EGO IN ADOLESCENCE

people just had to "stick around/' while "the repetitiveness of this
familiar round of life among neighbors may become acutely dis-
tasteful if either of man's great peacetime anodynes for routine —
marriage and work— are denied him." [486] This was the pre-
dicament of "Middletown youngsters." Marriage often had to be
delayed because there were no jobs.

As these observations show, a major economic event such as a
depression which further sharpens economic differences between
the classes may be reflected in a sharpening of the differences
among adolescent groups. These conflicts no doubt have psycho-
logical consequences. Turning again to Middletown, for example,
the Lynds note that the standards for dress in the high school
groups were set by the more well-to-do North Side girls. The
depression meant that the poorer girls from the South Side were
considerably less up to standard than before. These girls were
very distressed, "some of them to the point of withdrawing from
high-school." [445] The status of these South Side students was
further handicapped "by the presence among their number of an
increasing number of marginal persons who are going on into
high school because they cannot get jobs." [452] One result of
this stress on the South Side adolescent was that "some boys and
girls now no longer dare brave the front door of the high school
'with the steps crowded with richer students looking you over,'
but go around to the side entrance." [452]

The depression seems to have brought about particularly severe
social problems for girls. For even if a girl did not have to assume
the economic responsibility for the family or engage in serious
forms of deviant behavior, she may have had to quit school at an
early age "because of runs in her stockings, torn shoes, and worn-
out dresses." [13, 95] Or, she might become "afraid to bring any
friends of hers to her home" and have to evade their invitations to
go out after school hours because she has no money. "Her girl
friends don't understand, and she is afraid she is losing their
friendship." [96]

A special study of "Youth in the Depression" made by Kingsley
Davis [4], gives a realistic picture of the way a major economic
event can further aggravate the feelings of insecurity in a great
number of young people.

ADOLESCENCE IN DIFFERENT CULTURES AND TIMES 217

Boys and girls all over the country find nothing but a blank wall
in front of them. With their parents suffering, their own futures
clouded, the ordinary roads to success closed, they blindly seek a way
out. In such conditions youth movements spring up. [4, 12]

If not caught in actual youth movements of various kinds, young
boys or girls at least spontaneously develop more or less secret or
confidential groups, cliques or gangs, among themselves. From
these they derive a certain satisfaction of status and security in a
contradictory, apparently hostile, social world.

Extraordinary changes in the behavior of adolescents are also,
of course, brought about by war. We already have some sig-
nificant studies indicating the impact of World War II on adoles-
cents in the United States, a country, we should recall, that was
comparatively little affected by the war. Not only did thousands
of late adolescents have "maturity thrust upon them" by entrance
into the armed services [6, 62], but in the United States alone the
adolescent labor force from ages 14 to 18 grew from 872,314 in
1940 to 3,000,000 in 1944, with others working part-time and dur-
ing vacations, [15] While many quickly became "adult," many
others suffered from this aggravated contradiction in status. [1, 7,
33] Adolescent workers in war plants, for example, were some-
times only "tolerated" by adult workers, by adults in the commu-
nities, and by parents. [7, 27, 26] In addition to the greater dis-
parity between the values of adolescents and parents created by
the acceleration of cultural change brought about by the war, such
conflicting situations resulted in increased parent-youth conflict,
increased drifting away from home and grown-ups. [2, 39] In
particular, the war intensified the problems of the younger adoles-
cents. Although feeling "die restlessness, excitement, and anxiety
that war brings," they found little opportunity to share in it all and
were often held back by their parents. [38] One result of these
conditions for young adolescent girls, who take the "next older
group" or "those just older" as their reference group, was the great
rise in sex delinquency. [6, 9] This was found even among girls
"from families that are of high quality." [7, 30] Additional
problems came to those adolescents whose homes were broken by
the war, whose families migrated to strange communities, or
whose parents worked away from home during wartime. [2, 26]

218 RE-FORMATION OF THE EGO IN ADOLESCENCE

Davis [5] has given a cogent sociological characterization of the
main problems relating to "adolescence and the social structure."
He emphasizes the point that, as a result of the conflicting norms
relating to such matters as maturity status, profession, marriage,
in a society of rapid social change, the problems adolescent boys
and girls face "involve strain and inconsistency," making the
transition more or less an ordeal, prolonging it to a greater or
lesser degree, and in some cases creating inevitable parent-youth
conflict. In a separate study, Davis takes up specifically "The
Sociology of Parent-Youth Conflict" (pp. 287/.).

Davis further indicates the specific social inconsistencies and
contradictions of occupational placement, of the institutions and
norms regulating sexual behavior, and of the rights and privileges
of adolescents. Calling attention to such contradictions, he writes:

In our society, even apart from the family, the adolescent finds an
absence of definitely recognized, consistent patterns of authority.
Because of the compartmentalization of the culture he is defined at
times as an adult, at other times as a child. [5, I?/ italics ours]

In contrast to such casual and contradictory patterns, Davis points
out how, in a different society, the Soviet Union, adolescents are
an organic part of an integrated social system; how, for example,
the youth in school and in the Pioneer and Comsomol organiza-
tions play a responsible role in harmony with their maturity level.
On the basis of such considerations, he concludes:

The Soviet system suggests that to make the school an integral part
of the political and economic structure, and to give youth a produc-
tive role, central planning of the whole economy is necessary. [5, 15]

A study such as this forcefully brings home once more the futility
of any study of the social psychology, or of any psychology for
that matter, of adolescence without first placing the individual in
his socioeconomic setting. In a later chapter we include a few
specific illustrations of individual adolescent behavior in group
situations which are in harmony with the general trend of society
at large (pp. 338/.).

The full importance of a knowledge of the setting within which
the adolescent develops can be seen if we realize that, under certain

ADOLESCENCE IN DIFFERENT CULTURES AND TIMES 219

conditions, even schooling may be a curse instead of a blessing for
youths in the process of becoming grown-ups. A concrete illus-
tration of the point is reported by Majumdar [16] in his study of
"A Tribe in Transition/' the Ho tribe of the Ghota plateau in
India. Among other interesting problems facing this colonial
tribe, he reports the effects of schools introduced by the British
government. Education in the local schools "does not help the
Hos in the least from an economic point of view, unless the stu-
dents can proceed to the High School at Chaibassa." [197] Even
then the student will probably not receive a remunerative job from
the British government. However, children of the landowners
can return to be "the leaders in the village." The usual reaction
of the average Hos who go to high school is to "return to their
homes and curse their education for the rest of their lives" after
two or three years of moving "heaven and earth to secure a
job." [198]

As we shall see, adolescents frequently find relief from puzzling
inconsistent, confusing situations, by "rebelling" against the dic-
tates of adults in their immediate environment and anchoring
themselves in an age-mate world, or, specifically, in age-mate
groups (pp. 251 $.). Their behavior is then regulated in an impor-
tant way by the values or norms prevalent among the age mates
to whom they refer themselves. Many of these norms may run
counter to those of their parents and other adults. However, this
picture, if not completed, leaves an erroneous impression. Un-
doubtedly, the majority of adolescents in a particular culture
eventually become full-fledged adults, abiding by the major norms
of their culture, class, and so on, just as the "pleasant co-operative"
Manus children become "grasping competitive Manus adults."
An adolescent may defy his parents in relation to some more or
less important norms of his class; yet later, when he has passed
into adulthood and has incorporated norms appropriate to the
interests of his class and the status of adults in his particular situa-
tion, he may staunchly uphold the very same norms he once so
violently repudiated. For example, George Apley of John Mar-
quand's novel [17] outraged his Boston Brahmin family by falling
in love with an Irish girl. Only after the onslaught of united
family pressure and a trip to Europe did he give up his intentions

220 RE-FORMATION OF THE EGO IN ADOLESCENCE

of marrying her. But years later, George, now in his father's shoes,
fought with almost equal intensity his own son's affair with a
daughter of a nouveau riche from Worcester.

These few examples of cultural variation could be multiplied by
hundreds from the rather disconnected studies of ethnologists.
The facts reported here should be enough to give us some perspec-
tive and save us from the error of making generalizations based
on particular cultures. All in all, a survey of this material indi-
cates that the problems facing the adolescent vary from culture to
culture, rendering the transition to adulthood more or less compli-
cated, more or less conflicting, more or less prolonged. Such
studies indicate the necessity of using comparative material from
different cultures and times, and the necessity of first placing
adolescent ego problems in their social settings. For significant
variations and factors of social change necessarily reflect them-
selves in the status problems of the adolescent, who are themselves
in a critical and unstable stage of transition. After learning this
from the ethnologist, we can return to our own work as psycholo-
gists carrying with us the implications of the lesson learned. We
should start our work by reiterating a methodological considera-
tion appropriate in this connection. With variations in the social
setting, the transitional period of adolescence may be more or less
prolonged, fraught with more or less intense problems. However,
the basic psychological principles which operate in all of these
social settings should be the same. If we abandon the search for
these psychological principles, we will be falling into the tragic
blunder committed by the Fascist advocates of basic race differences.

REFERENCES

1. BOLL, E. S., Britain's experience with adolescents, 'Ann. 'Am. TAcad. Pol. and Soc.

Sci., 1944, 236, 74-82.

2. BOSSARD, J. H. S., Family backgrounds of wartime adolescents, Ann. Am. Acad.

Pol. and Soc. Sci., 1944, 236, 33-42.

3. BROWN, A. R., Andaman Islanders, Cambridge (England) : Univ. Press, 1922.

5. Adolescence and the social structure, Ann. Am. Acad. Pol. and Soc. Sci.,

1944, 236, 8-16.
6. GARDNER, G. E., Sex behavior of adolescents in wartime, rAnn. Am. 'Acad. Pol.

and Soc. Set., 1944, 236, 60-6.

REFERENCES 221

7. GROVES, E. R., and G. H. GROVES, The social background of wartime adoles-

cents, Ann. Am. Acad. Pol. and Soc. Sci., 1944, 236, 26-32.

8. HALL. G. SM Adolescence, Its Psychology and Us Relations to Physiology, An-

thropology, Sociology, Sex, Crime, Religion and Education, New York:
Appleton, copyright 1904.

9. HANKINS, D., Mental hygiene problems of the adolescent period, Ann. Am.

Acad. Pol. and Soc. Sci., 1944, 236, 128-35.

10. JONES, H. E,, Development in Adolescence, New York: Appleton-Century,

13. KOMAROVSKY, M., The Unemployed Man and His Family, New York: Dryden,

1940.

14. LYND, R. S., and H. M, LYND, Middletown in Transition, New York: Harcourt,

15. MAGEE, E. S., Impact of the war on child labor, Ann. 'Am. Acad. Pol. and Soc.

Sci., 1944, 236, 101-09.

16. MAJUMDAR, D. N., A Tribe in Transition, New York: Longmans, Green, 1937.

17. MARQUAND, J. P., The Late George Apley, Boston: Little, Brown, 1937.

18. MCGRANAHAN, D. V., and M. JANOWITZ, Studies of German youth, /. Abnorm.

& Soc. Psychol, 1946, 41, 3-14.

19. MEAD, M., Prom the South Seas, Studies of Adolescence and Sex in Primitive

20. : Coming of Age in Samoa, in [19].

21. Growing Up in New Guinea, in [19].

22. ? Sex and Temperament in Three Primitive Societies, in [19].

23. RADIN, P., The Autobiography of a Winnebago Indian, Univ. Calif. Publica-
tions in Am. Archaeology and Ethnology, vol. 16, April 15, 1920, 381-473.

24. Primitive Religion, Its Nature and Origin, New York: Viking, copy-
right 1937.

25. RIVERS, W. H. R., History of Melanesian Society, Cambridge (England) : Univ.

Press, 1924.

26. SKINNER, M., and A. S. NUTT, Adolescents away from home, 'Ann. Am. Acad.

Pol. and Soc. Sci., 1944, 236, 51-9.

27. SORENSON, R., Wartime recreation for adolescents, Ann. Am. fAcad. Pol. and

Soc. Sci., 1944, 236, 145-51.

28. VAN GENNEP, A., Les Rites de passage, Paris, 1909.

29. WEAVER, P., Youth and religion, Ann. Am. Acad. Pol. and Soc. Sci., 1944,

236, 152-60.

30. WEBSTER, H., Taboo, A Sociological Study, Stanford: Univ. Press, 1942.

31. WHITING, J. W. M., Becoming a Kwoma, New Haven: Yale Univ. Press,

32. WILLIAMS, F., Russia, Youth and the Present Day World, New York: Farrar &

Rinehart, 1934.

33. ZACHRY, C. B., Customary stresses and strains of adolescence, Ann. 'Am. rAcad.

Pol. and Soc. Sci., 1944, 236, 136-44.

CHAPTER 9

RE-FORMATION OF THE EGO IN ADOLESCENCE

(Continued)

We have seen that by the time of puberty the child develops to
relate himself psychologically to definite groups, such as family,
school, age mates, sex groups, church, and other social institutions.
We have cited briefly some effects of these diverse identifications.
But the child has yet to achieve the status of a full-fledged adult
man or woman with all that that status implies in the way of
grown-up functions, rights, privileges, and responsibilities. Psy-
chologically, he has yet to be treated as adult by his social sur-
roundings. He has yet to experience himself and behave as adult
through the incorporation of the grown-up values of masculinity
or femininity, norms of some work or profession (or anticipations
thereof), and norms of social status as prescribed by the prevailing
values of the economic and social institutions within his reach.
Usually, the period of adolescence during which girls and boys
reach their major physiological maturity is the period of transition
when they face these problems. The relative ease or difficulty, the
duration of the transition depends, as was briefly indicated in the
last chapter, on the particular economic and social circumstances
surrounding the boys or girls. The variations of socioeconomic
conditions, the integrated or contradictory character of prevailing
norms, the consistency or inconsistency of the treatment and ex-
pectations faced, the integration or "marginality" of their own
roles as part of the general social scheme, enter in as important
factors.

THE DEVELOPING EGO RENDERED UNSTABLE AND, AT TIMES, CRITICAL

Young boys and girls strive to satisfy newly developing desires,
to get settled or start getting settled. In the many different ways

222

DEVELOPING EGO RENDERED UNSTABLE AND, AT TIMES, CRITICAL 223

in which they experience themselves as being involved, they make
effective or futile efforts of emancipation or independence. In
their strivings to do away with childish things, their "psychological
weaning" 1 or drifting away from earlier dependencies is manifested
in various ways. In the course of these strivings, there arise in-
stabilities, insecurities, adult-youth conflicts, and crises proportional
to the resistances and inconsistencies met in the surroundings.
These resulting instabilities and insecurities are, of course, subject
to variations due to individual differences.

Our present concern is die impact of these phenomena on the
developing ego-attitudes. For the developing ego, which is thus
rendered less stable, less secure, wavering, and conflicting in the
midst of transition and inconsistent situations and norms, has to be
related anew to a constellation of more mature personal and group
relationships. It is painful to toss around without some stable
anchorage. Even the satisfaction of basic drives, including die
newly developed definite sex urges, have to be justified in terms of
one's ego-values. Because of the lack of adequate situations pro-
vided by the established grown-up world which might make these
status anchorings possible, the result, in many cases, is the sponta-
neous formation of more or less secret cliques, gangs, and similar
adolescent groups. We shall designate such groups as membership
groups. In other cases, crushes or identifications with idolized
persons, or identifications with groups of which the adolescent is
not directly a member (or even with whom he is not in contact)
may serve a similar function psychologically. These latter identi-
fications will be designated as reference idols or reference groups.2
These membership groups, reference idols, and reference groups
play an important role in determining the interests, attitudes, and
ego links of the adolescent boy or girl. In the remainder of this
chapter, we shall give an account of the ego development of ado-
lescents along these lines. Our account will necessarily be sketchy.

1 This characterization was aptly used and elaborated by L. Hollingworth. [20,
36 ff.; 21, 882-408]

2 The term reference group was used by Hyman (pp. 137/.). The exact sense
in which we use it will become clear as we go along. Our use of it is not essen-
tially different from Hyman's.

224 RE-FORMATION OF THE EGO IN ADOLESCENCE

The characterization of adolescence as the period of transition to
adult status, and, consequently, to mature or grown-up ego-atti-
tudes certainly needs to be qualified. For under prevailing eco-
nomic conditions a boy may be drawn to work in a shop, plant, or
farm even some years before the advent of puberty; a girl may be
imposed with the serious responsibilities of keeping house or
taking care of children. In such situations, he or she does develop
adult ego-attitudes in these respects. Still, if the age mates of a
child in such situations are not undergoing similar experiences, he
or she may experience more or less serious conflicts. And, while
performing the tasks of an adult, he or she may in other ways be
treated as a mere child. Actual observations in several Turkish
villages have provided many concrete illustrations of such treat-
ment. Before they were even seven or eight, these Turkish chil-
dren showed hardly any remnants of childish egocentric speech.
In some respects, they behaved and spoke as prematurely grown-up
children. The coefficient of egocentricity seemed to be reduced
almost to zero under the mature responsibilities they were sub-
jected to. Nevertheless, this premature development in some re-
spects did not save them from adolescent problems after they
reached puberty. We observed cases of various kinds of parent-
youth conflict, problems related to marriage and sexual activities
due to adolescent physiological development. For example, in
some cases, forced or mutually agreed-upon elopements, with a
great many complications from the family and other sources, en-
sued as a consequence. These are only illustrations. Many other
variations of adolescent problems due to differential inconsistent
out-of-phase timings of the various developmental processes may
be found.

Changing body and changing self.* In observations concerned
with the very beginning of ego development, we saw the impor-
tance and primacy of the delineation of the baby's body as his
from surrounding objects, the recognition of his hands, feet, face,
as his. Up to the advent of puberty, boys and girls are certainly
preoccupied with their bodies. As may be seen in examples se-
lected at random from hundreds of cases, boys and girls, during

8 This phrase, used by Zachry [49] as a chapter heading, apdy epitomizes the
adolescent bodily changes and their psychological consequences. [31]

DEVELOPING EGO RENDERED UNSTABLE AND, AT TIMES, CRITICAL 225

adolescence, become acutely aware of their own bodies and even
parts of it (besides the sex organs), especially in a society where
there is a high premium on physical attractiveness. An adoles-
cent's whole ego concern may at times be focused on the attrac-
tiveness or, real or fancied, unattractiveness of even a part of the
body. Prevailing norms concerning feminine and masculine at-
tractiveness and the relative importance attached to these norms in
the person's reference and membership groups may, of course,
determine in significant ways the extent and intensity of ego-
involvements focused on the body or its parts.

Studies dealing with physiological developments and their psy-
chological correlates at the period of adolescence are being rapidly
accumulated. After mentioning briefly the physiological changes,
we shall concern ourselves mainly with their impact on ego de-
velopment. A few more or less representative accounts of these
changes may be found in the references noted.

The bodily changes occurring during adolescence are regulated
to an important degree by the endocrine glands. The pituitary,
thyroid, adrenal (cortex), and gonads play particularly important
roles in the growth phenomena of this period. Adequate function-
ing of all the endocrine glands, with their proper interrelatedness
with each other, with the nervous and the cardiovascular systems,
is apparently a necessary condition for normal growth. Under
the regulation of the endocrine glands, an increased growth in
height and weight generally precedes pubescence. This growth is
accompanied by changes in body proportions toward more typi-
cally masculine and feminine builds, changes in the size of most
of the internal organs, appearance of the secondary sex charac-
teristics (for example, growth of pubic hair; change of voice and
growth of beard in boys; breast development in girls). At the
same time there is a maturation of the reproductive organs of each
sex, ordinarily indicated by the onset of menstruation for girls and
the secretion of spermatozoa for boys, together with the growth
and development of the genitalia. Such changes do not occur, of
course, without some changes in the general functioning of the
bodily processes, as indicated, for example, by measurements of
basal metabolic rate.

226 RE-FORMATION OF THE EGO IN ADOLESCENCE

The psychological consequences of these gross changes and the
more or less clear-cut differentiation of the sexes at this time are
treated later in more detail. However, we should note here for
future reference two of the more important facts of physical
growth for our problem of the re-formation of the ego at adoles-
cence. First, girls, on the average, mature physiologically a year
or so earlier than boys. As we shall see, the psychological conse-
quence of this fact is that girls tend to form attitudes of adult
femininity and social maturity earlier than boys of the same age.
We sometimes find, for example, that girls tend to drag the boys
of their age with them into more mature interests and skills, such
as dancing, appropriate to their more mature level of development.

Secondly, not only does variation in time and rate of growth and
the onset of pubescence vary from environment to environment,
from class to class, but even within a given group, individual
variations in development and rate of growth may be marked.
And we shall see that marked deviation in either direction from
group norms of development has psychological consequences for
the adolescent boy or girl who is in such a situation.4

With these more striking physiological changes, one's conception
of one's ego correspondingly changes. As Zachry [49] aptly puts
it, "the body is symbolic of the self," [32] To start with, the very
psychological correlates of these changes tend to be felt as extraor-
dinary even independent of their ego relationship. [47] The ado-
lescent's already accentuated awareness and focusing on his body
becomes even more acute with the more pronounced, somewhat
stylized attention of others (for example, parents and other adoles-
cents) on his or her body, with sex desires toward and from age
mates now present in a developed way. And with the develop-
ment of these sex desires and changing attitudes toward one's body
there comes an intense awareness of the developing opposite sex.
This fact is aptly illustrated by the statements of one boy concern-
ing his changing associations with girls. In junior high school
this boy was only "interested" in girls. However, he writes:

4 These bodily changes during adolescence are described in detail in [2, 3, 4, 7,
18, 20, 22, 25, 37, 39, 47, 49]; the earlier development of girls is discussed in
[2, 4, 7, 39, 49] ; variations of growth are shown in [1, 2, 4, 20, 49].

DEVELOPING EGO RENDERED UNSTABLE AND, AT TIMES, CRITICAL 227

It was in high school that I began to date in the true sense of the
word. It was now that girls were beginning to attract me in a differ-
ent light. It was no longer their intelligence or athletic ability or
torn-boyishness which attracted me, but it was the way they wore their
makeup, the way they moved their hips when they walked, and the
way they snuggled up close when we danced that I began to notice.
It was all new, strange, scary, but terribly interesting and exciting.
[48, 12]

As a consequence of these changes, the adolescent cannot help
but preoccupy himself and, especially, herself with comparisons in
relation to the prevailing norms of body proportions and growth,
and, more specifically, in relation to the girls or boys of his own
group. Zachry mentions the case of a girl who, being slightly
"larger and heavier than most of her contemporaries/' became so
conscious of her body that she covered herself up most of the
time "in a voluminous smock." [49, 63] Frequent letters appear
in the interesting magazine Seventeen to this effect:

How about showing some clothes for the short, chubby teen-ager?
We all want to look like the rest of the crowd — but you know how
some of us look in sweaters and skirts.

You put too much emphasis on the petite junior miss and leave
her skyscraper cousin out in the coldl

The adolescent boy or girl may try very hard to incorporate in
himself or herself and to conform to the particular norms of femi-
ninity or masculinity fashionable in the surroundings when sexual
maturity has been reached. At first these efforts may be clumsy
or affected. And all of these strivings tend to produce feelings of
uncertainty about one's own self.

In nearly all the representative works on adolescence, there are
many concrete illustrations of the changing body and the changing
self, and a more or less acute focusing of the whole conception of
one's self on the body in general, or even on some part of the body.
This may become psychologically so exaggerated as to become a
major ego concern and may have a major influence in regulating

228 RE-FORMATION OF THE EGO IN ADOLESCENCE

the adolescent's social behavior. Even anxieties and insecurities in
other respects may be reflected in such a concern. Peter Bios [5]
gives the following illustration:

At the age of thirteen or fourteen years, Betty begins to be very
concerned with her looks. The mole on her chee\, which is some-
what noticeable, becomes the focus of her self-consciousness. Worry
about her appearance increases and finally motivates her to avoid
dances or parties until the mole will have been removed by an opera-
tion. She has read about operations which have succeeded in im-
proving the looks of women, and has set her hopes on this surgical
work. [5, 93, italics ours]

To cite just a few other cases of the body or its parts becoming
a major focus of the adolescent's ego, the following statements,
communicated to the writers recently by a former student of a
large Midwestern University, are relevant:

All through my grade school years, I was the tallest girl in the class,
and, as a matter of fact, was rather proud of it. However, the summer
before I entered Junior High School at the age of thirteen, I grew to
just an inch below my present five-feet-eight. I towered above every
girl and boy in our class; and it seemed to me that I was the tallest
girl in the world. None of my family's comforting words made it
easier for me to wall( across the room at school. In high school, two
girls taller than I entered the class. But they weren't in our crowd,
so I continued to feel like a giraffe when I went out with the girls.
I suppose the fact that several of the boys grew to six-footers helped
dispel that shrinking feeling. But the crowning touch came in the
spring of my junior year. The school paper published a list of
characteristics of a composite "Ideal Girl." Lo and behold, my name
was listed after "Ideal Height." I haven't felt too tall since, [italics
ours]

Averill [1] mentions another case of a comparatively tall girl who
walked stooped and with round shoulders in order to appear
shorter. [32] Hollingworth [20] mentions several examples, in-
cluding the absorption of some adolescents with pimpled or blem-
ished skin. [8] One boy began to walk on tiptoes because his feet
seemed so large [12]; another was so conscious of his changing
voice that he refused, even under pressure from the teacher, to
sing in school [13] ; and still another sat "with his hand over his

DEVELOPING EGO RENDERED UNSTABLE AND, AT TIMES, CRITICAL 229

mouth and chin much of the time" because he thought he needed
to shave and his parents disagreed. [13]

As can easily be seen in the foregoing illustrations, the problems
raised in regard to one's self are relative matters; that is, problems
arise in regard to one's own stage of maturity and development
(height, weight, bodily proportions, and the like), in relation to
one's own sex and age mates. In several studies carried out in the
Institute of Child Welfare of the University of California, which
has contributed some of the most significant investigations in the
field, this result is reported time and again. For example, Nancy
Bayley and R. Tuddenham [4] conclude:

. . . that being different from their peers seemed to be a potential
hazard to adequate adjustment. The poorest adjusted among the jour
extreme groups were the early-maturing girls and the late-maturing
boys. As these children attended a coeducational school in which
grade placement was largely by chronological age, the two groups who
would stand out in the schoolroom as physically most different would
be the large, early-maturing girls and the small, late-maturing boys.
To be a girl and large, and to be a boy and small, are both contrary
to the ideals of the culture, and therefore it seems plausible to expect
that some of these children, if they do not have adequate compensa-
tions in other fields, might well find their physical difference an
emotional problem. [4, 53, italics ours]

Similarly, Zachry states:

A boy whose physical development begins rather earlier than that
of other boys in his class is apt to feel not only that his body is out-
sized. Perhaps he comes to feel himself a misfit. [49, 51, italics ours]

A case cited by Averill illustrates this point. Harold became
pubescent before the boys in his "gang" of which he had been the
leader.

. . . Harold's lengthening arms and legs, and his amazingly enlarg-
ing hands and feet have made him decidedly awkward and clumsy.
The other boys, not yet pubescent, are beginning to be somewhat
shaken in their loyalties to their recent leader. [1, 31]

Peter Bios illustrates the same general fact conversely.

The late developing boy or the boy showing inappropriate sex de-
velopment is handicapped in his social development on account of

230 RE-FORMATION OF THE EGO IN ADOLESCENCE

group discrimination. It has been observed that changes in physical
status are followed by a changed attitude of the group: thus a boy
with retarded maturation was long an outsider until a spurt of growth
set in which subsequently led to his smooth absorption in the group.
[5, 253, italics ours]

The self-consciousness due to late maturation in relation to one's
own age mates may cause the adolescent greater or lesser degrees
of shyness or timidity in his behavior. F. W. Burks [9] reports in
a study of the Tugwell High School Clubhouse (1936-37) 5 in
California that the "late maturing boys were not able to utilize the
clubhouse as a laboratory for practicing techniques for use with
girls in quite so free an atmosphere as those who had achieved
some proficiency in the Jackson School clubhouse." [12] In
White's account of Joseph Kidd [46] we see a concrete example
of the difficulties encountered by a boy who developed later than
his classmates, in this case because he was nearly two years their
junior. White states Joseph's predicament:

Being in the same grade with his brother, he had come to depend
upon him for companionship, initiative, and even defense. When
sexual maturity carried the brother into a new circle of activities, Kidd
felt deserted and helpless; he was faced by the new task of making
his own way, a task for which his being more than a year younger
than the group was at this age a serious handicap. His accustomed
social attitudes were now revealed as wholly unsuitable. [46, 796]

The relative standing of the development of an adolescent in
relation to his age mates may not be a constant matter; it may
mean different things in different situations. Zachry reports an
illustration of this point "as described by Lawrence S. Kubie, M.D.,
at a meeting held by the Study of Adolescents."

At the age of twelve one youngster may, for example, attain a size
more usual to a boy of sixteen. Grouped with other twelve-year-olds
in the classroom he may feel quite comfortable, since he is not unlike
them in the stage of his intellectual and emotional development. But
among the same boys on the playground he is facing a curiously
complicated psychological challenge. [49, 50]

6 We are indebted to Drs. H. E. Jones and M. C. Jones for securing this un-
published report.

DEVELOPING EGO RENDERED UNSTABLE AND, AT TIMES, CRITICAL 231

In detailed investigations of various aspects of the adolescence of
John Sanders, one of the cases studied longitudinally by the Insti-
tute of Child Welfare of the University of California [25], we find
clear-cut substantiation of the importance of the changing body
and changing self in relation to one's own group. John, who. was
not an unusual boy, whose case was not a dramatic one, and who,
incidentally, could get along much better with his father than with
his mother, was rated by his classmates as approximately average
in different personal characteristics (masculine, happy, popular,
and so on) at the age of 12.5 years. John matured physically a
year or so later than his age mates.

. . . during his junior-high-school years John became markedly
shorter, lighter, and punier in relation to classmates. [25, 155 f.]

At the age of 15, John suffered a "disheartening change of status
in all the traits represented." [154]

Adult observers agreed that around the age of 15 John was at a low
point in, for example, popularity, initiative, and good-naturedness,
and at a high point in evidences of anxiety, show-off behavior, and
affectation. [25, 755]

His "adolescent spurt" started at 15, a year or so later than other
boys. With this spurt, an upward trend came in his sociability and
status in relation to his age mates. By the age of 17.6 he ap-
proached the average of his age mates. In his freshman year in
college, John was reported as having "a pleasing personality."
In analyzing John's case, Harold Jones states:

. . . delayed maturing may lead not only to loss of status with
others, but also to the anxiety expressed in the question, "Am I nor-
mal?" When the biological innovations of adolescence are at last
clearly avowed, a turning point may be reached not merely in physio-
logical development, but also in social recognition and in feelings of
personal security. The interpretation followed above stresses the social
significance of adolescent changes, and implies that the psychological
effect of these changes rests upon the degree to which an individual
is sensitive to the norms and values of his social environment [25,
756]

232 RE-FORMATION OF THE EGO IN ADOLESCENCE

Incorporation in the ego of norms of masculinity and femininity.
We have seen that as the body changes into one of a mature male
or female, the adolescent's conception of himself or herself also
changes. The adolescent begins to conceive of himself or herself
as man or woman. This includes the social expectations and
values attached to the male or female body. As some of the illus-
trations in the previous section have indicated, certain values have
to do with desirable body proportions of one's own and of the
opposite sex. These values, when incorporated as part of the ego,
regulate in an important way the adolescent's experience and be-
havior related to his own body and to his choice of "desirable"
companions of the opposite sex. As we shall see later, these choices
are also defined in terms of ego-attitudes related to norms of the
"right" people for associates, in terms of class, status, and the like.
Whereas girls, prior to adolescence, are prone to be fairly free in
the way they handle their bodies, they now become highly con-
scious of them, handling them in terms of such culturally pre-
scribed norms as modesty and feminine attractiveness. So, too,
boys handle and treat their bodies in terms of norms of masculine
attractiveness which have now become more acutely ego-involved
for them. Thus, a high school boy may appear casual, athletic, or
whatever stance and pose is suitable to the particular culture and
time. Fashions of male and female dress assume great importance
at this time. This development has been aptly summarized for
200 adolescent boys and girls by investigators at the University of
California, [41]

Psychologically also the girl feels a necessity of proving to herself
and to the world that she is essentially feminine; the boy needs to
demonstrate that he has those masculine qualities which require others
to recognize him as a man. This characteristic accounts for the girls
spending a large part of their leisure time in shopping and in personal
adornment. This is the secret of the manicured nails, painted red to
match vivid lips. This is why they must wave and curl their hair,
and, having perfected the process, must pin into it ribbon bows, bits
of lace, or flowers. This is the reason for the boy's urge to learn to
drive a car and for his willingness to move heaven and earth to bor-
row or own one. Along with this development, also, we are told by
our group that a girl to be popular must be modishly pretty, keep

DEVELOPING EGO RENDERED UNSTABLE AND, AT TIMES, CRITICAL 233

herself clean and neat, be a good mixer. A boy, on the other hand,
must be aggressive and must excel at sports. He must have the ability
to dance and to talk easily with girls, and in addition he must show
that he can compete readily with other boys; that he can achieve and
master. [41, 6/.]

It may be seen from this summary characterization that not all
of the social values incorporated as ego-values connected with
masculinity-femininity are directly related to the male or female
body. There are also norms regarding the social and economic
functions, the statuses of men and women. And there are norms
regarding the essential nature of men and women which are more
or less appropriate to those particular social and economic func-
tions and statuses. No matter what the contribution of infantile
sexuality may be in determining the male or female ego, the ego-
values of masculinity or femininity are effectively acquired during
adolescence. As Goodenough [17] concludes on the basis of
standard studies in America:

Girls, on the average, earn their most highly feminine score on the
M-F test when they are in the eighth grade; boys make their most
masculine score during the third year of high school. Roughly, these
periods correspond to the usual age at the attainment of puberty.
Perhaps the explanation for the wide divergence of the sexes in psy-
chological traits at that time is a reflection of the adolescent's intense
interest in all matters that have to do with the establishment of his
status as man or woman. [17, 486 /., italics ours]

In Tryon's study [44] of certain "factors involved in the task of
maintaining status with one's peers," we find some substantiation
of Goodenough's last point. Tryon studied 350 boys and girls,
first at the age of 12 and later at the age of 15, acquiring their
opinions of others in the group by means of a verbal-picture
("Guess Who") test. As Tryon summarized her findings:

During the period between ages twelve to fifteen, values for girls
underwent some revolutionary changes; values for boys underwent
relatively minor changes, mainly in terms of slightly shifted emphases.
[44,565]

As an example, the 12-year-old girls with high prestige in the
group were described as "neat, attractive appearance; friendly but

234 RE-FORMATION OF THE EGO IN ADOLESCENCE

rather demure and docile social manner; quiet good humor; and
controlled behavior conforming to adult standards" [563] ; whereas
the 15-year-old girl gained prestige "either through buoyant, rather
aggressive good-fellowship with both boys and girls, or through
sophisticated, glamorous qualities which attract the boys." [565]

As we have seen, girls mature physiologically earlier than boys.
In the group Tryon studied [43] "most of the girls had passed
through the pubescent period at fifteen years, and probably less
than one-half of the boys had." [79] The data illustrate the
changing characteristics or "traits" necessary for status accompany-
ing the girls' changing bodies, just as, as we have seen, changing
interests come at this time. It would seem entirely possible, as
Tryon suggests, that if the boys in this study had been at a com-
parable level of physiological maturity, a similar shift in "desir-
able" personal qualities would have appeared for them. Whether
or not the shift would be as "revolutionary" as that for girls re-
mains to be answered by a study of the question. It is even pos-
sible that a further shift might be found in the girls' values. For,
as Tryon notes, the girls who were rated high because of "cordial
rather dominating good-fellowship with both boys and girls . . .
were very successful with the boys who were just venturing into
mixed-sex social situations; the behavior of these girls was enough
like that of the boys that it did not alarm the boys." [79]

The adolescent experiences himself or herself and behaves like
a man or a woman as prescribed by these norms, whatever they
may be in a particular culture. As Conklin formulated it:

Perceptions of the physical self as male or female and all the possible
meanings which may accrue to those perceptions must cause a very
large twist toward difference in the self concepts of the two sexes.
[12, 56, italics ours]

Certainly, norms regarding the conceptions of man and woman,
their functions, their status do "accrue" and do vary from culture
to culture as determined by their socioeconomic organizations.
Consequently, we find, in different cultures, different identifica-
tions, behavior manifestations, different problems. As Conklin
points out:

DEVELOPING EGO RENDERED UNSTABLE AND, AT TIMES, CRITICAL 235

If the greater introversion is perceived or believed in by a girl, that
will have its reflex upon her self concept and all self-regarding func-
tions. If the boy believes that he has better control than the girl, that
will affect his attitudes as much as hers. If any or all of the possible
emotional differences between the sexes are brought to the attention
and perception of boys and girls, then their self concepts will be
affected thereby. [12, 56]

This point, which should be seriously accounted for in any an-
alysis of personality, finds expression again in Wile's statement:
[47]

Even the growing differentiation of male dominant aggressiveness
and female dominant submissiveness acquires meaning and value only
in terms of social standards which set them up as laudable patterns
for adolescents. Their particular world defines the processes to which
adolescents shall submit and undertakes to guide them into the essen-
tial qualities which are deemed socially valuable. [47, 9]

The anthropologists, in particular Margaret Mead, have given
accounts of diverse and contrasting norms related to masculinity
and femininity in different cultures. Such variations are not pe-
culiarities or distant primitive cultures alone. With variations of
socioeconomic systems, the conception of man and woman varies.
For example, the Lynds [33] give the following characterization
of the conception of man and woman in America:

The worlds of the two sexes constitute something akin to separate
subcultures. Each involves an elaborate assignment of roles to its
members and the development of preferred personality types empha-
sizing various ones of the more significant role attributes. . . . But
this culture says not only that men and women do different things;
they arc different kinds of people. Men are stronger, bolder, less pure,
less refined, more logical, more reasonable, more given to seeing things
in the large, but at home needing coddling and reassurance, "like
little boys." Women are more delicate, stronger in sympathy, under-
standing, and insight, less mechanically adept, more immersed in
petty detail and in personalities, and given to "getting emotional over
things." [33, 176 f.}

In the Soviet Union, this dichotomy of personality characteristics
of man and woman is not the case. That such is the fact does not

236 RE-FORMATION OF THE EGO IN ADOLESCENCE

have to be demonstrated by citations from the studies of psycholo-
gists. Thousands of concrete illustrations have appeared in printed
form about the behavior of Soviet women during the fulfillment
of the Five Year Plans and during World War II, not only in
the auxiliary armed services and factories, but also in combat
situations and guerrilla warfare.

We have mentioned these sociological characterizations of norms
concerning man and woman because of their organic connection
with our problem. First of all, adolescents are in a transitional
period in terms of their status. If, as Zachry and others point
out, they at the same time receive inconsistent treatments from
grown-ups, they will have further difficulty in stabilizing their
egos. Gardner [16] writes of such conflict situations:

It might be well to note here in the interest of tolerance of the
adolescent that as far as the expression of maturity goes, he is "con-
demned if he does and condemned if he doesn't" show evidence of
maturity of sexual interest and outlook, and this even by his own
parents. That parents wish their adolescents to grow up and be
independent and that at the same time they wish them to continue
to be children and dependent upon them has never made the task of
the adolescent an easy one. [16, 61]

Now, in addition to such conflict situations, adolescents are put in
even more puzzling circumstances by virtue of the fact that many
of the norms relating to masculinity and femininity, even in
highly developed Western societies, are certainly survivals of past
centuries and periods.

Modern technological developments and social changes, recent
momentous events of the last decades (such as depression and war)
have brought about changes in the social behavior of men and,
especially, of women. But the norms concerning the "basic na-
ture" of man and woman, their "real" function and station in
society, still survive side by side with the necessary alterations in
behavior forced by the impact of these changes. The discrepancy
between certain practices imposed by social and technological
changes and these norms, which in themselves are contradictory,
produces conflict situations which surely have their psychological
consequences. Pointing to this discrepancy, the Lynds state:

DEVELOPING EGO RENDERED UNSTABLE AND, AT TIMES, CRITICAL 237

But the modifications have been in the kind of behavior sanctioned
by the culture, not in the belief that men and women are different in
character and temperament, and not in the ways in which they are
believed to be different. The modifications of the behavior patterns
themselves consist in tolerated exceptions rather than in the develop-
ment of any clear alternatives meeting with group approval. For the
individual, the result is frequently either that he is caught in a chaos
of conflicting patterns, none of them wholly condemned, but no one
of them clearly approved and free from confusion; or, where the group
sanctions are clear in demanding a certain role of man or woman,
the individual encounters cultural requirements with no immediate
means of meeting them. [33, 777]

Since adolescents are themselves in a more or less critical process
of transition, these situations certainly breed adolescent insecuri-
ties, conflicts, rebellions, and, at times, inevitable crises. In the
process of re-formation of the ego, we should expect to find, as,
the California study mentioned earlier in this section indicates,
that

. . . once the girl has arrived at the status in the group to which
she has aspired, or has learned to adjust herself to a version of the
universal feminine model which suits her own personality . . . once
the boy feels that he is accepted as a man . . . [he and she] become
more stable and predictable. Teachers, and parents say that they have
"settled down." [41, 7]

However, the problems related to the contradictions found in
being male or female in America do not always disappear in early
adolescence. We find ample evidence to show that such conflicts,
although perhaps lessened for a time, may increase as the adoles-
cent seriously faces the prospects of work and marriage. Such
evidence is to be found in such studies as those of Kirkpatrick
[26, 27] where he reports that attitudes toward femininity are
highly inconsistent, both for parents and adolescents of both sexes.

It also seems to be true that the sex differences in inconsistency tend
to be greater in the younger generation. [26, 355]

The fact that male students "were decidedly more inconsistent
than female students" would seem to make the lot of both males
and females fraught with difficulties. [27, 557]

238 RE-FORMATION OF THE EGO IN ADOLESCENCE

However, it is the female in a bourgeois society who is in most
danger of remaining "marginal," of experiencing continued con-
flict due to the contradictory ego-attitudes and situations in which
she finds herself. Kitay [28] found, for example, that girls tend
to incorporate the "prevailing views" about themselves maintained
by men, "even when they are uncomplimentary." [405] In the
areas of work opportunities, these problems are particularly ac-
centuated for girls. As Seward [40] puts it:

Having provided its boys and girls with the same educational oppor-
tunities and vocational motivation, our society then reverses itself,
suddenly denying the girls the very rewards it has held out to them
throughout the whole course of their development. [40, 178]

In studying college girls' attitudes toward their role in the post-
war period, Seward found

... for the group as a whole, an emphasis on equality between
men and women in educational and vocational opportunities, working
conditions, community activities, and social contacts. Inconsistent
with this liberal trend was a reactionary reinforcement of the tradi-
tional subordinate feminine role as far as wife and mother relation-
ships were concerned. [40, 193]

As would be predicted, those subjects who rejected the latter no-
tions, were found to be more insecure than those who conformed,
this apparently being "the price . . . [they] pay for their non-
conformity." [190] Further evidence that this conflict is of social,
not biological origin, was found in interviews in which the "at-
titudes and experiences with respect to sexual and maternal ac-
tivities could not be differentiated from those of the conservatives."
[193] This finding would seem to go counter to the psycho-
analytic theory that "all women . . . who fail to find complete
satisfaction in the role assigned them by contemporary society"
have a "masculinity complex." [177] For example, we would ex-
pect that girls who handled men's jobs during the war would find
it particularly difficult to return to the role conventionally pre-
scribed for women.

The major conflicts and anxieties experienced by girls who are
themselves in a state of transition can be traced back to the incon-
sistent conflicting values and norms in society. This fact was dis-

DEVELOPING EGO RENDERED UNSTABLE AND, AT TIMES, CRITICAL 239

cussed by Leta Hollingworth [20] 17 years ago and has been more
recently pointed out by Seward [40].

The changing ego and adult-youth conflict. The recasting of
some major ego-attitudes and the formation of new ego-attitudes
in relation to one's body, to one's own and to the opposite sex,
grown-ups, education, work or profession, standing in the world,
and so on, all imply a change in the ego. This change does not
occur overnight. The ego reaches its relative (adult) stability
only after a period of time, if it reaches it at all. Under some
difficult circumstances and for some persons, the striving for rela-
tive stability is considerably prolonged. For example, for some
old maids or bachelors frustrated during adolescence, the process
may continue throughout a whole lifetime.

We have already pointed out that because of the heightened
affective and emotional state of the adolescent due to significant
glandular changes and to the accelerated growth rate, he is also
in a state of flux psychologically. The more or less stable ego-
links formed up to adolescence become shaky and precarious.
New relationships, links, and aspirations are still in a fluid state
and subject to "mercurial" ups and downs (to use Zachry's char-
acterization), on account of the physiological flux and external
(social) pressures. The adolescent tosses about and suffers from
the lack of stable anchorages until some new ones are achieved.
This instability is especially aggravated in a changing social milieu
and in different family situations where the adolescent faces con-
tradictory norms and inconsistent expectations and treatments.

The psychological consequences are feelings of inadequacy, in-
security, and anxiety. Various degrees of crisis may ensue, in
some cases with grave consequences for the individual. The
intensity of the crisis is proportional to the degree of friction and
contradiction of the external demands and individual internal fac-
tors. The adolescent may feel all alone as he finds himself caught
in the whirl of sex desires, striving to amount to something in
the midst of contradictory and inconsistent relationships and val-
ues. Several expressions of this feeling of aloneness, of being left
out and even betrayed, were found in the diaries of Turkish ado-
lescent boys and girls. The writing of diaries, which indicates a
turning inward, seems to be more prevalent in a social milieu

240 RE-FORMATION OF THE EGO IN ADOLESCENCE

which does not provide many opportunities for the adolescents of
both sexes to mix together frequently in overt activities such as
age-mate parties, dancing and sports. That this tendency to turn
inward is reduced in a social milieu where adolescents do have
more of a chance to mix together is indicated, for example, by
the fact that at the present time in the upper middle-class milieu
in California very little diary writing is observed. We mention
the keeping of diaries only as an illustration in passing. Before
we give a brief account of other behavioral indications of the ado-
lescent's striving to amount to something in his changed relation-
ships and values, his effort to reanchor himself, we must examine
somewhat closely the implications of adult-youth conflict for our
problem.

Adult-youth conflict. The facts reported concerning adult-
youth conflict may be taken as a significant index of the instabil-
ity and, in many cases one might almost say, of the disintegration
of the childish ego. Up to the developmental stage of puberty,
a more or less stable set of ego-attitudes had been achieved in rela-
tion to parents, other grown-ups, the values inculcated, school
authorities, teachers, and age mates. With the changing body and
changing self, with the changed expectations and treatments from
the social surroundings including the family, even these existing
relationships may be altered.6

Zachry [49] has given an interesting account of these changes
in her chapter on "Changing Relationships with Adults." For
example, the adolescent sees himself now as grown-up or, at
least, as different, whereas the family at times still continues to
look at him or to treat him as the baby child. The case of John
Sanders [25], referred to earlier, is a good illustration of the point.
In relation to John's mother, Jones states:

It does not appear, however, that she could regard with objective
tolerance the preliminary signs of John's adolescent rebellion; to her,

6 This does not, of course, mean a denial of the special cases of significant
changes in parent-youth relationships at an earlier age in unfortunate family situa-
tions. In such cases, age mates in the streets, school, or in gang formations may
exert a dominant role. Also we are not ignoring prematurely produced effects in
those cases where economic responsibilities are imposed on boys and girls at an
early age.

DEVELOPING EGO RENDERED UNSTABLE AND, AT TIMES, CRITICAL 241

these changing attitudes were a source of irritation and were appar-
ently not thought of as related to her son's social maturing. [25, 20]

The "gripes" and "peeves*' adolescents have against their parents
because of the inconsistent way they are treated are reflected in
the following list mentioned by a 16-year-old boy:

Being called in the morning more than twice. Having them tell
me what to eat. Being yelled at in the bathroom in the morning.
Being asked questions about homework. Being "called down" about
my school marks. Having to tell them where I've been on dates,
where I'm going and who I'm going with. Always being nagged
about the length of time I use the phone, the light I read in, and the
radio programs I hear.7

Goodenough summarizes this source of parent-youth conflict as
follows:

The conflict between old habits and new requirements — represented
on the part of the adolescent by his feeling that he is grown up, that
he wants to be treated like a grown-up, while he still has habits of
acting like a child, and on the parents' side by their recognition that
the child is growing up, their feeling that he ought to act more like a
grown-up, although from force of habit they continue to treat him as
if he were still a child — often makes for a good deal of friction.
[17, 494]

Parent-youth conflict is the more general formulation of the facts
covered under "psychological weaning," or the tendency toward
independence (emancipation) on the part of adolescents. As a
result of such situations, the adolescent boy or girl makes im-
plicit or explicit, effective or, most of the time, futile moves to-
ward emancipation and independence. These rebellions may, in
some cases, assume serious proportions. Running away from home
and wanting to study in out-of-town places, are examples. Illus-
trations of this parent-youth conflict have been reported by many
observers. We can choose at random a few of the many concrete
cases.
Among other cases, Averill [1] relates this one:

7 This is one of the representative interviews collected for us by Carolyn Bcrl.

242 RE-FORMATION OF THE EGO IN ADOLESCENCE

Ruth, a sophomore in high school, is known to her classmates as a
"goody-goody," an appellation which she greatly resents. At home,
she indulges in the wildest temper-tantrums to get her own way from
parents who have scant understanding of the social needs of a young
girl. . . . Her clothes are neat, but practical rather than particularly
becoming. To Ruth they seem ugly, just because they are so practical.
She begs to be allowed to choose her own clothing, but is never
permitted any voice in its selection. . . . No company is allowed on
school nights, and no excuse is sufficient to gain for Ruth escape from
her homework. She is never permitted to attend the school parties,
and is resentful at the strict prohibitions which keep her from par-
ticipating in all club and dramatic activities. At school she is accused
of lacking school spirit, and suffers agonies in consequence. Of late,
her tantrums have been getting worse, and her parents, though coun-
seled to ignore them, are becoming greatly worried. Frequently she
is quite ill for a day or two following these attacks, and insists that
she has no interest in getting well. [1, 69]

Zachry [49] reports a case which is interesting because of the
indication it gives of an adolescent's awareness of the nature of
the adult-youth conflict:

A high-school senior whose home was pervaded by an atmosphere
of artificial politeness, in which it was almost unthinkable to express
resentment openly, wrote in a theme entitled "The Everburning Fire
of Youth":

"When the boy and girl first begin to take notice of a current
problem they see the cause of the problem with a clearer and cleaner
sense of view than do most of their elders, who are too burdened with
many worldly ideas. . . .

"It is disappointing to the younger set to find that their elders do
not want to cooperate. Many times when a young boy or girl tries
to give some advice he is laughed out of the picture by his elders,
who feel that youth has no place in the world except to listen and
learn. . . .

"As the boy and girl grow older they are given more chance to
have their say, but by this time the majority have either forgotten
their ideals or else the events have become so muddled that there is
no chance of clear youthful thinking." [49, 311]

A case of conflict in an adolescent boy of an average New Eng-
land family is taken from Healy [19] "out of the hundreds of

DEVELOPING EGO RENDERED UNSTABLE AND, AT TIMES, CRITICAL 243

available illustrations of such conflicts in our records." [141] Both
the father and mother are average normal New England folks.
There are no unusual disturbing frictions in the situation up to
the time of adolescence.

The issues came out so clearly because he began to rebel at their
formulae of life by the time he was twelve years old. The stirrings of
an unusually fine physique and a very early adolescence, together
with a violent rejection of an earlier father identification, led him to
phantasy hazardous adventure and to seek out young daredevils be-
longing to the unacceptable fringe of his neighborhood with whom
he engaged in reckless escapades and delinquencies. Undetected in
the latter he then, to the utter astonishment of his family, began a
series of runaway episodes. "I can't stand it, doing everything just
the way they want me to. They are good enough to me, but I can't
talk to them about the way I feel," this wholesome appearing lad told
us when we saw him after he had been so perplexing his family for
a couple of years. [19, 142 f.]

Adult-youth conflict is such a general phenomenon in modern
complex societies that the problem does not have to be subjected
to a precise psychological scrutiny to tap its existence. It occa-
sionally occupies the columns of daily papers. Sometimes, these
cases are serious indeed; but here we will note a comparatively
minor manifestation. For example, a pretty 15-year-old girl re-
cently remarked to a newspaperman:

Teachers and parents make all the plans, and we run all the
errands. We're always on the defensive. Grownups don't trust us
or give us any responsibilities. Take our city. We're working like
dogs to get a youth canteen. We're the ones who'll use it, but do we
have anything to say about it? Like heck we do. [36]

Adult-youth conflict may be a good deal more than the mere
individual conflicts of individual adolescents of certain families.
It may develop into a standardized attitude among adolescents.
Such a standardized adolescent attitude was observed by Stolz,
M. C. Jones, and Chaff ey [41] in one of the many adolescent
studies of the California Institute of Child Welfare. From their
investigation of "The Junior High School Age," "based upon an

244 RE-FORMATION OF THE EGO IN ADOLESCENCE

intensive study of one hundred boys and one Hundred girls which
has been carried on during the three-year period that they were
enrolled in junior high school/' the authors conclude:

Adult approval or disapproval meant almost nothing to these young
adolescents except as it might affect the attainment of their goal. In
fact there was a noticeable resistance, not so much to authority, as
our rules seldom got in their way, but simply to adults as such. Those
girls and boys who were in the throes of establishing themselves
socially were the most antagonistic toward adults. They manifested
this attitude chiefly by shunning adults and acting as if their presence
were a hindrance. Six months later these same pupils were likely to
be the ones who hung around and talked to adults as if, being quite
grown up now, they needed to talk and associate with other grown
persons. [41, 3]

In another California study of social development in adoles-
cence, Cameron [10] states:

But through it all there appears the steadily rising pressure to
break away from the earlier accepted domination of parents in the
home and of teachers in the school. It is as though an overwhelming
urge were released within many of these youngsters to assert their
independence, to explore quite new and thrilling kinds of relationships
with each other, and to proclaim their rights to self-expression as in-
dividuals. In a sense the clubhouse was misnamed, for no club meet-
ings were held in it. Nor has any desire been expressed for the
formation of clubs. The social organization which these adolescents
prefer is less rigid, more changeable and fluid. Formalities are for-
gotten in their quest for more personal relationships. [10, 4]

In a country in transition, in which the discrepancy between the
generations is that of different social periods, adult-youth conflict
may acquire still greater proportions. In Turkey, which has been
going through such a stage of transition, we have collected ma-
terial since 1937 (through diaries, interviews, and questionnaires)
on the social psychology of adolescence with special emphasis on
the problems of attitudes and ego formation. Among other ma-
terial collected were the reactions of over 3,000 boys and girls in
different parts of the country to a questionnaire especially designed
to tap these problems. The reactions were obtained under con-

DEVELOPING EGO RENDERED UNSTABLE AND, AT TIMES, CRITICAL 245

trolled conditions.8 We summarize here only the main results
relating to adult-youth conflict. Two of the questions were espe-
cially relevant to the present discussion: "Do you think grown-
ups understand you as you are?" and "If there are persons who
understand you as you are, who are they?"

The principal finding was that younger boys and girls (approxi-
mately between the ages 11 and 14) report, in general, that par-
ents, relatives, or teachers understand them. But above this age
and in late adolescence, in general the report is that grown-ups
do not understand them. Many boys and girls said that only a
few of their friends, who are their age mates, understand them
as they are. Some reported that nobody understands them, in-
cluding themselves. Among the introspections they volunteered
to write down, many reveal the important issues of transition.
We reproduce here as illustrations only two of these introspective
reports.

The grown-ups cannot understand me, because they are people of
the last century whereas I belong to this century. Things which do
not please them are very pleasing to me.

Another girl wrote:

We do not think grown-ups understand us. As there is a great
difference between the periods in which we have grown up they mis-
understand us and frictions come out as a consequence. [35]

These findings hold only for town and city adolescents attending
school. The problems of adolescents in rural districts present dif-
ferent characteristics since, until recent years, very few rural chil-
dren in Turkey attended school and the great majority of them
had to participate at an early age in economic life. These quali-
fying remarks are made to call attention once more to the fact
that the psychological problems (as well as other problems) as-
sume different features in countries in transition, according to the
tempo of change in different strata and regions of the population.
Perhaps the various acculturation studies now going on may fur-
nish valuable data for dealing with the psychology of these
problems.

8 The results of these studies will be published later.

246 RE-FORMATION OF THE EGO IN ADOLESCENCE

It may be said, in general, that parent-youth conflict increases
with the rate of social change. [15] The Lynds [33] observed
this trend in Middletown.

To quote a veteran worker with Middletown's children, "Our par-
ents are realizing the increasingly sharp divergence of their world and
that of their children today as never before." And the parents' world
strikes back! In many cases they attempt to use the schools as a means
of holding the two worlds together. A high-school course in sociology
has been dropped because of parental protest over the fact that prob-
lems of sex were discussed in class. Over the heads of Middletown
teachers, trained according to standards wider than some of the mores
of Middletown, hangs at all times the sword of parental conservatism
and anxiety. This is rendered the more difficult because, in manners
and morals as well as economics, politics, and religion, the local com-
munity contains taxpaying parents of widely varying personal stand-
ards. The teacher knows and the community knows that the children
ranged in their seats are wise in matters not in the curriculum, and
that many of these children are rebelliously clamoring for the right to
raise questions and to be outspoken in the face of the official and
parental restraints. As one teacher said, "I am facing a new problem
nowadays: My pupils insist on raising questions I dare not let them
discuss though my conscience demands that I not clamp down op
their honest questions. The things they say continually keep me on
pins and needles for fear some of them will go home and tell their
parents. I have an uneasy furtive sense about it all." [33, 233]

All of these observations indicate that new generations growing
up in rapidly changing social surroundings resent, and at times
rebel against, the efforts of grown-ups to shape them after their
own images. However, the impact of these facts concerning adult-
youth conflict must be qualified when viewed from the perspec-
tive secured through the studies of ethnologists and sociologists.
Adult-youth conflict reflects in a significant way the conflicts be-
tween the established generation and the younger generation. The
intensity of the conflict might be said to be, by and large, propor-
tional to the degree of social change. In a society in which the
survival norms constitute the major values of the superstructure
(as the Lynds pointed out) and lag behind the material-techno-
logical developments ("cultural lag"), no matter how serious the

DEVELOPING EGO RENDERED UNSTABLE AND, AT TIMES, CRITICAL 247

youthful rebellion and restlessness may be, adult-youth conflict
will, in most cases, be an intrafamily and intracommunity affair.
A concrete case, personally communicated, illustrates the point.
An adolescent boy was strongly and, at times, openly critical of
everything that his parents (both parents) did. Nevertheless, he
shared the major class delineations, political views, and social-
distance norms of his upper-middle class parents.

The impact of special socioeconomic events such as depression,
the introduction of new industrial developments in a society or
even in a particular locality, may produce new problems in adult-
youth relationships. For example, in her study of The Unem-
ployed Man and His Family, carried on in 1935-36, Komarovsky
[29] presents data amply illustrating this point. One important
result of unemployment was to undermine "the authority of the
father over the adolescent child even more frequently" than his
authority over younger children or his authority as a husband. [92]
This deterioration of authority came chiefly because money "was
frequently used by the parents as an instrument of education and
control." [92] In the light of our preceding discussion of the
strivings of the adolescent to amount to something as a person in
his own right, the meaning of such facts becomes apparent. Also
important was the finding that intrafamily and parental conflict
increased because "father is a changed man" since he lost his
work. [94 ff.] Furthermore, conflict between father and adoles-
cent children was found to be particularly intense when one of the
children was working. [97-102]

Such changes in the established parent-youth relationships due
to the impact of serious socioeconomic events suggest that the
situational determinations of parent-offspring relationships may be
more significant at times than the toilet habits or postulated
"Oedipus complexes" of early infancy. At least, in some cases of
serious economic misery or serious status problems, qualitative
changes in intrafamily relationships may be brought about which
go beyond the limits of such wholesale formulations as those
positing immutable childhood complexes, where, we are told, ad-
verse social circumstances act only as agents which release nothing
more than deep-rooted jealousies, hatreds, and loves in the rela-
tively fixed storehouse of the unconscious, (ch. 14)

248 RE-FORMATION OF THE EGO IN ADOLESCENCE

THE ADOLESCENTS' REACTIONS AND EFFORTS TO RE-ESTABLISH
THEMSELVES TO SOME DEGREE OF STABILITY

In our sketchy account up to this point we have indicated how
the adolescent's ego undergoes significant changes with his chang-
ing body, his altered relationships with grown-ups and age mates;
and how varying socioeconomic circumstances bring about cor-
responding variations that produce feelings of insecurity and
aloneness and different degrees and durations of instability in
the shaky ego-attitudes. We saw how, as a consequence, strivings
for independence and emancipation arise. These lead to the ado-
lescent's "psychological weaning" from grown-ups, and this in
turn produces varying degrees and kinds of adult-youth conflict.

Thus, having lost a more or less stabilized ground of ego links,
caught in the .whirl of new sex and other desires which meet
various degrees of resistances from social surroundings to which
he has to adjust himself anew, the adolescent is torn away from
his more or less solid earlier ego links. In the throes of re-estab-
lishing himself as a person in his own right, he may, consciously
or unconsciously, resort to innumerable reactions in addition to his
striving to satisfy his strengthened and specified desires. The ego
and ego links which have become more unstable and insecure must
be re-established, at least to some degree of stability with the new
grown-up values whatever they may be to him. Being "in a
vacuum," being marginal in so many diverse relationships of a
differentiated society is painful, especially during a transition stage
when the adolescent is so keenly aware of these ego issues in rela-
tion to his body, his male and female friends, his parents, and so
forth.

In studies of adolescence, hundreds of different kinds of reac-
tions are reported which reveal the painful and critical process the
adolescent goes through in re-establishing himself. We shall give
some samples of these reactions and then return to our problem
more specifically. As Hollingworth [20] points out, some adoles-
cents demand and feel thwarted if they are refused privacy, their
"own" room. [187 f.] As already mentioned, some adolescents,
particularly girls, keep diaries. Hollingworth [21, 595] and

ADOLESCENTS' EFFORTS TO RE-ESTABLISH THEMSELVES 249

Biihler [8, 390] both cite studies indicating that diaries are fre-
quently the recipients of the adolescent's most secret desires, hopes,
and dreams. In Turkey where, as we noted; diaries are more
common than in countries where adolescents have more oppor-
tunity for extracurricular activities providing for ever-enlarging
group activities, one girl of 17 wrote in her diary:

Oh, my beloved diary, I return to you! You alone understand me.
I feel so lost and alone in this cruel world. [35]

An adolescent boy or girl may become absorbed in daydreams or
phantasies in which, usually, he or she is the central character. [12,
20] Many adolescents are absorbed in the unreal world of Holly-
wood movies, the idolizing of movie stars. If there is one Mecca
for bourgeois youth all over the world today, it seems to be
Hollywood.

Sometimes, if conflict is too great, if failure to re-establish oneself
occurs for too long or too often, abnormal behavior may result.
Thus Ellen Hill, who in Davis and Dollard's Children of Bond-
age [14] was described by relatives, teachers, and friends as having
been, as a child, "an especially agreeable girl, 'sweet' in her dis-
position," "a favorite with her instructors," "very tractable," be-
came, during early adolescence, "impudent," "malicious," "sly,"
"very belligerent," and finally "definitely abnormal." [158 ff.]
She talked to teachers only in monosyllables. She dreamed day
and night of deprivations or alleviations of her situation, both
material and social. Ellen's case is not a simple one. However,
the authors make it clear that this crisis came as a result of an
intense impact of economic and family difficulties which increased
suddenly in her early adolescence and seriously threatened her
standing with her clique. The combination of factors associated
with adolescence, her aspirations to rise even higher in status, and
the crushing realities of economic deprivation and disgrace in her
family brought on these behavioral symptoms which the authors
characterize as "status anxiety . . , which, in the lives of persons
who have experienced rapid change in status, either upward or
downward, may be viewed as a form of 'status shock.' " [156]

Another example of more or less abnormal behavior is that of
adolescents who are frequently ill, with no discoverable organic

250 RE-FORMATION OF THE EGO IN ADOLESCENCE

disorders. Several authors have mentioned the relative frequency
of the onset of schizophrenia, manic-depressive psychoses, and
hysteria during adolescence. [12, 20, 39, 47] Suicide, which is
somewhat more common in complex and transitional societies,
may be resorted to. Hollingworth [20] aptly described adolescent
suicide when she wrote:

The adolescent prefers death to the torture of his uncertainties and
thwartings, and takes active steps to destroy himself. . . . The self is
lost irretrievably. . . . [20, 799 /., italics ours]

Among the many illustrations of adolescents' attempts to re-
establish themselves, Hollingworth cites that of a girl who read
the Bible and prayed in the morning and rode horses bareback all
afternoon, much to her family's consternation. The girl, it de-
veloped, was trying to decide between the occupations of dea-
coness and bareback rider. [171 /.] This illustration gives us some
clue to Conklin's interesting study [12] of 329 college students
who were asked if they had ever experienced more than one "self
at the same time. Twenty-six per cent could immediately recall
having experienced two fairly different "selves" at the same time.
"Twenty-eight per cent of the above group reported that they had
observed the same phenomenon in others." [143]

Zachry [49] mentions the case of a girl who threw herself into
sports activities and determined to attain perfection because she
felt that the female body was physically inadequate. Two adoles-
cent sisters who had no friends among their age mates engaged
in work and study as a substitute activity to the point of overwork-
ing themselves. Another girl became "over-assertive," pushing
herself to the fore in social gatherings. Still other cases are re-
ported who became self-deprecatory, cynical, or weighed down
with self-blame and guilt.

In the struggle to re-establish themselves anew, adolescents may
choose idols, or certain characteristics of several persons, and strive
to emulate them. Sometimes the model may be a movie star,
public figure, fictional character or teacher. One adolescent tried
to imitate her teacher in every way, saw no faults in her, and
allowed no one to speak ill of her. [20, 182] Crushes are also
found between age mates of the same sex, particularly among girls.

THE EFFECTS OF AGE-MATE REFERENCE GROUPS 251

It is not difficult to find two adolescent girls who spend most of
their time together, dress similarly, act very much alike, protect
each other, and, in general, identify with each other, at least for a
time. Cases of "puppy love" are epidemic in adolescence. As we
noted, adolescents may, under intense stress, undertake the serious
business of marriage at an early age as a way out of their conflicts.
Some adolescent loves may, indeed, be both intense and lasting.
However, many are highly temporary and frequent. Since love
can be described as a high degree of ego-involvement with another
person in addition to sex attraction and desires, this rapid shifting
and changing of adolescent loves is an understandable result of
the mercurial state of the adolescent's ego.

THE EFFECTS OF AGE-MATE REFERENCE GROUPS AND MEMBERSHIP
GROUPS IN THE RE-FORMATION OF THE EGO-ATTITUDES

The developing and increasing adolescent attitudes and interests,
itemized in detail in so many works on the subject, gain in psy-
chological meaning and coherence if they are studied in terms of
the reference groups and membership groups to which the adoles-
cent relates himself. For many of these adolescent attitudes and
interests develop in interaction with and conformity to such
groups. The adolescents' most intense strivings for status and
approval take place within such groups. Here our main concern
is, of course, with ego-attitudes.

Adolescents progressively turn to the closer company of age
mates in their transition from childhood to adulthood, in their
struggle to establish themselves as persons in their own rights in
an adverse adult-made world in which they are marginal in vary-
ing degrees. They interact in their own adolescent circles, limited
and influenced, of course, by their particular social setting at large.
This gives rise to certain norms of behavior, to fashions and fads
of dress and amusement peculiar to various adolescent groups.
During these years of transition, adolescents achieve immediate
status through conformity to the norms of their age-mate groups.
For the time being these peculiar adolescent norms of experience
and behavior become the adolescent's own values, determining his
personal relationships and attitudes to an important degree. It is

252 RE-FORMATION OF THE EGO IN ADOLESCENCE

not a mere accident of phraseology, therefore, that Harold Jones
and other authorities in the field refer to the ensemble of these
adolescent standardizations as "adolescent culture." These adoles-
cent norms may be of various durations, some may even be sea-
sonal affairs. They may and certainly do change from society to
society, even in different regions or districts of the same society.
But as long as they last, they demand conformity from the adoles-
cents within the particular reference group to which they apply.
The adolescent derives his status, with the age mates among whom
he moves to some extent at least, from the fulfillment of expecta-
tions prescribed by them. In this connection, we can advance the
hypothesis that the degree of influence of age-mate reference
groups and membership groups varies directly with the degree of
psychological weaning from grown-ups and the intensity of adult-
youth conflict.

The effect of age-mate reference groups on ego-attitudes. As we
noted, probably proportional to the degree of psychological wean-
ing from grown-ups and strivings for independence, adolescents
seek in an increasing way the company of their age mates or peers.
The influence of companions in determining the adolescents' likes-
dislikes, interests and attitudes, increases correspondingly. His
status or ego-values are increasingly derived from age-mate asso-
ciations. These adolescent values change, of course, from society
to society and vary even according to the particular socioeconomic
standing of the immediate milieu. We designate the age-mate
groups to which adolescent relates himself as his reference group.

Authorities in the field of adolescence, such as Hollingworth,
Harold Jones, Zachry, Bios, Goodenough, and others all give
interesting hints of the increased influence of age mates during
adolescence. Zachry [49] remarks:

In the desire to be liked by his own group, the adolescent usually
does his best to conform to its standards, even at considerable cost to
himself. [49, 355]

Consequently, while adamant to the criticisms and advice of
parents, the adolescent may be more receptive to the advice of
age-mate groups. This is well illustrated by Zachry's concrete
observation;

THE EFFECTS OF AGE-MATE REFERENCE GROUPS 253

A sixteen-year-old girl was saying she thought she could take criti-
cism from friends which she would not accept from her family. She
related that last year she wore bangs. Her mother was not sure she
liked them, but the student kept the bangs because her girl friends all
said they looked very well. The only negative criticism friends have
given her is that she is too loud. "The family have been telling me
for years the same thing," she explained. " 'That's enough noise from
you,' they say. Lately I've been quiet." [49, 355]

On the basis of such observations Zachry concisely formulates
the regulation of the adolescent's values by his reference group:

In the struggle to establish himself as a person in his own right,
independent of adults, the adolescent measures his success against
that of those whose status is similar to his. The greater success of
some of them in one aspect or another of development seems to
threaten to impair the solidarity of those on whom he depends. Also
it may appear to him a direct challenge to his adequacy. Differences
in degree of success in achieving standards that are important to peers
(and some of those that are prized by parents and teachers as well)
are therefore elements in their emotional relationships. Economic
status, social conventionality, ethical standards, religious and political
beliefs, academic success, athletic prowess, ability to win the indulgence
of adults, or popularity with members of the other sex — any one of
these or all together— as he and his peers embody them are to the
adolescent measures of his own success in establishing himself in
growing independence. [49, 369 f.]

Likewise Bios [5] has given a concise summary of the impact of
"peer-culture" in shaping the adolescent's personal values of failure
or success:

Group opinion serves, then, as a selective influence for desirable and
undesirable behavior, and the approval or disapproval of peers be-
comes progressively the most influential force in motivating adolescent
conduct. [5, 249]

And

This belongingness to the group, which becomes progressively im-
portant for the adolescent, replaces family ties to some extent and
thus prepares him for new conformities and identifications implicit
in the group life of adults. [5, 250]

254 RE-FORMATION OF THE EGO IN ADOLESCENCE

Bios then goes on to indicate that the attitudes and behavior of
the individual cannot be understood properly without reference to
his age-mate groups:

The intermediary phase of social development which takes place at
adolescence can be properly evaluated only with reference to its in-
trinsic functions and meanings. One of its most unique functions is
to establish a group life with its own standards, values, appreciations.
This group life, often referred to as peer culture, has a decisive impact
upon the adolescent's development and is indeed far more influential
at times than adult opinion or judgment. In fact adults are often
unable to comprehend the peculiar logic of adolescent behavior that
is perfectly reasonable to adolescents themselves. A girl of 14 ex*
pressed herself on this matter and said that sometimes she felt that
boys and girls of her age understand each other better than their
parents understand them. For instance, she continued, "They'll do
some silly thing, and the parents won't understand why it is they're
so silly " [5, 251]

GoodcnoughV account [17] is in harmony with these:

Unquestionably the influence of his associates upon the way the
adolescent thinks and acts is very great; greater, probably than at any
previous stage of his life. For the adolescent there can be no stronger
argument for having or doing a thing than the fact that "all the others
are doing it." Nothing is likely to awaken so great an emotional
disturbance or cause so much worry as the feeling that he is in some
way different from the others. "Others" in this case, means the other
members of his own particular group; he is not especially concerned
about resembling those belonging to some other clan. A fashion
started by the leaders of a group, even though it may happen to be
uncomfortable or inconvenient, is faithfully copied by all the lesser
members. Opinions, prejudices, beliefs, UJ(es, and dislikes are likewise
determined by the group, and the boy or girl who differs is made to
feel the force of group ostracism unless he has sufficient force of per*
sonality to bring the others around to his point of view. [17, 492 /.,
italics ours]

Such accounts of adolescent groups clarify the observations made
earlier, such as those of John Sanders (p. 231) concerning discrep-
ancies in physical and, consequently, in social maturity as com-

THE EFFECTS OF AGE-MATE REFERENCE GROUPS 255

pared with age mates and the resulting group discrimination
against the deviant boy or girl.

It is not difficult to compile detailed items of values concerning
popularity and friendship, fads and fashions, and other standards
that prevail among adolescent groups and that must be conformed
to if an age mate uses such a group as his reference group. For
example, Averill [1] gives a two and a half page list of fads pre-
vailing among high school pupils in 1935. [208-211] Because of
space considerations we cannot, unfortunately, reproduce such lists
here. The regulation of adolescent behavior in relation to age-
mate groups was further verified in a survey made by Life maga-
zine, [30] The reporter prefaced his pictures of teen-age girls
with this revealing observation:

It [the adolescent world] is also a world of many laws. They are
capricious laws, changing or reversing themselves almost overnight.
But while they are in effect, the laws are immutable and the punish-
ment for violation is ostracism, swift and terrifying practise of ancient
peoples. Months ago colored bobby sox folded at the top were de-
creed, not by anyone or any group, but, as usual, by a sudden mysteri-
ous and universal acceptance of the new idea. Now no teen-ager
dares wear anything but pure white sox without a fold. [30, 91]

Such observations are not confined to adolescent girls. Another
Life survey [32] of teen-age boys gives a similar picture:

Wherever they are seen, teen-age boys have a comfortable, sloppy
look. Their sloppiness is not haphazard but is governed by definite
though changing sets of fashions. The current style for daily wear
as evidenced by the boys of Des Moines consists of a loud flannel
shirt, heavy white athletic socks, and, if possible, wavy hair. [32, 92]

The urgent necessity of age-mate contacts for these teen-age boys is
shown in the following comment:

Many of Des Moines's teen-age boys have jobs after school but all
of them feel that life would be unbearable withput at least four hours
of "fooling around" every day. Fooling around consists of many
things: of carrying out some club ritual, of playing rummy or a game
of catch or teasing girls or holding a bull session under the awning
in front of the drugstore. [32, 96]

256 RE-FORMATION OF THE EGO IN ADOLESCENCE

In their intensive study of 100 adolescent boys and 100 girls in
California, Stolz, M. C. Jones and Chaff ey [41] drew definite con-
clusions regarding the influence of age-mate reference groups:

As we look back over this three-year period during which we have
measured, questioned, watched these youngsters in the early stages of
adolescent development, certain changes in interests, attitudes, and
activities seem to have accompanied the physical changes and to be
more or less typical of the group. One of the outstanding facts that
we have noticed about these children as they grow into adolescence
is their preoccupation with social activities. There is an overwhelming
desire among these typical junior high school children to be with other
children, to understand themselves in their relations to others in their
age group. . . . There are several characteristics of this phase of social
awareness which distinguish it from the play of younger children and
from the social contacts of adults. One of the most potent drives
behind this urge for social activity is derived from the youngsters'
desire for group approval. To achieve this approval they must adapt
themselves to the ways of the group, substituting its standards for
those of the home and the school. [41, 2]

It is relevant to our hypothesis to call attention to the fact that
these boys and girls are the same adolescents for whom adult
approval and disapproval meant almost nothing, (p. 244) The
effect of age-mate groups to which the adolescent relates himself
may be so strong that the adolescent may even feel apologetic
about the interference of his parents. One of the girls studied in
this group remarked:

I am afraid my friends will think I have no control over my
parents. [41, 4]

The more mature group influences start earlier for girls than
for boys, paralleling the conclusion reported earlier in this chapter
concerning the changing body and changing self. The girls
almost drag the boys to social attitudes and interests appropriate
to the group. Stolz, Jones and Chaff ey [41] state:

A point to be noted here is that girls begin to display this social
awareness and interest in the opposite sex earlier than boys. Probably
this age difference would be greater still if boys were allowed to
pursue their own course undisturbed. But actually what seems to

THE EFFECTS OF AGE-MATE REFERENCE GROUPS 257

happen is this: the girls, feeling the urge to be admired by boys, start
hunting for prospects where they are most likely to be found— in the
classroom among boys of their own age. Then begins a campaign
by the girls to train the boys as good dancing partners and desirable
party escorts. Under this tutelage, sometimes resented by the boys,
sometimes preeningly accepted, boys develop the required social atti-
tudes about a year later than the girls, many of them earlier, in all
probability, than if they were left to their own devices. [41, 5]

The dominance of group interests in the extracurricular activities
of adolescents has been observed by Cameron [10] who reports
that

In the fall of the second year no reference to any classroom situation
or school subject appeared in our records of conversation or in the
"scandal sheets." [10, 23]

In their "self-imposed isolation" from adults, to borrow another
characterization from Zachry, appropriate norms may arise due to
the group interactions. They may be only short-lived. These
norms often seem to serve the function of sanctioning certain
activities otherwise prohibited by society at large. The following
observation reported by Burks [9] gives a hint in this direction:

There seems to be a hypothetical danger in the clubhouse institution
in the children's lives — a danger that was only suggested by some of
the observations. This is the tendency for some of the group (espe-
cially the less mature youngsters) to promulgate unacceptable patterns
of behavior that started in the clubhouse, through association of that
behavior with the surroundings and atmosphere of the place where
the patterns developed. Such association might lead to a sort of
"jelling" of anti-social behavior, which would be further fostered by
the inertia of reputation among the clubhouse crowd. [9, 27 /.]

Among the adolescents of families in lower income groups, in
which the striving for some sort of social status and the attempt
to overcome economic and sex deprivations and unfortunate
family backgrounds are all combined together, group conformi-
ties may end with more grim consequences. In Cressey's study of
the closed dance hall in Chicago [13], he shows how, when dep-
rivations, conflict with grown-ups, thwartings, and uncertainties
become strong enough, the adolescent girl may run away to the

258 RE-FORMATION OF THE EGO IN ADOLESCENCE

"closed world" of the dance hall and anchor herself in the groups
she finds there. Most of these girls came to the dance hall during
adolescence. They came from broken homes and, generally, mis-
erable conditions. Usually, there was severe conflict between the
girl and her parents, perhaps because the latter's Old World values
were widely divergent from those of the Americanized adolescent
One girl remarked:

I lived with other dance hall girls, met my fellows at the dance hall,
got my living from the dance hall. In fact there was nothing I wanted
that I couldn't get through it. [13, 125]

Another said,

I don't feel like I belong back in Wisconsin any more. But up at
the "school" I just feel at home. ... I know how things go, I have
friends who are always glad to see me come back, and who really are
interested enough to spend their money on me. [13, 726]

Cressey concluded that the "desire for recognition, for status, along
with the desire for intimacy or response, and for new experience
and excitement, all find some satisfactions in the closed dance
hall." [726] But, in order to gain these satisfactions, the adolescent
girl must become one of the group of dance hall girls. For ex-
ample, one girl found that the talk in the rest room was disgusting
and so she avoided it. As a result, she was razzed by the girls.

But it didn't take long to get used to things. I gradually got to
using their talk and now when I get back there I talk dirty just like
the rest of them. [13, 137]

After she becomes a member of the group, it is not difficult for the
girl to turn to prostitution, as frequently happens.

The approval or disapproval of the reference group in regulating
the attitudes and interests of adolescents is demonstrated also in
the case of youngsters of the leisure class. Here the group attitudes
are directed towards maintaining social distinction and class lines.
Adolescents tend to anchor themselves in groups composed, for
the most part, of boys and girls of their own class. Edith Wharton
[45] described such a group in the 1880's:

Like all agreeable societies, ours was small, and the people com-
posing it met almost every day, and always sought each other out in

THE EFFECTS OF AGE-MATE REFERENCE GROUPS 259

any larger company. . , . Our society was, in short, a little "set" with
its private catch-words, observances and amusements, and its indiffer-
ence to anything outside of its charmed circle. . . . [45, 79, italics
ours]

As Ogden [38] has pointed out, the society sets today have more
or less institutionalized the atmosphere in which their children are
brought to adolescence through the private boarding school.

The homogeneous character of the student body is conducive to the
development of a class sense of cohesion. [38, 34]

Naturally, this limits the choice of friends.

She [the society girl] is cordial without discrimination to everyone
who is accepted in her sphere of society; she is snobbish to outsiders.
. . . She is afraid of the censure of her crowd. [38, 54, italics ours]

When a society girl makes her debut, at eighteen, she may become
a member of the Junior League, which, although not requiring a
debut for membership, is generally composed of girls who have
made debuts. The Junior League, purportedly organized for char-
itable purposes, seems actually to serve as a meeting ground of
friends, where the young girl carves a niche for herself and may
stay until she is too old to belong.

Similarly, college fraternities and sororities serve as groups of
"distinction." As one writer [6] comments:

The word, "sorority," connoting culture, refinement, social polish,
has become synonymous with campus prestige. [6, 31]

This same writer tells of personal experiences in a well-known
college sorority in which the importance of maintaining the pres-
tige of the sorority was so great that it was worth severe financial
strain. An "unorganized" college man [24] tells how the attitudes
generated in the fraternity reference group cut across group an-
tagonisms between fraternities:

I soon found out that the student body was separated by a wide
and formidable gulf: the fraternity members as a whole and the
independent or non-fraternity group. The first group stalked over
the campus as though they were God's chosen children, and in most
cases refused to have any association with the despised majority, of
which I was one. [24, 30]

260 RE-FORMATION OF THE EGO IN ADOLESCENCE

Student offices were ordinarily held by fraternity men, elected by
the amalgamated efforts of the fraternities. And when an "honor
system" with no supervision for examinations was proposed, the
"frat" boys united to push it through so that "the scholastic stand-
ing of the house . . . [would be] considered honorable." [30]

We must not ignore individual cases of strong identification seen
in intense crushes, love, or hero worship. In such instances, ego-
attitudes are shaped and oriented in many different ways as de-
termined by the identification with the lover, sweetheart, or hero.
Usually, the loved persons are individuals in the reference group
or the heroes worshipped are persons with high social prestige, in
the current opinion of the reference group. Even in such cases of
intense individual identification, the norms of the reference group
still exert a significant influence on the ego-attitudes of the indi-
vidual. However, if the idol is a person out of the reference group,
then the individual adolescent becomes a social misfit in his or her
immediate adolescent surroundings. Stolz, M. C. Jones, and
Chaff ey [41] report cases of high school girls who fell in love with
older men outside of their own adolescent milieu with the inten-
tion of marrying them and who became socially blind to their
immediate age-mate surroundings. [7] Not only did these ado-
lescent girls satisfy their sex urges but they established themselves
psychologically at least by means of these identifications.

The way in which these strong identifications with persons
(living or dead) who are outside the current prestige scale of the
immediate age-mate group may make an individual a social misfit
in his social milieu is nicely illustrated by a case described by
Hollingworth. [20] A 14-year-old boy

. . . began to appear in his classes and at meals, wearing his hat.
He steadfastly refused to remove his headgear at the request of parents
and teachers. This idiosyncrasy caused his anxious mother several
sleepless nights. Eventually a teacher more discerning than others
obtained the lad's confidential account of his peculiar action. He
would not remove his hat, because William Penn (his model for the
moment) had refused to take his hat off in assemblies! [20, 179]

But even such exceptional cases do not vitiate our hypothesis. For
besides any sexual or other functions such outside heroes may

THE EFFECTS OF AGE-MATE REFERENCE GROUPS 261

serve, they do serve the function of establishing the adolescent
psychologically and at least for the time being as a person in his
or her own right.

The effect of age-mate membership groups on ego-attitudes. In
our account of the re-formation of the ego in adolescence, we first
put the problem in its broad social setting. This gave us the per-
spective necessary to realize the impact of special socioeconomic
variations in producing variations in ego problems, making the
process more difficult in some societies than in others, prolonging
it more in certain societies than in others. We saw how the diffi-
culties and complications involved in the transition from childhood
to adulthood led to adult-youth conflict. This, in turn, led to
intensified efforts on the part of the adolescents to achieve inde-
pendence from adults and to establish themselves as persons in
their own right. We saw how adolescents gravitate towards each
other, forming age-mate groups that become of supreme impor-
tance in their lives at least during this transition period. Whatever
status value the adolescent genuinely experiences during this time
of transition is derived from his standing in this reference group
of age mates.

The age-mate reference group, however, defines identifications
and personal preferences only in broad outlines and only for
standards and fads common to all who relate themselves to these
groups. In the "self-imposed" psychological isolation of the ado-
lescent, further differentiation spontaneously takes place. Strong
friendships or cliques of two, three, or more adolescents emerge
on the basis of common secrets (sexual and otherwise), common
desires, common problems, common interests such as those based
on family background, school activities, and the like. In such
group formations, the members share secrets which they cannot
and dare not share with others, especially grown-ups. Certain
roles arise prescribing the relative standing of members to each
other. Certain expectations are produced which prescribe mutual
loyalties and responsibilities. Certain badges of belongingness,
certain catchwords, and even norms (though perhaps short lived)
arise, leading to attitudes appropriate for group members.

Such cliques, as Jones, Zachry, and others have pointed out, are
formed first among girls gnd then among boys. (Another fact

262 RE-FORMATION OF THE EGO IN ADOLESCENCE

that demonstrates the earlier social maturity of girls following
their earlier physical maturation.) The formation of cliques or
gangs made up of both sexes may follow. In some cases, the
clique formations of two or three close friends may serve as nuclei
around which large gangs are formed. Such cliques or gangs
may survive for a shorter or longer period owing to the more or
less "mercurial nature" of adolescents' relationships. These cliques
or gangs may be more or less confidential or secret formations,
depending on the character of the activities in which they engage
and the degree of conflict with adults and various institutions.
The clique or gang gains solidarity in proportion to the resistances
it meets and withstands. So long as they last, these cliques or
gangs demand conformity and loyalty from their members. In-
dividuals who do not conform are ostracized or discriminated
against. The status maintained in the clique or gang is the main
source of ego-satisfaction. The sense of group belongingness in
the clique or gang brings a feeling of personal stability or security
in proportion to the degree of psychological weaning from parents
or the intensity of parent-youth conflict.

Many authors in the field of adolescence have given accounts of
the importance of such clique or gang formations or have called
attention to the way in which they determine the character of
adolescent attitudes and identifications. Out of a host of such
reports we shall choose only a few representative examples.
Goodenough [17] points out the significance of the solidarity and
group consciousness that prevail among gang members:

Not only does the adolescent, as a rule, begin to show a new interest
in the opposite sex, but a new element appears in his relationships
with persons of his own sex. This is the formation of clubs or gangs.
It is, of course, true that long before the age of adolescence children
play together in groups and form special friendships that give these
groups something of a lasting character. But in 'most cases the social
groups formed by young children lac\ the solidarity and the feeling
of group-consciousness that characterize the adolescent gang or club.
[17, 491, italics ours]

Wile [47] generalizes as follows concerning the importance of
adolescent groups:

THE EFFECTS OF AGE-MATE REFERENCE GROUPS 263

Much of adolescent adjustment depends upon the relative degree of
self-consciousness and group consciousness. It also rests upon the
acceptance of oneself as part of the group and the willingness to
identify the demands of the group as in harmony with one's own
needs. Herein appears the potential significance of group pressures,
seeking to bring about adolescent conformity with the mores of the
age. Every group that invites adolescents to unite with it bids them
live in accord with group sanctions — and each group is concerned with
its own goals and principles which may not be in the interest of
society as a whole. Every social group molds adolescents in direct
ratio to their participation. Adolescent groups naturally are most
directive and may be coercive. The gang and the club, as sub-sections
of society, exert their influence for or against the ruling principles of
the world of grown-ups. The shifting morals of each age help to
determine the extent of the fight of society for, and of youth against,
specific indoctrinations. Concepts of right and wrong, good and bad,
moral and immoral, decent and indecent, constitute a risk for all
acceptances extending beyond the simple ideas that continually find
favor among adolescents upon the basis of reasonable tradition. [47,
4f., italics ours]

Zachry [49] points to some of the factors which make gang
standards become the adolescent's own standards:

It is significant also that in his compliance with gang standards he
is taking a step toward self-determination in conduct, since this group
is made up not of those who are much larger and stronger than he
but of those who are like him in appearance, capacities, and interests.
Thus these standards are more nearly his own than were those which
he acquired so early that he does not remember how this came about,
and some of which he is now relinquishing for the time being at least.
[49, 163 f.]

The formation of adolescent gangs and the function they serve
are clearly stated by Peter Bios [5] :

In early adolescence the formation of gangs represents the begin-
ning of a group life which has its own distinctive characteristics.
[5,249]

A few pages later, Bios writes:

It offers him in return a security in group belongingness and in
collective responsibility at a time when he is abandoning childhood

264 RE-FORMATION OP THE EGO IN ADOLESCENCE

relationships and reorienting himself in terms of mature goals. In
response to the pressures of peer culture, his family patterns of rela-
tionship, identification, and feeling life are gradually modified in the
direction of group norms. [5, 254, italics ours]

Commenting on the resistance these norms and their conforming
behavior encounter from grown-ups, Bios points out the difficult
state of marginality the adolescent experiences in his efforts to
establish himself:

Such adult indifference or hostility towards the adolescent's treas-
ured peer standards raises a further difficulty: if he is loyal to his
group, he denies himself adult acceptance and approval; if he com-
plies with adult demands, evading the possibility of asserting his
independence, he loses the recognition of his peers. [5, 254]

We shall be concerned again in the next chapter with the un-
pleasant consequences of marginality or conflicting identifications.

These representative statements are not mere armchair specula-
tions of authorities. As we shall see from the illustrations in this
and the next chapter, they are amply substantiated by factual
evidence.

The systematic observations of the social activities and groupings
in a high school clubhouse during the years 1936-37 unmistakably
show clique and gang formations. We should like to call atten-
tion to the fact that the situation in the clubhouse was not alto-
gether free from adult supervision. F. W, Burks [9], who sum-
marized the clubhouse observations, expresses the formation of
adolescent cliques or gangs in terms of "social stratification." 9

One of the most notable manifestations of the adolescent group,
which began during this year, and continued during the following
years after the clubhouse was closed, was the differentiation into dis-
tinct social strata, between which there was little real intercourse and
each of which built up its own barriers, defenses, and feelings of
solidarity. [9, 16]

When once formed, these groups, which generated "a growing
feeling of cliquishness," demanded that their members behave

9 We should prefer to save the term "social stratification" to designate major
class delineations in society at large in terms of the individual's role in the processes
of production, distribution, and the like: for example, as employer or employed.

THE EFFECTS OF AGE-MATE REFERENCE GROUPS 265

within the bounds of the group standards and keep in step with
them. Those who went beyond these bounds were ostracized or
discriminated against.

The approaches made by "novices" to be accepted by those who
have already established themselves were observed.

In addition to the rising stratification on the basis of prestige in the
social hierarchy of the school, there were also other bases for dis-
crimination and feelings of superiority. One of the most striking was
degree of social maturity, the less mature boys feeling at a disadvan-
tage with more experienced ones, hesitating to assert themselves, or
even to stand up for their rights. The less mature were subject to
disapproval for some of their activities by the "older" group; and
frequently compensated for their feelings of inferiority by swaggering
attempts to appear grown-up. [9, 19]

On the basis of such observations, Harold Jones [25] points out
the difficulties experienced by non-clique members or leftovers:

The social stratification encountered in high school affected the girls
much more than the boys. Yet it was the boys more than the girls
from Jackson Junior High who were outspoken about the treatment
which they received at the hands of the cliques. Although certain
positions (such as student body president) were available to students
who were not members of these exclusive groups, other offices dealing
with the school social functions were traditionally filled by a "club"
member. [25, 22]

Jones gives a concise and concrete picture of such clique for-
mations in the form of Moreno sociograms obtained from actual
data. He titles this section "Group Structures." Here we repro-
duce sociograms showing the interpersonal relationships of boys
and girls approximately 15 years old.10 It can be clearly seen from
Figure 1 that among the girls in the high ninth grade, "the social
structure, at this age level, consisted of a number of compact
and somewhat separated groups or cliques." [43] This compact

10 These sociograms are reproduced from Campbell's study [11] with the
permission of the author. They are also reproduced by Jones [25, 44]. The
sociograms were constructed from the results of an item on the "Guess Who" test
asking for the subject's "best friends.'* The dark lines represent reciprocal men-
tions of "best friends," while die broken lines represent mentions not reciprocated.

266

RE-FORMATION OF THE EGO IN ADOLESCENCE

cliquishness is not evident in the sociogram for boys at this age
level (Figure 2). This fact shows once more the earlier social
maturity of girls. It would be interesting to trace the interpersonal
relationships of boys a year or so older. We should guess that
clique formations among the boys would also increase when they
reached a corresponding level of social maturity.

Nonreciprocal mention
Reciprocal mention

FIG. 1. Best friends — girls.

Analysis of the consequences of being "left over," or of having
no established standing in the reference group and no member-
ship in a closely knit clique, shows in clear-cut fashion the psy-
chological properties that arise in group membership or from
group identification. This is revealed in the case of John Sanders,
studied by Jones and his associates. John is the same boy referred
to previously in our discussion of the changing body and chang-
ing self. In comparison to his age mates, he was retarded a year
or so in his physical development. We have already noted the

THE EFFECTS OF AGE-MATE REFERENCE GROUPS

267

important psychological consequences of such retardment. In
Figure 2 John is represented by circle 78 in the upper right corner
of the sociogram. As can be readily seen, he was in a peripheral
social situation. He felt the unpleasant experience, the insecurity

K^-^?^si

^«~ / \ / >&•

v x^C^*»> ' /*"\ \ / s *' i\?wj

'Wi

^—-77

**P\ f /

~*~ Nonreciprocal mention
— Reciprocal mention

FIG. 2. Best friends — boys.

of his peripheral state in relation to his immediate reference group.
At this time, he was at the high point of unpopularity among his
age mates, in spite of the fact that he made "unsuccessful attempts
to gain attention and to identify himself with his classmates." [57]

John is obviously the kind of person with whom no girl would go
out, if she thought she had prestige to maintain. Even girls who are
fairly independent in their attitudes toward their social position would
feel that they couldn't descend to go out with John Sanders! Perhaps
the chief reason for this is his lack of a functional familiarity with
social patterns; he tries hard to conform to these standards of the
adolescent culture, but is still an outsider wistfully looking in. [25, 57]

268 RE-FORMATION OF THE EGO IN ADOLESCENCE

This statement was verified by Tryon's research [44] on the
popularity of boys and girls 15 years old in this same social milieu,
perhaps these very boys and girls:

Boys, to be successful with girls, must be admired by boys. . . .
[44,565]

John's "unskillfulness in activities enjoyed by other boys marked
him as 'queer'; it made for social isolation, and his response to
this lowered status was to develop characteristics which further
increased his unpopularity." [159f.] This social isolation from
the group was deeply resented by John himself. As he expressed
it to his counselor in his senior year in high school :

The greatest mistake I ever made was not spending more time on
the playgrounds. I should have been made to do it. Boys don't like
you unless you can play games. It affects your whole personality.
[25, 103]

John was interested in art, perhaps as a compensation for his
lack of athletic prowess and other activities popular among the
boys of his reference group. And he was pretty good at it. But
among his age mates at the early years of adolescence, artistic
accomplishment was not a criterion used in judging acceptability.
As we saw before, after John's delayed "adolescent spurt" took
place, his popularity also jumped up. The consequences for John's
popularity of this "adolescent spurt" and the changing interests
of the group in later adolescent years are concisely formulated by
Jones:

In later adolescence these deficiencies became of smaller importance,
partly because of changing social values and partly also because of a
process of maturing that is expressed in social structures as well as in
organisms. The naive likemindedness characteristic of a younger
group broadens, at a later age, into a greater variety of special inter-
ests. Special sympathies and appreciations in this more differentiated
society give the individual a greater range of choice — a greater oppor-
tunity to select his own appropriate environment. . . . Thus, the more
favorable situation and prognosis for John, as he reached the end of
senior high school, were due partly to changes in John as he labori-
ously caught up with the group, but we must give credit also to

THE EFFECTS OF AGE-MATE REFERENCE GROUPS 269

changes in the group as they caught up with John, and as their values
and standards of achievement came closer to the sober aspirations
which John had always held important. [25, 160 f.]

In Burks' summary [9] of the Tugwell clubhouse, more evi-
dence of changing values within the adolescent reference group is
given. For example, as the group became older, the clubhouse no
longer served as the center of activities. As standards of amuse-
ment become more sophisticated, such as attendance at night clubs
and country clubs, the clubhouse was occupied chiefly by "young-
sters who had not been able, because of social immaturity or lack
of family 'status' to achieve a place in the various social groups in
the high school. . . ." [28] Just as an individual (for example,
John Sanders) may be a misfit in his reference group, so too
certain cliques may be generally looked down on as "queer." In
the clubhouse, the art group "had no prestige with the general
crowd," because its activities did not fit into the dominant values
current among the larger adolescent group. Whatever the diffi-
culties involved in belonging to a low prestige group, still, as
Burks remarks, at least a member would avoid the "thwarted
feeling" of having no group at all.

Group formations, such as those found in the California studies,
are not artifacts of biased observation. Such groups and cliques
can be found in concrete observations of everyday life. Life maga-
zine [30] had one of its reporters make a picture survey of an
adolescent clique composed of 12 girls from 15 to 17 years old.
The survey reveals that all of these girls "go to the same school,
take the same courses, know the same people and generally ex-
hibit the passionate uniformity of a teen-age clique." [92 f.] These
girls spent most of their time together, exchanged confidences,
spent long hours on the telephone. Group solidarity and loyalty
"keeps the girls firmly united against all protest" from grown-ups
concerning their activities or current fads.

Another Life survey [31], made in Indianapolis, revealed that
the currently prevalent "Sub-Deb Clubs" serve the same psycho-
logical function as does any spontaneously formed adolescent
clique. Any group of girls may form a Sub-Deb Club which is
free from adult supervision. At the time of the survey (1945)
there were in Indianapolis 700 such clubs with some 6,000 members.

270 RE-FORMATION OF THE EGO IN ADOLESCENCE

Sub-Deb Clubs have meetings and initiations and even print news-
papers, but their main purpose is to have parties. In Indianapolis they
are enormously successful in achieving this purpose. One reason is
that single girls might be shy about asking boys to parties but clubs
of girls can be downright aggressive. [31, 91]

This comment of Life's reporter is similar to those made by Stolz,
M. C. Jones, and Chaff ey [41] in California, indicating that the
girls, earlier in maturing, tend to "drag" the boys into social activi-
ties. These cliques, like many gangs, have names and even pins
which serve to strengthen the group and give an identification to
in-group members. Some of these names are clues to the changing
interests of these adolescent girls. For example, Swami stands for
"Subtle Women are Most Intriguing"; Jilts means "Jump in Line
to Smooch"; Genius, Inc. refers to the talents of its drama-loving
members; while the meaning of Glama is the secret of the mem-
bers alone.

Although these Sub-Deb Clubs are not exclusively secret socie-
ties, the members do share confidences. Goodenough [17] writes:

The girl's club is less likely to center around any particular activity.
Its members, however, share among themselves various "secrets," bits
of gossip, and so on to which they often refer mysteriously in the
presence of outsiders in the hope of arousing curiosity and envy. [17,
492]

It has frequently been noted that in the United States there is
relatively greater secrecy in the clique activities among girls than
among boys, due perhaps to the more conflicting ego-attitudes of
femininity.

Campbell's research [11] has already been mentioned in con-
nection with Jones's discussion of group structures. Although
Campbell specifically studied adolescent opinions of classmates of
their own and the opposite sex, her results also have implications
concerning the problem of clique formation among boys and girls.
Reference to Figures 1 and 2 taken from Campbell's study show
that "cliques of two, three or more individuals seem to be fairly
descriptive of the girls," while the boys of this age tend to associ-
ate in "chains" of friendship, not in cliques. We would be in-
clined to agree with Campbell's conclusion that most of these sex

THE EFFECTS OF AGE-MATE REFERENCE GROUPS 271

differences are related to "the greater physiological and social
maturity of the girls/' and that consideration of boys of an equal
level of maturity would reveal more similar results. However, in
line with our hypothesis that the degree of absorption in and the
degree of solidarity of age-mate groupings varies with the degree
of conflict, some questions posed by Campbell may be considered.

Do women in our culture feel less security of independent status so
that there is greater need of the ego support derived from identification
with a group? What is the effect on personality? Are women more
conservative in their ideas, more responsive to personal influence and
loyalties? . . . Does this type of organization tend toward a stereo-
typing of personality, interests, attitudes, opinions? [11, 150]

In view of material on gang formation presented in the next
chapter, we can safely say that the greater cliquish tendency found
among 15-year-old girls in California in this study is not always
in all strata of society, under all conditions, greater than for boys.
Additional research on older adolescents comparable to the upper
and middle class children in this study would give valuable clues
relevant to the preceding hypothesis concerning the degree of
absorption in, the solidarity, and the secrecy of adolescent groups.
Like any other group at any age level, an adolescent group, once
formed and stabilized, demands conformity and loyalty (identifi-
cation) from individual members. The status members really
experience is derived largely from their standing in the clique or
gang and is proportional to the degree of their identification with
the clique or gang. Behavior that is for them proper and im-
proper, decent and indecent is regulated by the current group
norms, as long as they last and as long as the individual enjoys
group membership. From an unpublished California study,11 we
cite a concrete case showing the observance of an adolescent girl
of rigid norms governing the acceptance of dates:

With respect to the group codes connected with "going steady" she
seems to have accepted all the necessary accompaniments— "I can't go
out with Fred on Friday." (Fred was coming to see her for a date
she had had for some time.) "So I just told him that I couldn't go

11 Unpublished material used through the kindness of Harold and Mary Cover
Jones.

272 RE-FORMATION OF THE EGO IN ADOLESCENCE

out with him and if he comes it's just too bad!" When I suggested
tentatively the possibility of breaking the date with her new "steady"
she responded with immediate certainty that that just couldn't be
done "because I'm going steady now and I just can't go out with
anybody else."

Although activity can proceed at a rapid pace, limits to behavior
are prescribed by group norms. If anybody goes beyond these
bounds he is put within the bounds again. This is keenly observed
by Cameron [10] in his study of 200 junior high school pupils:

To have news value, the competition of boys and girls for popularity
with members of the opposite sex, must be expressed in exaggerated,
daring, and exciting terms. But their verbal freedom is in general
divorced by a wide margin from their actions; so that, for example,
anyone who became really interested in heavy petting was ostracized
from this group. [10, 20]

Similarly, the reporter who made the picture survey of a high
school clique for Life [30] includes pictures showing that a mem-
ber of the clique runs the danger of ostracism if she is too inter-
ested in boys, puts herself in their midst ignoring the girls, "necks"
at movies, or has too many dates. Cameron observes further:

Let anyone get conceited about his status, or ride too high on a
wave of popularity, and without warning a torrent of invectives will
be let loose. With merciless directness and intolerance the offending
person's prestige is battered into shreds and he is left to fend for him-
self in getting back into the group. [10, 22]

In the next chapter we shall elaborate our account of the struc-
tural properties arising in spontaneously formed groups or gangs.
We shall give there concrete illustrations of the impact of these
structural properties of groups on the identifications, loyalties, and
attitudes of the individual members. Investigators, both in psy-
chology and sociology, who studied the behavior of the individual
member in adolescent gangs or groups, have furnished invaluable
data which are ripe for a social psychological conceptualization.
We include here only a few more examples to show the serious
individual consequences that can result from allegiance to group
norms.

THE EFFECTS OF AGE-MATE REFERENCE GROUPS 273

The concrete cases studied by Thomas [42] highlight the serious
effects such group memberships can have on the behavior of s'ome
unfortunate youngsters.

It frequently happens also that a girl is drawn or drifts out of her
family and community into a bad gang, as in the case No. 78, becomes
identified with them by assimilation, and cannot free herself. She
may then be kept by one of the men or sold into a house. Cases No.
79 and No. 80 are typical of the psychology of the girl in this relation.
[42, 142]

Augusta Jameson [23] who actually lived with a group of delin-
quent girls without identifying herself with the authorities until
she secured the girls' confidence, secured 29 autobiographies and
questionnaires from 106 delinquent girls. These questionnaires
were made through the aid of some of the girls themselves, and
were given twice, four months apart. Correlations between the
test and retest were "very high." Basing her findings on this
material plus "agency, institutional, and court records; and some
upon physical, psychiatric, and psychological examinations," Jame-
son concludes:

In general there appears to be a vague pattern, an outline of succes-
sive incidents, and conditions, in these girls' lives. These various stages
do not necessarily occur singly but often in combination with previous
or subsequent ones. [23, 30]

Among these conditions, Jameson lists the following which indi-
cate the effects of age-mate groups:

Failure of the family and the community to offer normal socially
accepted satisfactions for their personal needs. . . . Existence in the
community of an apparently congenial group of young people par-
ticipating in overt sex activity. . . . Initiatory experiences of the girl
in the sex group, frequently accompanied by fear and unpleasantness,
but necessary as a "price of admission," to this group whose members
appear to be having adequate satisfactions. . . . Adoption by the girl
of the pattern of sex delinquency defined by the group. [23, 31]

Jameson then concludes:

It is the writer's impression that the delinquency of these girls has
been a normal, natural process, resulting from the type of social stimuli

274 RE-FORMATION OF THE EGO IN ADOLESCENCE

to which they have been exposed. From the girls' standpoint, their
delinquency has represented an opportunity for securing the human
satisfactions which in more conventional social situations are secured
in more socially approved forms of conduct [23, 31]

Such group determinations of more or less consequential types of
behavior are amply illustrated in the next chapter.

SOME IMPLICATIONS OF THE FOREGOING MATERIAL FOR OUR

PROBLEM

Before closing our sketchy account of the psychology of the
re-formation of the ego during adolescence, a concise statement of
the main trend that stands out, especially in the last sections, will
provide a useful clarification. This trend has serious implications
that have to be accounted for in any psychology of what is usually
designated in a loose way as "ego drives" — an important domain
in the field of motivation. As was hinted before, the appallingly
long and disconnected lists of adolescent attitudes and interests
will gain a coherent scheme of conceptualization if they are studied
first in relation to the individual boy's or girl's reference groups in
general and membership groups in particular. For the adolescent
derives his major attitudes and interests from the reference groups
to which he relates himself. As we have seen before, the norms of
these reference groups become his attitudes. The major status
problems for him arise in relation to his reference groups in general
and to his membership groups in particular. His identifications,
loyalties, and conformities are, in a major way, determined in
relation to them. His main concern, for the time being at least,
is to establish himself, to have a standing in his reference and
membership groups, even though they may change in different
periods. The consequences of this concern define in an important
way many aspects of his ego problems.

Of course, any standing in the reference group or membership
group will not do. Individual members strive to achieve better
standing in their group due to the factors of individual differences
in temperament, intelligence, ability, and in many other dimen-
sions. These individual differences may lead to varieties of con-

SOME IMPLICATIONS FOR OUR PROBLEM 275

tinuous efforts to better relative standing in the group, may cause
frictions among the members, may end in discriminations, ostra-
cisms, and such. However, all of these effects of individual differ-
ences take place within the terms of group loyalty and conformity
prescribed by the group norms, whatever their character and
direction may be in the particular social and class setting in which
the individual moves. If he displays behavior altogether incom-
patible with the bounds of group characteristics, he is simply out;
he becomes an outsider. In some cases, any status in the group is
of more value to the individual than loss of the sense of belonging-
ness, especially if he is in conflict with unfortunate family circum-
stances, (p. 298) All of these conclusions indicate that the all
important factors of individual differences have meaning in group
situations as they relate to the relative standing of the individual
member. For the experts in the field of clinical psychology or
those who are mainly concerned with the therapeutics of indi-
vidual cases, behavior difficulties due to individual differences may
be the major concern. It surely is our business to keep in touch
with the findings of these psychologists. However, for the social
psychologist, no matter how unique and colorful these individual
factors may be, the main concern first should be the situational
determinations of group interactions and the psychological proper-
ties that arise as a consequence in the individual members. The
result of multitudes of experiments have probably made it quite
clear by this time that the individual behaves differently in group
situations. This fact deserves to be noted, by the social psychologist
especially, with the same importance as any fact of individual
differences.

If the adolescent's efforts to achieve some stability for an ego
which has been rendered more insecure and more unstable during
the process of transition, if his strivings to establish himself are
studied in terms of the demands of his reference and membership
groups, perhaps elaborately formulated lists of drives to account
for the ego-strivings of adolescents will become superfluous. For
example, in one of the recent accounts of adolescent drives, we
find the following items: "Drive for Autonomy, Drive for Social
Ties (Social Acceptance), Drive for Achievement, Drive for Rec-
ognition, Drive for Abasement, Drive for Aggression, Drive for

276 RE-FORMATION OF THE EGO IN ADOLESCENCE

'Succorance,' Drive for Control (Dominance), Drive for Escape."
This impressive list certainly looks like a refined elaboration of
McDougall. But by increasing the list of drives or needs and
thus compartmentalizing them, the functional relationships dis-
played in behavior manifestations aimed at achieving a desired
status are not clarified. We should think rather that they are
obscured.

What an adolescent, with the unstable and more or less transi-
tory state of his ego links and with the more or less confused
character of his ego aspirations, is striving to achieve, is to stabilize
his ego-values — to amount to something or to anchor his ego
securely — in relation to his reference group, whatever this may be
to him in his particular social milieu. In order to achieve this, he
has to and he wants to identify himself with the group or groups
in question. He does his level best to incorporate (in his ego
which is, we repeat, a genetic formation) the norms of the group,
whatever they may be in his particular social setting. He has to
and he wants to conform to them in his behavior. If conformity
to these norms is achieved by ruthless competition and individual-
ism, he does his level best to be competitive and individualistic to
the limits of his capacity. If the norms of his group put a great
premium on being co-operative, he does his best to be co-operative.
Within the bounds of these prescribed directions, individual
differences operate, sometimes to extremes of various kinds of
morbidity.

For example, a Samoan, a Zuni, a Bathonga adolescent [34]
will do his best, for the sake of his ego, to display individualistic
behavior as little as possible. Perhaps an adolescent in these groups
would never dream, for the sake of his ego, of exhibiting behavior
displayed by the members of an exclusive fraternity or sorority
oriented towards greater achievements of social distinction and
individuality. In a culture in which cooking is considered a
greater mark of distinction, a woman will be less lured by com-
pliments directed to, say, a Greer Garson.12 Anybody who is
familiar with behavior manifestations in different societies can

12 An actual observation communicated to the authors by Irving A. Hallowell
of Northwestern University.

REFERENCES 277

give hundreds of examples of functional variations in ego-striv-
ings. In one, self-assertiveness may be effective in achieving the de-
sired status; in another, submission and inconspicuousness may be
more effective in establishing one's self in his group. In a society
in which "male and female human natures" are judged by double
standards, strong masculine characteristics may raise one's appeal
value as a person. In the same society, coyness and submissiveness
may raise a woman's appeal value as a person.

In short the developing ego, which is a genetic formation itself,
or the re-forming ego in adolescence, has to be anchored securely
and in a relatively high standing in relation to one's group.
Whether this will be achieved by being assertive or submissive, by
being individualistic or co-operative, by the attainment of this or
that sort of personal virtues and accomplishments, will vary ac-
cording to the demands and pressures of one's own reference group
in general and membership group in particular.

In these chapters, we have given a few functional variations of
adolescent strivings to establish one's self in his group. In the next
chapter we shall cite some more concrete illustrations. Scientific
concepts are certainly the variables with which investigators in
various fields deal with their data. However, if the constructs or
concepts come in to confuse issues and to compartmentalize arti-
ficially the functional relationships of these variables, they render
no scientific service, to say the least.

REFERENCES

1. AVERILL, L. A., 'Adolescence: A Study in the Teen Years, Boston: Houghton

2. BALDWIN, B. T., The Physical Growth of Children from Birth to Maturity,

Univ. Iowa Stud.: Stud, in Child Welfare, vol. 1, no. 1.

3. BAYLEY, N., The adolescent growth study: III. Skeletal X-rays as indicators of

maturity, /. Consult. PsychoL, 1940, 4, 69-73.

4. and R. TUDDENHAM, Adolescent changes in body build, 43rd yearbook.,

National Society for the Study of Education, 1944, 33-55.

5. BLOS, P., The Adolescent Personality, A Study of Individual Behavior, New

6. BRADLEY, P., The touch system among coeds, Real America, 1934, 4, 31 f.

7. BROOKS, F. P., The Psychology of Adolescence, Boston: Riverside Press, 1929.

8. BUHLER, C., The social behavior of children, in Handbook of Child Psychology

(C. Murchison, ed), .Worcester: Clark Univ., 1933, 2d ed., 374-416.

278 RE-FORMATION OF THE EGO IN ADOLESCENCE

9. BURKS, F. W., The Tugwdl High School Clubhouse (1936-37), unpublished,
Univ. California, Inst. Child Welfare.

10. CAMERON, W. ]., A Study of Social Development in Adolescence, unpublished,

Univ. California, Inst. of Child Welfare.

11. CAMPBELL, H.. M., Sex differences obtained by the "Guess Who" technique in

reputation assessments given and received by adolescent boys and girls, thesis
on file in Library, Univ. California, 1941.

12. CONKLIN, E. S., Principles of Adolescent Psychology, New York: Holt, copy-

right 1935.

13. CRESSEY, P. G., The Closed Dance Halls in Chicago, thesis on file in Library,

Univ. Chicago, 1929.

14. DAVIS, A., and J. DOLLARD, Children of Bondage, Washington: Am. Council on

Education, 1940.

15. DAVIS, K., The sociology of parent-youth conflict, Am. Sociol. Rev., 1940, 5,

523-35.

16. GARDNER, G. E., Sex behavior of adolescents in wartime, Ann. Am. Acad. Pol.

and Soc. Sci.f 1944, 236, 60-6.

17. GOODENOUGH, F. L., Developmental Psychology, New York: Appleton-Century,

18. GREULICH, W. W., Promising leads for research in problems of adolescence,

Proc. Second Bienn. Meet, of Soc. Research in Child Development, Washing-
ton, 1936, 13-14.

19. HEALY, W., Personality in Formation and Action, New York: Norton, copy-

right 1938.

20. HOLLINGWORTH, L., The Psychology of the Adolescent, New York: Applcton,

2i Tne adolescent child, in Handbook of Child Psychology (C. Murchison,

ed.), Worcester: Clark Univ., 1933, 2d ed, 882-908.

22. HOSKINS, R. G., The Tides of Life, New York: Norton, 1933.

23. JAMESON, A. T., Psychological factors contributing to the delinquency of girls,

/. Juvenile Research, 1938, 22, 25-32.

24. JANNIS, J., Brothers under the gin, Real America, 1934, 4, 30 f.

25. JONES, H. E., Development in Adolescence, New York: Appleton-Century,

26. KIRKPATRICK, C., A comparison of generations in regard to attitudes toward

feminism, /. Genet. Psychol, 1936, 49, 343-61.

27. Inconsistency in attitudinal behavior with special reference to attitudes

toward feminism, /. Appl. Psychol., 1936, 20, 535-52.

28. KITAY, P. M., A comparison of the sexes in their attitudes and beliefs about

women: a study of prestige groups, Sociometry, 1940, 3, 399-407.

29. KOMAROVSKY, M., The Unemployed Man and His Family, New York: Drydcn,

1940.

30. life, Teen-age Girls, December 11, 1944, 17, no. 24, 91-9.
31. Sub-Deb Clubs, April 2, 1945, 18, no. 14, 87-93.

32. Teen-age Boys, June 11, 1945, 18, no. 24, 91-7.

33. LYND, R. S., and H. M. LYND, Middletotvn in Transition, New York: Harcourt,

34. MEAD, M. (ed.), Cooperation and Competition Among Primitive Peoples, New

York: McGraw-Hill, 1937.

REFERENCES 279

35. MIZANOGLU, N., rA Study of Psychological Development During Adolescence,

unpublished, on file in Library, Univ. Ankara, Turkey.

36. New Yor{ World-Telegram, March 22, 1946.

37. OGDEN, E., Regulation of circulation at adolescence, Proc. of Second Bienn.

Meet, of Soc. Research in Child Development, Washington, 1936, 121-4.

38. OGDEN, M. B., The Social Orientation of the Society Girl, thesis on file in

Library, Univ. Chicago, 1938.

39. SCHWAB, S. I., and B. S. VEEDER, The Adolescent: His Conflicts and Escapes,

New York: Appleton, 1929.

40. SEWARD, G. H., Cultural conflict and the feminine role: an experimental study,

/. Soc. Psychol, 1945, 22, 177-94.

41. STOLZ, H. R., M. C. JONES, and J. CHAFFEY, The junior high school age, Univ.

High School }., 1937, 15, 63-72.

43. TRYON, C. M., Evaluations of adolescent personality by adolescents, Monogr.

Soc. for Research in Child Development, 1939, 4, no. 4.

44. Evaluations of adolescent personality by adolescents, in Child Behavior

and Development (R. G. Barker, J. S. Kounin, H. F. Wright, eds.), New
York: McGraw-Hill, copyright 1943, 545-66.

45. WHARTON, E., A Backward Glance, New York: Appleton-Century, copyright

1934.

46. WHITE, R. W., The personality of Joseph Kidd. I. History of an adolescent

crisis in the development of ego-structure, Character and Personality, 1943,
11, 183-208.

47. WILE, I. S., The Challenge of Adolescence, New York: Greenberg, copyright

1939.

48. WINCH, R. F., Social and Personality Characteristics of Courtship Revealed in

College Men, thesis on file in Library, Univ. Chicago, 1942.

49. ZACHRY, C. B., Emotion and Conduct in Adolescence, New York: Appleton-

CHAPTER 10

EGO-INVOLVEMENTS AND IDENTIFICATIONS IN
GROUP SITUATIONS

It has become almost a truism by now that group interaction
produces differential results in the experience and behavior of
individuals participating in a group situation. Before we take up
the problem of ego-involvements and identifications in group situa-
tions, we shall call attention to the psychological properties gener-
ated in group situations. Whether organized or not, when two or
more (say, five hundred individuals) interact in a situation, psy-
chologically speaking, we have a group. The size of the interact-
ing group will, of course, greatly aflfect the characteristics of the
group, as, for example, its compellingness for the individual mem-
bers. A group will function differently depending on whether it
is spontaneous or organized, homogeneous or heterogeneous.
However, without losing sight of special problems these and other
variations create, we can still say that essentially the same basic
psychological principles are at work in the many variations of
group interaction.1

At the end of the 19th century and during the first decades of
the present century, sociologists were time and again stressing the
fact that the individual in group situations no longer experienced
and behaved in the same way as he does when in isolation, while
psychologists in general preoccupied themselves with a search for
the elements of the mind (sensations) before attempting to handle
concrete problems of everyday life. Since sociologists received
little help from the main body of academic psychology, they
tended to formulate their own psychological principles or to
advance suprapsychological (supraindividual) doctrines. In the
writings of Durkheim [16], Le Bon [24], Blondel [8], Ross [47],
Martin [29], La Piere [23], Blumer [9], and others, we find inter-

1 For a discussion of this point, see [56] .

280

EGO IDENTIFICATIONS IN GROUP SITUATIONS 281

esting characterizations of collective behavior. Almost everyone
who wrote on collective behavior stressed the general fact that the
individual, when in a group, becomes a "different person" than
he is in isolation and may indulge in activities not ordinarily
expected of him. Some authors emphasize the point that the indi-
vidual becomes a sadistic beast when in a collective situation (for
example, Ross [47]), or releases his brakes altogether to regress
completely to the basic instinctive (libidinal) level of psychological
functioning (for example, Freud). Others maintained that an
individual achieves the highest deeds of altruism while he moves
as part and parcel of a collective movement (for example, Durk-
heim [16]).

Without making a special issue of the positive or negative effects
of collective behavior, we shall note in passing that the direction
taken by the activities of an interacting group is determined by the
factors (motives) that are instrumental in bringing individual
members together and the norms arising during the process of
interaction. For example, a revolutionary group, emerging as a
consequence of disgust felt against reactionary forces and deter-
mination to wipe them out, will lead the individuals involved to
achieve deeds of genuine selflessness; a lynching party, instigated
by reactionary ideology and groups, will commit beastly acts;
while an artist or nudist colony in the bohemia of sonje large city
may indulge in acts of orgiastic libidinal satisfactions.

Starting especially with the works of Walter Moede [32] and
F. H. Allport [1], psychologists studied differential group effects
on many psychological functions (for example, thinking, attention,
feeling). In the excellent reviews of Murphy and Murphy [38];
Dashiell [14]; Murphy, Murphy, and Newcomb [39]; we find
convenient summaries of the rapidly accumulating investigations
concerned with the effect of group situations. In the genetic
studies of Piaget and his students, sociometric studies started by
Moreno, and the experiments of Lewin and his students, the struc-
tural, as contrasted to piecemeal (elementaristic), properties of
group situations stand out significantly. We shall review these
studies briefly later in this chapter.

Impressed by the fact that in actual social life group norms
usually emerge in critical situations, Sherif [55] produced the rise

282 EGO IDENTIFICATIONS IN GROUP SITUATIONS

of group norms in an experimentally introduced ambiguous and
unstable stimulus situation, (pp. 52/.) Cantril [11], studying the
rise of actual social movements, analyzed the basic psychological
principles at work in collective behavior.

If we are ever going to have a social psychology of more or less
lasting group situations and group identifications, we must seek
the structural properties of group interaction and formation, group
products once they are formed, their subsequent effects on the
behavior of individual members, and the reciprocal functional
relationships between group and individual members. If there
are any consistent dynamics involved in group formations and
functioning and in the behavior of the individual member, they
should be conceptualized on the basis of concrete observations,
especially everyday life situations. This should show us the gen-
eral functional variables of the group-individual relationship in
any group situation whatever the particular circumstances may be
that give rise to group formations and whatever the particular type
of behavior thus determined or altered. Once this is done, it will
be comparatively easy to study the specific conditions and factors
that enter into the functioning of a particular group and the
specific goals to which it is directed.

In this chapter we shall confine ourselves to comparatively small
groups and to the rise of norms, ego-involvements, and subsequent
identifications in these groups. We shall be concerned chiefly with
spontaneously formed small groups (gangs). For in such spon-
taneously formed small groups, differential group behavior, group
products, and identifications are comparatively easily traced. Be-
cause of their relatively simple nature, adolescent cliques and gangs
are in certain respects excellent prototypes of group interaction
and formation. We can see in them the emergence of group
products, the determination of the behavior of the individual
member by group identifications, the generation of group loyalties
and pressures. We should, however, make it explicit that gangs
are not only adolescent phenomena. Drifting away from the con-
ventional family setting may occur before adolescence, even in
early childhood, depending on the degree to which the child iden-
tifies himself with his family and other conventional groups or

EGO IDENTIFICATIONS IN GROUP SITUATIONS 283

institutions. This identification, in turn, is regulated by complex
social and economic factors. However, as we have seen in chapter
7, a certain degree of ego development must take place before a
child can relate himself to any group. The rate of this devel-
opment is undoubtedly affected by many of the same factors
influencing the degree to which he later identifies himself with
conventional groups.

Already sociologists have amassed many impressive investigations
of cliques, gangs, isolated groups, and collective phenomena.
These are full of direct implications for the psychological con-
ceptualization of group formation and of those supralocal (supra-
individual) properties of group structures which determine the
differential behavior of individual members. In their psychologi-
cal conceptualizations of their own data, sociologists generally have
coined their own "psychologies" consistent with the ideas of
"human nature" to which their particular ideologies lead them.
On the other hand, psychologists, just beginning to face group
problems as psychological problems, tend to ignore the vast wealth
of sociological data which lend themselves so easily to psychological
formulations. It seems that many sociologists, following the erro-
neous traditional dichotomy between the individual and society,
have taken psychology as the apologist of the individual and of
"individualism" and have neglected to follow closely the concepts
psychologists work with. At the same time, it is surprising that
most psychologists investigating group problems have not often
bothered to go out of their little worlds and examine the wealth of
material already collected by sociologists.

The main theme of this chapter can be briefly summarized here
on the basis of the sociological and psychological data, now con-
verging in their implications. The ego of the growing boy or girl
develops as a consequence of various contacts with the surrounding
physical and socioeconomic milieu. This process defines one's
identity as a person, anchors him in a constellation of interpersonal
relationships in many capacities. His sense of status and its sta-
bility is derived from this constellation of relationships interwoven
during the course of genetic development. He carries on his daily
activities (for example, his strivings to make a living and still a
better living) as prescribed by these socially incorporated ego-

284 EGO IDENTIFICATIONS IN GROUP SITUATIONS

values. If these ego-values serve the function of regulating his
activities in such away that his basic needs are more or less satisfied
and if he feels secure in the constellation of human relationships
thus organized, he leads his life as a respectable normal member of
the group (subject, of course, to variations due to individual differ-
ences). But, if these values or norms do not adequately satisfy his
basic needs, or if they produce conflict due to the lack of integra-
tion between the values of different groups a person identifies him-
self with, then he may strive restlessly to anchor himself anew, or
he may indulge in daydreams, various sorts of abnormal phan-
tasies, or other "substitutive activities" with their possible neurotic
consequences. Individuals who are experiencing basic depriva-
tions, who are tossing around without a secure social anchoring,
owing to the contradictory nature of organized social relationships,
may gravitate towards each other to form, spontaneously, more or
less well-organized groups. And they may then derive their satis-
factions from the activities and identifications such informally
organized groups make possible.2

Most crucial and realistic observations on group psychology are
still made, not by psychologists, but by observers who either per-
sonally share collective experiences or take a part in the process of
group transformation. For, unlike psychologists, these observers
cannot afford to make serious mistakes. Concrete illustrations of
this point will be seen later in relation to Makarenko's work in
the Gorki Colony during the trying days of the early 1920's when
civil war was raging in the Soviet Union. In the more or less iso-
lated situations of combat in war where men share misery and
dangers in the most elemental and consequential way, there de-
velop spontaneously among them groups peculiar to them alone
in which other men of their own army may not be allowed to

2 Although we shall not consider them here, groups which arise because they
promise happiness to their members through escapist solutions are good illustra-
tions. For examples see [7, 11, 17, 57]. On the other hand, the experience and
observation of misery, class contradictions, social prejudices of all sorts which are
derivatives of these contradictions lead many people in all countries to accept more
objectively valid explanations concerning the causes of this misery and contradic-
tion. Subsequently, these individuals may take a realistic firm stand in the face
of many hardships.

EGO IDENTIFICATIONS IN GROUP SITUATIONS 285

participate. It is just as if the process were regulated by an estab-
lished norm.

Among his other keen observations of men collectively under
stress and reported in words or incisive lines and shadings, Bill
Mauldin [31], who shared it all, caught the major properties of
such groups:

While men in combat outfits kid each other around, they have a
sort of family complex about it. No outsiders may join. Anybody
who does a dangerous job in this war has his own particular kind of
kidding among his own friends, and sometimes it doesn't even sound
like kidding. Bomber crews and paratroopers and infantry squads
are about the same in that respect. If a stranger comes up to a group
of them when they are bulling, they ignore him. If he takes it upon
himself to laugh at something funny they have said, they freeze their
expressions, turn slowly around, stare at him until his stature has
shrunk to about four inches and he slinks away, and then they go
back to their kidding again.

It's like a group of prosperous businessmen telling a risque joke and
then glaring at the waiter who joins in the guffaws. Combat people
are an exclusive set, and if they want to be that way, it is their privi-
lege. They certainly earn it. New men in outfits have to work their
way in slowly, but they are eventually accepted. Sometimes they
have to change some of their ways of living. An introvert or a
recluse is not going to last long in combat without friends, so he
learns to come out of his shell. Once he has "arrived" he is pretty
proud of his clique, and he in turn is chilly toward outsiders.

That's why, during some of the worst periods in Italy, many guys
who had a chance to hang around a town for a few days after being
discharged from a hospital where they had recovered from wounds,
with nobody the wiser, didn't take advantage of it. They weren't
eager to get back up and get in the war, by any means, and many of
them did hang around a few days. But those who did hang around
didn't feel exactly right about it, and those who went right back did
it for a very simple reason—not because they felt that their presence
was going to make a lot of difference in the big scheme of the war,
and not to uphold the traditions of the umpteenth regiment. A lot
of guys don't know the name of their regimental commander. They
went back because they knew their companies were very shorthanded,
and they were sure that if somebody else in their own squad or section

286 EGO IDENTIHCATIONS IN GROUP SITUATIONS

were in their own shoes, and the situation were reversed, those friends
would come back to make the load lighter on them. [31, 58 ff., all but
the last italics ours]

Further examples of ego-involved group loyalties arising during
critical times are reported in the next chapter.

Judgments, perceptions, and attitudes are referential affairs, con-
sciously or unconsciously related to a framework. If this frame
becomes unstable and conflicting, judgments and attitudes related
to this frame are consequently apt to lose their stability and inte-
gration. The same is true for the genetically formed ego. If we
lose our faith in the persons or groups with which we identify our-
selves, or if we are estranged from them for various reasons, our
feeling of identity becomes unstable and shaky. Under the cir-
cumstances, we are apt to strive to anchor ourselves more firmly
in a new constellation of human relationships.3

The case of the "marginal man," with ambivalent or contradic-
tory group loyalties, or with experiences of successive acceptance
and rejection by the groups he is related to, illustrates our point
clearly. Such a man usually develops conflicts due to the contra-
dictory components of his loyalties, or to frustrations arising from
his alternating acceptance or rejection by the groups he is related
to in the social order in which these contradictions prevail. In the
works of Park and Miller [43], Park [44],-Stonequist [58], Child

8 The cases of more or less isolated groups (for example, in prisons, concentra-
tion camps, or involuntary isolation of some sort), their formation, and the prod-
ucts emerging in them may be studied to exemplify our theme. For example, in
Clemmer's study [13] of life in a large prison, he notes that, because of uncer-
tainty and confusion about the life they have left and because of the impersonal
prison routine, new inmates almost invariably experience a "loss of identity" at
first. Some men never recover from this chaotic state. However, the majority
come to accept the prison code and even anchor themselves in informal groupings
to a greater or lesser degree. They then identify themselves with the prison group,
and their behavior is regulated by the code. Other members remain anchored in
persons or groups outside of prison and manage to live with a minimum of inner
conflict, because their behavior is judged by themselves in terms of a reference
group outside. However, some men "have a double or triple allegiance,*' identify-
ing themselves with the prison group in some respects, the outside world in others.
It is these prisoners, the "betwixt and between/' who suffer inner conflict, who
become "stool pigeons," and whose behavior seems "confused and illogical"
These "stool pigeons" are looked down upon scornfully by both inmates and
authorities.

EGO IDENTIFICATIONS IN GROUP SITUATIONS 287

[12], and others we find interesting illustrations of such conflict
situations. Recently Hughes [20] has given a sociological account
of these "dilemmas and contradictions of status," which at times
cause frustrating experiences for the individuals caught in them.

Group identifications. Studies of adolescent conflicts, crises,
identifications, and cliques give us important psychological clues
by means of which we can more adequately examine the intricate
problems of ego-involvements and identifications in group situa-
tions. We have seen how the adolescent boy or girl tosses in the
flux of "unsettledness" and personal confusion with the rise of the
sexual urge and the development of other youthful aspirations and
longings, with now more intensely felt deprivations, emerging
interests and values. And we will recall that most of these new
adolescent yearnings are not sympathetically shared, in general,
by the older generation and are usually not satisfied in what the
adolescent regards as a rigid adult world filled with restrictions
and prohibitions. The consequences are, in many cases, parent-
youth (adult-youth) conflict, leading, for example, to: drifting
away ("psychological weaning") from parents and other grown-
ups, ending in actual running away from the oppressing family
situation in some cases; crises of various kinds in which the ado-
lescent feels that nobody understands him, he is all alone in an
unsympathetic sadistic world; or expressed or unexpressed feelings
or acts of rebellion against different types of authority.

The kind and the intensity of parent-youth conflict, of psycho-
logical weaning, of crisis and rebellion, and of actual behavior that
may ensue will vary according to the class structure of the society,
the relative stability or instability of the times, the rate of techno-
logical changes, and the deprivations the particular adolescent is
subject to because of the particular circumstances of his family,
class, and so on. A sociological analysis of certain of these im-
portant variables determining the amount and degree of parent-
youth conflict in a particular culture (as contrasted to universal
factors, for example, differences in age between parents and chil-
dren) has been made by Kingsley Davis [15], Pointing out that
such conflict is minimal or inconsequential in some cultures, Davis
emphasizes that, although the physiological changes at adolescence
are highly important factors, they are universal and, consequently,

288 EGO IDENTIFICATIONS IN GROUP SITUATIONS

cannot in themselves account for variations in the degree of con-
flict from one culture to another. The four "complex variables"
Davis analyzes are: "(1) the rate of social change; (2) the extent
of complexity in the social structure; (3) the degree of integration
in the culture; and (4) the velocity of movement (e.g., vertical
mobility) within the structure and its relation to the cultural
values." [535] Viewing contemporary American culture in terms
of these variables, Davis comments that owing to the rapidity of
sociological change, not only do the norms of adults and youth
differ in content, but the complexity of our society with its lack
of integration leads to conflicting standards, norms, and goals
"within the generations" (including, of course, those norms relat-
ing to sex).

The feeling of insecurity, of being tossed around, is painful, as
any deprivation is painful. It has its limits of endurance. As a
result there is a tendency to anchor one's self some place where an
actual or fancied feeling of security is provided. This anchoring
may be achieved through various kinds of identifications with
persons who have affective value or who stand high in one's eyes;
or it may be attained through membership in some clique, gang,
club, sect, select neighborhood, or institution. In "casually pat-
terned" societies of a high degree of development and differentia-
tion, to borrow a concept used by Robert Lynd in his provocative
book, Knowledge for What? The Place of Social Science in Ameri-
can Culture [28], efforts to get one's self anchored may be directed
to contradictory and escapist orientations. These contradictory
identifications and affiliations may develop into absurd proportions.
Instead of giving a consistent feeling of security, they may only
produce further conflicts.4

Youngsters who are striving, sometimes desperately, to get out
of a psychological crisis situation, to find for themselves an atmos-
phere of experience and action sympathetic to and in harmony
with their yearnings and aspirations, or to satisfy keenly felt dep-
rivations, spontaneously form adolescent groups (cliques, gangs)
with kindred souls. The structural properties of such groups —

4 For some accentuated illustrations of this point, see the references on the
"marginal man" and ch. 11.

THE STRUCTURAL PROPERTIES OF GROUPS 289

such as degree of solidarity, integration, degree of exclusiveness
of loyalty demanded— will vary according to the extent to which
each individual member is driven to cast his own personal lot
with a group as determined by the locality in which he lives, the
degree of mobility possible, economic class, and ethnic affiliations.
For economic class and ethnic affiliations are major determinants
of significant identifications and anchorages or of the lack of them,
especially in bourgeois societies where rigid prejudices prevail (as
seen in "social distance" studies).

The goals towards which clique or gang activities will be di-
rected vary according to the character of the major deprivations,
the character of the feeling of not belonging, and the aspirations
of the individuals in the gang or clique. A certain gang of the
type most frequently studied by sociologists may engage particu-
larly in pilfering, "jack-rolling" or stealing. Another gang, whose
members are economically above the subsistence level, may special-
ize in orgiastic or other sexual activities, a third gang or clique
may be noted for its acts of "distinction" in assuring for its mem-
bers an envied status in their social world. School gangs or cliques
of the latter kind have not attracted so much attention, perhaps
because they do not stand out as spectacular. As we saw in the last
chapter, college fraternities and sororities almost serve as a proto-
type of groups engaging in such activities.

THE STRUCTURAL PROPERTIES OF GROUPS

Studies of the spontaneous formations of gangs and the subse-
quent rise of appropriate norms (codes) and roles which define the
relative status of individual members, give us excellent informa-
tion concerning the character of group structures, identifications,
and loyalties, and their determination of the behavior of the mem-
bers. The material on gangs is especially helpful in formulating
psychological generalizations, since sociologists have published
elaborate studies on the formation and functioning of gangs, in-
cluding case histories of individual members. The group proper-
ties, individual identifications, and behavior in gangs found here
give us, as we have said, the essential prototype of any group or
group behavior.

290 EGO IDENTIFICATIONS IN GROUP SITUATIONS

In these gang studies, a cardinal fact concerning the behavior
of individual members in any collective situation stands out in high
relief: the fact that, once an individual identifies himself with a
group and its collective actions, his behavior is, in a major way,
determined by the direction of the group action, whatever this
direction may be, good or bad, constructive or destructive. Once
an individual identifies himself with the group, whether this group
is a clique, gang, club, fraternity, sect, or political organization, his
ego becomes so involved that he is apt to feel a loss of personal
status if he does not keep pace with group activity. His social
status as he feels it consists largely of a constellation of these group
identifications, whatever the specific character and level in the
particular scheme of social stratification may be. Deviations and
injuries inflicted on his identifications, either by himself or by
others, are usually experienced as a personal loss of prestige. Thus
a gang member acquires his real social status in his gang, even
though he may have learned by heart all the prevailing norms of
society at large.

This fact is nicely pointed out by Zorbaugh: [63]

The church, the school, and the occupational group, then, as well
as the newspaper, play no intimate role in the local life of the Near
North Side [of Chicago], . . . The Gold Coast has its clubs; intimate
groups gather in "village" studios; the foreign areas have numerous
lodges and mutual benefit societies; the slum has its "gangs." Even
in the rooming-house area, where group life is at a minimum, occa-
sional cults and sects spring up, and every pool hall and cigar store
has about it a nebulous group. And these groups may play an enor-
mously important role in the lives of their members. [63, 192]

In Thrasher's work we have an account of hundreds of gangs
studied in the early 1920's. Thrasher's book is a mine of rich data
for the social psychologist. It is full of material which shows the
process of group formation under well-defined economic and
social situations, the structural properties of groups, and the rise
of appropriate norms (codes) that regulate the behavior of indi-
vidual members to such an important degree.

Before we analyze the structural properties of "gangs," it is
important to note that, no matter what kind of "deviant" activities

THE STRUCTURAL PROPERTIES OF GROUPS 291

gang boys engage in, they are generally wholesome and normal
human beings, subject only to the usual individual differences
found in any school, Sunday school, or club population. Thrasher
[60] states that

Aside from their usual lack of adjustment to the formal demands
of conventional social codes, however, gang boys ... are not morbid
or psychopathic as is sometimes the case with boys who are subject
to the repressions and punishments of a more artificial situation. [60,
172]

Other investigators substantiate the fact: we see it in Clifford
Shaw's Brothers in Crime [52] ; 5 in Whyte's Street Corner Society
[62]; and Zorbaugh's The Gold Coast and the Slum [63]. Gangs
are formed spontaneously to serve the function of a social institu-
tion, to secure a status and a social identity for youngsters not
genuinely provided with such an identity by society at large. And
perhaps even more important, gangs regulate and encourage ac-
tivities which satisfy basic human needs, because families and
communities have failed to provide many children with the means
of relieving major deprivations.

Gangs represent the spontaneous effort of boys to create a society for
themselves where none adequate to their needs exists. [60, 37]

It offers a substitute for what society fails to give; and it provides a
relief from suppression and distasteful behavior. [60, 38]

This comes out again and again in representative studies. For
example, we see in Zorbaugh's conclusion [63] how restrictions
imposed by privileged classes to maintain class lines encourage
gang formation.

The child cannot live and conform in both social worlds at the
same time. The family and colony are defined for him in his Ameri-
can contacts by such epithets as "dago," "wop," "foreign," and the like.
He feels the loss of status attached to his connection with the colony.
In his effort to achieve status in the American city he loses his rapport
with family and community. Conflicts arise between the child and
his family. Yet by virtue of his race, his manner of speech, the neces-

5 The clinical summaries contained in this book and made by the psychiatrist,
Harold Hanson [ch. 13] are particularly to the point.

292 EGO IDENTIFICATIONS IN GROUP SITUATIONS

sity of living in the colony, and these same definitive epithets, he is
excluded from status and intimate participation in American life,
Out of this situation, as we have already seen, arises the gang, afford-
ing the boy a social world in which he finds his only status and rec-
ognition. But it is by conforming to delinquent patterns that he
achieves status in the gang. And every boy in Little Hell is a mem-
ber of a gang. [63, 176 f.f italics ours]

Thrasher [60] begins his study by giving socioeconomic account
of the areas particularly conducive to the formation of gangs
(gangland). He writes that

The gang is almost invariably characteristic of regions that are
interstitial to the more settled, more stable, and better organized por-
tions of the city. The central tripartite empire of the gang occupies
what is often called "the poverty belt"— -a region characterized by
deteriorating neighborhoods, shifting populations, and the mobility
and disorganization of the slum. [60, 22]

It is against this situational background that the activities of such
gangs become significant. The specific activities of different gangs
may vary, as Thrasher points out. The situational determinants in
each case must be specifically studied.6

Thrasher, like some other sociologists in the field, tends to
consider gangs as cases of disorganization. This seems to us a
moralistic view of the subject. As Whyte recently noted, activities
of slum areas and those of gangs have an internal organization of
their own while they last.7 In Whyte's words:

It is customary for the sociologist to study the slum district in terms
of "social disorganization" and to neglect to see that an area such as
Cornerville has a complex and well-established organization of its
own. I was interested in that organization. I found that in every
group there was a hierarchical structure of social relations binding the

6 The almost universal formation of gangs among young boys in certain areas
of the population formerly has led certain authors to posit such conceptions as a
"gang instinct" (see, for example, J. Puffer [46]). But sociologists like Thrasher
and Shaw who are intimately acquainted with gangs have dismissed such untenable
psychological positions in favor of situational (environmental) explanations.

7 We say "while they last" because the impact of the established society, which
contributed to the gang's formation, at the same time impinges upon it in the
direction of its dissolution. We shall comment on this point later.

THE STRUCTURAL PROPERTIES OF GROUPS 293

individuals to one another and that the groups were also related
hierarchically to one another. Where the group was formally organ-
ized into a political club, this was immediately apparent, but for
informal groups it was no less true. While the relations in such
groups were not formally prescribed, they could be clearly observed
in the interactions of individuals. [62, viii, italics ours]

As we shall see presently, adolescent boys, particularly those who
experience economic stress and deprivation, who are actually (if
not legally) denied the opportunity to identify themselves organ-
ically with society at large, cannot help but gravitate to each other
in their common destiny to form spontaneously more or less or-
ganized groups which provide them with some kind of status,
some means of satisfying their youthful deprivations. If these
same boys could identify themselves with a group that held oppo-
site values and used other devices to achieve the same ends, they
would have formed their loyalties and oriented their activities
accordingly.

In chapter 7 we pointed out certain important implications
which contact with age-mate groups had on the process of ego
development. Thrasher comments:

The majority of gangs develop from the spontaneous play-group.
[60, 29]

In the light of our earlier discussion, this fact acquires particular
significance. More recently, Whyte [61] further substantiated
Thrasher's observation:

The clique structure arises out of the habitual association of mem-
bers, over a long period of time. The nuclei of most gangs can be
traced back to early boyhood years when living close together provided
the first opportunities of social contacts. [61]

These observations show in a concrete way the effect of spontane-
ous age-mate contacts and games on the developing social identity
of children. It is immaterial for our argument, of course, whether
all gangs develop from early childhood contacts, or whether many
of them are products of- the adolescent age level. Clifford Shaw
reports several concrete cases of gangs which started when young-
sters exchanged stories of exciting experiences and began to or-

294 EGO IDENTIFICATIONS IN GROUP SITUATIONS

ganize various exploits. These interactions tend to produce a
group structure which varies in its stability according to the
situation.

In the process of group (gang) formation, the relative standing
of one individual to another becomes defined. Each member
acquires a relative status with appropriate functions of authority
and responsibility. The leader himself emerges in the process of
interaction in diverse group activities. Thrasher points out:

There is a process of selection in the gang, as a result of the struggle
for status, whereby the ultimate position of each individual is deter-
mined. The result of this process depends largely upon the individual
differences — both native and acquired — which characterize the mem-
bers of the group. [60, 334]

Whyte, who lived in the slums and intimately associated with
gangs, formulated in a clear-cut way the crystallization of a relative
role or status for each member, as well as shifts of status with
changing situations:

Each member of the corner gang has his own position in the gang
structure. Although positions may remain unchanged over long
periods of time, they should not be conceived in static terms. To have
a position means that the individual has a customary way of interact-
ing with other members of the group. When the pattern of inter-
actions changes, the positions change. [62, 262 /.]

On the basis of extensive observations of hundreds of gangs,
Thrasher states:

While it may sometimes be true that a gang forms about a leader,
the reverse is generally true: the gang forms and the leader emerges
as the result of interaction. [60, 351]

Certainly individual differences in various psychological charac-
teristics of the members, their relatively high or low status in the
group, their superiority in diverse abilities may secure a particular
member leadership in the gang. Thrasher mentions such charac-
teristics as physical strength, athletic prowess, gameness, quickness
and firmness of decision, and imagination as qualities which deter-
mine the leadership of a particular member in a particular gang.
Which one of these or other qualities will help a person gain

THE STRUCTURAL PROPERTIES OF GROUPS 295

leadership in a gang is situationally determined by the particular
pattern of activities the gang goes in for. As Thrasher states:

The marks of leadership vary from gang to gang. The type of boy
who can lead one gang may be a failure or have a distinctly subordi-
nate role in another. . . . Physical and athletic prowess, which stand
the leader in such good stead in most gangs, for example, v/ould not
be valued in the following type of group. [60, 344]

Then he cites the case of "The Bandits" who, while carrying on
"delinquent" activities, engage as a group in such activities as
"social and folk dancing with girls." In another example he notes
that

A hunchback was a very successful leader of a gang of healthy boys.
[60, 350]

Studies on personality traits, such as aggressiveness or submissive-
ness, acquire concrete meaning only when the situational factors
in any group situation are given due consideration.

Leadership in a group is by no means an accidental or arbitrary
affair. The status of the leader is exercised not simply by virtue of
some personality trait, but rather because the leader lives up to
certain expectations demanded by the pattern of established rela-
tionships. As Thrasher states,

The leader has considerable power over his subordinates so long as
he does not abuse it. [60, 292, italics ours]

Whyte [61] points out that the higher a member's status is, the
stricter the expectations are for the fulfillment of his responsibilities
and obligations.

Not all corner boys live up to their obligations equally well, and this
factor partly accounts for the differentiation in status among the men.
The man with a low status may violate his obligations without much
change in position. [61, 657]

But this is not the case for members with high status, including the
leader. The leader, as Thrasher says, "goes where others fear to
go" in the exploits of the gang.

The number of members in the gang may range from two to
several hundred. It is interesting to note that usually the member-

296 EGO IDENTIFICATIONS IN GROUP SITUATIONS

ship does not exceed limits which will make interpersonal contacts
difficult or direct face-to-face group pressure on the members im-
possible. For example, out of 895 gangs Thrasher examined from
this point of view, 538 gangs had membership within the range of
10 to 20 members each.

The specific variations in the particular situations that give rise
to gangs and the variations in the aspirations produce gangs with
different characteristics.

No two gangs are just alike. The cases investigated present an
endless variety of forms, and every one is in some sense unique.
[60,45]

Gangs specialize in certain types of activity:

Gangs which develop specialized structures and codes for the fur-
therance of some interest of their own may be regarded as functional
types. Thus, groups are organized around such dominant interests as
junking, sex, picking pockets, stealing, athletics, gambling, or some
special type of crime. In each case they develop their own technique.
[60, 297]

These different groups start spontaneously around a more or less
diffuse nucleus and become structured and organized in various
degrees as time goes on.

All sorts of collective products emerge in the process of inter-
action in group activities and experiences. The new group prod-
ucts further strengthen the group structure and solidarity, re-
enforcing group pressure on the individual members. Gang
names, such as "Dirty Dozen," "Lilies of the Valley," "Shielders,"
"Hudson Dusters," "Yakey Yakes," "Five Points," "Vultures,"
"Forty Thieves," add to the feeling of group belongingness.8
Gang members are called by special nicknames assigned according
to their relative positions in the group. Thrasher says:

Personalities are recognized by the names applied to the members
of the gang. Individual peculiarities, which have an important effect
in determining status, are likely to give color to the boy's whole per-
sonality. He is named accordingly, and his name often indicates the
esteem in which he is held by the group. [60, 339 f.]

•These arc names of actual gangs taken from [60, 275 /., 281] .

THE STRUCTURAL PROPERTIES OF GROUPS 297

In the course of time, the gang develops definite boundaries as
its area of activity. Psychologically, this area is appropriated as
the gang's own area for operation. Violations of this appropriation
by some other gang are on occasion reacted to violently.

Just as among nations borderline disputes sometimes precipitate
disastrous wars, so gangs may be mobilized and led to battle on the
same issue. [60, 726]

Time and again, Thrasher calls attention to the fact that group
solidarity, the "we" feeling, is strengthened through outside re-
sistances, collective fights, and alliances with other gangs. In some
cases, this outside resistance may come from adults. Thrasher
quotes a gang member:

''This desire to escape family supervision marked the beginning of
our feeling of solidarity. Our first loyalties were to protect each other
against our parents." [60, 31]

Similar to the feelings of belongingness in any group, and the
development and delineation of attitudes towards the "in-group"
and "out-group" members, attitudes develop which define co-
operative and sympathetic in-group relationships, various degrees
of prejudice and of social distance towards outsiders.

All systematic investigators like Thrasher, Shaw, Zorbaugh,
Landesco, and Whyte have observed that appropriate norms arise.
These, in turn, regulate the formation of the attitudes and the
subsequent behavior of the members. In Thrasher's words:

Every gang tends to develop its own code of conduct, of which its
members are more or less aware and which may be more or less
rigidly enforced upon them. The code of the gang is in part reflected
from the patterns of behavior in its own social world, in part the
result of the development of primary group sentiments, and in part
the product of the individual group in its own special environment.
[60, 284]

In a similar way, group slogans arise which formulate gang prac-
tices in a short-cut way. Expressive words become standardized
for the gang, have special meaning to the members.

298 EGO IDENTIFICATIONS IN GROUP SITUATIONS

The isolated life of gangland leads to the development of a distinct
universe of discourse. . . . Like its morality, this argot, too, follows to
some extent patterns in its own social world. ... [60, 266 f.]

As in any social group of any degree of solidarity, these norms
are inculcated in the individual members in the very process of
interaction, generating feelings of belongingness and loyalty.
Also, as in any social group, various sorts of pressures, correctives
(such as applause and ridicule), and punishments are applied to
keep the attitudes and behavior of the members in line.

Opinion in the gang manifests its pressure in the variety of mech-
anisms through which group control is exerted, such as applause, pre-
ferment and hero worshipping as well as ridicule, scorn, and ostracism.
... In the gang the member who has broken the code may be sub-
jected to a beating or in extreme cases may be marked for death.
[60, 297 /..italics ours]

Deviations from group behavior are thus reacted to by the group
as a whole with varying degrees of severity. Since "squealing" is
the worst deviation, in some cases it is punishable by death. On
the positive side, group identification generates at times the highest
degree of co-operative and sympathetic tendencies within the de-
linquent gang. There exists within the gang "a sort of brother-
hood and mutual kindliness. This manifests itself in many forms
of self-sacrifice. If a member is in serious danger the rest will
spare no pains to save his life. One boy will sometimes undergo
severe hardships to aid another." [290]

After a boy becomes a good member of the gang, his personal
identity is linked to that of the group. His status in the gang is,
in a major way, his status as he experiences it. For it is in the gang
interaction that he lives his life intimately and intensely. When
his ties with the gang are strained, he may feel he is losing his
ground. Thrasher aptly puts it:

Any standing in the group is better than none, and there is always
the possibility of improving one's status. Participation in gang activi-
ties means everything to the boy. It not only defines for him his
position in the only society he is greatly concerned with, but it becomes
the basis of his conception of himself. [60, 332, italics ours]

TOE STRUCTURAL PROPERTIES OF GROUPS 299

Consequently, his feeling of personal security is derived from gang
membership. This feeling of security "tends to remove the qualms
that might well arise in an individual embarking upon some peril-
ous undertaking on his own account!' [296, italics ours] Here we
see the differences, even qualitative differences, between the indi-
vidual alone, or in one situation, and the same individual in a
group with which he strongly identifies himself. Under the pres-
sure of the group situation, the individual's social identity may be
transformed.

Thrasher cites many concrete cases of such differential group
behavior. In the report on one gang by an ex-member we will see
(p. 303) how a member of a gang where toughness was at a pre-
mium dropped his ruffian ways and was always quiet and courte-
ous when he went out on the sly with his girl. Here is another
example:

We have one case of an Italian boy, R , who in the gang can

always be counted upon to respond to an appeal for the best for him-
self and the gang. Outside the gang his record has not been so satis-
factory. In the gang he is stimulated by group appreciation; while
without he is not. [60, 295]

Group loyalty may at times dominate over serious cases of per-
sonal injury, as we shall see shortly (p. 301) in the case of a
gang member who refused to squeal on another member who had
cut his head open by a blow with a lead pipe. Individuals in
group situations sometimes become so personally involved in the
collective situation that they do not isolate themselves as individ-
uals to figure out what is most advantageous to them personally.

Whatever we did, we knew would be done as a group. At the end
of the season Steve suggested that we enlist as a body (the whole
team), and leave at once. Some wanted to join the marines; some
the army; but a vote decided on the navy. In order to stay together,
we went to the Great Lakes Naval Training Station and enlisted as
a group of apprentice seamen, even though some of us could have
received ratings had we been willing to quit the others. [60, 188]

All of these facts indicate the inadequacy of any approach to
personality which posits unchanging personality traits, especially
those concerned with social characteristics, without due regard to

300 EGO IDENTIFICATIONS IN GROUP SITUATIONS

the determination of behavior by situational factors generated in
any collective interaction in a psychologically lawful way. These
psychological products emerging in the process of gang formation
and conduct are amply illustrated by Thrasher. His account of
"The Dirty Dozen" gang, which he characterizes as a fairly typical
group, will give us concrete evidence of the structural properties,
emergent products, and subsequent attitudes and identifications
found in a group. This report was made by a former associate of
the gang.

The Dirty Dozen began merely as the result of a dozen or more
fellows (from sixteen to twenty-two years of age) meeting casually
on a street corner at the entrance of one of Chicago's parks and later
on in "Mike's" poolroom a short distance away. Most of the boys
were loafers, who spent their time swimming, playing baseball and
football, shooting craps, or sitting around and talking. They liked
brawls and fights, and the gang helped to satisfy these wants with less
personal discomfort than might occur if one fellow alone started hos-
tilities or tried to steal something. Of their various activities, some
form of conflict seems to have been the chief.

There was war between the gang and the police, for even though
the latter did not always have any particular offense for which the
fellows were wanted, they did try to break up the group whenever it
congregated on the corner.

The gang as a whole often came into direct conflict with other
gangs. One night at the old Imperial Theater, the Dirty Dozen found
themselves seated opposite the "Chi" gang, their rival in football and
baseball. During the show, which was poor vaudeville, the fellows
started to hurl remarks at each other. The verbal conflict grew into a
near-riot, which continued until the police came.

The Dirty Dozen, however, was capable of collective action against
other enemies than rival gangs. One night while the race riots of 1919
were at their height, the gang, armed with revolvers, blackjacks, and
knives, started out to get the "niggers."

At Thirty-fifth and State streets, five miles or more from their own
territory, and after some preliminary skirmishes, "Shaggy" Martin
threw the trolley of a street car filled with colored people. The rest of
the gang, which had increased to about twenty by this time, piled on,
"Shaggy," who was left alone at the back to hold the trolley-rope,

THE STRUCTURAL PROPERTIES OF GROUPS 301

was standing there with it in one hand and a billy in the other when
a colored woman slashed him across the heart with a razor. Then
someone hit her, and another fellow "got" her husband.

Shaggy died in the patrol on the way to the hospital. "Swede"
Carlson, the only fellow the police caught at that time, said that his
last words were, "What will mother say?" The gang took up a
collection for flowers, but the direct result of the episode was a desire
for revenge. They killed two negroes and "beat up" five more after
the death of Shaggy.

The standing of each fellow in the gang was determined by compe-
tition and conflict within the group itself. Each member was trying
to outdo the others in football and everything else. There was always
a struggle for the leadership, which usually went to the best fighters.

"Slicker" Charlie and Ellman were for some reason or other "on the
outs," and a fight was arranged to see who was better. The encounter
came off in the park. Each fellow had his second, and the time of
the rounds was set just as if it were a regular prize fight. Ellman,
who won, mauled Charlie severely, and the latter fell into disgrace, at
least in his own opinion.

This feeling of his own belittlement caused Charlie much resent-
ment toward the victor and led to another fight in which Charlie
struck Ellman with a lead pipe. The blood shot out of a big gash in
his head. After they had taken him to the emergency hospital, a cop
came in and wanted to know how it had happened, but Ellman would
say nothing except that he had fallen and his head hit a rock. The
code of the gang was that honor forbade squealing. With this incident
the feud came to an end.

An example of conflict of the play type, which had a very tragic
outcome, occurred one day in the park. About eight of the fellows
went to the lagoon and piled into two tiny rowboats. It was a warm
summer evening, and the bunch was feeling pretty good, so they de-
cided to have a battle. Splashing soon led to striking with oars. The
battle was raging when one of the boats went over. In it was a fellow
called "Steam," who could not swim. The others struck out for the
shore, but Steam went down. As soon as they discovered that he was
gone, they went out and dived for him until one of them succeeded
in getting the body. The fire department came and a pulmotor was
used, but to no avail. Before the funeral a collection was taken up,
and an expensive floral piece was purchased. The gang turned to the
good for one day, and every member went to the church. Steam was

302 EGO IDENTIFICATIONS IN GROUP SITUATIONS

never spoken of afterward, for each one of them felt a little bit
responsible for his death.

Members of the gang often engaged in shady exploits as individuals
or in pairs. Ellman and "Dago" were always managing to make some
money in one way or another. At one time Ellman told me of the
"booze" ring, for which he and Dago did the delivering. Where they
got the booze I never found out, but they made $25 or $30 apiece for
a night's work and gambled it away at a place which was a regular
Monte Carlo, with tables for crap-shooting, and caller's chips which
were purchased from the cashier.

The same pair were involved in the robbery of a golf shelter.
Owing to Ellman's carelessness, he was followed and arrested. He
was convicted of petty larceny and put on probation, but the police
could not make him reveal the name of his pal. By keeping mum he
saved Dago a lot of trouble.

Another example of loyalty was an incident which occurred when
the gang went to Detroit. Dago gave the money which he was to
use for carfare home to a younger fellow. Although it was winter,
he himself rode the blind. Since the train took water on the fly, he
was frozen to the train when it pulled in.

The gang also enjoyed many quiet evenings. It was the rule for
the fellows to meet at Mike's on winter nights to shoot pool and talk.
In the summer their hang-out was on the corner at the entrance to the
park. There was a tendency to stick together at all times in play, just
as in other activities. They often went swimming. Every year they
played football, for which they tried to keep in training, and they
developed a good team. The older fellows were the leaders in their
athletic activities.

One of the exploits of the gang was a migration from Chicago to
Detroit when high wages were being paid to automobile-workers.
They rented a house there and the whole gang lived together. Even
though they were making fabulous wages, they did not save a cent,
and finally came back to Chicago— broke. It was this Detroit adven-
ture that made bums out of most of them. They had drinking orgies
almost every night at their house, and the crap games took their
money.

The gang controlled its individual members, particularly when the
group was together. As individuals, and in other group relationships
they were not so bad, but in the gang they tried to act as tough as
possible. The man who danced, who went out with girls, or who
was well-mannered was ostracized. Charlie used to act hard-boiled,

TOE STRUCTURAL PROPERTIES OF GROUPS 303

and he even wore his cap so that it made him look tough. Ellman,
who liked to give the impression that he was a ruffian, was going with
a girl on the sly. When he was with the gang he was one of the
meanest fellows in it, but when he went out with his girl he was very
courteous, quitting his loud talk and dropping his braggadocian air.
In the last few years the gang has disintegrated. There has been a
tendency for its members to be incorporated into the more conven-
tional activities of society. The majority of them seem to have be-
come more settled in their mode of life. Some have moved away.
Even the fellows who have changed, however, are still pretty low
under the polished surface. Gang habits and influences still persist.
[60, 46-50]

The reasons for the disintegration of a gang give us further
insight into the mechanism of group identification. We have seen
that gangs are formed by boys as they strive to relieve deprivations
and secure for themselves a stable and genuine social identity. It is
not a mere coincidence, then, that "settling down" in conventional
society tends to disintegrate gang loyalties or, at least, to cause
members to drop out of active gang participation. As' the former
associate of the Dirty Dozen gang wrote in the last paragraph of
his report, there is "a tendency for its members to be incorporated
into the more conventional activities of society. The majority of
them seem to have become more settled in their mode of life."
Desertions from the gang probably vary with the degree of or-
ganization and solidarity of the group.

According to Thrasher, a "new activity of settlement, play-
ground, or club" may take away some of the gang members.
Thrasher cites marriage, becoming a family man, as one "of the
most potent causes for the disintegration of the older groups." [36]
Whyte summarizes the process concisely:

To the casual observer the corner gang seems to go on for years
without change, but actually changes are always taking place; and,
as the men grow out of their twenties, the gang itself tends to dis-
integrate. Some of the members marry and have children. Even if
they continue to hang on the corner, their interests are no longer con-
fined to that social area. With marriage, some move out of Corner-
ville; and, even when they return to spend time with the boys, they
are not the active members they once were. In this period of life the

304 EGO IDENTIFICATIONS IN GROUP SITUATIONS

corner boy is expected to "settle down" and find the job that will
support him and his family in future years. He becomes a different
fellow, and his gang either falls apart or is included in some larger
club organization. [62, 35]

Not all gang members "settle down" in the orthodox established
life of society after their adolescent years by getting a steady job,
marrying, and so on. Some go on to participate in the more grim
exploits of the adult gangs.9 In these adult gangs, group loyalty
and conformity are more exacting, perhaps, in proportion to the
rewards and punishments gang members face as the consequence
of their exploits. As a result, the structural properties and pres-
sures of groups imposed on members of adult gangs become more
rigid. Deviations are punished more ruthlessly, in many cases by
death. Landesco [21] has given close-range accounts of such adult
gangs and of their exacting structural properties in his impressive
study of "Organized Crime in Chicago." There he cites concrete
instances of death penalties meted out to deviant gang members.

On the basis of his longitudinal and intensive studies of the gang
world, Landesco generalizes on the group norms that emerge to
determine the attitudes and behavior of the gang. He comments
on how gangs at times try to impose their codes on the out-groups
with which they are in contact:

The gang not only has its own code which governs the conduct of
its members, but it even goes so far as to impose it upon outside
society. In recent years in Chicago, the public has become familiar
with the bold practices of criminal gangs in terrorizing witnesses and
in exacting the death penalties upon them and upon members of the
gang who are suspected of having given information to the police.
An inside view of the attitudes and codes of a notorious criminal gang
shows how a closely \nit group develops its own standards and is
outraged and puzzled by the attempts to deal with them according to
the law. [21, 1055, italics ours]

Landesco goes on to indicate that gang members "form a group
dominated by the gangster's code of loyalty," that the "welfare,

9 The study of factors that determine whether a gang member will "settle down"
after adolescent years or advance to membership in adult gangs should be of great
significance psychologically. We cannot diverge here to make a special issue of the
point.

THE STRUCTURAL PROPERTIES OF GROUPS 305

standards, and laws of organized society evoke no response in their
hearts and minds." [1057] He gives concrete illustrations of
"gangsters' mutual loyalty" [1053] ; of how "a man of character"
is defined among the gang members as prescribed by gang norms
[1047] ; and how, once these norms are well standardized and in-
culcated in the youthful candidates, "a stigma is soon attached to
legitimate employment." [1046]

Time and again, Landesco emphasizes that it is only by coming
into contact with the pressures and punishments of society outside
of his underworld that the gang member "gets his first sense of
the necessity of justifying his behavior." [1048] * For within his
own group and the underworld which constitutes his real psycho-
logical reference group, he derives his relative status through the
degree to which he fulfills and surpasses the prescribed expecta-
tions of his group. In formulating this point, it seems to us that
Landesco has provided one of the best possible characterizations
of the psychological properties of more or less closed groups and
the subsequent conforming experiences and behavior of individual
members.

The gangster's defense of his mode of life arises only when he comes
in contact with the legitimate outside world. Only then does he
become conscious of a conflicting way of living. In his own group,
on the contrary, he achieves status by being a gangster, with gangster
attitudes, and enhances his reputation through criminal exploits. His
contacts with the police and the courts and his successive confinements
in the corrective, reformatory, and penal institutions, beginning with
the Juvenile Detention Home, then in turn the Industrial Training
School, the reformatory and the penitentiary, gain him the prestige of
a veteran in his group. His return from the State Reformatory at
Pontiac or from the penitentiary at Joliet is the occasion of sympathy
and rejoicing from his gang brothers. The bitterness engendered
within him by punishment and the feelings of revenge nurtured by
his mutual association with other convicts have more deeply impressed
upon him the psychology of the criminal world. Then, too, the
stigma which society places upon him as an ex-convict identifies him
the more with the underworld. [21, 1043, italics ours]

In another interesting study, "The Woman and the Under-
world," Landesco [22] reports the case of a high-grade Chicago

306 EGO IDENTIFICATIONS IN GROUP SITUATIONS

gangster. This study contains significant hints concerning the
psychology of group membership by its inclusion of a concrete
case from real life showing the dominance of established group
ties over the promise of a settled life with plenty of money and an
attractive and refined woman. Among "five women who entered
the life of Eddie Jackson," the case of the "Companionate Woman
for Whom He Cared" is particularly illuminating from this point
of view. The companionate woman "was an American girl, born
in the East. She was an attractive looking woman — tall, about
five feet eight inches, weighed about 130 or 135 pounds, had
studied music and had graduated from a finishing school. She
always retained a maid in the house." [894]

Miss 's father was a manufacturer in the east. Occasionally he

came to Chicago for a cure, which was known as the "gold cure" and
was given for $25 a treatment. He took two or three treatments a
week. [22, 595]

Miss tried hard to reform Eddie Jackson and to settle down

with him in the East. In Jackson's own words:

She wanted me to quit and go to work. She had plenty of money.
We had our trunks packed to go to New York and she wanted to
start me in some business. [595]

She wanted to help me start in any business I might choose. I had
some money. I cannot say that I did not have plenty of chances, but
I liked the excitement of the racket, the politics, and the fixing — the
successes and the failures. [22, 896]

Jackson finally made up his mind to leave for New York:

Our trunks were packed and I decided to let her go ahead, and
follow five days later. I never reached New York. [22, 896]

The successes and failures of his own group had become so well
ingrained in Eddie Jackson that they weighed more heavily than
the settled life which came so closely within his reach. In Eddie's
own words:

You see, there was a good deal of excitement and interest, and some
skill involved in the racket— and it was not so easy to separate from
it for the sake of Miss . [22, 896]

THE STRUCTURAL PROPERTIES OF GROUPS 307

Landesco's analysis sheds light on the dominance of group iden-
tification over other factors in this case:

Upon his [Eddie Jackson's] release from prison, he went directly to
her apartment. She wanted him to leave Chicago, to change his ways
and friends. The prison experience had changed her (not him), had
sobered her; the lark was over, the feast of freedom embittered. She
insisted. He allowed her to leave. He could not leave his under-
world. [22, 901 , italics ours]

Generality of gang formations. If gangs were a phenomena
occurring only in Chicago or a few large cities, there could be no
justification for generalizing from gang material about spontane-
ous group formations, their psychological function for the indi-
vidual, the rise of group products, and their subsequent role in
regulating members' behavior. However, sociological literature
gives abundant evidence that spontaneous group formations like
gangs, far from being isolated or rare phenomena, occur quite
generally — occur, in fact, wherever individuals are under the stress
of the various factors already mentioned as important in spontane-
ous group formation, as, for example, various sorts of deprivation,
lack of a stable social identity.

The almost universality of spontaneous group formations under
the stress of these factors has been pointed out by Gist and Hal-
bert. [18]

Ganging is a natural process. Whether the activities of a gang are
perverse or constructive depends upon the character of the habitat of
the gang — upon the culture patterns predominating in the region and
upon the sequences of situations that arise in the natural history of
the gang. The gang is a form of adjustment that boys, and even
girls, make whenever their family or neighborhood do not satisfy
their major wishes in a conventional way. [18, 272, italics ours]

In 1925, Park [42] commented on the generality of spontaneous
group formation, tracing much of it back to the play group, which
"under the conditions of urban life" is assuming "an increasing
importance." [Ill] Such groups frequently evolve into gangs
which "have exercised a considerably greater influence in forming
the character of the boys who compose them than has the church,
the school^ or any other communal agency outside of the families

308 EGO IDENTIFICATIONS IN GROUP SITUATIONS

and homes in which the members of the gang are reared." [112]
In Asbury's book, The Gangs of New Yorl(, [5] we learn that
gangs of boys and young men have existed since New York City's
early days. He notes, for example, that during and after the Civil
War, "as the slums increased in extent, gangsters of all types and
ages multiplied in numbers and power." [238] This increase in
the number of gangsters was related to the increasing number of
gangs often "composed of lads from eight to twelve years of age."
[239] He also notes that gangs of similar sorts occur in various
ethnic and national groups, including orientals. From material
collected in 20 American cities, Shaw and McKay [53] show that
the spontaneous formation of gangs which engage in "delinquent"
activities occurs wherever the causes already indicated are found to
exist. Basing their generalizations on data from such diverse cities
as Chicago, Richmond, Peoria, Denver, Boston, and Spokane, the
authors conclude:

"Delinquency — particularly group delinquency, which constitutes
a preponderance of all officially recorded offenses committed by
boys and young men — has its roots in the dynamic life of the com-
munity." [435, italics ours] These roots are "products of the oper-
ation of general processes more or less common to American
cities." [415] Evidence supporting the authors' statement that
such statistics may be interpreted in terms of groups is given by
a study of boys brought to court in Cook County. This revealed
that

. . . 8L8 per cent of these boys committed the offenses for which
they were brought to court as members of groups. And when the
offenses were limited to stealing, it was found that 89 per cent of all
offenders were taken to court as group or gang members. [53, 167 f.]

In many additional cases, the influence of gang membership was
to be seen.

Studies of boy transients and tramps show further how some
members of the younger generation drift away from established
conventional family life, from institutions such as schools and the
church, and gravitate toward patterns of loyalties and identifica-
tions that have already been informally created by other individ-
uals who had already found the more established ways of life un-

THE STRUCTURAL PROPERTIES OF GROUPS 309

satisfying. A youngster who "takes to the road" may have his eyes
opened to the excitement and mobility of this way of life from
older and experienced members of transient groups. [2, 256] [3,
300] [4, 756] [41, 64] Many transients take to the road during
adolescence. This is significant in view of the factors that con-
tribute to adolescent discontent with the established order of
things.

Since there is always a tendency to attribute gang formations to
some psychological factors or traits peculiar to the gang members
themselves, we stress again the fact that gang formations serve the
same psychological function as any membership group does for
its members— a school clique, a fraternity or sorority, a club. A
gang provides a social identification, a status. Thrasher cites
many cases of gangs or embryonic gangs formed in the schools.
And we have already seen how adolescents gravitate towards each
other to form more or less confidential cliques when conventional
settings do not afford them social anchorings or identities in har-
mony with their developing longings and the values of their new
generation. They drift away to form their own intimate social
cliques, even though some of these may be short-lived. Under
certain conditions these cliques may develop into gangs. Thrasher
states that "a clique may serve as the basis for a gang" [60, 320]
or "in a certain sense a well-developed clique is an embryonic
gang." [320] The objective purposes towards which the group
(clique or gang) activities are directed may be quite different, even
diametrically opposite. But from the point of view of group for-
mation, essentially the same psychological mechanisms are at work
in the various sorts of group formations. So we must draw no
sharp and artificial distinctions between cliques and gangs in
seeking the psychological principles involved in group formations.

The artificiality of drawing sharp lines, in relation to the basic
properties of groups, of conceiving them as closed and unchanging
entities can be shown in more diverse groups. Taking the ex-
amples of a momentary group situation, caused by a serious auto-
mobile accident on the one hand, and the organized and lasting
group core of a senate body on the other hand, Sapir [48] calls
attention to the fallacy of making any arbitrary demarcations:

310 EGO IDENTIFICATIONS IN GROUP SITUATIONS

There is in reality no definite line of division anywhere along the
gamut of group forms which connect these extremes. If the auto-
mobile accident is serious and one of the members of the crowd is a
doctor, the informal group may with comparatively little difficulty
resolve itself into something like a medical squad with an implicitly
elected leader. On the other hand, if the government is passing
through a great political crisis, if there is little confidence in the repre-
sentative character or honesty of the senators or if an enemy is be-
sieging the capitol and likely at any moment to substitute entirely
new forms of corporate authority for those legally recognized by the
citizens of the country, the Senate may easily become an unimpor-
tant aggregation of individuals who suddenly and with unexpected
poignancy feel their helplessness as mere individuals. [48, 179]

Impact of society at large. In our analysis of the influence of
the group and group products in regulating the behavior of indi-
vidual members, it is important to add that, although once an
individual is a member of a group (gang) — once he identifies him-
self with it — the particular sort of behavior in question (for ex-
ample, delinquency) is not due only to contact with the group
(gang). In our discussion of the essentially similar psychological
functions served by various spontaneous group formations, and in
our demonstration of the effects of group loyalties and identifica-
tions on the behavior of individual members, we do not even im-
ply that group formations of this sort have, in the larger sense,
any existence independent of the social milieu in which they are
formed. For these groups are obviously, in turn, products of eco-
nomic, ethnic, and other major social situations in the society at
large. Thus, Shaw [49] and Zorbaugh [63] have indicated that
gangs engaging in delinquent activities are products of the exist-
ing social milieu with its social and class structure, as Shaw com-
ments, of "processes more or less common to American cities."
Anderson [4], in criticizing his own neglect of larger social condi-
tions in studying transients, recently indicated that the factors giv-
ing rise to transiency are inexorably tied together with sociological,
technological, and economic conditions and changes. The very
factors which give rise to spontaneous groups are inevitably found
gs features of the larger social system.

THE STRUCTURAL PROPERTIES OF GROUPS 311

By the same token, the particular activities, standards, and the
like which provide individuals with social standing, status, or
popularity in the larger society or in a particular stratum or local-
ity of that larger society loom as important in the activities of
these more or less well-structured subgroups. For example, the
preponderance of athletics in the activities of boys' groups in
America today reflects the value placed on such activities by society
at large. The high premium placed on such things as feminine
attractiveness or dancing is reflected in the activities of adolescent
girls' cliques. The standard of living in a society has a major
influence on the nature of a gang's exploits. Stealing cars assumes
wide proportions among delinquent boys in the United States.
The luxurious standards of an Al Capone and his gang could be
found only in a society which makes possible "conspicuous con-
sumption" of the staggering dimensions found among the leisure
class of a Park Avenue or a Gold Coast.

Certain prohibitions in society may provide gangs with a type
of activity that seeks definite economic rewards. Zorbaugh [63]
mentions, for example, the importance of "bootlegging" and "hi-
jacking" in the gang activities of Chicago at the time of prohibi-
tion. [174] In some strata of society, a high economic standing
may be so keenly needed and highly valued that the means by
which it is acquired may be relatively unimportant to the members
of the community. For example, the local boy in the slums who
achieves a decent or even luxurious way of life by "hi-jacking" may
be regarded as a local hero, whereas outside of his community
he is a "crook." In a "higher" level of society, the means by
which some financial magnates gain their fortunes may be over-
looked by other members of this society.

In the last analysis, the major established standards of success
or failure of the gang or the gangster world are derived from the
competitive, individualistic, and financially hoarding standards of
the society at large. This is clearly expressed by Andrew A. Bruce
in his introduction to Landesco's survey of "Organized Crime in
Chicago." [21, 815-821] Bruce characterizes the general nature
of the behavior of the gang or gangster world as "a rebellion
against organized society and the laws under which organized

312 EGO IDENTIFICATIONS IN GROUP SITUATIONS

society has chosen to be ruled and governed." [5/5] He goes on
to say that the major patterns of the gang world are derived from
the social system in which it functions.

Not the least of the disclosures that have been made are those of
the permanence of the reigns of the lords of the underworld and the
introduction of the capitalistic system into their operations. [21, 815]

When adult gangs develop their enterprises to great proportions,
they may become a real force in the economic and political life
of the community. At the same time they still keep the structural
properties of the in-group intact. In such cases, rather close rela-
tionships may be established between business men, politicians, and
gang leaders.10

Similarly, the prevalent intense competition between gang and
gang, clique and clique, club and club reflects the intense social
and economic competition of the larger culture. Gang fights be-
tween children of various ethnic, racial, or religious groups often
seem to reflect antagonisms and prejudices of the adult culture.
In other instances, social, ethnic, religious, and racial demarcations
may break down when individuals from such groups are brought
closely together under the powerful stress of deprivations, similar
ego-strivings, identifications, and so on. These are only some
examples that can be cited of the impact of the macrocosm (larger
society) upon the microcosm (gangs, cliques, social movements of
various sorts). They cannot be neglected in any discussion of
spontaneous group formation.

INDIVIDUAL MEMBERS AS INFLUENCED BY GROUP NORMS
AND IDENTIFICATIONS

There is substantial justification for the position of certain psy-
chologists that the social psychology of group interactions and col-
lective behavior in all its phases should be worked out in terms of
the experience and reactions of single individuals if it is going to
be psychology at all. In the previous section we gave a brief ac-

10 These relationships arc admirably indicated in Landesco's survey [21], espe-
cially in chapter 23 on "Racketeering," chapter 24 on "The Gangster and the
Politician," and chapter 25 on "Funerals of Gangsters."

INDIVIDUAL MEMBERS AS INFLUENCED BY GROUP NORMS 313

count of some of the consequences of interaction in terms of the
resulting group properties and their effects on individual mem-
bers. In this section, we shall analyze in more detail material
concerned with single individuals, and the way these individuals
identify themselves with and participate in particular groups. As
we shall see, when we approach group situations in terms of the
single individual, we are led to the same conclusions concerning
the social psychology of group interaction that were reached when
we started with the properties of the group. Thus we can do
away once more with the individual-group dichotomy.

Our illustrations will be derived from "gang" members, not,
however, because our main concern is the special type of behavior
exhibited in delinquent groups. As we said before, group be-
havior shown in gangs merely affords psychologists an unusually
good opportunity to study group formations and differential group
behavior in a rather clear-cut way. Such gang formations (under
given conditions) can be traced comparatively easily. And since
they are deviations, their major features stand out in bold relief.

With the aid of expert investigators in the various fields con-
cerned, Clifford Shaw intensively studied boys from the point of
view of their socioeconomic background, their psychological
make-up, and their physical characteristics. For a good many
years he followed closely the lives of boys who participated as
members of various gangs at different times. These studies are
exemplary. They give admirable accounts of the economic-cul-
tural setting in which these boys gravitate towards each other to
form their own group and to participate in activities which relieve
their deprivations. Shaw secured the "own stories" (informal
autobiographies) of some of these boys and checked them against
objective information he collected. In this discussion, we are in-
terested chiefly in the group (gang) identifications, their effects in
forming appropriate attitudes and in producing differential group
behavior. Shaw's studies contain unusually clarifying insights
into the problem of spontaneous group formation because of the
stress of major deprivations and the lack of or conflict in personal
identity.

The "own stories" are especially important for the psychologist.
They show the group identifications, the attitudes formed in group

314 EGO IDENTIFICATIONS IN GROUP SITUATIONS

situations, and the behavior conforming to these attitudes— all as
experienced by the participants themselves. These documents give
the "essentially human" or psychological accounts of these gang
boys' lives. In the words of Burgess, "In the life-history is revealed,
as in no other way, the inner life of the person, his moral strug-
gles, his successes and failures in securing control of his destiny
in a world too often at variance with his hopes and ideals." [50,
4] The following "own story" of a gang member furnishes us,
for example, with considerable insight into the dynamics of spon-
taneous group identifications and the inculcation of appropriate
norms in the participants of the group:

When I started to play in the alleys around my home I first heard
about a bunch of older boys called the "Pirates." My oldest brother
was in this gang and so I went around with them. There were about
ten boys in this gang and the youngest one was eleven and the oldest
one was about fifteen. . . .

Tony, Sollie, and my brother John were the big guys in the gang.
Tony was fifteen and was short and heavy. He was a good fighter
and the young guys were afraid of him because he hit them and beat
them up. Sollie was a little guy about twelve years of age. He
couldn't fight, but he was a smart guy and told stories and made plans
for the gang. He was the brains of the gang. My brother was fifteen
and was bigger than Tony and was a good fighter. He could beat
any guy in the gang by fighting, so he was a good leader and every-
body looked up to him as a big guy. I looked up to him as a big guy
and was proud to be his brother. . . .

When I started to hang out with the Pirates I first learned about
robbin. The guys would talk about robbin and stealing and went out
on "jobs" every night. When I was eight I started to go out robbin
with my brother's gang. We first robbed junk from a junk yard and
sometimes from the peddlar. Sometimes we robbed stores. We would
go to a store, and while one guy asked to buy something the other
guys would rob anything like candy and cigarettes and then run. We
did this every day. Sollie always made the plans and Tony and John
would carry out the plans. . . .

The gang had a hangout in an alley and we would meet there every
night and smoke and tell stores and plan for robbin. I was little and
so I only listened. The big guys talked about going robbin and told

INDIVIDUAL MEMBERS AS INFLUENCED BY GROUP NORMS 315

stores about girls and sex things. The guys always thought about
robbin and bummin from school and sometimes from home. . . .

Besides robbin, the gang went bummin downtown and to ball parks
and swimming. On these trips we always robbed everything we
could get. . . .

When I was ten the gang started to robbin stores and homes. We
would jimmy the door or window and rob the place. I always stayed
outside and gave jiggers. The big guys went in and raided the place.
They showed me how to pick locks, jimmy doors, cut glass, and use
skeleton keys and everything to get into stores and houses. Every guy
had to keep everything a secret and not tell anybody or he would be
beat up and razzed. The police were enemies and not to be trusted.
When we would get caught by the police we had to keep mum and
not tell a word even in the third degree.

/ looked up to my brother and the other big guys because of their
courage and nerve and the way they could rob. They would tell me
never to say a word to anybody about our robbin. My mother didn't
even \now it. Some kids couldn't be in the gang because they would
tell everything and some didn't have the nerve to go robbin. The guys
with a record were looked up to and admired by the young guys. A
stool-pigeon was looked down on and razzed and could not stay in
the gang. . . .

The guys stucJ{ together and helped each other out of trouble. They
were real good pals and would stick up for each other. They were
always planning new crimes and new ways to get by without being
caught. Everyone hated the police and looked upon them as enemies.
Anybody who was friendly to the police was not trusted. The plans
for stealing were always secret and anybody who talked about them
to fellows outside of the gang or to the police was not trusted and
became an enemy of the Pirates. . . . [50, 10f.f italics ours]

Clifford Shaw published these intensive longitudinal studies and
"own stories" in The ]ac\ Roller (1930) [50], The Natural His-
tory of a Delinquent Career (1931) [51], and Brothers in Crime
(1938) [52]. His work on the "Jack Roller" (Stanley) is an inten-
sive account of a boy who participated in delinquent activities and,
at last, settled down to conventional society for good. Checking
Stanley's own story against the objective data at his command and
his contacts with Stanley for five years, Shaw states that "the sin-
cerity of the story cannot be questioned" and that "the story re-
veals his fundamental attitudes and typical reactions to the various

316 EGO IDENTIFICATIONS IN GROUP SITUATIONS

situations in which he has lived." [50, 47] As we shall see, Stan-
ley's account tells us a great deal about spontaneous group forma-
tions and identifications when there is deprivation and lack of
stable social links.

Stanley was first studied by Dr. William Healy when he was
seven years and ten months old. He was found to be a little above
the average in intelligence and of about normal physical condition.
He seemed

... on the whole to be a very nice boy. During the examination
he talked freely. [50, 198]

He had a "winning smile." [198]

The psychological tests at the age of eighteen showed an intelligence
quotient of 1.06. [50, 799]

Shaw gives a rather detailed account of the social and economic
areas of Chicago in which Stanley's family lived at different pe-
riods. They were slum areas with a relatively high degree of
poverty and with conflicting immigrant and American values.
Concerning one of the areas in which Stanley's family lived, Shaw
states:

In the present Polish neighborhood back of the yards, with a popu-
lation in 1920 of 52.1 per cent foreign-born, there is a definite break
between the foreign-born parents and their native-born children. [50,

Stanley, the American born son of a Polish immigrant worker, was
four years old when his mother died. A few months later his
father married a woman who brought with her "seven children
from two previous marriages."

The stepmother favored her own children and discriminated against
Stanley and his brother and sister. [50, 42]

Throughout his story, Stanley complains bitterly about the treat-
ment he received from her. With over ten children in the family,
they went hungry most of the time.

Under the stress of hunger and other conditions, Stanley started
his real life activities in petty stealing, led by his step-brother and
other boys a few years older. He kept himself away from the re-

INDIVIDUAL MEMBERS AS INFLUENCED BY GROUP NORMS 317

strained and miserable home situation. He entered school at the
age of six but played hooky a great deal.

Despite his frequent truancies, he was graduated at the age of
thirteen and a half, while in the St. Charles School for Boys. [50, 32]

His genuine psychological identifications and attitudes seem to
have been little affected by the school, although it undoubtedly
tried to mold him in the usual routine way. His real identification
was with a gang he joined at the age of seven. This particular
gang "consisted of about twelve members, who ranged in age from
six to seventeen years." [44] Membership in this gang and, later,
in other gangs gave Stanley a personal status and identity he did
not find in his family or school. It was only as a member of the
gang that he was not "looked down" upon.

His delinquent activities began while he was in company with
this group. As a member of this group and other gangs he ad-
vanced progressively from "truancy and petty stealing at the early
age of six years, to the more serious delinquency of 'jack-rolling'
and burglary, in the adolescent period." [25] Arrests and commit-
ments followed each other, so that Stanley spent almost half his
youthful life in correctional institutions.

Our chief concern in Stanley's story is the effect of group mem-
bership on his identity and behavior. From this point of view, one
of his experiences can serve as a starting point for the further
examination of his story:

One day my partner didn't show up, and right then and there I
lost all my nerve. I needed someone with me to steal. I was too
cowardly to steal alone. A companion made me brave and gave me
a sense of security. I couldn't to save my soul steal a dime alone.
[50, 86, italics ours]

Without implying in the least that all delinquent behavior is a
function of group behavior, this experience of Stanley's is signifi-
cant. It gives a typical illustration of the psychological qualities
of a group situation, irrespective of the direction group activities
take. It is not unusual, for example, to hear a war veteran cite
the case of some fellow who surprised his buddies by unexpected
bravery— for him— during some active combat.

318 EGO IDENTIFICATIONS IN GROUP SITUATIONS

". . . the life in the streets and alleys became fascinating and
enticing" to Stanley very soon after he reached school age. In
the streets he found two close companions, Tony and William,
whom he regarded as heroes. He soon developed so he fit into
their pattern, as any growing boy might fit into the pattern of his
heroes, whatever their characteristics might be.

To my child-seeing eyes, I visioned Tony as a great leader in the
neighborhood, and he directed his gang around with much bravado.
He and William were always stealing and talking about stealing and
I fell in with them as soon as I began to play around in the neighbor-
hood. [50, 51]

Stanley identified himself so closely with the gang he happened
to belong to at the time, was so anchored in its social setting, that
he felt personally secure only in its atmosphere. We see his loss
of ego bearings when he was outside this atmosphere.

From the time I used to go to the markets and to West Madison
Street with the old gang I had been attracted to throngs of people, not
the Loop throngs, but the West Madison and South State Street
throngs. / could not explain this irresistible interest, even if I wanted
to. Perhaps it was the telepathy that is from one derelict to another.
I do know full well that this human wreckage was always full of in-
terest and mystery to my dreamy mind. Men of all nationalities and
races, from the four corners of the earth, were there and brushed
shoulders with the crooks and gunmen of the underworld. They
were all attracted there, as I was, by the cheap movies, flophouses,
cheap hashhouses, and, most of all, by the human derelicts that make
West Madison Street what it is. When blue and bro\en-up I would
always find an old pal there to tell my troubles to and receive the sym-
pathy that comes through mutual understanding. All the old bums
and human wrecks were my family. We all ate at the same table and
enjoyed ourselves at the same theaters. In fact, we consisted of a
brotherhood whose object was mutual pity and sympathy. The
brotherhood was made up of ordinary "bos," pickpockets, pan-handlers,
petty thieves, "jack-rollers," and the other wrecks that compose the
underworld. Here was my favorite haunt, because my friends made
their rendezvous there. It seemed to me that here the lights gleamed
brighter, the lures were stronger, and that there were more bums to
hide me from the stares of snobbish people. [50, 79 /., italics ours]

INDIVIDUAL MEMBERS AS INFLUENCED BY GROUP NORMS 319

But not any kind of a life that appears to be settled is sufficient
to make one feel psychologically settled, even though it may afford
food, shelter, and luxuries. When Stanley was an adolescent boy,
he was taken into the home of the vice-president of a company
where he worked for a time. The vice-president who "was mar-
ried but had no children," even planned to adopt him. But Stan-
ley felt he did not belong there. Something was missing. He
longed for his pals, in whose company he felt himself at ease and
a person in his own right.

The surroundings in my new home and neighborhood took my
breath away. My first day at the foster-home was like a sweet dream.
The new luxury seemed to dazzle and blind me. My new father
rode with me to work every morning and home in the evening. We
had nice lunches together at noon. He talked nice to me, gave me
spending money and good clothes, but I missed my old pals and the
gay life we had lived. Here I did not have any boy chums, but had to
spend my time playing the victrola. My foster-parents didn't have
much life, but spent their time reading and playing a tame game of
cards. They had lots of company of snobbish people, and they looked
down on me. Even if they were nice, it was because of pity and
charity. There was something missing. Eating at the table I was
ill at ease. I couldn't do the things just right, and my foster-mother
looked at my blunders through the corner of her eye. I compared
everything with my sister's common fare and poor surroundings, and
•finally longed to go bac\ to my friends and pals. Back home I wasn't
dressed up all the time, and could play and romp and gamble and
swear. But here I was not free to move and talk as I was in the
habit of doing before. Everything was different — strange and stiff.
/ felt out of place— z city waif dependent upon charity. I had been in
jail half a lifetime, but now I was suddenly placed in luxury after
living in a dirty hovel. My adventurous spirit rebelled against this
dry life and it soon won out. [50, 87 f., italics ours]

After leaving this home, Stanley was again in the gang atmos-
phere, in his own element.

The lures and the irresistible call drew me on like a magnet. I was
always helpless before them. I was like a canoe on a storm-swept sea,
buffeted here and there, helpless and frail. / had about as much
chance of controlling my desires to drift with the current of the under-

320 EGO EDENTinCATIONS IN GROUP SITUATIONS

world as the canoe had of braving the storm. But here I mingled
with bums and derelicts like myself, and people did not stare at my
rags and misery. Here I felt at home, for "misery loves company."
So I drifted on with the rest of the human driftwood — carried on by
»the current of West Madison Street's exclusive "Four Hundred*5 or
more. [50, 93, italics ours]

In this social atmosphere, Stanley enjoyed the prestige acquired
from his relative status in his new gang.

There v/ere four of us who hung around together. The other three
had been in St. Charles School for Boys while I was there, and that
strengthened our faith in each other. / was loo\ed up to as the hero
of the quartet because I had done fifty-six months in St. Charles, more
than all the others put together. They naturally thought I was one
who had a vast experience and was regarded as one might regard the
big social hit of society. [50, 96, italics ours]

Once groups or gangs are formed, reciprocal loyalties develop
among the members. Norms arise more or less informally but
nevertheless become binding within the group and are inculcated
as personal values in the ego structure of the members. Stanley
speaks of these reciprocal loyalties:

My fellow-workers [in the gang] were fast guys and good pals,
We were like brothers and would stick by each other through thick
and thin. We cheered each other in our troubles and loaned each
other dough. A mutual understanding developed, and nothing could
break our confidence in each other. [50, 96]

In a similar way, an atmosphere of solidarity is established in
jail. Cliques or gangs are formed spontaneously on the basis of
common interest and in the face of the common opposition to
authority.

In the tailor shop [of the penal institution to which he was com-
mitted on this particular occasion] were two pals that I had known
in Pontiac. So we became friends immediately and helped each other
out by exchanging reading materials, tobacco, and by giving each
other warnings and inside tips about how to get by. // was a little
mutual aid society, which is very necessary in prison. The prisoners
have to band together for their own protection, [50, 155, italics ours]

INDIVIDUAL MEMBERS AS INFLUENCED BY GROUP NORMS 321

Once incorporated, the norms of this more or less isolated prison
group may also be experienced as intensely felt personal values in
much the same way that the norms of any social group are ex-
perienced. Stanley's account illustrates this point:

To squawk on a fellow-prisoner is an unpardonable sin and only
the lowest characters will squawk. But there were boys who would
squawk and they would usually become boy officers, so we did not
trust them but harbored hatred toward them. They were not fit to be
associated with decent boys. [50, 67, italics ours]

We see from Stanley's own account how he made the norms of
the isolated prison situation a part of him:

I fell in the web without any experience, but soon got onto the
ropes. My feeling was for the code and against the officials. Don't
trust anybody except tried pals who won't squawk. [50, 67]

Group norms may become so well incorporated as personal ego-
attitudes that individual group members will observe them at the
cost of personal punishment and hardship. This fact is concretely
illustrated in Stanley's story:

One Saturday afternoon all of us were playing on the drill field,
and the first lieutenant (a boy) asked me to go to the cottage and
bring his harmonica. While I was in the cottage I saw two other boys
who had sneaked into the cottage, and they were stealing something.
I took the harmonica to the lieutenant and ten minutes later I was
accused of stealing some cigars from the basement. I denied the
charge, and could have cleared myself by telling on the two boys, but
I wouldn't squawk and break the code; consequently, I was given a
good beating and forced to do "haunches" another hour. Many times
did I suffer because I wouldn't squawk, but I'd die before I'd turn on
a fellow prisoner. [50, 69]

And just as good members of any organized group uphold the
values or norms of the group, expect the same of other members,
and impose various correctives and punishments on those who de-
viate, so the good members of gangs become conscious of their
own norms and react violently against deviants and nonconform-
ists. Stanley believed

322 EGO IDENTIFICATIONS IN GROUP SITUATIONS

. . . that any game should be played according to the rules of the
game. Violators of rules should be punished. Crime is a game, and
therefore as a rat violates the rules or code by informing the "dicks"
and the "screws," he should be punished when caught, just like other
criminals are punished. I think everyone will agree with me in my
feelings about these low rats. All prisoners who are worthy of the
name will agree with me. [50, 112]

We saw in the last section that when gang members "settled
down" in conventional society, they tended to pull away from the
gang. This happened to Stanley. Through Clifford Shaw's in-
sightful analysis of the case and his effective help in placing Stan-
ley in situations which contributed to his settling down without
making him feel out of place, Stanley eventually conformed to
the norms of conventional society. When about 18, Stanley was
released from the House of Correction, identifying "himself with
the adult criminal group." [164] Shaw gave him new clothes
and placed him in a congenial home, where, as Stanley reported,
"They seemed to accept me and not look down on me." After
several trials in jobs, he became a salesman and showed consider-
able ability in this work, in which there was not much chance to
be reminded constantly of his past record. He married a girl who
told him that she did not care what he had done, but was inter-
ested in what he was going to be. He enjoyed the company of
her other young friends. Encouraged by Shaw, he enrolled in
evening classes to complete his high school education. But
throughout all this period, his old pals in the slum area still exerted
influence over him. In Shaw's words:

The influence of these earlier relationships did not begin to diminish
until other interests and relationships were established in his new
situation. We may assume that the gradual changes which are taking
place in Stanley's conduct throughout this chapter reflect changes in
his group relationships. [50, 175]

Since thousands of young men, who may identify themselves with
the adult of the criminal group at the end of their release from
prison, do not have the expert guidance of an understanding per-
son, it is likely that many of them will follow the lead of their
more mature and grim gang identifications with all the conse-

INDIVIDUAL MEMBERS AS INFLUENCED BY GROUP NORMS 323

quences until they can be absorbed in work and in interpersonal
relationships with society at large through the transformation of
ego identifications.11

Another case presented in The Natural History of a Delinquent
Career [51] is particularly interesting, because it traces the effects
of gang influence on the identifications, attitudes, and activities of
a boy, Sidney, who differed in some important respects from Stan-
ley, the "jack roller." The results of Sidney's intelligence test at
the age of 15 indicated "excellent mental development" and placed
"him in the group having superior intelligence." His intelligence
quotient was reported as 126.

The physical and neurological examinations were negative. There
was no indication of mental pathology. [51, 267]

The community in which Sidney grew up was one of the worst
slum areas in the city. He was the youngest of two children in
a poor, often "destitute" Jewish family. Shortly after Sidney was
born,

Because of the father's repeated desertions, the mother was forced
to seek employment outside of home. [51, 230]

His brother, Abe, seven years older, "was in most respects a
model person" of "average intelligence."

The mother exercised much closer supervision of Abe than it was
possible for her to exercise in the case of Sidney. [51, 234]

Abe did not become associated with neighborhood gangs.

Sidney's first social experiences outside of the home were with
a neighborhood play group made up of children four or five years
older than himself. As we shall see, Sidney rather consistently
associated and managed to keep up with groups of boys older than
himself. Possibly he was able to do so partly because he was un-
usually intelligent. His delinquent activities (petty stealing) be-
gan at about the age of seven after his entrance into this group.
Sidney wrote of these early stealing experiences:

11 For an account of the development of identifications with the criminal world,
as well as for material relevant to gang effects and the impact of the community
and larger society on youthful gangs, see [59, 51-81] .

324 EGO IDENTIFICATIONS IN GROUP SITUATIONS

Never a thought occurred to me as to whether it was right or wrong,
it was merely an interesting game. The apple or orange didn't ma\e
as much difference as the getting of them. It was the taking them
that I enjoyed. [55]

One night I remember I rounded up a few of my acquaintances
and invited them down to one of these fruit stores and showed them
how I could get away with things. I stole about a dozen large beets.
At another time I stole for the same bunch some tomatoes or some-
thing else to eat. Everyone had a fine time and cheered me on to
further efforts. I felt fine at achieving such success in their eyes. But
a few of them tattled to my brother and I never surrounded myself
with an audience after that. I don't mean that afterwards I stole by
myself. The fact is that I never stole when I was by myself. The
kick came when there was someone with me and the fun could be
mutual. It was a merry, exciting pastime that interested me to the
exclusion of all others. [51, 59 /., italics ours]

Shaw verifies the fact that Sidney stole almost exclusively in the
company of others and adds that "more than 90 per cent of the
stealing offenses in cases brought before the Cook County court
are committed by groups of two or more boys." [59]

During this period, Sidney began to play truant from school,
not so much because he disliked school as because it seemed dull
compared to the thrilling activities of his gang.

Despite his repeated truancy, his school report shows a record of
good scholarship. [51, 231]

Because Sidney was much younger and smaller than .the other
gang members, he seldom got a fair cut of the booty. They would
encourage him to pick a fight with an older boy and then enjoy
seeing him "take" the bigger boy. But Sidney "didn't like this as
I wanted to be one of them and not the object of their amuse-
ment" [73, italics ours]

After several experiences in the Parental School for delinquents
and truants, Sidney moved with his family to a new neighborhood.
His mother bought him his first new suit. For a year, he skated,
played baseball, and so on, with the boys in this school and "was
a model pupil." But the following winter, he decided to go to
work, was picked up by the truant officer who akeady knew him

INDIVIDUAL MEMBERS AS INFLUENCED BY GROUP NORMS 325

well, and was sent oft to the Parental School again. This was his
fourth term in this detention home.

On his release, Sidney started back to school again. The "nice"
boys and girls were not intimate with him. As he wrote:

I was very unhappy and couldn't find anything to do that would
interest me continuously. I knew that if I could get in with a gang
I would find plenty of excitement and thrills, but I didn't know of
any gang. It wasn't my first choice, but it was a good substitute and
I knew it was interesting because I had belonged to a gang when I
had been younger. Excitertient seemed to be my natural impulse and
I greatly desired companionship— some one with similar desires as
mine. I wanted lots of fun. / fyiew how to get it in the legitimate
way, but couldn't. So I wanted to go with some gang who broke the
laws because I knew I could soon gain their attitudes because it
would be naturally somewhat similar to the attitude of my old gang.
[51, 113, italics ours]

Finally, Sidney "dropped over to the west side to see what
became of the old gang." [117] Afterward, he met several boys
acquainted with older criminals at the Burns Athletic Club, whose
membership, according to Shaw, included "some of Chicago's
most notorious criminal characters." [131] As Shaw notes:

Prior to Sidney's contact with the Burns Athletic Club his delin-
quencies had been limited very largely to pilfering, burglary, and
shoplifting. ... It was immediately following his association with
this group and while in the company of some of its younger members
that Sidney's first experience in the larceny of automobiles and holdup
with a gun took place. [51, 232]

Because he had no "vocational and leisure-time interests" and was
not "incorporated" into any more or less permanent group, he
easily accepted "the adult criminal pattern of this group."
These criminals were heroes to Sidney.

The three fellows that I went with lived in the neighborhood all
their lives and they told me the history of many of these racketeers.
They knew them all personally and of course I got to know them
personally. Just knowing them made us feel like big shots and I
longed to be able to carry a big forty-five automatic like they carried
on their hip. My life had been lawless and I felt that some day to

326 EGO IDENTIFICATIONS IN GROUP SITUATIONS

become a big gangster would be a fine thing for me. I wanted to be
one tough guy. [51, 136]

It is evident that this group of criminals became the reference
group with which Sidney and his friends identified themselves.

When he was 16 years old, he was sentenced to 20 years in
prison for rape at the point of a gun. From Sidney's "own story"
we gather that, until he knew that the police had been informed
of this act, he thought of it as an exciting experience, as some-
thing to brag about at the Burns Athletic Club. Shaw points out
that this offense "was an integral part of his whole criminal-
behavior pattern." [252]

It is perhaps important to observe, also, that prior to the first rape
episode in which this gang was involved a number of similar cases
had occurred in the Chicago district. These cases were known to
Sidney and his companions and had been the subject of discussion
among them. ... It may be assumed that his attitudes toward women
and sex behavior were defined through his experience with prosti-
tutes and in the course of his conversations with other delinquents.
He was never incorporated into a conventional group through which
he might assimilate the conventional attitudes and moral values of
society. For the most part, his contacts with conventional groups
were not only casual and infrequent but essentially formal and external
in character. [51, 233, italics ours]

This does not mean, of course, that Sidney was ignorant of the
norms of larger society concerning sex. But it does indicate that
the norms of larger society were not his. Identification with the
adult criminal group was for him a more potent determinant of
behavior than mere knowledge of the norms of society. Without
attempting to analyze all the important factors in this case, we can
report Shaw's own conclusion after his study of the records of each
member of the major gangs Sidney identified himself with:

The foregoing records suggest that Sidney's delinquencies occurred
as part of the activities of the play groups and gangs of which he was
a member. It is clear that delinquency was an established tradition in
these groups prior to Sidney's contact with them. [51, 41]

In a more recent publication, Shaw has portrayed the individual
cases of the five Martin brothers [521. Their social and economic

INDIVIDUAL MEMBERS AS INFLUENCED BY GROUP NORMS 327

examined the boys concluded that they could be properly classified
as both physically and mentally normal. Brothers in Crime gives
a detailed account of the deviant behavior and of the "settling
down" of the five brothers both in verified objective terms and in
the boys' "own stories." The general lines of the course of develop-
ment of their psychological identifications and attitudes and the
factors that contributed to their "settling down" in society at large
are similar to those summarized briefly in the case of the Jack
Roller. In short, they began their early childhood in play groups
and embryonic gangs, psychologically identifying themselves with
these spontaneously developed groups.

The boys' mother was a devout church member. But as the
boys became involved in the activities of their gangs, "they repu-
diated all institutions which sought to enforce conformity to con-
ventional standards of conduct." [140] The compellingness of
group values or norms in shaping the brothers' lives was indicated
by the "inability of the family, the school, the church, the juvenile
court, and family case-work agencies to alter their conduct." [126]
Through the efforts of their mother, teachers, social workers, and
other adults the boys became quite familiar with the norms of con-
ventional society. However, knowledge of these norms did not
materially affect their identifications, attitudes, and behavior. The
boys had clearly incorporated the values and norms of their gangs
as their own. Consequently, the conflicting norms of society at
large had little or no effect in regulating their behavior.

They gravitated towards organic membership in these groups
under the stress of basic deprivations and the denial of an inte-
grated personal identity in home, school, church, and other conven-
tional situations. They had to derive their main feelings of per-
sonal status from membership in these play groups, embryonic or
crystallized gangs. Their basic deprivations were relieved through
the activities of these groups. Thus, when John Martin, the oldest
brother who set the example for the others,

. . . was approximately seven years of age, he became identified
with one of the many flay groups in his community, a group com-
posed of at least twelve boys ranging in age from five to twelve years.
Their playgrounds were the alleys, streets, and railroad yards; their
activities were largely spontaneous, random, and unsuper vised; simple

328 EGO IDENTIHCATIONS IN GROUP SITUATIONS

forms of stealing were interspersed with nondeliquent activities with
little realization of their moral implications. [52, 109, italics ours]

The psychiatrist who examined the Martin brothers reports that
they "differed in regard to personality traits." But "despite differ-
ences in personality, physical stature, and intelligence, all of the
brothers engaged in the same forms of delinquent conduct
throughout the early periods of their careers." [325] It seems
clear, therefore, that the similarity of their behavior in early years
was due to their membership in similarly formed groups. In
later adolescent years their individually deviant behavior differed
according to the specific activities of the gang to which each,
brother belonged.

One of Shaw's generalizations based on keen observation should
be of particular interest to any psychologist who wants to see the
problems of personality with clear perspective.

It is interesting to observe that the brothers who had the longest
careers in delinquency were the ones who possessed personality traits
which are usually regarded as being most desirable. John, Edward,
James, and Michael are sociable, friendly, and loyal persons who
adapt themselves readily to other individuals. Carl, on the other hand,
possesses fewer of these traits, yet he continued in delinquency for a
shorter period of time than did his brothers. It is suggested that
perhaps socially desirable personality traits may be related to satisfac-
tory adjustments in the delinquent group in the same manner in which
they are related to adjustments in conventional groups. In short,
they may be social assets in both situations. Conversely less desirable
traits may complicate the process of adjustment in delinquent and in
nondelinquent groups. [52, 31 3]

It seems a tragic irony, in the case of the Martin brothers at least,
that a less sociable, less friendly, and less loyal "personality" came
as a blessing to save one of the brothers from the more prolonged
indulgence in delinquent behavior of his more sociable brothers.12

12 For another example, see case 1 in fudge Bafar Foundation Studies No. 1
(Boston, 1922). Throughout the complete report of this delinquent boy there are
comments by various officials and examiners on his friendly personality. He is
described as "thoroughly pleasant, responsive, smiling often" [26]; "fond of
activity and fun-loving" [2#]; "friendly, and very cooperative, and frank in his
discussion." [37a] This boy had nine formal complaints against him in three
years' time. As he said, "You do lots of things to make others think you are a
great fellow." [34]

INDIVIDUAL MEMBERS AS INFLUENCED BY GROUP NORMS 329

Shaw's observations of the family origins of gang members
should be mentioned for they give further insight into the prob-
lem of parent-youth conflict, the subsequent psychological drift-
ing away from the family situation, and the establishment of new
ego links. So far the gang members we have mentioned all came
from slum areas. However, Shaw states that there are cases of
youthful gang members who stem from "the highest income
groups in the community." [101] Such cases also reflect the con-
sequences of parent-youth friction due to the conflicting identifica-
tions of children and their parents. As we have seen before,
parents and boys of the new generation may have incorporated
values or norms which represent either different or contradictory
cultural patterns due in some instances to the rapid transition of
the times.

In each of the individual studies, we have seen how the boy
very soon embarked once more on delinquent activities after he
was let out of a detention home. In their work on delinquency
areas in Chicago, Shaw and his collaborators [49] give significant
hints concerning the effect of group formations in prolonging the
deviant types of behavior of individual group members. In this
provocative work, the authors systematically studied the relative
contribution of different areas of the city to the total number of
individuals brought to court. For our present problem, the results
on "recidivism among male delinquents brought before the juve-
nile court during 1900-1906 and 1917-1923" are important. For
among other things, they reflect again the importance of group
belongingness or group reference as a cause of the differential .rates
of recidivism in various parts of the city. On the basis of their
analysis, the authors conclude:

It is clear from the foregoing material that the extent of recidivism
is highest in the areas having the highest rate of individual delinquents
and that this fact explains the disproportionately high rate of delin-
quency cases in these areas. This finding suggests that the factors
contributing to delinquency in these areas of concentration tend also
to give rise to recidivism by increasing both the proportion of delin-
quents who become recidivists and the number of times the recidivists
appear in court. [49, 186]

330 EGO IDENTIHCATIONS IN GROUP SITUATIONS

In a more recent work, Shaw and McKay [53], using similar
statistics collected from 1927 to 1933, reach the same conclusion.

From these findings and other material on gangs already cited,
it is clear that continued gang membership is one of the chief
factors in the relatively high rate of recidivism in these areas.
There is concrete evidence that, if young delinquents after their
release from prison could be placed in informal groups where their
interests could be directed along other channels and where they
could feel they were active participants, the rate of recidivism
would decrease. Referring to such attempts undertaken under
the supervision of Clifford Shaw in certain Chicago areas, Martin
[30] writes:

Shaw believes it [recidivism] is caused partially by the tendency of
an ex-convict's community to shun him when he comes out of prison.
Barred this contact with "respectable" people, the ex-con is forced to
seek association with criminals. Soon he will go back to prison. The
Area Project attempts to reintegrate ex-cons into their communities.
The parolees handled by the Russell Square Committee range from
youngsters of, say, fourteen years, locked up for the first time, to men
of fifty with long criminal records. Of forty-seven parolees dealt with,
only one has been returned to prison for parole violation. (The parole
agent caught him drunk.) [30]

In this connection, the practical remarks contained in a recent
memorandum from Shaw to the board of directors of the Chicago
Area Project are pertinent. [54] They imply the psychological fact
that the direction of an individual's behavior is not affected in a
major way unless and until he becomes ego-involved in social
situations. Shaw observed:

Attempts to produce these changes for the community by means of
ready-made institutions and programs planned, developed, financed,
and managed by persons outside the community are not likely to meet
with any more success in the future than they have in the past. This
procedure is psychologically unsound because it places the residents
of the community in an inferior position and implies serious reserva-
tions with regard to their capacities and their interest in their own
welfare. What is equally important is the fact that it neglects the
greatest of all assets in any community, namely the talents, energies,
and other human resources of the people themselves. For these

SOME PSYCHOLOGICAL LEADS 331

reasons, these superimposed programs and institutions, while perhaps
providing temporary aid to individuals and families, are not likely to
exercise any deep and lasting influence in the social character of the
community. They are related to the community only in the most
superficial manner and thus have not appreciably reduced the volume
of truancy, delinquency, and crime. What is necessary, we believe, is
the organization and encouragement of social self-help on a coopera-
tive basis. [54, 2]

SOME PSYCHOLOGICAL LEADS

The conclusions reached on the basis of the material so far
reviewed are further confirmed by the more psychological analysis
of Healy and Bronner [19]. In their study of many delinquent
cases who were paired with nondelinquents, die authors investi-
gate from all possible angles the factors contributing to deviant
types of behavior. Without denying in the least the contribution
of other variables, we shall call attention to the impact of group
contact in producing individual delinquency. We repeat that our
concern throughout this chapter has been the group determination
of this consequential type of behavior. For this throws light on
group behavior in general. We have not been interested in indi-
vidual or group delinquency as such.

The chain of causation between basic urges, desires, and wishes
on the one hand, and delinquency on the other, runs clear through
Healy and Bronner's impressive work. The authors have clearly
diagrammed this chain in Figure 3.18 We see that basic urges,
desires, and wishes may be satisfied through "socially acceptable
activities" in society whatever the particular norms of the particu-
lar society may be. If they are not satisfied, if they are hindered
by economic or other situational circumstances, "feelings of inade-
quacy, deprivations, and thwartings" arise. These in turn are
followed by urges for substitute satisfactions. These urges for
substitute satisfactions need not necessarily express themselves in
delinquent behavior. Between these urges and actual participation
in delinquent activity there is the step of "acceptance of ideas of
delinquency." In the authors' words:

18 Reproduced from [19, 4] by permission.

332

EGO IDENTIFICATIONS IN GROUP SITUATIONS

Now what form substitutive activities will take, whether or not
they will be antisocial, depends partly on external circumstances, but
mainly upon the acceptance of certain ideas. [19, 7]

The process of acceptance is further elaborated in such formula-
tions:

Very few indeed, if any, enter into delinquency as the result of a
new born impulse, without previously having had thought about it.

I ACCEPTANCE OF —

» IDEAS OF DELINQUENCY —

FIG. 3. Diagram showing the development of delinquent behavior. The general
life stream of feelings and activities.

There is almost universally some period of incubation of such ideas,
generally not thought out to definite conclusions concerning action,
but still recurring as part of the mental content. An educative or
assimilative process has been going on, usually under the stimulus of
some environmental source or sources, whereby the individual learns
about delinquency, its forms and techniques, as he might become
informed or educated about f we will say, tree climbing. [19, 68, italics
ours]

The impact of group factors in the "acceptance of ideas of
delinquency" is stressed time and again in different connections by
Healy and Bronner. For example, they state that "litdc delin-
quency is engaged in without companionship or gang connections"
[63, italics ours] And again, "this particular educative process
generally began with information received from youthful com-
rades— two were taught by older criminals." [66]

SOME PSYCHOLOGICAL LEADS 333

In our opinion, the process of acceptance of ideas or norms of
delinquency through social contacts will gain clarity and func-
tional usefulness if it is conceptualized in terms of identifications
in actual groups or ego-involvements in relation to certain refer-
ence groups in general and membership groups in particular.
Once identification takes place, whatever the size of the group
may be, essentially similar psychological consequences may be
expected. Psychologically, it makes a great deal of difference
whether praise or ridicule comes from an indifferent group or a
group in which we are strongly ego-involved. Once the norms of
a delinquent group or any other group are accepted, once identi-
fication with a group takes place, the individual is not necessarily
content merely to hold the attitudes of the group or to indulge in
prescribed activities. He may spontaneously praise the attitudes,
spontaneously engage in new forms of behavior consistent with
the group line.

The material gathered by Healy and Bronner indicates clearly
the way a boy may become identified with a group and the
psychological consequences of this identification.

A boy, for example, feeling himself inadequate in other relation-
ships finds himself accepted and gains recognition with a gang if he
takes up with the suggestions they give him of stealing with or for
them. [19, 8]

They mention in passing the case of a delinquent boy who "previ-
ously was effeminate or feminized." The boy gave the rationale
of his deviant behavior.

They thought I was no good so I went out to show a cockeyed
world that I was a regular guy. [19, 134]

Although the authors do not specify it, the "cockeyed world" the
boy referred to is undoubtedly the reference group whose ridicule
at last drove him to such action, and in relation to which he
wanted to excel as a "regular guy."

In Shaw's account of the Martin brothers, we noted that the
brothers who engaged in delinquent activities the longest Were
the most sociable friendly ones. In this connection, it is interesting
to note that Healy and Bronner found that "gregariousness" or

334 EGO IDENTIFICATIONS IN GROUP SITUATIONS

"sociability" is clearly more prevalent among the delinquents than
among the individuals used as controls. The greater sociability of
delinquents may be, at least in part, a product of their striving to
anchor themselves in a social setting when social status is denied
them by already established groups. The study of Healy and
Bronner clearly suggests the psychological function served by the
opportunity to anchor one's self in a definite group, even though
it may be a delinquent one. For example:

Under certain circumstances it may be healthier and more normal
to join in with the activities and imbibe the ideas of a delinquent
crowd than to be a withdrawing, soft, effeminate "mother's boy" or,
as in instances already mentioned, to mope at home and develop an
abnormal phantasy life. [19, 136]

SOME VERIFICATIONS OF THE EFFECTS OF GROUP SITUATIONS

Some representative data already presented have demonstrated
the effects of group situations on individuals. We have seen how
ego-attitudes may be structured or modified in group situations in
a lasting or a temporary way. During the past two decades, these
findings have been amply verified on the psychological level. We
shall limit our discussion here to a brief summary of a few investi-
gations. All of them compel us to call attention once more to the
convergence of sociological and psychological formulations. They
prove that there cannot be two kinds of psychologies of collective
behavior: the psychology of the individual in group situations is
valid social psychology, and his social psychology is valid individual
psychology.

Since social interaction is possible only when individuals in a
situation are able to grasp reciprocal relationships (the point of
view of others as well as their own) and when certain rules or
norms established as a consequence of human interaction in the
past or emerging in the actual situation are observed, the studies of
Piaget and his associates, carried out in the 1920's are especially
impressive. These investigations conclusively elucidate the genetic
development and properties of group interactions and furnish an
unique crucible of the psychology of group interaction, the incor-

SOME VERIFICATIONS OF THE EFFECTS OF GROUP SITUATIONS 335

poration of social norms in the individual, and their subsequent
effects on behavior.

Piaget studied the successive stages of development of (1) the
practice of rules and (2) the consciousness of rules. Since his
results show that development runs parallel in both respects, we
shall not make a special point of presenting his results separately
and shall mention only those findings most relevant to our dis-
cussion. He specifically examined the development of the indi-
vidual's morality from the comparatively early years of childhood
almost up to puberty. As he puts it, "All morality consists in a
system of rules, and the essence of all morality is to be sought for
in the respect which the individual acquires for these rules." [45,7]
After calling attention to this general fact, Piaget starts with a
detailed study of "the rules of the game" as played among age
mates. These "rules of the game" exemplified by the game of
marbles, are among the first rules grasped by the developing child.

During the first years of his life (in the motor stage) the child
cannot really participate in a play situation, let alone in more
developed levels of group participation. This inability of the very
young child to share collective activity of the simplest sort is due
to the fact that his ego is not sufficiently differentiated for him to
distinguish between what is his own desire and what is external
to him. He cannot yet separate fantasy and fact. In short, he
cannot recognize his ever-changing mercurial subjectivity as such.
Hence, he cannot consistently follow a conversation, a game, or
any social activity involving a give-and-take type of relationship.
As he grows older, certain rules (norms) are imposed on him by
parents, older boys and girls, or other grown-ups. He is made to
abide by these rules in the daily routine of life. But even though
he abides by them, for the child around 5 or 6 years of age, rules
or norms have not yet become an integrated part of his psychology.
To him, the rules or norms he is made to follow are absolute, made
in an unchangeable way by grown-ups. Even though he abides
by them because of the sheer constraint and authority exerted by
his elders, he easily lapses to the ever-changing flux of his desires
and fantasy when he is not under the grip of external authority.
For these externally imposed rules or norms have not yet become
his own rules or norms.

336 EGO IDENTIFICATIONS IN GROUP SITUATIONS

Only after further development (around the age of 7-8 in the
case of Piaget's children) is the child mature enough to grasp
consistently the points of view of others, to interact reciprocally
and to co-operate in play and other activities with his equals (age
mates). As a consequence of age-mate group interactions and
co-operations, the group rules or norms become his own norms.
In this process he ceases to consider them as the absolute and
immutable dictates of grown-ups. In the course of the develop-
ment of participation in age-mate activities (around the age of
11-12 in Piaget's cases), children reach the stage where they col-
lectively and spontaneously evolve and codify appropriate norms
for the situation at hand.

These spontaneously emerging norms in collective age-mate
activities are among the first norms that boys or girls accept, re-
spect, and abide by as their own. At this point the experience and
behavior of co-operation and autonomy as contrasted to authority
and heteronomy is first indicated. In Piaget's words:

From the moment that children really begin to submit to rules and
to apply them in a spirit of genuine cooperation, they acquire a new
conception of these rules. Rules become something that can be
changed if it is agreed that they should be, for the truth of a rule docs
not rest on tradition but on mutual agreement and reciprocity. [89]
Henceforward, he will not only discover the boundaries that separate
his self from the other person, but will learn to understand the other
person and be understood by him. So that cooperation is really a
factor in the creation of personality, if by personality we mean, not
the unconscious self of childish egocentrism, but the self that takes
up its stand on the norms of reciprocity and objective discussion, and
knows how to submit to these in order to make itself respected. . . .
Cooperation being the source of personality, rules cease, in accordance
with the same principle, to be external. They become both the con-
stitutive factors of personality and its fruit, in accordance with the
circular process so frequently exemplified in the course of mental
development. In this way autonomy succeeds heteronomy. [45, 90]

Likewise, with the development of co-operative group activities,
the unilateral respect and awe felt towards grown-ups and the
conforming behavior of early childhood owing to the pressure of
external authority alone give way to feelings of mutual respect

SOME VERIFICATIONS OF THE EFFECTS OF GROUP SITUATIONS 337

and "inner responsibility ." These conclusions based on rich con-
crete data and so briefly, summarized here, are full of implications
concerning the effects of group situations in determining an indi-
vidual's personal values and loyalties. They substantiate on a more
refined level of psychological analysis the evidence that emerged
from the gang studies carried out at approximately the same period
in a different country. (See pp. 289-304.)

Piaget considers the social and practical implications of his
findings in the final section of his study. The upshot of his bril-
liant discussion is that the individual can only develop a sense of
the reciprocal nature of real human relationships through partici-
pation in group activities. Only through such co-operative par-
ticipation does he come to accept group norms as his own and to
develop his identification, loyalty, and iqner responsibility towards
them. If such co-operative participation is lacking, the individual
considers the norms imposed on him by sheer authority as nui-
sances to be evaded whenever possible. Only as an outcome of
co-operation in group situations with equals do "the infantile traits
that mark the conformist spirit make place for the features that
are the outcome of cooperation," [341] "Whence the decline of
unilateral respect and the primacy of personal judgment. But in
consequence of this, cooperation suppresses both egocentrism and
moral realism, and thus achieves an interiorization of rules." [411]
At the end, Piaget makes explicit the implications of his results:
"It is obvious that our results are as unfavourable to the method of
authority as to purely individualistic methods." Piaget specifically
criticized the authoritarian sociology of Durkheim and its educa-
tional deductions.

Unfortunately, under the influence of a "pre-notion," hard to
account for in a sociologist, and especially in one so methodical,
Durkheim thinks of children as knowing no other society than adult
society or the society created by adults (schools), so that he entirely
ignores the existence of spontaneously formed children's societies, and
of the facts relating to mutual respect. Consequently, elastic though
Durkheim's pedagogy may be in principle, it simply leads, for lack of
being sufficiently informed on the subject of child sociology, to a
defence of the methods of authority. [45, 358 f.]

338 EGO IDENTIFICATIONS IN GROUP SITUATIONS

Unlike psychologists who complacently stop after uttering their
conclusions on the basis of restricted "closed" situations, Piaget
anxiously looks ahead to see if his conclusions hold in concrete
situations:

For, after all, it is one thing to prove that cooperation in the play
and spontaneous social life of children brings about certain moral
effects, and another to establish the fact that this cooperation can be
universally applied as a method of education. This last point is one
which only experimental education can settle. Educational experi-
ment, on condition that it be scientifically controlled, is certainly more
instructive for psychology than any amount of laboratory experiments,
and because of this experimental pedagogy might perhaps be incor-
porated into the body of the psychosociological disciplines. [45, 413 f.]

The results of educational processes which give an opportunity
for free co-operation among equals in diverse activities and which
encourage initiative in positive group undertakings are described
in many reports by progressive educators. An outstanding illus-
tration of the emergent effects of democratically organized collec-
tive training on individuals is seen in Makarenko's far-reaching
work [6]. In 1920, at a time when famine and civil war were still
ravaging the Soviet Union, Makarenko started the Gorki Colony,
a school devoted to the reforming and training of juvenile delin-
quents. The first six students who arrived at the colony were, for
example, youngsters who had committed quite serious offenses.
"Two of them had been found guilty of larcenies, four of armed
burglaries. In the institution they acted as a unit. . . . They as-
sumed an attitude of indifference to the rules or to the staff." [38]

After Makarenko had once proved to the youngsters that he
could be tough too, he devoted his energies to the creation of a
common life in which administration, teachers, and students alike
participated. To this end, they all shared in all activities and
hardships and in any rewards that came as a consequence of
common effort. In Makarenko's words: "In our nervewracking
poverty there was one good feature — all of us, teachers and pupils,
were hungry and poor alike." The report continues: "Thus in
the process of living together, a common formula was being
shaped. Events molded both director and pupils, forming the

SOME VERIFICATIONS OF THE EFFECTS OF GROUP SITUATIONS 339

rudiments of a community interest." [6, 39] In this collective
process of working and living together, which effectively trans-
formed the attitudes of the participating individuals, stealing,
drinking, and gambling which were common when the institution
started, were successfully eliminated. Once the collective trend of
the colony took definite shape, all such objectionable behavior was
eliminated, not through the use of punishments, but by putting the
matter to the students themselves and securing their active par-
ticipation. The positive results emerging in the Gorki Colony
were carried to other such institutions. In these projects the stu-
dents of the Gorki Colony played no small part. From the origi-
nal colony and another carried to its same level by the Gorki
teachers and students, three thousand boys and girls graduated.
Many of them attained leading positions in industry, the arts, and
sciences. When they assumed responsible work in society at large,
they were not treated as exconvicts or "reformed" boys, but as
full-fledged citizens.

It may be safe to conclude that the success of this educational
experiment in the Soviet Union in transforming the whole life
patterns of unfortunate deviant boys and girls into highly useful
citizens is due to the fact that the conception and character of the
experiment fit in with and, in fact, were encouraged by the whole
social system. During the first decade of the century, exponents of
progressive education in many countries spread their enthusiasm
for creating an ideal society through the education of new genera-
tions. And, when we consider the Gorki Colony experiment in
the light of similar undertakings in capitalist countries, when we
relate it to the disillusionment expressed by many progressive
educators in Europe and America, its implications become even
more striking. The fate of so many experiments in progressive
education tends to show that, in highly differentiated Western
societies where individuals must sooner or later face groups with
contradictory conflicting functions and values, they are bound to
be torn in different directions with inevitable psychological con-
sequences. Before jumping to any conclusions about the definite
effects of a particular group on its individual members, it therefore
becomes necessary to investigate at the same time the question of
whether or not the groups which an individual sooner or later

340 EGO IDENTIFICATIONS IN GROUP SITUATIONS

will face in a major way are integrated in function and values.
For groups cannot be taken as closed systems, especially today.
The values and directions shaped in one group have serious conse-
quences in the lives of an individual member if they run counter
to those of other groups which he is subsequently bound to en-
counter. It is not difficult to find cases of antagonistic groups in
which the degree of in-group solidarity, sympathy and co-opera-
tion may be proportional to the prejudices, intolerance, and enmity
exhibited towards the members of out-groups. For example, the
utmost degree of consideration, democracy, and good will ex-
hibited within the inner bounds of an exclusive club or a Junior
League need not be bestowed on out-group persons, especially if
the persons in question are members of groups standing at some
distance from the club's particular social hierarchy.

Other relevant experimental and research studies of groups have
been reported which provide substantial verification of the effects
of group situations on the individual member's identifications and
ego relationships, on the structural properties of groups, and on the
effects of differential group identifications. Here we can mention
only a few representative studies, among which should be included
the work of Moreno and his associates. Before 1925, Moreno
found that individuals assigned in a group to improvise "certain
attitudes for typical situations" often committed "the most bewil-
dering acts, although in the realm of fiction, which seem unrelated
to their individual selves when we saw them in daily life." [33, 13]
In 1934, Moreno [35] summarized a considerable body of research
chiefly concerned with interpersonal relationships within various
groups. For example, by asking every child from kindergarten
through the eighth grade in a public school to choose seat mates,
Moreno constructed "sociograms" showing such social relations
within each class. He found a progressive development and differ-
entiation in these children's groups. In kindergarten and the first
and second grades, children were "seldom sufficiently certain
whom to choose!' [35, 54, italics ours] After about the fourth
grade, intragroup relationships were more complex, suggesting
that children develop to "exchange emotions readily and freely
form partnerships and secret associations." [35, 54] With the
development of "cooperative group action," with the "increased

SOME VERIFICATIONS OF THE EFFECTS OF GROUP SITUATIONS 341

differentiation" of children's groups, a "cleavage" from adults
occurs, as evidenced by "the declining insight of adults" into the
relationships within children's groups. [35, 50] Only after recip-
rocal relationships developed among children did they accurately
practice status distinctions on the basis of grown-up norms. For
example, after about the fourth grade "the percentage of hetero-
sexual attractions drops very low." [35, 61] And, at about the
same time, choices were made more frequently in terms of the
children's own nationality and color groups with simultaneous
rejection of outside groups as prescribed by grown-up norms.
"This phenomenon could not be observed in the pre-school groups
nor in the 1st, 2nd, and 3rd grades although the percentage of
members of different nationalities was about the same." [35, 61]
The effects of relatively unified groups as contrasted to relatively
divided groups are shown in Moreno's study of the New York
State Training School for Girls. The standard of conduct and
morale of the group and the number of runaways and requests for
transfers varied with the degree of interest in the group.

Moreno and his associates have developed ingenious devices,
such as the sociogram, and statistical refinements which facilitate
the study of groups. [37] Considerable research has been stimu-
lated. To take a recent example, Bronfenbrenner [10] essentially
repeated Moreno's studies of school children. One of the signifi-
cant findings of this study was that the shift in an individual's
status "must be interpreted not only in terms of change in indi-
vidual, social, or psychological adjustment, but also in terms of
group developmental trends." [76]

However, the theoretical background presented by Moreno puts
the psychologist in the puzzling situation of studying empirical
data along with theoretical formulations mixed with mystic no-
tions. For example, in 1943 Moreno [36] wrote: "I have had the
good fortune to develop three ideas. The first idea, a study of the
godhead, has remained cryptic and misapprehended. The second,
a study of man called psychodrama, has aroused some hope that
man can train his spontaneity to overcome many of his short-
comings. My third idea, the study of society called sociometry,
has given the greatest promise that a measure can be developed
for a deeper understanding of society and a key to the treatment

342 EGO IDENTIFICATIONS IN GROUP SITUATIONS

of its ills. Many of my friends consider these three ideas one
apart from the other. In my own mind, however, all three ideas
are of one piece. One has developed out of the other." [299] The
"study of the godhead" is expressed in The Words of the Father
[34], a book published in 1941 and listed as one of the "Basic
Works of J. L. Moreno" in Sociometry. The preface and com-
mentary of the book are provided by Moreno who points out
that "on the title page of this book there is a vacant place: there
is no author's name there." [316] "The name of the author is
given in the title itself — in The Words of the Father. [317] As
Moreno points out in the beginning of his preface "This is an
extraordinary book." [vii] He continues:

It is unique because of its premise. Even before a line of it is
read— before it is weighted as to its content— its premise is: these
are God's own words, [vii] . . . God Himself, not only speaks but
is shown acting, creating, ruling and judging. God is present. He
creates His own universe. He analyzes His own universe. He is in
direct communication with every atom of the universe, [ix] ... It
would seem that the idea of God has found in this book a final and
total expression, [x] . . . It is a consolation that the message of the
Father comes to the world at this time. There has never been a
moment when a word of encouragement was more welcome, [xxi]

God's pronouncements cover over 100 pages. The first reads:

I AM GOD,

THE FATHER,

THE CREATOR OF THE UNIVERSE.

THESE ARE MY WORDS,

THE WORDS OF THE FATHER.

Such prophetic and ecstatic statements are hardly acceptable to
the psychologist.

In 1926, the Wawokiye Camp Research Project [40], a study in
"experimental sociology," began under the direction of W. I.
Newstetter of Western Reserve University, Designed to gain
"generalized knowledge of the primary group and the means for
its study" [93], this long-range study, in the words of its director,
"provides devastating evidence that interactions (social behavior)

SOME VERIFICATIONS OF THE EFFECTS OF GROUP SITUATIONS 343

are not the result of measurable 'traits.' " [104] During the early
period of the project (1926-28), the approach was slanted chiefly
towards the diagnosis and therapeutics of the individual in social
situations. "The value of adjustment through group association
was demonstrated by practical results." \vt\ However, research
results were not so satisfactory. "The measures of these supposed
traits weighted in some way were intended to yield a score which
was taken as an index of social adjustment. This may be a suitable
approach for the interpretation of individual reactions, but has
been unfruitful as the basis for interpreting social behavior." [93 /.]

As a result, the orientation turned toward a study of the group
itself as a step forward in achieving a "situational approach."
From 1930 to 1933, two five-week camp periods were held each
summer. About thirty boys, most of them problem cases, attended
each session. Camp life was more or less unplanned, activity and
direction generating chiefly from the boys themselves. Among
the findings relevant to our discussion were the measurements of
status based on weekly reports of preference for companions. By
correlating these indices of group status, it was found that each
group had a more or less characteristic pattern of stability in status
relationships from week to week.

An attempt to discern what sort of behavior is directly related to
acceptance by the group was undertaken by Newcomb. [40, 66-92]
As a result of considerable previous experience, cordial and an-
tagonistic responses were chosen as being most inclusive and re-
lated to the problem. Observation of free groupings was recorded
on a nine-point scale with considerable reliability. The principal
finding of this observation was that cordiality received was sig-
nificantly related to group status, while cordiality (or antagonism)
given bore no significant relation to group status. Attempts to
relate ascendance-submission, volubility of expression, and atten-
tion to counselors given by a member to his status revealed no
relationship between the measures, although ascendance-submis-
sion received was related to group status. "Our principle conclu-
sion, then, is a methodological or technical one. Significant and
reliable measures involving interactions of individuals can be ob-
tained from behavior observations, if these interactions are not
assumed to flow from traits of individuals." [92]

344 EGO IDENTIFICATIONS IN GROUP SITUATIONS

Another valuable series of studies stems from Lewin and his
students. In one of their earlier experiments, Lewin and Lippitt
[25, 27] undertook to study under relatively controlled conditions
the effects of democratic and autocratic leadership and procedure
upon "the unity or division of the group structure pattern" of two
similarly composed groups of children performing the same activ-
ity (mask making). [27, 31] An analysis of extensive records
showed that the unity of the club with autocratic leadership was
less stable than that with democratic leadership. For the present
discussion, comparative results which were taken as indices of
"personal ego involvement versus group goal involvement" are
highly relevant. [33] For example, of the first-person pronouns
used by the autocratic group, only 18 per cent were plural (we, us,
ours) as compared to 36 per cent used by the democratic group.
After the groups had functioned for some time, members were
asked to vote as to whether or not the meetings should be con-
tinued. All of the autocratic-group members voted to stop, while
four of the five democratic-group members wanted to continue.
At the same time, the groups voted on how to dispose of the prod-
ucts of their activities. All of the democratic-group members
suggested group disposal of one or more of the masks, while the
autocratic group members each claimed his own work.

Such examples indicate that members of the group more or less
dominated by the leader were less involved with their group than
were members of the group in which co-operative relationships
among leader and members were fostered. But the distinction
made between "ego involvement" and "group goal involvement"
seems unnecessary. When one participates as a member of a
group, may he not become personally involved with the group, its
activities, its goals ? Or, when one identifies with the group, may
not its goals, its rules, its norms become his? Lewin and Lippitt
comment in connection with these groups of boys: "In spite of the
greater spontaneity of expression in the D-situation, the data indi-
cated that the A-members were more frequently observed to be in
an overlapping situation where an individual goal conflicted with
a group goal and resulted in the member leaving the field of club
work." [27, 33] It would seem possible that one reason the auto-
cratic-group member was more often in conflict was that the group

REFERENCES 345

goal was not his goal, that is, he was less ego-involved than the
democratic-group member. Conversely, one factor accounting for
"greater spontaneity" of democratic-group members would seem
to be greater identification with the group, that is, greater ego-
involvement.

Without attempting to summarize the many interesting and
relevant findings in this and other studies of Lewin and his stu-
dents, their substantiation of the sociological material on the differ-
ential behavior of members toward in-group and out-group can
be mentioned. In the study just cited, "about twice as many social
interactions, per units of interaction possibility, occurred between
in-group members as between out-group members." [27, 33] In a
further study by Lewin, Lippitt, and White [26], fights, reminis-
cent of "gang wars," developed spontaneously between clubs on
two different occasions. One fight occurred between two demo-
cratic clubs; the other occurred between a democratic and a
lalsscz faire group, where the leader exerted little pressure on the
group.

REFERENCES

1. ALLPORT, F. H., Social Psychology, Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1924.

2. ANDERSON, N., The Hobo, Chicago: Univ. Press, 1923.

3. The juvenile and the tramp, /. Criminal. Law and Criminol., 1923-24,

14, 290-312.

4. Men on the Move, Chicago: Univ. Press, 1940.

5. ASBURY, H., The Gangs of New Yor^, An Informal History of the Underworld,

New York: Knopf, 1927.

6. BERMAN, N., The making of Soviet citizens, Psychiatry, /. Biol. and PathoL

Integers. Rcls., 1945, 8, 35-49.

7. BEYNON, E. D., The Voodoo cult among Negro migrants in Detroit, Am. f.

SocioL, 1938, 43, 894-907.

8. BLONDEL, C., Introduction a la psychologic collective, Paris: Colin, 1928.

9. BLUMER, H., Collective behavior, in An Outline of Principles of Sociology

(R. E. Park, cd.), New York: Barnes & Noble, 1939, 221-80.

10. BRONFENBRENNER, U., The Measurement of Sociometric Status, Structure and

Development, Sociometry Monogr., no. 6, New York: Beacon House, 1945.

11. CANTRIL, H., The Psychology of Social Movements, New York: Wiley, 1941.

12. CHILD, I. L., Italian or American? The Second Generation in Conflict, New

Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1943.

13. CLEMMER, D., The Prison Community, Boston: Christopher, 1940.

14. DASHIELL, F., Experimental studies of the influence of social situations on the

behavior of individual human adults, in Handbook of Social Psychology
(C. Murchison, ed.), Worcester: Clark Univ. Press, 1935, ch. 23.

346 EGO IDENTIFICATIONS IN GROUP SITUATIONS

15. DAVIS, K., The sociology of parent-youth conflict, Am. Social. Rev., 1940, 5,

523-35.

16. DURKHEIM, E., Les formes elementaires de la vie religieuse, Paris, 1912.

17. FAUSET, A. H., Blac% Gods of the Metropolis, Philadelphia: Univ. of Pa. Press,

1944.

18. GIST, N. P., and L. A. HALBERT, Urban Society, New York: Crowell, copy-

right 1942.

19. HEALY, W., and A. F. BRONNER, New Light on Delinquency and Its Treatment,

20. HUGHES, E. C, Dilemmas and contradictions of status, Am. J. Sociol., 1945, 50,

353-9.

21. LANDESCO, J., Organized Crime in Chicago, in The Illinois Crime Survey,

Illinois Assoc. for Criminal Justice, Chicago: Blakely, 1929, part 3, 815-1090.

22. The woman and the underworld, /. Crim. Law and CriminoL, 1936, 26,

891-902.

23. LA PIERE, R. T., Collective Behavior, New York: McGraw-Hill, 1938.

24. LE BON, G., The Crowd, A Study of the Popular Mind, London: Ernest Been

Ltd., 1938.

25. LEWIN, K., Field theory and experiment in social psychology: concepts and

methods, Am. J. Sociol., 1939, 44, 6, 868-96.

26. R. LIPPITT, and R. K. WHITE, Patterns of aggressive behavior in experi-
mentally created "social climates," /. Soc. Psychol, 1939, 10, 271-300.

27. LIPPITT, R., Field theory and experiment in social psychology: autocratic and

democratic group atmospheres, Am. /. Sociol., 1939, 45, 1, 26-49.

28. LYND, R., Knowledge for What? The Place of Social Science in American

Culture, Princeton: Univ. Press, 1939.

29. MARTIN, E. D., The Behavior of Crowds, New York: Harper, 1920.

30. MARTIN, J. B., A new attack on delinquency, Harper's Magazine, May 1944.

32. MOEDE, W., Experimented Massenpsychologie, Leipzig: Hirzel, 1920.

33. MORENO, J. L., Group Method and Group Psychotherapy, Sociometry Monogr.,

no. 5, New York: Beacon House, 1931.

34. The Words of the Father, New York: Beacon House, 1941.

35. Who Shall Survive?, Nervous and Mental Disease Monogr., Series No. 58,

Nervous and Mental Disease Publishing Co., Washington, D. C., 1934.

36. Sociometry and the Cultural Order, Sociornetry Monogr., no. 2, New

York: Beacon House, 1943.

37. and HELEN M. JENNINGS, Sociometric Measurement of Social Configura-
tions Based on Deviation from Chance, Sociometry Monogr., no. 3, New
York: Beacon House, 1945.

38. MURPHY, G., and L. B. MURPHY, Experimental Social Psychology, New York:

Harper, 1931.

39. MURPHY, G., L. B. MURPHY, and T. M. NEWCOMB, Experimental Social Psy-

chology, New York: Harper, 1937.

40. NEWSTETTER, W. L, M. J. FELDSTEIN, and T. M. NEWCOMB, Group Adjustment:

A Study in Experimental Sociology, School of Applied Social Sciences, West-
ern Reserve Univ., Cleveland, Ohio, 1938.

41. OUTLAND, G. E., Boy Transiency in America, Santa Barbara, Calif.: State Col-

lege Press, 1939.

REFERENCES 347

42. PARK, R. E., et al., The City, Chicago: Univ. Press, 1925.

43. and H. A. MILLER, Old World Traits Transplanted, Chicago: Univ.

Press, 1925.
44. Race relations and certain frontiers, in Race and Culture Contacts (E. G.

Reuter, ed.), New York: McGraw-Hill, 1934.

45. PIAGET, J., The Moral Judgment of the Child, London: Kegan Paul, Trench,

46. PUFFER, J., The Boy and His Gang, Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1912.

47. Ross, E. A., Social Psychology, New York: Macmillan, 1908.

48. SAPIR, E., Group, in Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences, New York: Macmillan,

51. The Natural History of a Delinquent Career, Chicago: Univ. Press,

53. and H. D. McKAY, Juvenile Delinquency and Urban Areas, Chicago:

Univ. Press, copyright 1942.
54. Memorandum Submitted to the Board of Directors of the Chicago Area

Project January 10, 1944, mimeographed report.
55. SHERIF, M., A study of some social factors in perception, Arch. Psychol., 1935,

no. 187.
56. The Psychology of Social Norms, New York: Harper, 1936.

57. SHOHLE, R., The Isolated Religious Sect, master's thesis on file Univ. Chicago

Library, 1923.

58. STONEQUIST, E. V., The Marginal Man, New York: Scribner's, 1937.

59. TANNENBAUM, R, Crime and the Community, New York: Ginn, 1938.

61. WHYTE, W. F., Corner boys: a study of clique behavior, Am. J. Sociol,, 1941,

46, 647-64.

63. ZORBAUGH, H. W., The Gold Coast and the Slum, Chicago: Univ. Press, copy-
right 1929.

CHAPTER 11

EGO-INVOLVEMENTS IN CONCRETE SOCIAL
SITUATIONS

In our review of experiments and controlled investigations
(ch. 6), we saw how various kinds of ego-involvements entered
in to shape or modify experience and behavior. We saw how an
individual identified himself with certain occupational or status
groups, how his role as a member of a class was related to affec-
tively toned attitudes. We found that in some instances experi-
ence and behavior were modified by ego-involvements which
resulted from the acceptance of established norms and values,
whereas some ego-involvements resulted from the momentary
demands of the actual experimental situation in which the indi-
vidual found himself.

The concept of ego-Involvement is, of course, not a mere artifact
created to account for artificial laboratory situations or for the facts
obtained in other controlled investigations. Indeed, the laboratory
experiments and other investigations came sometime after obser-
vations of concrete social situations had suggested the usefulness
and validity of the concept. [4, 5, 41] Equipped with a knowledge
of how the ego develops in the child, how it is re-formed in ado-
lescence, how it is constituted and how it affects behavior in con-
trolled laboratory situations, we now have some solid basis from
which to view ego-involved activities as they can be seen in con-
crete social situations.

We can consider only a scattered few of the thousands of ex-
amples one might choose for analysis. We shall proceed from
relatively simple to more complicated situations. We repeat again
that the basic psychological principles are the same, whether they
are demonstrated in laboratory experiments, controlled investiga-
tions, simple or complicated situations of everyday life.

"The apparel oft proclaims the man!9 Whatever the origin or

348

EGO-INVOLVEMENTS IN CONCRETE SOCIAL SITUATIONS 349

origins of clothes, whatever purposes they serve in different cli-
mates, there is little doubt that one of their chief functions is to
extend the "self of the wearer, to enhance his ego, to display his
status. Whether it is the simple necklace of the Samoan, the girdle
of the Javanese, the earrings of the Siberian Eskimo, the tweed
coat of the American college man, or the latest lounging robe
exhibited at a fashion show in contemporary Russia, men and
women reveal the fact that they are concerned about the clothes
they wear, the impression clothes make on themselves and others.
This is true, of course, only in a relative sense. A destitute person,
suffering from the ravages of war, depression, or other circum-
stances, will be eager enough to get any clothes that satisfy his
functional needs. Over a hundred years ago, Carlyle, in his pro-
test against conventions, Sartor Resartus [8], wrote:

Perhaps not once in a lifetime does it occur to your ordinary biped,
of any country or generation, be he gold-mantled Prince or russet-
jerkined Peasant, that his Vestments and his Self are not one and
indivisible; that he is naked, without vestments, till he buy or steal
such, and by fore thought sew and button them. [8, 40]

Veblen, in his penetrating Theory of the Leisure Class [43], points
out that

No one finds difficulty in assenting to the commonplace that the
greater part of the expenditure incurred by all classes for apparel is
incurred for the sake of a respectable appearance* rather than for the
protection of the person. [43, 767 /.]

When Hurlock asked people the question: "Is your feeling of self-
confidence increased by being well and appropriately dressed?"
99 per cent of the women and 94 per cent of the men said
"Yes." [19, 46]

In his well-known book, The Psychology of Clothes [14], Flugel
states that the great majority of authorities "unhesitatingly re-
garded decoration as the motive that led, in the first place, to the
adoption of clothing." [17]

The essential purpose of decoration is to beautify the bodily appear-
ance, so as to attract the admiring glances of others and fortify one's
self-esteem. [14, 20]

350 EGO-INVOLVEMENTS IN CONCRETE SOCIAL SITUATIONS

This self-esteem, ego-enhancement, or ego-gratification can, of
course, be accomplished in a number of different ways, as Flugel
indicates. The most obvious example is the function clothes serve
as an indicator of rank in military or religious circles. And in
ordinary civilian life clothes provide one of the most concrete
expressions of status, especially in those areas of life where status
is proportional to the things money can buy. Veblen showed how
clothes were used by members of the upper class to demonstrate
conspicuous waste and conspicuous leisure. Flugel notes that

One woman can seriously hurt another, even to the point of making
a permanent enemy of her, by being better or more fashionably
dressed upon some significant occasion. As long as individuality is
permitted, women struggle with one another for wearing the "latest"
or most costly frocks. The snobbery of wealth may even take a
purely quantitative form, and it may — and often does — become a point
of honour to wear a different dress each day (or several different
dresses each day, according to the varying occasions of morning,
afternoon, and night). [14, 114]

Another way in which clothes serve to enhance the ego is what
Flugel calls the "extension of the bodily self." A person can
increase his apparent size, cover up certain physical defects or dis-
proportions, conform more to current norms of beauty by various
tricks of dressing. Thus we find today the padded shoulders for
both men's and women's garments, padded or supported busts and
tight girdles that give women more alluring figures. In extreme
cases, we have the long coronation robes of kings and queens, the
fancy headdress of the Indian chief, the top hat for the gentleman's
evening wear, and the long train of his lady — all of these serve the
function of distinguishing the individual from others.

We sec ourselves in the movies. It has been pointed out many
times that the enormous appeal of motion pictures is due in no
small part to the many vicarious satisfactions they provide. By
projecting ourselves into the characters and situations, we can
escape momentarily from humdrum lives, worries, and cares, the
limits imposed upon us by our incomes, our lack of opportunity,
our mediocrity in appearance, ability, or talents.

The extent to which this ego-involvement occurs has been
recently demonstrated by studies of the tastes and preferences of

EGO-INVOLVEMENTS IN CONCRETE SOCIAL SITUATIONS 351

movie-goers. The upshot of this research is that individuals choose
as their favorite movie stars people with whom they can most
easily identify themselves— persons of the same sex, of comparable
age, and who tend to be cast in roles that represent a person of
their income group. Here is a brief summary of the findings,
taken from a report (1941) on audience research: [2]

Most stars do not gain support equally from all groups of theater-
goers, but appeal particularly to certain segments of the population.
Naturally, the variation is greater in the case of some stars than in
others. But the star who is equally popular with both sexes, all age-
groups, all income levels, and in all parts of the country, is the rare
exception rather than the rule.

Theatergoers have a tendency to project themselves into the situa-
tion portrayed on the screen, to imagine themselves in the place of the
star, or (perhaps subconsciously) to pretend they are the star.

Obviously, it is easier to imagine yourself in Mickey Rooney's shoes
if you are a boy of seventeen than if you are a middle-aged housewife.
Broadly speaking, that is why Rooney is overwhelmingly more popu-
lar with boys of his own age than with any other group of the
population.

Many other instances point to the importance of self -identification
as a factor in determining marquee values. For example, Judy Gar-
land, Deanna Durbin and Linda Darnell are most popular with girls
of their own age. Muni is strongest with men over thirty-one, as are
also Lionel Barrymore, William Powell and Edward Arnold. May
Robson is particularly popular with elderly females. Joan Crawford,
Miriam Hopkins, Irene Dunne, Claudette Colbert and Norma Shearer
are most popular with women over thirty.

Seventy-eight per cent of the female stars are more popular with
women than with men. ... By the same token 60 per cent of the
male stars are more popular with men than with women. The first
thirteen stars, as ranked by men, are all male.

This phenomenon of self -identification can be seen at work in other
fields. For example: The old theory that the best way to interest
women in an advertisement is to show a picture of a man, or the
best way to interest a man is to show a picture of a woman, has no
real foundation in fact. The best way to attract women is to have
women in the advertisement. The best way to attract men is by
having men, or men and women. [2, 14 /.]

352 EGO-INVOLVEMENTS IN CONCRETE SOCIAL SITUATIONS

Advertising. The whole "psychology of advertising" can be
regarded as an attempt on the part of the advertiser to identify
the consumer's self-interest with a particular product. And the
interest of the consumers appealed to are in no small part com-
posed of ego-involving values. One of the most brilliant and
successful advertisers in the United States has said that "the whole
secret of advertising is to get under a person's skin,"— to get a
person so interested in and involved with a product that he cannot
rest content until he buys it. Anyone familiar with the plethora
of appeals made to the public in most countries where competition
for business and profits is keen, can, on a moment's reflection,
think of dozens of examples of the advertiser's attempt to protect,
sustain, and enhance his ego. Our involvement with our bodily
appearance or its characteristics is demonstrated by the phenome-
nal success of such advertisements as those which tell us to buy
a certain mouthwash to avoid "halitosis" or a certain soap to avoid
"body odor." Our identification with norms that determine status
is fully recognized and exploited by those who imply that, if we
use or buy their products, we will be in the same class as the distin-
guished man or the aristocratic woman shown in the illustration.
The manufacturer of a relatively expensive automobile displays a
picture of a car with a middle-aged man and woman in it and
underneath there is the bold caption, "Here we are being envied";
a hand-lotion concern uses the ad, "Makes working hands look
like leisure hands."

Other skillful propagandists as well as advertising experts are
well aware of the various attitudes which channel into a person's
ego. Analyses of different propaganda campaigns in terms of their
effectiveness in arousing ego-involvement would be rewarding.

What's in a name? * Although most of us tend to take our
names for granted, don't think much about them, still, for nearly
all of us, there are occasional instances when we become aware of
how much a part of us our names have become. We do not always
act with complete neutrality when we see our names misspelled,

1 This discussion of names is largely based on Robert Holt's Studies in the
Psychology of Names [18]. This unpublished work is the most thorough, well-
documented, and systematic treatment of the subject that has come to our
attention.

EGO-INVOLVEMENTS IN CONCRETE SOCIAL SITUATIONS 353

we are flattered when old and casual acquaintances remember
our names, we are likely to feel hurt if someone we think should
know our name has forgotten it, we tend to pass on our names to
our children, we sometimes scrawl our names in public places or
on historic shrines. The vanity of certain wealthy men is exploited
by the trustees of universities, hospitals, and similar institutions
who promise that the man's name will be perpetuated in a build-
ing or some other memorial if he contributes funds to the institu-
tion. The good salesman and the good politician make it one of
their first rules to flatter their customers and voters by remember-
ing their names. We saw in chapter 7 how the small child learns
that his name is a vehicle around which certain definite things
happen and with which he identifies certain values and experi-
ences. In interviews with a great variety of people, Holt found
that the overwhelming majority of them felt that their names were
a part of them, built in like an arm or a finger, and not a fortuitous
possession.

Anthropologists have frequently pointed out that many primitive
men make no distinction between the name and the person
signified.

Primitives regard their names as something concrete and real, and
frequently sacred. [22, 50]

In some primitive tribes this identification of the name and the
person went to such a length that "to be" and "to be named" were
synonymous and the child was not regarded as having been com-
pletely born until he was named. It is a common practice among
primitive peoples to give an individual a new name, or to change
his name, at some critical time of life such as puberty or marriage.
Among the Dakota Indians, a young man who had distinguished
himself in battle was allowed to take on a new and distinctive
name; Abram's name was changed to Abraham, the Bible tells us,
at the time of the long march to Palestine. Those familiar with
anthropological literature could multiply these examples many
times.

In the history of surnames the psychologist finds that people
who voluntarily chose their names tended to identify themselves
with some positive value current at the time. Thus the name

354 EC3O-INVOLVEMENTS IN CONCRETE SOCIAL SITUATIONS

"John," almost unknown in Saxon England, spread widely with
the return of the Crusaders; the medieval craftsman, proud of his
skill, gratified himself with names such as Shoemaker, Carpenter,
Smith, etc.; others took the names of high offices such as Cham-
berlain, King, Duke. The Reformation, with the King James
version of the Bible, had a profound effect on English nomencla-
ture: girls were named Martha, Mary, Phoebe; boys Peter, Paul,
Matthew, and so on. The strict Puritans, desirous of standing out
from the rest, began the fashion of naming their children after
abstract virtues. And so children got such first names as Patience,
Prudence, Faith, Hope, etc. This fashion became so extreme that
some unfortunate children had whole phrases as their first names.
For example, there were three Barebone brothers named: If-Christ-
had-not-died-f or-thee-thou-hadst-been-damned Barebone ; Praise-
God Barebone; and Jesus-Christ-came-into-the-world-to-save Bare-
bone. As Holt says, in all of these instances the individual was
trying to "identify the self with something with which there was
already ego-involvement." [18, 32]

That individuals in everyday life try to get some ego-enhance-
ment from the prestige they hope to associate with their names is
revealed by the existence of various organizations which will, for
a fee, send to those who write a complete history of their family.
In their enticing advertisements, these organizations list such
ordinary names as Jones, Baker, Cooper and Smith. A skeptical
journalist wrote one of these organizations for a number of these
family accounts, each of which they advertised as "separate and
distinct works." He discovered striking similarities in them all,
similarities which built up the prestige of the recipient, no matter
what his name happened to be. He writes:

In each of 25 manuscripts there occurs a paragraph which flatter-
ingly summarizes the traits and characteristics of ancestors in that
particular family. This paragraph, with only the slightest modification
of a word or two, reads: "The descendants of these and probably of
other branches of the family of America have spread to practically
every state of the Union, and have aided as much in the growth of
the country as their ancestors aided in the founding of the nation.
They have been noted for their integrity, industry, energy, courage,
fiety, ambition, initiative, resourcefulness and ferseverance" Occa-

EGO-INVOLVEMENTS IN CONCRETE SOCIAL SITUATIONS 355

sionally, to add a nice touch of distinction to the family history, the
order of the words was shifted around. But in 21 of the 25 "separate
and distinct works," these italicized virtues were identical. [38]

Further confirmation of the prestige and status significance of
names is found in the rather common tendency of persons whose
names reflect some unpleasant stereotype or negative value to
change their names to something more common and accepted.
Jews have had trouble with their names all through their history.
In various countries and at various times, they have been forced by
law or decree to assume names that would distinguish them from
the non-Jews of a society. Such laws were passed in Bohemia in
1787, Napoleon in 1808 forced Jews to adopt certain names, and a
Nazi decree required "any Jew having a non-Jewish first name
to adopt as an additional given name Israel, if male, Sarah if
female." It became a practice for officials to sell names to Jews so
that those who were wealthy were able to acquire "good" names
such as Stern (Star), Blum (Flower). A young man whose name
had formerly been Ginsberg, but who had changed it to Gray,
when asked why he had changed his name said:

It was because of certain associations and meanings connected with
the name Ginsberg which did not apply to my family. [18, 115]

He commented that the former name "suppressed my ego and
gave me inferiority feelings."

There are also illustrations of government edicts commanding
all people to take certain types of names in the national interest.
Thus Edward IV of England in 1465 told the Irish to take English
surnames or forfeit their possessions; Philip II of Spain in 1568
forced the remaining Moors in Spain to be baptized with Spanish
names. In a decree issued in 1933, all Turkish citizens were
ordered to assume a distinct family name of Turkish origin. The
names taken by many Turks during this period reveal their ego
aspirations. Father Divine urges his "children" to assume new
names at the time they join his movement, on the theory that since
they have become new persons they should have new names. [6,
725]

Many people have so identified themselves with their names
that they have refused to change them for professional reasons or

356 EGO-INVOLVEMENTS IN CONCRETE SOCIAL SITUATIONS

because of custom. Lucy Stone, one of the early agitators in this
country for women's rights, refused to change her name when she
was married and believed so strongly that a woman somehow lost
her identity by assuming her husband's name that she became the
rallying point for the Lucy Stone Leaguers. As one of the Lucy
Stoners put it:

I confess that I believe there is something in names; that one's
name is what Lucy Stone called it "the symbol of my identity which
must not be lost." The point of view is simply that if you have from
your very first conscious thought regarded yourself as Anna Maria
Brown, you can't suddenly with any comfort regard yourself as
Mrs. Thomas Smith. [18, 110]

A Southern woman, when asked by Holt how she felt about
changing her name at marriage, wrote:

To be strictly truthful in the matter I shall have to admit that a
strong feeling of resentment predominates. I remember it as a dis-
tinct shock when I was first called Mrs. Landess. I felt at first a sort
of blank bewilderment and then I became almost angry — bristling
with resentment. I was always very proud of what Papa made
Hilditch stand for — all my ideals (real or fancied) I had cherished
seemed tied up in that name and then to have to change it to one
vastly inferior, which I came to realize stood for nothing but vulgarity
was almost too humiliating. [18, 130 f.]

Interesting personality comparisons might be made of professional
women who change their names when they are married, those
who keep their maiden names, and those who adopt the compro-
mise solution of using both maiden and married names together.
The martyr. The pages of history are rife with examples of
persons who preferred to die the death of a martyr or a hero than
to give up what to them were ideals more important than life
itself. Giordano Bruno, the Dominican friar of the sixteenth cen-
tury, was condemned to the flames by the Inquisition because he
would not renounce the ideas of God and the universe which the
Copernican doctrine had inspired in him. Paul Lafargue and his
wife, daughter of Karl Marx, committed suicide when they felt
they had outlived their effectiveness as protagonists for Marxism.
Joan of Arc, the Maid of Orleans, was tried as a heretic and burned

EGO-INVOLVEMENTS IN CONCRETE SOCIAL SITUATIONS 357

at the stake because of her innocent and unswerving allegiance to
the revelations of her "voices" which were not at all in conformity
to official Church interpretations. In such instances we have
illustrations par excellence of the fact that a value can and does
become such a central part of the ego, that the individual feels
life is intolerable and meaningless if this value cannot be preserved
as a part of the self.

World War II brought out in striking fashion — as most wars
do— the fact that ordinary soldiers and ordinary common people
sometimes prefer to take their own lives, to die for what they
believe is a cause (value) rather than be captured by the enemy.
The utmost heroism — self-sacrifice — was displayed by men fight-
ing in the various armies. Particularly dramatic illustrations were
exhibited by certain Japanese soldiers who chose to blow them-
selves to bits rather than give themselves up; suicide (Kamikaze)
pilots volunteered for extinction; there were authentic reports of
individual and mass suicides of Japanese civilians. These people
died as they did, not because of any innate "Japanese mentality."
They had learned thoroughly and felt intensely the particular set of
values taught by a chauvinistic religion which held that a life not
lived in the service of the Emperor or the State was valueless, while
death in the service was noble and would be rewarded in heaven.
[37] Heroes in other armies sacrificed their lives for other value
constellations.

Ego-involvements determined by situation. We have already
pointed out that an individual's behavior may be modified or deter-
mined not only because of ego-involvements due to the acceptance
of established norms, but also because of more or less temporary
ego-involvement created by the demands of an actual concrete
situation. Thus a person who happens to be at the scene of an
accident will often feel that it is his responsibility to help an in-
jured person until more competent professional aid arrives.
When we take a long ride in the train, get acquainted with the
other passengers in our car, a certain camaraderie often develops,
we feel that the people in that particular car are members of our
group as distinct from the passengers in other cars.

In the last chapter we cited an example of group formation from
Bill Mauldin's penetrating Up Front [29]. At the very beginning

358 EGO-INVOLVEMENTS IN CONCRETE SOCIAL SITUATIONS

of the book, Mauldin describes the identification a soldier makes
with his division — a somewhat more permanent identification than
one that may be built up with a special outfit assigned to a tem-
porary job but still a group situation brought on by the exigencies
of war, not an established group such as the family or the church,
characterized by values that remain relatively enduring.

During the three years I spent in the 45th Division, I was certain
that it was not only the best division in the army, but that it was the
army. Since then I have kicked around in more than fifteen other
divisions, and I have found that the men in each of them are con-
vinced that their division is the best and the only division. That's
good. [29, 1]

In Men Under Stress, a book filled with keen observations,
Grinker and Spiegel [16] describe the identifications and loyalties
that emerged when men were thrown together in the same air
combat team during World War II.

The most vital relationship is not the purely social. It is the feeling
that the men have for each other as members of combat teams and
toward the leaders of those teams, that constitutes the essence of their
relationship. It is an interesting fact that, although the members of
combat crews arc thrown together only by chance, they rapidly be-
come united to each other by the strongest bonds while in combat.
. . . The men and their plane become identified with each other with
an intensity that in civil life is found only within the family circle.
Crew members habitually refer to each other as "my pilot" "my
bombardier" "my gunner" and so on, and their feeling for their
plane is equally strong, since its strength and reliability are as im-
portant as those of any human members of the crew. . . . The emo-
tional attitudes the fliers ta\e toward each other have less to do with
the accident of their individual personalities than with the circum-
stances of their association. . . . The men in the combat teams are
brothers by virtue of their constant enforced association, their depend-
ence upon each other, their common ideals and goals, and their rela-
tion to their leaders. [16, 22ft., italics ours]

In another book, War Neuroses [17], the same authors show
how this identification with a group is one of the strongest forces
preventing anxiety in the individual. The group

EGO-INVOLVEMENTS IN CONCRETE SOCIAL SITUATIONS 359

. . . becomes the object of considerable love and affection on the
part of its members. They are proud of the group, and resent new-
comers. They are jealous of other groups, and strive to achieve per-
fection for their own. . . . Not what happens to the individual, but
what happens to the group, is the dominant concern. The injury, or
even death, of the individual is insignificant, compared to the fate of
the group. One pilot with an anxiety neurosis stated this very simply :
"I couldn't sweat it out at the field while my crew were over the
target. It was worse than going along." Through his identification
with the group, the individual shares in the achievement and victory
of battle — even if he should be injured or killed. A part of him con*
tinues to live gloriously, as a member of the group, no matter what
his personal fate. This alteration in disposition of the psychological
energy by virtue of identification with the group contributes im-
mensely to the capacity of the ego to ward off anxiety. [17, 118, italics
ours]

The loss of morale in the individual soldier and the consequent
change in his behavior when his group is broken up and he loses
his established loyalties is recognized in the following order issued
by General Joseph T. McNarney to all unit commanders of
American troops in occupied Germany (April 1946): [36, italics
ours]

Due to rapid demobilization and frequent change of station of units
and assignments of enlisted men and officers, firm ties of unit-pride
have been weakened. The traditional constant concern of officers for
the welfare of their men and consequent mutual loyalties have been
difficult to maintain during this transition period. Team-work often
has been forgotten.

Consequently discipline in certain localities and commands in this
theatre has deteriorated to a point of discrediting the fine performance
of our troops in general. Indications of this state can be found in :

A. Participation in black market activities and indulgence in drunk-
enness.

B. A high absent-without-leave rate and excessive incidence of
other disciplinary infractions.

C. The high automobile accident rate.

D. The excessive venereal disease rate.

E. The general lack of smartness in appearance and conscientious
observance of military courtesy.

360 EGO-INVOLVEMENTS IN CONCRETE SOCIAL SITUATIONS

F. The complaining attitude toward constituted military authority
and those duties essential to maintain high standards of soldierly
efficiency. [36]

In chapter 12, dealing with the breakdown of the ego, we shall see
further instances of the effect on the individual of the loss of links
to other kinds of groups.

Statements obtained from scientists doing strategic work on the
atomic bomb during the war revealed that under the stress of
circumstances they tended to lose any interest in personal acclaim
and identified themselves with the success of the venture as a
whole.

It was the newness and magnitude of the undertaking in time of
national crisis which created a spirit of cooperation and teamwork
within the group. One only had to note the lights burning in the
offices and laboratories far into the night to realize that time was of
the essence. These were also times in which there were so many
problems of basic scientific detail to be answered that the young
physicist or chemist, assigned one question to answer, felt that on the
successful resolution of his problem depended the venturing into the
next stage of development. . . . Cloistered theoretical scientists, uni-
versity professors and students, industrial engineers, presidents of
companies large and small, army dignitaries and government officials,
all these were able to iron out their views and settle differences of
policy on which hinged the success of the venture.

Another scientist reported that

In looking back over my experience with the Manhattan project, I
remember a great deal of friction and bitter argument, yet I can hardly
remember a case where the basis of friction was personal. I believe
the reason why the feeling was so strong in many instances was that
the individuals concerned were fighting for the success of the project
as a whole and differing only about what course would lead most
surely to that success. The very obstinacy with which some main-
N tained their point of view was because they felt that if they gave it
up they were giving up something much more important than per-
sonal opinions or prejudices. There were many instances in the
project of men taking on distasteful jobs merely because they felt they
had to be done. Almost universally it was necessary for the directors
of the project to keep the professional men from working too hard

EGO-INVOLVEMENTS IN CONCRETE SOCIAL SITUATIONS 361

rather than to push them. I really believe that there were very few
people on the project who were not willing to sacrifice their personal
feelings and ambitions for the over-all success. I would estimate that
in the professional group over ninety per cent of the men that I know
tried and, in large measure, succeeded in merging their egos with the
whole work. In many cases this attitude extended down through the
clerical and technical groups as well.

By June of 1944, 83 per cent of the people in the United States
felt they were personally doing something to help win World
War II. Skilled workers, industrialists, housewives — as well as
atomic scientists and those in the armed forces— were able to unite
their personal values with a larger social value. This identification
was determined largely by the circumstances of the war itself, by
common threats and the need for all-out effort if all were to sur-
vive, and not by any harmony of established values that continued
at war's end. Such developments as the wave of strikes that fol-
lowed the industrial "truce" during the war, controversies over
racial discrimination, and the full emergence of party politics in-
dicated that when the war was over there was no longer a unified
clearly understood well-directed "cause" for people to identify
with. Common allegiances broke down and gave way to separate
often conflicting group or class interests which existed in the par-
ticular social organization.

An example of the way an astute national leader in a democ-
racy got people to take part in a decision which he had to make
but which he knew might be resented is found in President Roose-
velt's announcement when he ordered General MacArthur's escape
from the Philippines. It was known from a public opinion poll,
taken shortly before MacArthur's departure, that half the people in
the United States felt General MacArthur should stay with his
men in the Philippines to the bitter end. Roosevelt was therefore
faced with the possibility that MacArthur would be branded as a
deserter by this sizable number of Americans. He could further-
more take it for granted that Axis propagandists would capitalize
on the event to show that American generals were yellow and cow-
ardly. The carefully worded statement issued by the President
as the first announcement of MacArthur's escape not only soothed
what would otherwise have been the ruffled American public but

362 EGO-INVOLVEMENTS IN CONCRETE SOCIAL SITUATIONS

also made it impossible for the Axis propagandists to make capital
of the event. It can be seen in the statement below how Roosevelt
put the decision up to every American citizen, made them feel it
was their decision, and that they could choose no other alternative.

I know that every man and woman in the United States admires
with me General MacArthur's determination to fight to the finish
with his men in the Philippines. But I also know that every man
and woman is in agreement that all important decisions must be made
with a view toward the successful termination of the war. Knowing
this, I am sure that every American, if faced individually with the
question as to where General MacArthur could best serve his country,
could come to only one answer. [35]

This was the whole announcement.

The effectiveness of "group decision" has been well known
and practiced for years in certain industrial concerns, such as the
DuPont Company in its safety programs, the great TVA develop-
ment, and the recurrent Five Year Plans of the Soviet Union.
For example, David E. Lilienthal, former Chairman of the TVA,
in his penetrating book, TV A— Democracy on the March, reports
that

From the outset of the TVA undertaking it has been evident to
me, as to many others, that a valley development envisioned in its
entirety could become a reality if and only if the people of the region
did much of the planning, and participated in most of the decisions.
To a considerable degree this is what is happening. Each year,
almost each month, one can see the participation of the people, as
a fundamental practice, grow more vigorous, and, although it suffers
occasional setbacks, it is becoming part of the thinking and the
mechanics of the development of the Tennessee Valley. [77, italics
ours]

And LilienthaPs book contains numerous illustrations to show
how group decisions were encouraged as a method of ensuring
maximum co-operation and effectiveness of effort. A demonstra-
tion of the same principle is found later in a report by Lewin
of experiments conducted during the war in an attempt to get
people to change their food habits: those who had actively helped
in establishing a group norm felt the decision was theirs. As the

EGO-INVOLVEMENTS IN CONCRETE SOCIAL SITUATIONS 363

report indicates, "the specific effect of asking for a 'group' decision
is to heighten the sense of involvement and thus secure greater
participation." [23, 9]

Status within groups. We have already reported a number of
studies which show the way in which an individual identifies him-
self with a particular occupation, race, or class, and the effect such
identification has on his own conception of status (chs. 4 and 6).
And we saw in the last chapter how the individual develops loyal-
ties to particular groups and the important role these loyalties play
in defining his ego links. It would, however, be an oversimplifi-
cation of the real state of affairs if any impression remained that
because an individual finds himself placed in some broad category
within the social organization, such as "skilled worker," "doctor,"
"Negro," or "servant," his identification with the group and the
status accorded him by other members of the group was identical
with the identification and status of all other people who fall
within the same general category. For, on closer examination, it
will be found that, in addition to the conflicting and ambivalent
loyalties already emphasized, there are generally very definite
hierarchies and substatus groupings within any broad category.
In addition to his general status derived from a broad reference
group, an individual acquires a specific status according to his
membership character within a given group. Hence, to under-
stand the particular ego constellation of any individual in a pre-
cise way, it becomes necessary to know how an individual places
himself and is placed by other members of a group within any
category objectively defined. The point can be illustrated with
reference to concrete observations of two commonly used descrip-
tive classifications— "Negroes" and "factory workers."

There is no need here to elaborate the fact that there is a wide-
spread stereotype in the United States concerning the place most
white people feel the Negro should have in our contemporary so-
cial organization. The existence of the color line was described as
follows by the father of an intelligent Negro boy who at the age
of 14 was just beginning to be aware of the fact that color made
a difference. While sitting on the doorstep of their home in a
middle-sized New Jersey city, the father pointed to a tramp who
happened to be walking along the street and said to his son, "You

364 EGO-INVOLVEMENTS IN CONCRETE SOCIAL SITUATIONS

see that tramp standing over there, Jim ? He's shiftless, common,
and no good. However, if he were to bathe, shave, and put on a
clean suit, he could gain entrance to any public place in the coun-
try. With you it's different. No matter what you do, how well
educated you become, you can never be treated on the same social
level as that tramp because of your color." [28, 1]

But within the Negro world itself, one finds approximately the
same hierarchy of status according to occupation, education, and
so on that exists in the surrounding white macrocosm. This is
only one example of a minority group accepting in part the norms
of the majority. Negroes who regard themselves as members of
the upper class, while denouncing the rigid caste barrier between
whites and Negroes will by and large ardently defend a class struc-
ture within the Negro group itself. Davis, Gardner, and Gardner,
in their study of the Deep South [12] indicate that four of the
questions asked by upper class Negroes of other Negroes trying
to break into the upper class, go somewhat as follows:

1) What has been his education? 2) Has he professional or semi-
professional status? 3) Are his language, manners, and dress "pol-
ished"? 4) Is he black? [12,2*6]

The answer to the last question must be "No." And the same
authors further report that "the overwhelming majority of colored
persons are considered lower class, according to the colored group's
own standards!' [222]

A particularly revealing fact about these specific status group-
ings among Negroes is that the lighter a Negro is in color, the
greater chance he has to rise in the social scale. An unusually
large percentage of light Negroes is found in the upper class of
the Negro world. A young Negress whose very light skin enabled
her to pass easily from the Negro to the white world revealed the
sensitivity of Negroes about their color when she reported:

When I am in the presence of dark skinned people, I'm always
very careful not to let the word "black" enter into my conversation.
I have seen dark people get very angry when anything concerning
blackness is brought up. They seem to think that you are belittling
or making fun of them. [28, 39]

EGO-INVOLVEMENTS IN CONCRETE SOCIAL SITUATIONS 365

This same Negress, a college graduate, observed that many of the
"better" Negro sororities definitely tended to exclude girls of very
dark skins. It is not unusual for Negroes when filling out docu-
ments (such as applications for a marriage license) that require
a designation of "color," to be quite specific if they are not them-
selves black, by inserting "light tan," "brown," and so on. Davis,
Gardner, and Gardner describe the way in which light-skinned
Negroes tend to form subcliques, and Myrdal reports that

In such cities as New Orleans, Charleston, Mobile, Natchez, and
later Washington, highly exclusive mulatto societies were formed
which still exist, to a certain extent, today. Color thus became a
badge of status and social distinction among the Negro people. [32,
696]

The same study also reports that

Darker Negroes who rose from the masses to distinction in the
Negro community by getting an education or by conducting successful
business enterprises showed an almost universal desire to marry light-
skinned women and so to become adopted members of the light-
colored aristocracy and to give their children a heritage of lighter
color. [32, 697]

An experimental demonstration of this process was reported in
Marks's study (pp. 136/.).

The importance of skin color within the Negro world, together
with certain practices such as the attempt of many Negro women
to take the curl out of their hair, clearly indicates that Negroes
have made many norms of the white world their norms, that by
and large in contemporary United States these norms taken over
from the white world become for them ego-involved in various
degrees. Because of his marginal position, various conflicts in
values or conflicts of ego identification are bound to be felt by a
large proportion of Negroes in our society: their own implicit
allegiance to certain bourgeois white standards and white norms
tend to run counter to any unequivocal allegiance to aspirations
certain Negro leaders may have for racial solidarity and unity and
likewise run counter to class allegiances that pay no attention to
culture whether white, black, or mulatto.

366 EGO-INVOLVEMENTS IN CONCRETE SOCIAL SITUATIONS

The hierarchy of status among skilled and semiskilled factory
workers has been highlighted in the past decade in the United
States by the intense rivalry between the two major labor unions —
one organized along craft lines, the other along industrial lines.
From the psychological point of view, it is by no means accidental
that craft unions got a much earlier start. For workers, identify-
ing themselves with a particular job or skill, could with relative
ease join others in the same specific occupation to form an or-
ganized pressure group in which all would benefit by the achieve-
ment of certain goals. The resistance met by the Congress of In-
dustrial Organizations in breaking down these relatively restricted
ego-involvements and transforming them into identifications with
persons of other skills in the same industry is well known.

A good description of the specific-status hierarchy felt by work-
ers because of their membership character in the same industry is
given in the detailed study of Roethlisberger and Dickson: [39]

In the factory, as in any social milieu, a process of social evaluation
is constantly at work. From this process distinctions of "good" and
"bad," "inferior" and "superior," arise. This process of evaluation is
carried on with simple and ready generalizations by means of which
values become attached to individuals and to groups performing cer-
tain tasks and operations. It assigns to a group of individuals per-
forming such and such a task a particular rank in the established
prestige scale. Each work group becomes a carrier of social values^
In industry with its extreme diversity of occupations there are a
number of such groupings. Any noticeable similarity or difference,
not only in occupation but also in age, sex, and nationality, can serve
as a basis of social classification, as, for example, "married women,"
the "old-timer," the "white-collared" or clerical worker, the "foreign
element." Each of these groups, too, has its own value system. . . .
Just as each employee has a particular physical location, so he has a
particular social place in the total social organization. ... It is obvi-
ous that these scales of value are never completely accepted by all the
groups in the social environment. The shop worker does not quite see
why the office worker, for example, should have shorter hours of work
than he has. Or the newcomer, whose efficiency on a particular job
is about the same, but whose hourly rate is less than that of some
old-timer, wonders why service should count so much. The manage-
ment group, in turn, from the security of its social elevation, does not

EGO-INVOLVEMENTS IN CONCRETE SOCIAL SITUATIONS 367

often understand what "all the fuss is about." As was indicated by
many of the studies, any person who has achieved a certain rank in
the prestige scale, regards anything real or imaginary which tends to
alter his status adversely as something unfair or unjust. It is apparent
that any move on the part of the management may alter the existing
social equilibrium to which the employee has grown accustomed and
by means of which his status is defined. Immediately this disruption
will be expressed in sentiments of resistance to the real or imagined
alterations in the social equilibrium. [39, 555 /.]

And the same authors report that dissatisfaction with wages is
due not only to the absolute amount of wages but to what the
worker may feel is an unfair wage differential between himself
and someone doing a slightly different job.

Complaints arise when wage differentials do not express appropri-
ately the differences in social significance which the different jobs
have to the employees themselves. Many workers who expressed a
grievance about wages went on to say that the reason for their com-
plaint was not that they were dissatisfied with their own wages but
that "it isn't fair." [39, 576]

This is one more example of the fact that judgment is based on a
referential scale.

In addition to the mixed loyalties caused by differences in the
nature of the jobs themselves, unionization, especially in the earlier
days when floods of immigrants were coming into the United
States, was made difficult because of the mixed national loyalties
of people who became factory workers. MacDonald, in her Labor
Problems and the American Scene [27], writes that

The foreign composition of the labor force has had a profound
effect on the trade unions. The difference in experience, language,
and especially skill has made a breach in the ranks of organized labor
by creating an aristocratic group with little consideration for the un-
skilled. The division line between skilled and unskilled has often
coincided with that of native and alien. ... By mixing nationalities
to prevent communication, pitting one group against another, playing
up the racial and religious antipathies of the Old World, introducing
immigrant strikebreakers, employers for a number of years were able
to control their labor forces for their own ends. Constant introduction
of new recruits tended to keep the labor market in a fluid condition.

368 EGO-INVOLVEMENTS IN CONCRETE SOCIAL SITUATIONS

No sooner had a labor group settled down and the union movement
made an attempt to enlist the workers than another immigrant group
was brought in. [27, 237 f.]

Job satisfaction. With increasing technological advancement,
the dependence of more and more people on large-scale industrial
production and distribution both for a livelihood and for consumer
goods, one of the most crucial problems of contemporary society
is the attitude toward the job held by those who occupy dependent,
wage-earning, or marginal positions. The fact that in the past
few decades the rapid industrial development in the United States
has enormously changed the occupational distribution of gainful
workers can be illustrated by the following census figures: there
is a marked decrease of agricultural workers, an increase of work-
ers in jobs concerned with the production or distribution of manu-
factured goods. Along with this shift in occupation has gone, of
course, the familiar shift of the population from farm to urban
areas.

PER CENT DISTRIBUTION OF GAINFUL WORKERS IN CERTAIN OCCUPATIONS:
1870 AND 1930 [9]

1870 1930

Agriculture 53.0 21.4

Manufacturing and mechanical industries 20.5 28.9

Trade 6.8 12.5

Transportation and communication 4.2 7.9

It is unnecessary to point out here that this increasing indus-
trialization has by no means been accomplished entirely by har-
monious relationships between management and workers in the
United States or most other countries. By and large, workers have
"had to fight" for higher wages, lower hours, and better working
conditions. A recent survey (1945) has shown that less than one
third of skilled and semiskilled workers are satisfied with their
incomes, whereas nearly 60 per cent of those in the business and
management class say they are satisfied. [10] When Centers asked
the question on a national survey, "Do you think working people
are usually fairly and squarely treated by their employers, or that
employers sometimes take advantage of them?" less than a third
of manual workers felt that the working people were being fairly
treated whereas approximately half of all business, white collar,

EGO-INVOLVEMENTS IN CONCRETE SOCIAL SITUATIONS 369

and professional people believed workers were getting what was
due them. [10]

We are calling attention to the fact that wages and hours are
fundamental conditions of work satisfaction to make it quite clear
that these must be taken as part and parcel of any more general
consideration of what constitutes work satisfaction. However, in
addition to the more important structural properties of economic
organization, it is apparent that "work satisfaction" involves psy-
chological factors that form a context within which satisfaction
with wages and hours is judged.

We cannot survey here in any detail the vast literature that has
accumulated on the problem of incentives in industry. Summariz-
ing a number of studies on work satisfaction (1939), Watson con-
cludes:

We have provided psychologically satisfactory employment for a
large proportion of the people in professional and managerial occupa-
tions, and for a majority of the middle-class workers in small towns.
We have been much less successful in the mines, factories, and un-
skilled trades. [45, 123]

And he points to the problem that concerns us here when he ob-
serves that certain investigations on the subject of job satisfaction
have shown that there is "most distress over ego injuries." H. J.
Ruttenberg, research director of the Steel Workers Organizing
Committee, expressed the workers' point of view in answer to a
question put to him at an industrial conference:

I live in a district where the workers live, and spend almost all of
my time with them, and they are emotionally dissatisfied, intellectually
dissatisfied, and economically dissatisfied . . . because of having to
respond to technical changes which they did not originate, and in con-
trast to [workers] who increased production when they were consulted
on technical changes. . . . One of the most fundamental impulses in
a man in a shop is self-expression. If he is denied that in determining
his wages, he feels much dissatisfied. If he is permitted expression in
the production set-up, then he feels that he has made a contribution
to the whole. [34, 133 f.]

From his review of industrial leadership, McGregor concludes that
"opportunities to participate in the solution of problems and in

370 EGO-INVOLVEMENTS IN CONCRETE SOCIAL SITUATIONS

the discussion of actions which may affect him, the opportunity
to assume responsibility as he becomes ready for it" are two of
the conditions necessary if an industrial worker is to feel satisfied
and secure. [30, 63] When the British Institute of Public Opinion
asked the question (January 1946) "Apart from wages and secur-
ity, what do you need most in a job for making you feel contented
whilst at work?" 40 per cent of all respondents gave answers that
revealed their desire for more active participation in the total job —
answers such as "cooperation between management and em-
ployee," "appreciative employer." Most of the other answers given
were very general ones such as "good working conditions," or con-
cern with specific desires for shorter hours.

Roethlisberger and Dickson conclude from their careful investi-
gation that2

It is not possible to treat, as in the more abstract social sciences,
material goods, physical events, wages, and hours of work as things in
themselves, subject to their own laws. Instead, they must be inter-
preted as carriers of social value. For the employee in industry, the
whole working environment must be looked upon as being permeated
with social significance. Apart from the social values inherent in his
environment the meaning to the employee of certain objects or events
cannot be understood. To understand the meaning of any employee's
complaints or grievances, it is necessary to take account of his position
or status in the company. This position is determined by the social
organization of the company: that system of practices and beliefs by
means of which the human values of the organization are expressed,
and the symbols around which they are organized — efficiency, service,
etc. [39, 374]

It is clear beyond any shadow of doubt that the satisfaction an
individual has in his job can never be complete unless he feels that
the work he is doing is Ms job, unless there is some way in which
he can participate through his job in some activity that will bring
him satisfaction. This satisfaction may be relatively restricted as
in the case of a man who feels the importance of his work in rela-

2 The failure of most American industrialists to take adequate account of some
of the conclusions that can be derived from these and other empirical studies is
pointed out by Elton Mayo of the Harvard Business School in his book, The
Social Problems of an Industrial Civilization.

EGO-INVOLVEMENTS IN CONCRETE SOCIAL SITUATIONS 371

tion to others in his factory unit; it may involve the larger satis-
faction he feels *s an important cog in the whole industrial plant;
or a worker may identify himself and his job with the fate and
progress of a whole social organization or with workers in all
countries.

It is not our task here to discuss the relative effectiveness with
which this job identification can be accomplished under different
systems of economic organization. But we can learn something
of the psychological components of job satisfaction among indus-
trial workers in the United States if we examine a concrete case
where job satisfaction seems to be extremely high. We take as our
example the Lincoln Electric Company which has received a great
deal of publicity. Just what conditions prevail in the Lincoln
Electric Company to make for job satisfaction ? Why does it stand
out as a plant where there appears to be complete harmony, co-
operation, and mutual confidence between "labor" and "manage-
ment"?

A report issued by the United States Department of Labor on
incentive wage plans (1942) states that the grievances workers
have against scientific management

... are attributable to the tendency of management engineers to
consider labor as impersonal and as a part of the machine process.
Workers feel that they are being treated as abstract "labor" rather than
human beings at work. [21, 7]

The undeniable success of the Lincoln Electric Company seems
to be due basically to the feeling of its President that "labor is an
individual not a commodity." [24, 203] And for Mr. Lincoln the
statement was more than words handed out by a public relations
department or aired at a management-labor conference. He pro-
ceeded to try to create the conditions within which the individual
could participate as an individual in the total job of the plant.
One of the first things he did was to encourage the formation of
an advisory board chosen from the entire personnel of the plant,
one man being elected from each department by all members of
that department The men on the board, together with the plant
superintendent and Mr. Lincoln, who acts as chairman, serve as

372 EGO-INVOLVEMENTS IN CONCRETE SOCIAL SITUATIONS

the board of directors of the plant. Here are a few of the deci-
sions this advisory board has put into operation: installed a piece-
work incentive plan with rates guaranteed by the company and
with the worker having the right to challenge the rates set; in-
sured all workers for the equivalent of a year's wages without cost
to the individual worker; provided two weeks vacation with pay,
closing the entire factory for the purpose; issued stock to the em-
ployees who want it (over half are stockholders); established a
suggestion system and provided that anyone whose suggestion for
more efficient production is accepted will receive half of the net
estimated savings for the first year of use (approximately 50 new
suggestions are turned in every month and about one tenth of
them prove useful); inaugurated a bonus system whereby each
worker receives what is regarded as his share of the bonus accord-
ing to his value to the company; installed an annuity plan and a
trust fund; set up an employee association to provide for social
and athletic activity and which has, for example, a sick committee
whose members have among their duties the obligation to visit
within 48 hours anyone who has not reported to work because of
illness.

Some of the claims which the Lincoln Electric Company can
make (in the early 1940's) are the following: Lincoln workers
produce more per hour than any organization making a com-
parable product in the world; Lincoln Electric factory workers are
the highest paid employees in industry anywhere in the world.
In 1943 the average annual earnings for all employees was $5,539.
Approximately 90 per cent of Lincoln employees own their own
homes. There is practically no labor turnover: of 260 employees
on the payroll ten years ago, 203 are still with the company. Lin-
coln selling prices are less than those of any company making a
comparable product.

Lincoln himself describes his plan as one based on "intelligent
selfishness." [25] What he means by this is that each individual
in the plant sees his relationship to the plant as a whole and
realizes that "he is a vital part of one going whole." The worker
knows that the company's success is his success and Lincoln em-
ployees do not seem to share the fear so common in many indus-

EGO-INVOLVEMENTS IN CONCRETE SOCIAL SITUATIONS 373

tries with incentive wage plans that they will either work them-
selves out of a job or that rates will be cut. According to Mr.
Lincoln, the plan under which his company operates

... has changed our workers from people who are working at a
job at so much an hour into people who feel their success is tied
definitely, completely and proportionately into the success of the com-
pany itself. They are not working at a job so many hours a day at so
much per hour. They are working to get a job done. This change of
attitude from working so many hours a day for so much money into
the desire of working to produce a certain result produces unbelievable
results in efficiency of production. [33, 21]

An employee of the company puts it as follows:

I know that the more I make, the more my company is able to make.
Every time any of us increases our efficiency, the amount saved is
proportioned between me and the rest of my business partners. [47, 4]

This particular employee regards himself as a business man with
definite status:

For some reason or other, a lot of people seem to be impressed
with the idea that because you work where the labor of production
gets your hands dirty, you have no right to be paid more than so much
a year. . . . Most of these fellows work with their hands and get them
pretty dirty sometimes, too. Yet no one ever questions whether they
are worth the incomes they make. I look at welding as a kind of
professional business, an art I have to be good at in order to keep up
with* the rest of the businessmen who work around me here at
Lincoln. [47, 4}

The Lincoln Electric Company, as we pointed out, is unusual.
The particular combination of factors that makes it what it is also
makes it something of a little world of its own. The company's
practices deviated so much from the usual ones in American in-
dustry that during World War II it was kept busy justifying its
methods to government committees and departments. There is
no union in the Lincoln Electric Company and the employees,
therefore, regard themselves more as "businessmen," identify them-
selves with the company and its welfare, not with other working
people in the larger world outside. In other words, employee

374 EGO-INVOLVEMENTS IN CONCRETE SOCIAL SITUATIONS

identifications with their jobs can be regarded as occurring within
a relatively restricted and isolated industrial microcosm: a micro-
cosm with its own norms and values. Hence the Lincoln em-
ployee, in identifying himself with his particular organization,
does not simultaneously and automatically identify himself with
more widespread values common to the whole social organization
within which his company is but a small part. Just what would
happen to the Lincoln plan and just what identifications Lincoln
Electric workers would make if there were a major depression are
moot questions.

Lilienthal's report of the development of the TVA clearly re-
veals the sense of identification and participation an individual
worker can obtain if conditions are such that it is apparent to
him that in working for a whole regional project he is benefiting
himself. He writes:

In pouring concrete so that the Douglas Dam could be built on a
world-record schedule, in tending the glow of the giant electric fur-
naces at Muscle Shoals, or in stringing aluminum and copper cable
along the line of march of transmission towers, TVA workers know,
and show they know, that in thus working for their valley they are
working for themselves; they build for themselves. [97]

And as Lilienthal points out, incentives based on identifications
with group norms can be stronger than incentives based on the
"profit motive" alone:

Whether in private business or public service a man's conviction
that he is performing an important service for others, that he is
part of something far more important than himself, is a measure to
him of the importance of that job. It is this, I think, that accounts
in considerable part for the continued enthusiasm of the TVA tech-
nical staff long after the newness of the undertaking has passed, a
spirit that has been observed and remarked upon by a long succession
of visitors from other parts of the country and the world. The notion
is naive that only by the incentive of pay or profit do men "keep on
their toes" and do their best work. Many of the TVA's key staff
members are earning less than in the posts they left to join this
job. \122]

EGO-INVOLVEMENTS IN CONCRETE SOCIAL SITUATIONS 375

At the present time, the identification of a worker with his job
in a factory, mine, or farm, and his simultaneous identification
with the larger values and purposes of the whole social organiza-
tion through his job can be best illustrated with reference to the
role of the worker in the Soviet Union. In a socialist organization
where all means of production and exchange are owned and oper-
ated by the state, the possibility exists for each worker, no matter
what his job, to identify himself with the purposes and aspirations
of the whole society. Socialism and Communism are constantly
held up to the people of modern Russia by their leaders as the
goals toward which each member of the society should strive. The
principles of socialism and Communism, as defined by Stalin, are
as follows:

The principle of Socialism is that in a socialist society each works
according to his ability and receives articles of consumption, not ac-
cording to his needs, but according to the work he performs for soci-
ety. This means that the cultural and technical level of the working
class is still not a high one, that the distinction between mental and
manual labor persists, that the productivity of labor is still not high
enough to ensure an abundance of articles of consumption, and, as a
result, society is obliged to distribute articles of consumption, not in
accordance with the needs of the members of society, but in accordance
with the work they perform for society. Communism represents a
higher stage of development. The principle of Communism is that in
a Communist society each works according to his abilities and receives
articles of consumption, not according to the work he performs, but
according to his needs as a culturally developed individual [42, 6]

In other words, the aspiration is that the standard of living and
the cultural level of all workers should eventually be raised to
the level enjoyed by the most advanced technicians or profession-
als. This is the ultimate goal which, as Stalin says, is now far
from realization.

The point that concerns us here is the fact that such a general
goal exists, is explicitly stated, and that a great effort is made by
the Government and party members to keep the goal constantly
before the eyes of the people. Status and social approval are meas-
ured in terms of the usefulness of an individual's labor in achiev-
ing the common goal. Particularly efficient workers are praised

376 EGO-INVOLVEMENTS IN CONCRETE SOCIAL SITUATIONS

in the press and honored with medals. Their photographs appear
on special bulletin boards of their factories. They become "Heroes
of the Soviet Union." For example, during World War II, hun-
dreds of official decorations were awarded to workers in the rear
as well as to members of the fighting forces. Special distinctions
are bestowed on factory or agricultural units that show particular
initiative or efficiency. Similarly every effort is made to turn pub-
lic opinion against those who do not seem to be doing their share.
It is in this general context that the Stakhanov movement, de-
veloped in the middle 1930's, assumed its particular significance.
Although from a technical point of view, it introduced no methods
not known and practiced in more advanced industrial countries
[26], and although the zest with which Stakhanovism was taken
up developed certain weaknesses and exaggerations because of
hasty application [13], there can be little doubt that the solid
achievements it represented in the long run were largely possible
because the individual Stakhanovite in trying to raise his own
production standards was not only increasing his income but help-
ing to achieve a national goal that he understood and identified
himself with. In becoming a Stakhanovite, an individual was be-
coming a national hero. For example, Molotov told the All-Union
Conference of Stakhanovites:

Do we not know that the most popular representatives of the
Stakhanov movement are rank-and-file working men and women?
Yesterday they were still unknown to many even in their own fac-
tories, yesterday they were on a level with the other rank-and-file
working men and women. But today the whole working class of the
Soviet Union knows the names of its new heroes, the names of those
working men and women who have become the standard-bearers of
the new movement in the fight for socialism. [31, 4]

Stakhanovism was regarded in the Soviet Union as a new form
of "socialist competition." There was not only competition be-
tween individual workers but competition between factories, fac-
tory departments, mines, and collective farms. This socialist com-
petition, the general principles of which were laid down by Lenin
in 1918, holds the possibility of leading to cohesion rather than to
a division of interest. For the competitor, whether he acts as an

EGO-INVOLVEMENTS IN CONCRETE SOCIAL SITUATIONS 377

individual or as a member of a larger unit, competes within the
larger framework of a common goal which is constantly made
clear through the press, over the radio, and in organizational
meetings. "The resultant change in the psychological atmos-
phere," as Ward observed it, "is one of the things that causes
the visitor to realize that he is in a new world." [44, 133]

In a speech to the members of the First Conference of Stak-
hanovites held in the Kremlin in 1935, Stalin told them:

People in our country do not work for exploiters, for the enrichment
of parasites, but for themselves, for their own class, for their own,
Soviet society, where government is wielded by the best members of
the working class. That is why labor in our country has social sig-
nificance and is a matter of honor and glory. . . . Here the man who
labors is held in esteem. Here he works not for the exploiters, but for
himself, for his class, for society. Here the man who labors cannot
feel neglected and solitary. . . . And if he works well and gives society
all he can — he is a hero of labor and is covered with glory. [42, 13]

This identification of the Soviet worker with the Communist
goal is seen in reports revealing the conviction of the Soviet citi-
zens that what the state accomplishes, he accomplishes; that what
the state owns, he owns; that his standard of living will be raised
by collective effort. An American observer writes that "The Soviet
people have learned from experience that 'what's ours is mine.' "
[44, 40] A system of ownership has been developed "which makes
it true that when a man works for others he is also working for
himself." [43 f.] A British engineer working in Russia has said
that

For an engineer, a maker of machines, work in a Soviet factory
offers tremendous satisfaction. The commercial principle that holds
sway in capitalist industry very often forces engineers to spend their
energy, strength, and knowledge for nothing, several factories turning
out one and the same article, each striving when an order comes to
secure the contract. All making new designs but only one obtaining
the order. The other designs are wasted. In the Soviet Union, on
the other hand, all tasks are linked up with the development of the
industry and the engineer knows that the plan he has drawn up will
be used. [20, 24]

378 EGO-INVOLVEMENTS IN CONCRETE SOCIAL SITUATIONS \

The conversations Pearl Buck reported with a Russian-born and
educated girl are revealing. This young woman, who had come
to the United States with her husband, was not a Communist.
Buck reports:

I discovered after our first conversation that she was even rather
vague about the political theories of communism. She judged her
country solely by pragmatic tests. What was good she knew because
it had been good for her and her family. What was bad was bad
because it had not lived up to her expectations. [3, 10]

Here are a few excerpts from the conversations.

"What did the village do with the kulak's brick factory?" I asked.

"It belonged to the collective farm," Masha said. "Those who
wanted to work there instead of in the fields could do so. The people
now felt the bric\ factory was theirs, and they worked harder than
ever and the production was higher than before. I worked in this
brick factory in the summer for several seasons, and of course, if you
are interested in profits, you compete, and we actually did two days'
work in one. Whoever produced the most was respected by others.
It was interesting and good work, and our collective farm took the
profits and in this way we built new cow barns, and we bought new
machines for the fields and to work on the flax." [49, italics ours]

"But I want to tell you about the evening school. Those people
worked all day and they came directly from the factory to the school,
which was in a barracks. During the little free time before school
began, they read and studied. Sometimes they discussed the day's
work, and I remember they spoke especially about quotas of work,
whether this shop or that factory had lived up to its program. They
felt the responsibility for the worJ^. . . ." [3, 94, italics ours]

A Stakhanovite girl who had broken many production records
in the textile mill said to an American observer:

We work in our own mill, we work for ourselves, without any
bosses, for our country . . , and that is why we are able to tend such
a large number of looms. [15, 13 f*]

This possible identification of the Soviet worker with the values
of the whole social organization has been very neatly stated by
the Soviet psychologist Rubinstein:

EGO-INVOLVEMENTS IN CONCRETE SOCIAL SITUATIONS 379

The very fact of social life and social division of labor naturally, by
an internal necessity, brings it about that the activity of man is directly
aimed at the satisfaction not merely of his own personal needs but of
those of society as well. To satisfy his own needs, a man must make
the satisfaction of social needs the direct goal of his actions. . . . The
socially important, becoming the personally important while still re-
maining the socially important, arouses in the individual tendencies
and forces of great strength . . . the socially important, becoming
personally important for the individual, arouses in him forces much
more powerful than those evoked by personal desires alone, and differ-
ent from them in their content, origin and significance. [40, 795, italics
ours]

Special attention should be drawn to the last part of Rubinstein's
statement. For he brings out here a fact we have repeatedly em-
phasized, namely, that in new social situations new norms and
values often arise, that the individual identifies himself with these
emerging values and exhibits a behavior which qualitatively as
well as quantitatively can and often does differ from the behavior
"characteristic" of him— "characteristic" only because of the par-
ticular constellation of social determinants in his more usual en-
vironment, and which can change radically when those deter-
minants are altered.8

In this particular publication, Rubinstein gives no psychological
underpinning for his observation that what is socially important
can be personally important and vice versa. And he himself poses
as "one of the greatest tasks of psychology" the study of "how
these moral motives arise and operate, how the individual rises
above the merely personal to the socially important, and how the
socially important becomes personally important for him." [795]
It seems to us that the answer to this question is found in the
genetic formation of the ego, the incorporation of social values into
the ego structure of the individual, the identification of the self
with established values of a group or with new norms that may
arise in new social situations. There will be "harmony," "integra-

8 We repeat again that we are not ignoring here individual differences in tem-
perament and ability and certain characteristic tendencies of behavior which they
determine. But the relationship of these personality characteristics and traits to
the social environment and to particular constellations of situational determinants
cannot be analyzed in detail here.

380 EGO-INVOLVEMENTS IN CONCRETE SOCIAL SITUATIONS

tion," "adjustment" between the individual ego and the values of
various groups or the common values of a whole social organiza-
tion insofar as the established values of groups or social organiza-
tions are objectively compatible with one another.

In a society where the values of different class, status, occupa-
tion, religious, racial, or nationality groups conflict, in which di-
lemmas are produced by conflicting statuses, an individual almost
invariably finds himself placed within two or more of these con-
flicting groups. He will almost inevitably be torn in his loyalty,
ego-involved to a greater or lesser extent with values that he can-
not make jibe with each other. Hence he will feel subjectively
torn, frustrated, maladjusted. This conflict of loyalties was clearly
indicated, for example, in a study of the attitudes of U. S. coal
miners made by the Office of Public Opinion Research in early
May 1943. [7] At that time the miners' leader, John L. Lewis,
was threatening to call a strike. A temporary truce had been ar-
ranged while negotiations continued. The war was raging, and,
if a strike were called, government seizure of the mines seemed
inevitable. The workers were asked if they would favor or oppose
calling a strike. The representative sample voted two to one
against a strike. They gave as their chief reason their desire not
to let down the war effort, their confidence in President Roosevelt
as a man who would give them a square deal. They preferred,
almost two to one, to follow Roosevelt's orders as Commander-
in-Chief to orders of their union leaders. At the same time, how-
ever, over three fourths of them said that, if a strike were called,
whether they wanted it or not, they would go out— they couldn't
let their union and their union leaders down. As Roethlisberger
and Dickson point out in their impressive studies of workers in
an American industry, there is in the United States often consid-
erable conflict between an individual's personal values and the
values accepted by him and his immediate coworkers, the values
held by management, or the values the worker encounters outside
the factory when he assumes the role of a citizen. They conclude:

Where the social conditions of work are such as to make it difficult
for a person to identify himself or his task with any social function,
the worker is also liable to obsessive responses and hence to a dimin-
ished capacity for work. [39, 328]

EGO-INVOLVEMENTS IN CONCRETE SOCIAL SITUATIONS 381

And they state further that the ultimate significance of an indi-
vidual's work

... is not defined so much by his relation to the company as by
his relation to the wider social reality. Only in terms of this latter
relation can the different attitudes of satisfaction or dissatisfaction of
individuals who are presumably enjoying the same working environ-
ment and occupational status be understood. [39, 376]

In a revealing study on some of the factors that make for work
satisfaction, W. T. Watson concluded from his analysis of the case
histories of a variety of workers that "some form of restlessness or
mental dissatisfaction seems always to be present" if workers are
separated "in spirit and objective," if they cannot see some general
meaning or value in their job. [46, 255] All these results confirm
Cooky's earlier observations concerning the importance of the
various roles a worker plays in society in addition to his role as
a producer. [11]

On the other hand, the worker in the Soviet system has the pos-
sibility of finding an extension of the values held by his local fac-
tory unit to the whole factory or the collective operation and, in
turn, to the larger goal of the whole social organization. Thus
the values which are for him personal values and which give him
status in his own eyes and the eyes of his fellow workers are part
and parcel of or reflections of values of larger social organizations
of which he and his immediate group regard themselves a part.

The upshot of all this is, then, that the individual will feel con-
sistently and harmoniously ego-involved in proportion to the ob-
jective consistency and harmony of the many social situations and
values which form his particular ego constellation. Without un-
derstanding the relationship of the values which constitute the ego,
the extent of conflict between or overlapping of those values, we
cannot understand either the dynamics of industrial morale or the
reasons for the differential participation of a given individual in
his job and the gratification that job provides him. The "active"
and "reactive" egos of industrial workers described by G. W. All-
port [1] become meaningful when there is an understanding of
the relationship between values that have become personal and
value judgments encountered in actual working conditions.

382 EGO-INVOLVEMENTS IN CONCRETE SOCIAL SITUATIONS

This conflict between the values of small social units or between
the values of small social units and those of larger organizations
could be schematically represented somewhat as follows. Figure 4
could represent the loyalties of a typical American factory worker
in 1946. He will have definite loyalties to his family; these may
conflict with his loyalties to his union (as, for example, when his
family suffers if he goes out on strike) ; the loyalties to his union
may oppose some loyalty and identification he may have to the
industry in which he works; the precepts he has subscribed to as
a Christian he will find at times contradicted by racial discrimina-
Union Public allegiance
Discrimination "

Family

Religion (^*

Management

FIG. 4. Conflict of values and identifications.

tion which he may practice or condone; if he thinks of the con-
sumers' welfare or of the progress of the "nation as a whole" he
may feel that some of the organized pressures which he has to
exert along with other workers in order to maintain or improve
his position as a worker are in conflict with the over-all welfare of
the public of which he is a member, and so on. Just what con-
flicts become emphasized, what degrees of overlapping in values
occur, what identifications are strongest at the moment will be
likely to vary enormously with the changing demands of situa-
tions. In brief, there is no clear-cut overlapping of the values that
have become part of him.

By contrast, in a situation where there is no contradiction either
between the values of different groups or between the values of
single groups and a larger social organization, the possibility
exists of complete overlapping so that what is socially important
can and will become personally important and what is personally
important can and will be socially important. The schematic pic-
ture would then be somewhat as in Figure 5.

It is clear from all this that the common cliche "human nature
can't be changed" has no basis in fact. "Human nature" is incon-
ceivable unless it develops in some social environment. Any social

REFERENCES 383

environment includes values or norms which vary in their uni-
formity and their duration. What the individual is and what he
feels himself to be are largely conditioned by the particular con-

FIG. 5. Overlapping of values and identifications.

stellation of values he learns and that become a part of him. To
begin with, "human nature" as represented by any single indi-
vidual or any group of individuals is not something that follows
any fixed pattern laid down by inexorable laws of nature; it is,
rather, a complex of potentialities subject to enormous differentia-
tions, emerging in new forms and evolving to new adjustments in
a constantly changing world.

REFERENCES

1. ALLPORT, G. W., The psychology of participation, PsychoL Rev., 1945, 53,

117-32.

2. AUDIENCE RESEARCH INSTITUTE, INC., Increasing Profits with Continuous Audi-

ence Research, New York: Am. Book, 1941; reprinted by permission of G. H.
Gallup.

3. BUCK, P. S., Tal{ About Russia with Masha Scott, New York: John Day,

4. CANTRIL, H., The prediction of social events, /. Abnorm. & Soc. Psychol., 1938,

33, 364-89.

5. The Invasion from Mars, Princeton: Univ. Press, 1940.

6. The Psychology of Social Movements, New York: Wiley, 1941.

7. How the Miners Feel, unpublished report, Princeton, 1943.

lished in Fraser's Magazine, 1833—34.

9. CENSUS, BUREAU OF, Industrial Distribution of the Nation's Labor Force: 1870

to 1930, October 23, 1938.

10. CENTERS, R., Psychological aspects of socio-economic stratification: an enquiry

into the nature of class, Princeton Univ.: thesis to be published.

11. COOLEY, C. H., Social Process, New York: Scribner's, 1918.

384 EGO-INVOLVEMENTS IN CONCRETE SOCIAL SITUATIONS

12. DAVIS, A., B. B. GARDNER, and M. R. GARDNER, Deep South, Chicago: Univ.

13. DOBB, M., Soviet Planning and Labor in Peace and War, New York: Inter-

national, 1943.

15. FRIEDRICH, G., Miss U.S.S.R., New York: International.

16. GRINKER, R. R., and J. P. SPIEGEL, Men Under Stress, Philadelphia: Blakiston,

1945.
17. War Neuroses, Philadelphia: Blakiston, 1945.

18. HOLT, R. R., Studies in the Psychology of Names, thesis on file Princeton Univ.

Library, 1939.

19. HURLOCK, E. B., Motivation in fashion, Arch. PsychoL, 1929, 17, no. 111.

20. JOHNSON, H., The Secret of Soviet Strength, New York: Workers Library,

21. LABOR, DEPARTMENT OF, Incentive-Wage Plans and Collective Bargaining,

Washington: 1942, Bull. 717.

22. LEVY-BRUHL, L., How Natives Thin\, London: Allen and Unwin, copyright

1926.

23. LEWIN, K., The Relative Effectiveness of a Lecture Method and a Method of

Group Decision for Changing Food Habits, State Univ. Iowa, Child Welfare
Research Station, 1942.

24. Mr. Lincoln's formula, Fortune, February 1944, 143-206.

25. LINCOLN, J. F., Intelligent Selfishness and Manufacturing, Cleveland: Lincoln

Electric Co., 1942.

26. LITTLEPAGE, J. D., and D. BESS, In Search of Soviet Gold, New York: Harcourt,

Brace, 1937.

27. MACDONALD, L., Labor Problems and the American Scene, New York: Harper,

28. MANGUM, W. R., Class and Status Determinants within the Negro Caste, thesis

on file Princeton Univ. Library, 1946.

30. MCGREGOR, D., Conditions of effective leadership in the industrial organization,

/. Consult. Psychol, 1944, 8, 55-63.

31. MOLOTOV, V. M., What is Stakhanovism? , New York: International, copyright

1936.

33. NATIONAL INDUSTRIAL CONFERENCE BOARD, INC., Wage Incentive Practices,

Studies in Personnel Policy, No. 68, published by The Conference Board,
247 Park Avenue, New York 17, N. Y., 1945.

34. NATIONAL RESEARCH COUNCIL, Fatigue of Workers — Its Relation to Industrial

35. New Yor^ Times, March 18, 1942, statement by President on ordering Mac-

Arthur to leave the Philippines.

36. April 26, 1946, order issued by McNarney to all unit commanders of

American troops in occupied Germany.

37. NEWELL, T. E., Ncuropsychiatry in the Japanese Army, /. Am. Med. Assoc.,

1944, 126, 373 f.

38. Reader's Digest, June 1937, 108, anonymous.

REFERENCES 385

39. ROETHLISBERGER, F. J., and W. J. DICKSON, Management and the Worker,

40. RUBINSTEIN, S., Soviet psychology in wartime, Phil, and Phenom. Res., 1944, 5,

181-98.

41. SHERIF, M., The Psychology of Social Norms, New York: Harper, 1936.

42. STALIN, J., The Statyanov Movement in the Soviet Union, New York: Work-

43. VEBLEN, T., The Theory of the Leisure Class, New York: Modern Library,

45. WATSON, G., Work satisfaction, in Industrial Conflict: A Psychological Inter-

pretation (G. W. Hartmann and T. Newcomb, eds.), New York: Cordon,
1939, ch. 6.

46. WATSON, W. T., Division of Labor: A Study in the Sociology and the Social

Psychology of Wor1{ Satisfaction, Ph.D. dissertation, Univ. Chicago, 1930.

47. WILSON, N. F., Charlie Wilson, businessman, Adventures in Business, 1944, II.

CHAPTER 12
BREAKDOWNS OF THE EGO

The ego cannot be regarded as a fixed, rigid, or permanent en-
tity. For no matter how well formed or "integrated" the ego may
seem to be, it can be and sometimes is considerably altered by
stresses and strains and upheavals of one sort or another. These
pressures may be due either to the impact of concrete situations
which have various degrees of compellingness, or they may be
rooted in the physical organism and due to motivational (instinc-
tual) tensions or to organic disturbances. Even though an indi-
vidual builds up a relatively well-formed ego in the course of life,
even though he may have a number of firmly established ego-
attitudes which determine or affect his judgment and behavior,
even though his particular constellation of ego-involved values
has a fairly stable continuity of personal identity, and even
though the individual experiences the continuous flow of his own
identity from day to day and from year to year, and others around
him have consistent expectations as to what he will or will not do
under various conditions — in spite of all this — sufficient pressure
of one kind or another can break down the ego in varying degrees.

There will, of course, be wide individual differences in the par-
ticular way any given person is affected by the same pressure or
pattern of forces. We have repeatedly pointed out that ego-con-
stellations vary according to social and personal values and that
they vary not only in their range of inclusiveness but also in their
intensity. Undeniable individual differences in temperament, abil-
ity, and organic functions all affect ego stability. Nevertheless,
the variety of individual differences, whatever their cause, in no
way alters the fact that the ego can be radically changed; can
break down; can expand, shrink, dissociate, or regress if a situa-
tion is so compelling as to be crushing, if the deprivation of an
instinctual need is so severe as to be "unbearable," or if an organic

386

DISSOCIATION OF THE EGO FROM THE BODY 387

disturbance is so great as to make "normal*' behavior impossible.
The whole problem of the breakdown of the ego, and we repeat
again, an ego that is genetically formed, deserves much more de-
tailed and elaborate consideration than space allows here. But in
this chapter we can at least indicate with examples, some of the
circumstances under which the ego is altered in one way or an-
other, beginning with relatively normal instances and ending with
pathological cases.

DISSOCIATION OF THE EGO FROM THE BODY

The child has to learn and does learn that his body is part of
himself. And he learns the norms that constitute modesty, physi-
cal attractiveness, and morality. A constellation of values, both
social and personal, associated with his body — its appearance, well-
being, sanctity — become an integral part of the genetically formed
ego (ch. 7). We feel inferior if our physical attractiveness,
strength, or poise is not more or less up to standard; we feel em-
barrassed if we overhear someone say that we smell badly or don't
keep our fingernails clean.

In her revealing autobiography [10], Sheila Cousins, a London
prostitute, pointed clearly to the distinction between her body as
an integral part of her person and her body as something men
used.

I have moments when I realize that I am a person to no one, that
to the male I am just a body, to the policeman a chance of promotion,
to the rest simply a problem. [2]

However lofty their protestations, men were, in the end, only after
my body. [10, 145]

"I wasn't a good prostitute," she writes. "I hadn't sufficient de-
tachment from what I was doing to be able to pretend feeling for
my clients ... the act of sex I could go through because / hardly
seemed to be taking fart In it. It was merely something happen-
ing to me, while my mind drifted inconsequentially away. In-
deed, // was scarcely happening even to me: it was happening to
something lying on a bed that had a vague connection with me,
while I was calculating whether I could afford a new coat or

388 BREAKDOWNS OF THE EGO

impatiently counting sheep jumping over a gate!' [10, 150 f.,
italics ours]

Personal interviews with ten prostitutes in New York City
confirmed Cousins' observations that, when participating in the sex
act as a prostitute, a woman, as a person f does not usually seem to
be involved.1 Of the ten young women interviewed, only two said
that they put "themselves" into the sex act when being paid for it.
Both of them described themselves as "over-sexed." For the other
eight, any "enjoyment" was only a pretense put on for business
reasons. Here are some typical statements from the conversations
with prostitutes:

The less personal you become the easier it is on you.

I think I can honestly say that any emotions I might display to a
man are just pretense. / never become aroused. Afterwards I am
tired and a great deal disgusted with the horrible habits men acquire.
But I guess I am no better than they are or I wouldn't be with them.

I almost always pretend that I am having some sort of response.
After all these men are paying money to be kidded. The least I can
do is see to it that they are not cheated. How good an act do I put on ?
I suppose all the things we do in this are acting to some extent. I kid
and laugh with them before I get down to real business, this makes
them think I'm a pretty good sport, but believe me sometimes I could
choke them. I don't care what anyone says, it's not as easy as some
people think.

Do I put myself into it? No, I don't. Any man who has to go out
and pay for it, is not worth the effort it would take to try and respond.

// doesn't mean anything at all to me. How could it mean anything
when you make your living at it? This is a business just like any
other. You can't be sentimental in this racket. The men want you
to go down and that is all. So you get as much as you can out of
them and put as little as you can into it.

But when these prostitutes were with their husbands (and quite
a number of them were married) or went out with their sweet-
hearts or boy friends, the sex act took on a very different charac-
ter; the women reported that they took part in it as individuals,
that it was happening to them, not just to their bodies.

1 These interviews were all made privately and confidentially by a young woman
personally acquainted with the prostitutes. Her assistance was obtained through
the kind interest of a New York physician.

DISSOCIATION OF THE EGO FROM THE BODY 389

Sheila Cousins reports her feelings after she first met Richard
whom she later married.

I liked Richard. I felt at once he wasn't xmt to buy me. That first
day he got me a pair of gunmetal stockings and a pair of gloves after
lunch, but I knew that there would be no account to settle in a
fumbling taxi going home. There was a friendly shyness about every-
thing he said or did. ... I discovered that he was not only in love
with me, he respected me. I think he was the first man who ever had.
[10, 136 f.]

In a life where sex is merely a commodity, casually traded over the
counterpane daily, the faintest spark of personal affection grows to be
worth a fortune. [10, 182]

The same thing appears in the conversations with New York
prostitutes. When they go out with their lovers or boy friends,
they indulge in characteristic feminine resistances. Their egos are
involved, and they want to defend them with the feminine wiles
appropriate to the norms of their society. And if they do have
intercourse, their reaction is more complete, they feel involved.

When I meet a man whom I would really like as a lover, I flirt
with him. If you choose a man, that does not mean he is necessarily
attracted to you. So it is only natural that you have to assert yourself
in order to interest him in you. When I have finished with a man
who pays me, I feel tired. I feel like leaving him as soon as possible.
But when I am with my boy-friend it's so different. He comes to my
house. I always meet the other men outside. When my boy-friend
comes we make a real time of it. We eat and drink and fool around.
We talk and have fun. I flirt with him for I want him to keep
interested in me.

I have many affairs with men who do not pay me. // a man is nice
and I am attracted to him I see no reason why I should not indulge
myself. I don't believe I flirt with them openly but I do try to attract
them. Doesn't every woman try to attract men to her with what she
considers her feminine guiles? As for any such affair being auto-
matic, that is for animals, not people.

The same lack of ego-involvement — the separation of the physi-
cal needs of the body from the self— can be seen from the accounts
of men describing sex relations they have had with women who
were not their sweethearts or wives. Here is an account of the sex

390 BREAKDOWNS OF THE EGO

life of officers and men overseas with the U. S. Army during
World War II written for us by an American officer who spent
nearly four years abroad.

During my time overseas I talked intimately with many officers and
men of the American Army. Most of them were in their twenties.
Quite a number were married, many not long before they had been
ordered abroad. Although some of these marriages were either on the
rocks or obviously about to break up, the majority of the boys seemed
very much in love with their wives. They would talk to me for hours
about their wives, their children if they had any, and their plans for
the future of their family.

Frequently, however, the morning after one of these talks, they
would tell me in jocose fashion about some gal they had slept with
the night before. There was no embarrassment whatever about such
confessions and probably a few hours later they would be telling me
again how much they loved their wives.

The explanation, I am sure, lies in the complete dissociation in the
minds of these particular soldiers between their wives and families, on
the one handt and the necessity of relieving their glandular pressures
on the other. In their eyes, there is no connection between these two
things. While the man might sleep temporarily — and perforce by
necessity — with sluts and prostitutes, there is never any doubt in his
mind where his love and major values lie: with his wife and his home.
In following the necessitous path of extramarital relationships, he does
not feel that he is doing his wife any harm (short of contracting a
disease), and feels quite clear that his behavior has nothing to do with
what will be his life when he returns home again. This is not true,
of course, for all soldiers, but did seem to be the state of affairs for
most of those who indulged in extramarital relations.

All of this points again to the ancient and well-recognized
conclusion that the physical sex act can be regarded as an act of
"love" in proportion to the extent the partners merge their egos,
identify themselves with each other. Van de Velde has expressed
it in his famous book Ideal Marriage:

What husband and wife who love one another seek to achieve in
their most intimate bodily communion, and, whether consciously or
unconsciously, recognize as the purpose of such communion is: a
means of expression that makes them One. [42, 321]

THE EGO MAY TEMPORARILY DISSOLVE 391

THE EGO MAY TEMPORARILY DISSOLVE

Under certain conditions an individual may merge his own ego
with another person's, feel that he — as a single identifiable person
— has ceased to exist and that he belongs to and is a part of some-
one else. In the next chapter we cite illustrations from literature
of this mergence of one ego with another, of lovers who, together,
feel as one but who, alone or separated, feel personally torn apart.
This same melting away of the ego is also experienced by certain
creative artists who "lose themselves" in their work. The dancer,
Martha Graham, has said, for example, that an artist must first
"destroy himself if he is to be creative. [5, 142] In elaborating
this statement of Martha Graham's, a commentator writes:

It was not merely a matter of sloughing off this manner and that
technique. A whole self had to be danced out and away. [5, 142]

The ego may also temporarily "break down" under the influence
of alcohol or various drugs. There is an apt definition of the
"superego" as "that portion of the personality which is soluble in
alcohol." Since we will indicate later (pp. 492 /.) that there seems
to us no reason to use the term superego as something distinct
from the ego, we can just as well apply this definition to the ego
itself. Everyone knows that when a man gets drunk he is likely
to say or do things which surprise those who know him well.
After consuming sufficient alcohol, a "gentleman" or "lady" may
clearly lose some of his normal behavioral characteristics because
some of the restraining influences of his ego — personal or social
values which are part of himself— have collapsed. In the inter-
views with prostitutes, we have seen how these young women
often dissociated their bodies from their persons in their work.
The prostitutes were also asked if alcohol had any effect on the
ease with which they could give their bodies to a customer.
Among those who drank, the consensus of opinion was that a few
drinks before intercourse for business did facilitate separation of
the "self" from the body. Here are some of their statements.

Drinking to me is a boon. I naturally am a reticent person, and
alcohol brings me out of myself. I become quite bold.

J92 BREAKDOWNS OF THE EGO

Another reports:

Alcohol makes me feel like being more entertaining. Some of the
girls get all ginned up, so that they can take anything that comes
along.

Another girl said:

This job of mine is not as easy as some people think, so a little nip
now and then does the trick.

Those who have studied inveterate drinkers known as alcoholics
seem generally agreed that the underlying reasons for the addic-
tion is its acceptance by the individual as a method of escaping or
overcoming some unpleasant situation or emotional conflict, or its
use to make it possible for an individual to play some role denied
him in normal life. [33, ch. 12] A penetrating analysis of alco-
holics has been written by Bales who states that

The alcoholic is a man divided against himself. No matter how
genuinely he may agree with those who condemn him, there is another
part of him which fights back . . . the drinker becomes more and
more isolated, "desperately alone," "misunderstood," more and more
bound up with his own circular reasoning and self-destructive tend-
ency. . . . The alcoholic "loses his perspective," as some of them put
it, and finds himself "bucking the whole world." [4, 16]

It might be mentioned in passing and in connection with the
function of groups as described in chapter 10 and the overlapping
of identifications discussed in chapter 11 that the most successful
cures for alcoholics seem to be those which enable the individual
to reintegrate his broken ego "with a social group of which he
feels truly and basically a part, a group which understands him
thoroughly and sympathetically." [4, 17] The current success of
the organization known as Alcoholics Anonymous seems due, for
example, almost entirely to the fact that the members of the
organization are all ex-alcoholics, that "the new candidate in such
a group intuitively recognizes that he is among friends" [18] and
that in such a group "the alcoholic obtains recognition and re-
sponse through the admission of thoughts and activities which,
before, he had been desperately trying to hide, even from him-

BREAKDOWNS OF TOE EGO UNDER EXTREME DEPRIVATION 393

sqlf." [18] In summarizing the success of Alcoholics Anonymous,
Bales writes:

As a member of a solidary group in which the desired ideas are
held as group convictions, they come home to the individual with a
personalized, tailored-to-fit quality, and with an emotional intensity
and repetition impossible to duplicate in any other way. In the matrix
of a concrete group with which the individual is closely identified, and
in which he has a particular role, the ideas and desired behavior pat-
terns can be thoroughly integrated with his social goals, tied up imme-
diately and directly with those emotions and needs which can only be
activated and satisfied in a social context. [4, 21]

In describing the use of the drug pentothal as an aid in relieving
neuroses created by war experiences, Grinker and Spiegel speak
of "the sedative effect of the drug on the ego" [22, 436]. and state
that it "serves to desensitize the ego." [383] Without necessarily
accepting the psychoanalytic implications of these authors, we find
their description of the effect of the drug highly pertinent to our
discussion here. For they point out how pentothal, combined with
intelligent psychotherapy, can bring together different portions of
the self into a more normally integrated ego. Under the influence
of pentothal "the relationship between regressive dependent needs
and self-respecting ego forces and even overcompensations often
becomes quite clear as the different portions of the personality are
expressed in associations." [391]

Under the influence of the drug and during the process of abreac-
tion, although not fully conscious, the ego, devoid of the stress of
anxiety, synthesizes some and often much of the important isolated
and pathogenic material into its main body. It is as if the emotions or
the memories had been separated from the active ego forces as in a
hysterical dissociation, because they had been too threatening to the
ego's stability or productive of terrifying and unendurable anxiety.
[22, 392 f.]

BREAKDOWNS OF THE EGO UNDER EXTREME DEPRIVATION

If an individual is long denied the satisfaction of an instinctual
need, then there is a considerably greater chance that he will
transgress the established norms which under more usual condi-

394 BREAKDOWNS OF THE EGO

tions are part of his ideas of good conduct and with which he
would normally identify himself. Enforced sexual continence
may lead to such results as obscene acts and homosexuality; pro-
longed hunger may lead to theft or to some other form of anti-
social or at least undignified behavior.

Bill Mauldin, in describing the "abject poverty and hunger of
the Italian refugees" encountered by the United States Armies in
Italy, has pointed out the very unladylike behavior of old Italian
women under such conditions.

It would take a pretty tough guy not to feel his heart go out to the
shivering, little six-year-old squeaker who stands barefoot in the mud,
holding a big tin bucket so the dogface can empty his mess kit into it.
Many soldiers, veterans of the Italy campaign and thousands of similar
buckets, still go back and sweat out the mess line for an extra chop
and hunk of bread for those little kids. But there is a big difference
between the ragged, miserable infantryman who waits with his mess
kit, and the ragged, miserable civilian who waits with his bucket.
The doggie knows where his next meal is coming from. That makes
him a very rich man in this land where hunger is so fierce it maizes
animals out of respectable old ladies who should be wearing cameos
and having tea parties instead of fighting one another savagely for a
soldier's scraps. [31, 66 ff.f italics ours]

Another American soldier told how norms of decency broke
down in Italy and Sicily to such an extent that formerly respectable
women sent children out on the streets to solicit Allied soldiers
for them, to circumvent the stringent penalties imposed on public
prostitution. These observations are particularly significant since
the soldier who reported them had lived in Italy for some time
before the war, spoke fluent Italian, had seen the country under
normal conditions and knew that the behavior he observed was
nothing "typical" of Italy but due to the extraordinary conditions
created by war.

While in Palermo, I saw little children soliciting trade for their
sisters, cousins, aunts, or mothers. They would stop soldiers on the
street with such remarks as "Hey, Joe, wanna gal, verra clean, only
one dollar," or they would use some American slang to mention per-
versions that made the trade sound more interesting. In one instance,
I observed a mother with her daughter carrying on "trade" in a single

BREAKDOWNS OF THE EGO UNDER EXTREME DEPRIVATION 395

dark room on a squalid street on the outskirts of the city with another
G.I. outside, waiting. From all accounts I could gather, these women
had originally come from the servant class who now found a more
profitable way to spend their time. On other occasions, I encountered
women of higher class means inviting officers to their homes, hoping
to acquire some political favor or food. Their "trade" was more
formal and practiced with little publicity. War widows or those who
had their husbands in Allied prison camps were especially among the
latter type. On still other occasions, one found young girls who were
out to have a "good time" and the disruption of family life spread a
sense of "devil may care" attitude. Most of these women had been
bombed out of their homes and had lost their cherished possessions.
Many had had relatives killed. They had been forced out of their
normal home environments and the fear of ostracism from the social
pattern indigenous to that environment no longer existed. It was no
wonder they had become cynical, hard-bitten and had chosen this pro-
fession out of economic necessity. I had spent considerable time in
Italy before the war. What I saw during the war was a real shock to
me because it was so very different from what I had previously
known.2

A German physician, once an inmate of the Belsen concentration
camp, has reported how the ordinary self-respecting and law-
abiding citizens of normal life "resorted to cannibalism to avoid
starvation." The account of his testimony states:

He told how human beings fought like animals for food, how they
carried human flesh around in their pockets, and how the SS (Nazi
Elite Guard) ordered those who practiced cannibalism hanged or
beaten to death. [35]

Further evidence that the ego is not a mystical entity, that it is
related to the organism and affected by physical deprivation is
seen in changes of personality such as feelings of unusual exhilira-
tion and well-being, loss of judgment, emotional outbursts, the
impairment of critical ability and self-criticism, if an individual
breathes air which lacks the amount of oxygen normally required
(Anoxia). [40, 585 f.] Recent studies have also shown that even
a slight deficiency of vitamin B has marked influences on a per-

2 These observations were given us by R. V. Botsford, Princeton '48, who was
with the American Army in Italy.

396 BREAKDOWNS OF THE EGO

son's behavior and the conduct he would normally feel befitting
to him. Summarizing a number of studies, Shock reports:

One of the symptoms of even slight vitamin B deficiency in human
subjects is their increased irritability, moodiness, lack of cooperation
and "meanness." With more severe B-vitamin deficiency such mental
states as apathy, depression, and emotional instability have often been
observed. A most striking study is that of Williams, ct al. (1942)
who restricted the B-vitamin (thiamin) intake of eleven women to
.45 mg. daily, which is an amount little, if any, below that obtained
in many American diets. Within six or eight weeks the subjects
began to show such symptoms of emotional instability as irritability,
moodiness, quarrelsomeness, lack of cooperation, and vague fears pro-
gressing to agitation and mental depression. When thiamin was
restored to their diets, or even when riboflavin was reduced in the
presence of adequate thiamin, no such symptoms were observed.8
[40,59S/.]

THE EGO MAY BREAK DOWN IF ESTABLISHED NORMS COLLAPSE OR
ARE NO LONGER IN FORCE

If an individual has identified himself, made part of himself,
certain social values which are suddenly and completely upset or
destroyed by some major cataclysm, then that portion of the ego
composed of those values may itself be destroyed, and the indi-
vidual may exhibit behavior quite out of keeping with what he or
his friends would regard as normal or right for him. Two illus-
trations, both dealing with the collapse of norms in Germany as
a result of Allied advances, will suffice here to show how behavior
can be radically altered when normal ego-involving standards are
suddenly withdrawn.

A vivid description of the looting of a German castle was written
for us by Lewis F. Gittler. The important part of the story for our
present interests is put in italics. It shows how respectable middle-
class Germans in one moment condemned the looting of the castle
by others, even by other Germans who happened to be peasants,
but in the next moment themselves indulged in looting when they

8 The study referred to by Shock is [45],

EGO MAY BREAK DOWN IF ESTABLISHED NORMS COLLAPSE 397

learned that there was something they wanted badly and could
now steal without fear of legal action or particular social dis-
approval.4

Near the Weser River east of Paderborn was a large modernized
castle dominating a town of about 350 inhabitants. A cavalry recon-
naissance squadron on its way to the river passed by the castle about
8 P.M. one evening. There had been no American troops in the town
as yet and there was no resistance on the part of the Germans. It was
an out of the way town, reachable only by a dirt road thru a forest.
As the column of jeeps, half-tracks and armored cars passed the castle,
they decided to spend the night there. The major sent in an officer
to negotiate with the Baroness. He asked for two floors for his troops.
She could remain in her own quarters and the upper two floors. She
began protesting, complaining it would not be feasible and generally
became such a nuisance about the thing that the Major ordered the
castle evacuated by its occupants in two hours. The old Baroness left
and the toughened reconnaissance troops moved in. The castle was
jampacked with goods and clothes and furniture and foods of all
kinds. The troops disturbed nothing outside of the wine cellar.
There they found 1,000 bottles of French champagne and cognac.
Until 4 A.M. they drank and finally left at dawn with every bottle of
liquor, camera, souvenirs, etc. At dawn, the townspeople woke up to
find the Americans gone. Many came back from the fields where
they had hidden in terror. There was no authority left in the town.
The old Baroness (known locally as the Alte Hexe, "old witch,") was
in another chateau about 15 miles away where Army trucks had taken
her and her servants. The Baroness had been the power and the
mainstay in that village. Her grounds and acreage had about 200
Poles and Russian slave laborers.

I had come in with the reconnaissance squadron and after they left
I stayed behind. At about 6 A.M., the Russians came into the courtyard
and seeing no one around went into the castle and came out loaded
down with clothing. The Poles were next. They went in and came
out with hundreds of jars of conserved foods. The German peasants
went in next and carted out lamps and bedding. In the house where
I was staying were several refugees from Krefeld and Duesseldorf.
They were of the substantial middle class and had used this as their
summer house. One was an art dealer, another a soap manufacturer,

4 This incident was first reported to us by Donald V. McGranahan, former
major, AUS, who suggested we get in touch with Mr. Gittlcr.

398 BREAKDOWNS OF THE EGO

another a publisher. We watched the looting going on and as it
became more and more intense, these Germans were outraged by the
filthy Poles and the thieving Russians and the stupid peasants. They
talked about dignity and honor and how Americans should prevent
this sort of thing and if the Alte Hexe comes back there would be
hell to pay. Just then, the sister of one of the men in the house came
in breathlessly saying, "Someone just opened the big room with the
silverware!' It had been known in the town that the hexe had thou-
sands of Solingen flat ware in a special room, and all kinds of kitchen
utensils, boxes and boxes of them. The soap manufacturer and the
art dealer nodded and a moment later muttered something about going
downstairs. I saw them go into the castle with a dozen other re-
spectable-looping Germans. A minute later they came out with their
arms full of canopeners, kjiives, ]or\$, scissors and pots. The cycle of
looting was completed and the castle was quiet again with only a few
Poles scavenging around.

Members of the German army during World War II were
generally regarded as highly disciplined troops, with great love
and respect for the Fatherland. However, documents found on
German troops, captured during the last months of 1944 after the
Germans had been pushed back on their own territory and when
it was becoming clear that defeat was inevitable, revealed warnings
from German commanders against looting by German soldiers on
German territory. The documents indicate in no uncertain terms
that the considerable looting going on during that period was
entirely inconsistent with the duty and honor of a German soldier.8

In the last chapter we noted that some individuals identify them-
selves so completely with certain established values that they prefer
to die the death of a martyr or a hero rather than live in a world
in which these values are taken away. Such people refuse to
compromise, and by destroying themselves they preserve what they
regard as their integrity. For them there is no breakdown, no
dissociation, no alteration of the ego. The implication is that those
who do not follow the logical course of the martyr must make
readjustments if they are to live in peace with themselves. As
Dublin and Bunzel remark in their study of suicide [11, 281] "self-

6 The writers wish to thank Donald V. McGranahan for sending these captured
documents.

EGO MAY BECOME RE-FORMED UNDER SITUATIONS OF STRESS 399

destruction seems the only solution of intolerable difficulties," and
they cite notes left behind by suicides which show how impossible
it has been for them either to alter themselves or escape from
themselves.

Bettelheim has described the case of a prominent German
politician who had been kept in a concentration camp by the Nazis
and who saw that adaptation to the camp was only possible if a
basic change occurred in his personality and value relationships.
The man killed himself rather than live on as essentially another
person.

He declared that according to his experience nobody could live in
the camp longer than five years without changing his attitudes so
radically that he no longer could be considered the same person he
used to be. He asserted that he did not see any point in continuing
to live once his real life consisted in being a prisoner in a concentra-
tion camp, that he could not endure developing those attitudes and
behaviors he saw developing in all old prisoners. He therefore had
decided to commit suicide on the sixth anniversary of his being
brought into the camp. His fellow prisoners tried to watch him
carefully on this day, but nevertheless he succeeded. [7, 438]

THE EGO MAY REGRESS, DISSOCIATE, OR BECOME RE-FORMED
UNDER EXTREME SITUATIONS OF STRESS

Comparatively few individuals, however, choose self-destruction
to self-modification. The more likely effect of extreme stress
caused by pressures from the environment is some change of the
ego formed during the course of life. This may be clear and
drastic or it may be relatively hidden and subtle. Numerous
examples of such alterations have been observed during the past
few years under the many varieties of social upheaval concomitant
with the rapid social change in most Western societies.

From studies made on the psychological effects of unemploy-
ment, for example, it can be readily discerned that if an individual
is not provided the opportunity or right to work, the constellation
of values constituting his ego may deteriorate radically, causing a
shift in his aspiration levels and a breakdown of former group
loyalties. We should emphasize that in this discussion we are not

400 BREAKDOWNS OF THE EGO

generalizing that these are the inevitable effects of unemployment
and depression alone, but that unemployment and depression
sometimes can and do cause these effects as well as others that do
not concern us here. And obviously, how any single individual
will react to unemployment will depend in part upon personality
factors such as temperament and on the length and circumstances
of unemployment.

Autobiographies written by unemployed people in Poland in the
early 1930's and reported by Zawadski and Lazarsfeld [46] vividly
reveal the "feelings of degradation and superfluousness" experi-
enced. A youth writes, for example,

I become something absolutely superfluous in my own family. I am
nineteen years old, and I define my part quite clearly as that of a
sponger. [46, 240]

An unemployed man tells how he no longer feels that he is an
integral part of society:

Of the many unemployed who have committed suicide lately, many
did it, as I believe, under the influence of the fixed idea that they had
become superfluous in the world. Really, every unemployed person
is excluded from the creative life. For instance I had, as long as I
worked, although I did it for the wages, the definite feeling that I
participated in the antlike, productive activity of mankind. [46, 240 f.]

The effect of this ostracism on the normal feeling of self-respect is
clear. One of the unemployed writes, for example,

I look for a job. / bow with servility, I as\, 1 beg, I humble myself
and lose my ego. I become a beast, a humiliated beast, excluded from
the realm of society. [46, 238, italics ours]

Another says:

Life has made a coward of me. Sometimes I would like to bend
myself in an humble way before the world and beg, "Buy me! Buy
me!" [46, 238]

The effect of unemployment on one's own conception of his
social status and his loss of status in the eyes of others is exempli-
fied by the statement of a 43-year-old mason who wrote:

EGO MAY BECOME RE-FORMED UNDER SITUATIONS OF STRESS 401

How hard and humiliating it is to bear the name of an unemployed
man. When I go out, I cast down my eyes because I feel myself
wholly inferior. When I go along the street, it seems to me that I
can't be compared with an average citizen, that everybody is pointing
at me with his finger. I instinctively avoid meeting anyone. Former
acquaintances and friends of better times are no longer so cordial.
They greet me indifferently, when we meet. They no longer offer me
a cigarette and their eyes seem to say, "You are not worth it, you don't
work." [46, 239]

After reviewing numerous studies made on the psychological
effects of unemployment (1938) Eisenberg and Lazarsfeld point
out

. . . that the last stage of unemployment consists of a general nar-
rowing of activities as well as of outlook on life. There is also a
narrowing of wants and needs. Yet there is a limit beyond which this
narrowing cannot go; otherwise a collapse occurs. [12, 378]

The effect of unemployment on the status relationship held by
different family members provide particularly neat illustrations of
the way an individual's role and position can change if he loses one
of his main and traditional functions, in this case if the father in
an American family is unable to carry out his role as the bread-
winner. Summarizing the analysis of 65 case studies collected in
Newark during the depression of the early 1930's, Stouffer and
Lazarsfeld, in their monograph on The Family in the Depression
[41] state the following "hypotheses" concerning the shifts in
family loyalties and authorities:

1. If an unemployed father loses authority with his wife he is very
likely to lose authority with his children.

2. Conversely, if an unemployed father loses authority with his
children he may or may not lose authority with his wife.

3. If the father is unemployed, an adolescent daughter is more likely
to rebel against deprivations than an adolescent son, who gets unusual
ego satisfaction if he can be treated like a grownup as the result of
even slight contributions to the family budget.

4. The presence of an unemployed father in the home, unless there
is great irritability and conflict, tends to increase his companionship
and authority with very young children.

402 BREAKDOWNS OF THE EGO

5. If the mother takes a job, after the father loses his, authority over
the children tends to be transferred to the mother.

6. The conflict between father and son tends to be greater if the son
returns home unemployed after a period of employment than if the
son had never been employed.

7. If the father is employed and especially if he has some influence
with his friends outside of the family, a depression tends to increase
the dependence of a son on the father, since such a father is likely to
be the best means of getting the boy a job.

8. Authority based on categorical orders and punishment is more
likely to deteriorate, in the family of an unemployed father, than
authority based on intimacy and an attempt at mutual understanding.
[41, 116 /.]

In Angell's The Family Encounters the Depression, dozens of
examples can be found of the restriction of the ego due to unem-
ployment. The following case, taken almost at random, describes
what happened to one of the older sons of a family who, together
with his father and sister who were once wage earners, had lost
his job: [2]

He has completely lost his role. He is unable to face what he con-
siders an exposure. He considers himself a failure. His inadequacy
stands revealed to himself. He has previously sensed it, but never
actually experienced it. Without his shield or a good job he cannot
face the rest of the world. Occasionally he "talks big" but has lost all
his braggadocio. Very often he talks deprecatingly of himself. Some-
times he will sit for hours and do nothing but stare. He lacks initia-
tive of any sort. He hates activity of any kind, hates to look for work.

Sometimes he will tirade against every one — the government, church,
home, friends. One feels a tension, a conflict, a strain when he is
about. Sometimes when this strain is too great he "goes to pieces" in
a most pitiable, horrible way. All his inhibitions, his restraints, are
lifted and he reveals all his hurts, his disappointments, frustrations —
till it is more than others can bear. He once became involved in such
a scene in the presence of several young nieces. All the children were
weeping and utterly torn with sympathy. He is now incapable of
making the least decision for himself— for instance, to wear or not to
wear a coat is a source of conflict. [2, 201 /.]

Many other effects of unemployment on ego standards and
values can be listed from a review of the literature on the subject.

EGO MAY BECOME RE-FORMED UNDER SITUATIONS OF STRESS 403

A common finding is that levels of aspiration are definitely low-
ered [26]; some unemployed who never before touched liquor
may take to drink [46, 237 /.]; some may lose all former respect
for those whom they once regarded as their superiors and their
bosses [242f.]; some lose all national loyalties [249]; and, if unem-
ployed workers are not highly organized, class-conscious, or in
some way cared for by their union or other group, their solidarity
with other workers is apt to deteriorate and to be replaced by
feelings of hostility toward each other and by individualistic
competition and the like. [244 f.]

In their article, Personality Under Social Catastrophe, Allport,
Bruner, and Jandorf summarize an analysis of 90 life histories of
persons who experienced various degrees of persecution and suffer-
ing in Germany after the Nazi rise to power on January 30,
1933. [1] The authors state as one of their summary conclusions:

Even catastrophic social change does not succeed in effecting radical
transformations in personality. Before and after disaster, individuals
are to a large extent the same. In spite of intensification of political
attitudes (toward extreme opposition) and in spite of growing aware-
ness and criticism of standards of judgment and evaluation, the basic
structure of personality persists — and, with it, established goal striving,
fundamental philosophy of life, skills, and expressive behavior. When
there was change in our subjects, it did not seem to violate the basic
integrations of the personality but rather to select and reinforce traits
already present. [1, 19 f.]

But they also point out in their conclusion that, in addition to the
stability of these traits:

Besides aggressive responses, direct or displaced, we find defeat and
resignation, regression, conformity, adoption of temporary frames of
security, changes in standards of evaluation, lowering of levels of
aspiration, heightened in-group feeling, increased fantasy and insula-
tion, and, above all, increased planning and problem-solving. [1, 20,
italics ours]

Now just what "personality" is and just what changes in thought
and behavior have to take place before personality can be consid-
ered to have "changed" is a problem we cannot go into here.
However, we have already cited in previous chapters numerous

404 BREAKDOWNS OF THE EGO

instances of profound alterations in behavior and attitude due to
new situations in which an individual finds himself. Without in
the least denying the fact that manifestations of temperament,
abilities, or organic characteristics often show an amazing con-
sistency under different conditions, any conception of personality
which leaves out ego-involvements seems quite inadequate for
social psychology and, what is more important, quite unsupported
by the facts of the laboratory and everyday life which show so
clearly the effect of these ego-involvements in determining be-
havior. This point of view seems supported by the Allport-
Bruner-Jandorf study itself. In commenting upon the changed
attitudes toward National Socialism as the movement became
more and more powerful and ubiquitous in Germany, the authors
note "the inevitable desertion of neutral attitudes as the social
crisis verged into personal catastrophe" [9], and they quote from
one case study the remark:

"Everything was appraised according to pro- or anti-Nazi; there was
simply no possibility of being objective. You had to belong to one
group. We individualists instinctively felt the loneliness of our posi-
tion outside any group." [1, 9, italics ours]

They also point out that "great anxiety and feelings of insecurity
were practically universal," [11] and that the most frequent cause
of this anxiety was "uncertainty of future status." [12] Another
of their findings is that

As the months of persecution went on, 42 per cent of the cases for
whom data are available betrayed an increased fatalism in outlook.
. . . Others made attempts to come to terms with the situation through
alterations in their scale of values. ... In some cases, for example,
moral standards were disturbed. [1, 16, italics ours]

Such terms as "resignation," "regression," "adoption of temporary
frames of security," "changes in standards of evaluation," "lower-
ing of levels of aspiration" obviously have no meaning if the
implication that these psychological conditions are related to the
ego is taken away.

Just what did happen to the egos of German citizens when they
were put in very extreme situations has been brilliantly described
by Bettelheim in his report of his own experiences at the German

EGO MAY BECOME RE-FORMED UNDER SITUATIONS OF STRESS 405

concentration camps of Dachau and Buchcnwald and his observa-
tions and conversations with other inmates. [7] Bettelheim is
careful to point out that "there were great individual variations'*
and that his statements must be regarded as generalizations.
However, it is quite apparent from his account that there were
limits to individual variations and that generalizations were, there-
fore, quite possible.

Summarizing the effect of the initial shock of being taken pris-
oner and deprived of civil rights, Bettelheim states:

It seems that most, if not all, prisoners tried to react against the
initial shock by mustering forces which might prove helpful in sup-
porting their badly shaken self-esteem. Those groups which found in
their past life some basis for the erection of such a buttress to their
endangered egos seemed to succeed. Members of the lower class
derived a certain satisfaction from the absence of class differences
among the prisoners. Political prisoners found their importance as
politicians once more demonstrated by being imprisoned. Members
of the upper class could exert at least a certain amount of leadership
among the middle-class prisoners. Members of "anointed" families
felt in prison as superior to all other human beings as they had felt
outside of it. [7, 428 f.]

The initial effort was, then, an attempt to preserve the established
constellation of ego-attitudes.

When the prisoners were removed from the prison to the con-
centration camp, every effort was made by the Gestapo "to break
the prisoners as individuals." [418] The Gestapo principle was
"to force the prisoners to feel and act as a group, and not as indi-
viduals." [434] In pursuance of this policy the Gestapo "insisted
that none of them [the prisoners] was any better than the others."
[447] Among other methods of achieving the purpose was

... the hostage system and the punishment of the whole group for
whatever a member of it does; not permitting anybody to deviate in
his behavior from the group norm, whatever this norm may be. [452]

If a prisoner tried to protect a group, he might have been killed by
a guard, but if his action came to the knowledge of the camp adminis-
tration then the whole group was always more severely punished than
it would have been in the first place. In this way the group came to

406 BREAKDOWNS OF THE EGO

resent the actions of its protector because it suffered under them. The
protector was thus prevented from becoming a leader, or a martyr,
around whom group resistance might have been formed. [7, 436]

In addition to various tortures administered, other methods of
destroying individuality were systematic and crude attempts to get
the individual to dissociate himself from established norms and
values. Prisoners were forced

... to hit one another, and to defile what the guards considered the
prisoners' most cherished values. For instance, the prisoners were
forced to curse their God, to accuse themselves of vile actions, accuse
their wives of adultery and of prostitution. This continued for hours
and was repeated at various times. [7, 429]

Bettelheim noticed that new prisoners who had not yet been
broken or had not resigned in any way were unusually sensitive
to any news from the "outside" world which reflected any change
in their social position.

Even the smallest change in their former private world attained
tremendous importance. . . . Their desire to return exactly the person
who had left was so great that they feared any change, however trifling,
in the situation they had left. Their worldly possessions should be
secure and untouched, although they were of no use to them at this
moment. [7, 439 f.]

The general feeling seemed to be

// nothing changes in the world in which I used to live, then 1 shall
not change, either. . . . The violent reaction against changes in their
families was then the counterpart of the realization that they were
changing. What enraged them was probably not only the fact of the
change, but the change in standing within the family which it im-
plied. [7, 440, italics ours]

Bettelheim notes how particularly disturbing and "unforget-
table" experiences were that could not be related to some existing
frame of reference.

It seems that camp experiences which remained within the normal
frame of reference of a prisoner's life experience were dealt with by
means of the normal psychological mechanisms. Once the experience
transcended this frame of reference, the normal mechanisms seemed

EGO MAY BECOME RE-FORMED UNDER SITUATIONS OF STRESS 407

no longer able to deal adequately with it and new psychological
mechanisms were needed. [433, italics ours]

The psychological reactions to events which were somewhat more
within the sphere of the normally comprehensible were decidedly
different from those to extreme events. It seems that prisoners deal
with less extreme events in the same way as if they had happened
outside of the camp. For example, if a prisoner's punishment was not
of an unusual kind, he seemed ashamed of it, he tried not to speak
about it, A slap in one's face was embarrassing, and not to be dis-
cussed. One hated individual guards who had kicked one, or slapped
one, or verbally abused one much more than the guard who really
had wounded one seriously. In the latter case one eventually hated
the Gestapo as such, but not so much the individual inflicting the pun-
ishment. Obviously this differentiation was unreasonable, but it
seemed to be inescapable. One felt deeper and more violent aggres-
sions against particular Gestapo members who had committed minor
vile acts than one felt against those who had acted in a much more
terrible fashion. [7, 435]

As time went on and as one torture followed another, the author
consciously felt the pressure on his ego and realized the inadequacy
of established frames for the interpretation of camp experiences,
and the danger that his body and its daily life might somehow
become split off or detached from what he really regarded as
himself. He states:

If the author should be asked to sum up in one sentence what, all
during the time he spent in the camp, was his main problem, he
would say: to safeguard his ego in such a way, that, if by any good
luc\ he should regain liberty, he would be approximately the same
person he was when deprived of liberty. He has no doubt that he
was able to endure the transportation, and all that followed, because
right from the beginning he became convinced that these horrible
and degrading experiences somehow did not happen to "him" as a
subject, but only to "him" as an object. [7, 431]

This observation was confirmed by others and not limited to
Bettelheim's own introspection as a psychologist. He writes:

The importance of this attitude was corroborated by many state-
ments of other prisoners, although none would go so far as to state
definitely that an attitude of this type was clearly developed already

408 BREAKDOWNS OF THE EGO

during the time of the transportation. They couched their feelings
usually in more general terms such as, "The main problem is to
remain alive and unchanged," without specifying what they meant
as unchanged. From additional remarks it became apparent that
what should remain unchanged was individually different and roughly
covered the person's general attitude and values. [7, 431]

Bettelheim goes on to describe this detachment he felt:

It was as if he watched things happening in which he only vaguely
participated. Later he learned that many prisoners had developed
this same feeling of detachment, as if what happened really did not
matter to oneself. [431]

During the transportation the prisoners developed a state of detach-
ment, feeling as if what happened did not really happen to them as
persons. [7, 433 1 italics ours]

If an individual was unable to keep his ego intact, was unable to
view what was happening as something not happening to him,
then the only alternatives were to commit suicide or suffer a break-
down or dissociation of the ego and a subsequent re-formation that
made conditions bearable. We have already cited the case of a
man who was conscious of these alternatives and who chose sui-
cide as the lesser of the two evils. Bettelheim reports that the
suicides that did occur were confined mainly to middle-class
prisoners who were particularly anxious

. . . that their status as such should be respected in some way.
What they resented most was to be treated "like ordinary criminals."
After some time they could not help realizing their actual situation.
Then they seemed to disintegrate. [7, 427]

For the majority of prisoners it seemed that this ability to remain
detached was lost, The Gestapo was successful in breaking down
individuality. Old norms disappeared, and new ones took their
place. Bettelheim reports, for example, that

Prisoners who died under tortures qua prisoners, although martyrs
to their political conviction, were not considered martyrs. Those who
suffered due to efforts to protect others were accepted as martyrs.
[7, 436]

And he notes that

EGO MAY BECOME RE-FORMED UNDER SITUATIONS OF STRESS 409

... as time went on the difference in the reaction to minor and
major sufferings slowly seemed to disappear. [437]

There was a general "regression to infantile behavior" on the
part of nearly all the prisoners who "asserted their power as a
group over those prisoners who objected to deviations from normal
adult behavior." [444] The prisoners began to live

. . . only in the immediate present. . . , Friendships developed as
quickly as they broke up. Prisoners would, like early adolescents,
fight one another tooth and nail, declare that they would never even
look at one another or speak to one another, only to become close
friends within a few minutes. They were boastful, telling tales about
what they had accomplished in their former lives, or how they suc-
ceeded in cheating foremen or guards, and how they sabotaged the
work. Like children they felt not at all set back or ashamed when it
became known that they had lied about their prowess. [7, 445 f.]

The relapse of more adult attitudes under the strain of some
deprivation, the stress of conditions that seem irreconcilable with
established attitudes, or the internal conflicts and contradictions
between various attitudes is a relatively common form of ego-
breakdown. We will note it again in the cases of war neuroses
cited later in this chapter. This regression to a more infantile level
of adjustment frees a person from what has become his intense
and trying effort to maintain his more usual consistent status.
Often quite "normal" people resort to it temporarily for relief.
Bettelheim notes that, once this regression had taken place:

No longer was there a split between one to whom things happened
and the one who observed them . . , everything that happened to
them, even the worst atrocity, was "real" to them. [7, 437]

The extent to which the original ego had broken down is indi-
cated by Bettelheim's statement that

Once this stage was reached of taking everything that happened in
the camp as "real," there was every indication that the prisoners who
had reached it were afraid of returning to the outer world. [437]

Old prisoners did not like to mention their former social status or
their former activities, whereas new prisoners were rather boastful
about them. [7, 443]

410 BREAKDOWNS OF THE EGO

Bettelhcim reports that

Some of the indications from which one could learn about the
changed attitudes were: scheming to find oneself a better place in
the camp rather than trying to contact the outer world, avoiding
speculation about one's family, or world affairs, concentrating all
interest on events taking place inside of the camp. [439}

Old prisoners did not like to be reminded of their families and
former friends. When they spoke about them, it was in a very
detached way, [7, 442]

It is particularly significant that these "broken" prisoners did
not become completely disorganized chaotic individuals. They
became, on the contrary, re-formed individuals. Their repeated
experience and constant exposure to the values in the microcosm
of the concentration camp gave them new frames of reference, new
anchorages which determined in large part their thought and
behavior and with which they identified themselves. Bettelheim
states that "a prisoner had reached the final stage of adjustment to
the camf situation when he had changed his personality so as to
accept as his own the values of the Gestapo'' [447, italics ours]
Examples of this identification with the Gestapo's values are cited.
For instance,

Practically all prisoners who had spent a long time in the camp
took over the Gestapo's attitude toward the so-called unfit prisoners.
... So old prisoners were sometimes instrumental in getting rid of
the unfit, in this way making a feature of Gestapo ideology a feature
of their own behavior. [7, 448]

If a "traitor" was found in the midst of the old prisoners, he was
slowly tortured to death just as the prisoners themselves were
tortured by the Gestapo, instead of being summarily eliminated.
The old prisoners tried to get hold of and wear pieces of Gestapo
uniforms, tried to make themselves look like the guards. Accept-
ing the Gestapo criticism of American and English newspaper
accounts of cruelties committed in the camps, the old prisoners
"would insist that it is not the business of foreign correspondents
or newspapers to bother with German institutions," [449]

EGO MAY BECOME RE-FORMED UNDER SITUATIONS OF STRESS 411

When erecting buildings for the Gestapo, controversies started
whether one should build well. New prisoners were for sabotaging,
a majority of the old prisoners for building well. [7, 449]

The old prisoners took particular delight in standing smartly at
attention during the daily roll-call, prided themselves on being
tough, and even imitated in their own games one of the games
played by the guards which consisted of discovering "who could
stand to be hit longest without uttering a complaint." [450] The
old prisoners accepted the Nazi race theory; they believed in the
need for German Lebensraum. They accepted "as expression of
their verbal aggressions, terms which definitely did not originate
in their previous vocabularies, but were taken over from the very
different vocabulary of the Gestapo." [447]

This study of behavior in extreme situations gives us, then, an
unusually vivid cameo sketch of an individual's initial attempt to
defend and protect his ego, his attempt to preserve some detach-
ment, his eventual regression to a more primitive childlike level
of adjustment, and the reconstruction of his ego along lines deter-
mined by his experiences and the prevailing values of those in
complete authority in the little world in which he found himself.

There is no need to spell out the fact that the methods of
modern warfare create conditions for the man in active combat
which place on him enormous, sometimes overwhelming, strain.
Fortunately for psychology, the effects of these harrowing condi-
tions on individuals were carefully observed by trained psychia-
trists during World War II. In their two outstanding books,
War Neuroses and Men Under Stress, Drs. Grinker and Spiegel
who served with the Army Air Forces have reported their work
in considerable detail and have documented it with numerous case
studies. It is especially significant that these two volumes, the
second of which prompted General Eisenhower to award the
authors the Legion of Merit, were both written while the war was
still going on, while the authors were still on active duty, not,
therefore, constructing their impressions after a lapse of time and
formulating their interpretations in any library or remote office.
[21, 22] Under these conditions and with the men they were

412 BREAKDOWNS OF THE EGO

treating close at hand, the authors use as their own central theme
the effect of war-created situations on the ego. In the preface of
War Neuroses, they write:

Opportunity is furnished by the violent, severe stress of war to
observe the ego's capacities to handle the rapidly and intensely mo-
bilized biological and physiological drives signaled by anxiety. [21, vii]

Elsewhere they state:

The appearance of the symptoms of a neurosis of war is the signal
that the weakened ego, no longer able to cope with the accumulated
anxiety, has begun to sacrifice a part of its normal functions. [21, 123]

They are careful to point out that the syndromes they encountered
showed enormous variety with no two being exactly alike. Be-
cause of this fact the authors show a healthy disregard of any rigid
classification or pigeonholing.

In reviewing the accounts of Grinker and Spiegel, we should
remind ourselves that all of the men they treated were already
preselected. They had already undergone psychological and psy-
chiatric tests. And although such tests, as the authors point out,
still leave much to be desired, (since, for one thing, the psychia-
trist has "no laboratory means of duplicating the stress to which an
individual will be exposed in combat" [22, .76]), still there is little
doubt that the young men selected for the Army Air Force could
be regarded as above the average in the total population in general
emotional stability.

It should also be noted that although the publisher's jacket for
War Neuroses states that the book is "based on no preconceived
theories," the authors' treatment of the ego follows a psychoana-
lytic interpretation which, however, they do not particularly elabo-
rate or defend. As they employ the term, they do, however, fall
into the psychoanalytic error of reifying the ego, endowing it with
an autonomy all its own. They use such phrases, for example, as
"the ego interprets," [22, 126] "the weakened ego can no longer
appraise reality," [136] "the ego twists and turns under the pres-
sure." [21, 137] As we point out in chapter 14, any such concep-
tion of the ego seems to us quite invalid and unnecessary. But in
spite of this loose use of the term and disagreements we would

EGO MAY BECOME RE-FORMED UNDER SITUATIONS OF STRESS 413

have with many of the authors* more detailed interpretations of
specific cases, their rich and penetrating observations and their
placement of these in an ego context make their studies particu-
larly pertinent for our purposes here.

The authors state that "one of the most frequently heard remarks
in our wards was, 'I took it as long as I could; I can't take it any
more.' " [21, 69] In a very real sense, this simple everyday state-
ment of the G.I. sums up the problem of ego-breakdown. The
job of the psychologist is, of course, to determine precisely what
the "I" and the "it" mean. Both of these volumes contain elo-
quent, if horrible, testimony of the fact that the "it" produced by
combat conditions can and often does break down the "I."
Grinker and Spiegel use the apt phrase "situational psychotic
breakdown" in describing the relationship between the individual
and his immediate environment. Just what the authors mean by
"situational psychotic breakdown" is shown in the following state-
ment where they point out that under conditions of great stress
an individual loses his intellectual capacity to make discrimina-
tions, indulges in behavior not at all characteristic of himself, and
may gradually regress to a less mature level of adjustment:

As the pressure on the ego increases, its inhibitory and intellectual
functions begin to disappear. Inhibition of the vegetative and motor
signs of anxiety becomes impossible. Try as he may, the soldier
cannot prevent the appearance of tremor, tachycardia, tachypnea, and
restlessness. This is the situation in the moderate anxiety states. A
little more pressure of anxiety, and the intellectual, appraising func-
tions of the ego begin to yield. Thought becomes confused and con-
centration impossible. Discrimination — so important in the danger
situation — becomes lost, and when this happens there occurs a further
increment to anxiety, because now an accurate evaluation of trau-
matic stimuli cannot be made, and all stimuli seem equally dangerous.
Caught in this deadly vortex, the ego twists and turns in a desperate
effort to prevent its complete disintegration. Often patients— or sol-
diers on the field — express this need in the verbalization: "I've got to
get a grip on myself"; and this impulse sometimes finds a motor outlet
when the patient clutches the nearest object tightly and squeezes it as
if his life depended on it. As the ego functions give way further,
various released motor expressions appear: uncontrollable laughing
and crying, aimless running about. Sudden failures of muscular

414 BREAKDOWNS OF THE EGO

inncrvation occur, comparable to the intellectual failure; and the
patient may fall down and be unable to arise, because of weakness.
The loss of ego function appears to be a biological retreat or regres-
sion to steadily more immature and primitive levels of ego develop-
ment. This is not a strategic retreat, but a disorderly rout, under the
overwhelming pressure. [21, 124 f.]

We can include here only portions from a few of the case studies
selected by Grinker and Spiegel which provide the evidence for
this statement. The following case of severe anxiety shows how a
man "lost control of himself due to dissociation:

A 32 year old infantryman had taken part in the severe fighting in
Northern Tunisia. Nothing was known of his past history beyond
the fact that his company had been subjected to heavy mortar fire
and dive bombing, while attempting to take a height strongly de-
fended by the enemy. When brought into the hospital, he was
unable to speak, and presented the typical picture of severe terror.
He had coarse, persistent tremors of the hands and lips and started
violently when any part of his body was touched. At times he
seemed about to speak, but nothing came of it except inaudible
whispers. He made no effort to get out of bed or to help himself in
any way but lay in a flexed posture with his body curled up like an
intra-uterine fetus. The diagnosis on his field tag was schizophrenia,
as was the tentative diagnosis made by the admitting officer. It was
determined to give the patient a few days' rest, sedation, and adequate
nourishment before specific therapy was initiated.

At the end of two weeks the clinical picture had undergone con-
siderable change. The patient was now out of bed, but walked with a
peculiar simian gait. His knees were bent and his shoulders stooped,
his arms hung lifelessly at his side to below the knees, and his head
and neck jutted forward at a peculiar angle. His facial expression
was one of anxious, puzzled apprehension. He squinted and frowned
at his attendants as if trying to make out who they were and what he
had to fear from them. If an attendant made a sudden or unexpected
motion, the patient would start back with fear. With much stam-
mering, he asked simple questions in a childlike fashion about who he
was, where he was, what had happened to him. He asked these
questions over and over again, never receiving satisfaction. From
time to time a fatuous smile would cross his face, he would laugh and,
leaping upon his cot, he would jump up and down on the springs

EGO MAY BECOME RE-FORMED UNDER SITUATIONS OF STRESS 415

and shout "Dive bombers! Dive bombers I", as if it were a huge joke.
Apparently an accomplished accordion player in the past,* he had his
instrument with him and enjoyed playing it. He repeatedly played
the song, "Maybe," singing the words to his accompaniment without
a trace of his usual stammer. When he sang, his whole face lit up in
a kind of ecstasy, tears ran out of his eyes, and the apprehension dis-
appeared, only to return as soon as he put away his instrument.
There was considerable stereotypy, and various bizarre mannerisms
reappeared in a regular routine.

After treatment, this patient made a good recovery. He was able to
reconstruct his battle experience, and to orient himself in relation to
his past life. Before his breakdown he had been worried concerning
his wife's pregnancy, and it appeared that the song, "Maybe," was her
favorite melody. The bizarre behavior disappeared, and, although
much anxiety and depression in relation to his battle experience re-
mained, there was no longer any question of a diagnosis of schizo-
phrenia. It was obvious that the patient was in a severe anxiety state
with much regression and disintegration of the ego. As is typical in
the severe anxiety states, recovery of the ego's functions proceeded
rapidly after treatment. For a few weeks the gait continued to be
somewhat shuffling and stooped, without the normal swinging of the
arms. The facial expression was masked, the skin of the face oily,
and the eyelids blinked rarely. A moderate tremor of the extremities
persisted, which was associated with rigidity of the cogwheel type.
Without a knowledge of the past history of this patient, one would
have been tempted to diagnose an organic lesion of the extrapyramidal
system. After four weeks of psychotherapy this patient recovered
from his depression, and the facial expression became spontaneous
and lively and the gait normal. Anxiety disappeared except during
air raids. The patient was able to assume duties in the ward and
about the hospital, and was eventually discharged. [21, 5ff.]

We have already noted (pp. 285 /.) how individual men in com-
bat tend to identify themselves with their combat unit or division.
Grinker and Spiegel particularly emphasize the important role
played by ego-involving group loyalties in forestalling dissociation
and regression. If the support of this identification with a group
is undermined either by the loss in battle of many group members
or by the inability of a group to act as a team under overwhelming

416 BREAKDOWNS OF THE EGO

odds, then the individual feels deserted and more alone, and
regression is much more likely.

Thus, the problem of anxiety in this context centers about the posi-
tion of the ego in regard to mastery, independence and freedom of
activity. In the anxiety problems of early childhood which form the
core of the usual neurotic process, the ego is peculiarly helpless be-
cause of its inexperience and its complete dependence on the family
figures which constitute the threat. In combat, the ego is often
helpless because of its position in the group and the nature of the
danger situation. The combat personality surrenders a great deal of
its freedom of activity to the group, which is then relied upon for
protection. The efficient functioning of the team is the guarantee of
safety, and this applies equally to the efficient functioning of equip-
ment, such as the aircraft, which must be maintained by teams.
As long as the group demonstrates its ability to master the dangers
fairly effectively, the individual feels sufficiently protected and com-
petent in the environment. But when combat losses are high and
close friends have been lost, or when the individual has experienced
repeated narrow escapes or a traumatic eventf the group is no longer
a good security, and the ego learns how helpless it is in the situation.
There is no one to rely upon. At the same time, it cannot overcome
the dangers by its own efforts because of the actual dependence on
the group.

The ego is thus in a regressed and relatively impotent position,
reminiscent of childhood. Its difficulties accumulate as it withdraws
more affection from the group and develops greater concern for its
own fate, only to find that this fate is less and less under control.
Confidence in the activity of the ego is further shaken by the loss of
friends with whom there is much identification, when the thought
arises: "He and I were exactly alike; if it could happen to him, it
can happen to me." Confidence is diminished in addition by physical
fatigue and illness and loss of sleep. A vicious circle is established,
leading to the progressive destruction of confidence in the ego's ability
to master the dangers. Out of the ensuing helplessness is born the
intense anxiety. Thus severe anxiety is always secondary to regression
and dependence of the ego, and its meaning is that in its regressed
position the ego has been deserted by all the forces which could help
and protect it; nothing can be done, and the only possible method
-of avoiding complete dissolution is by flight. [22, 129 f., italics ours]

EGO-BREAKDOWNS IN ABNORMAL AND PATHOLOGICAL CASES 417

These reports of the effect of an individual's participation in a
group under conditions imposed by war is consistent with and
further confirms our discussion of ego-involvements in group
situations in chapter 10.

EGO-BREAKDOWNS IN ABNORMAL AND PATHOLOGICAL CASES

The vast literature of abnormal psychology is filled with ex-
amples of individuals who, for one reason or another, change from
their usual socially acceptable and predictable selves to individuals
whose behavior, perception, judgment, thought, or imagination has
become disorganized, so incompatible with reality, so dissociated
or so idiosyncratic that they are no longer classifiable as "normal."
Case studies reported by Janet, Prince, Sidis and others have by
now become classics in the field. No matter what classification the
psychologist or the psychiatrist may use to describe a particular
patient (and these classifications do not concern us here), the
general underlying symptom is that these "abnormal" individuals
exhibit in one way or another a distorted ego reference, can no
longer adjust themselves to the objective conditions around them.
In a short paper on The Psychopathology of the Ego System,
Kisker and Knox [27] show how certain mental disorders can be
considered as ego disturbances. Basing their discussions on
Koffka's conception of the ego, they note that "the ego has of
necessity been postulated in psychology for the same reason that
astronomers were forced to postulate a previously unknown
planet" [66 f.] and they believe that "a large number of functional
mental disorders are matters of the ego and its relationships." [67]
Such mental disorders mentioned are regression, "a detached ego,
split ego, excessive development of the 'myness' system, and ego-
isolation." [68]

This breakdown of ego reference is vividly seen in what has
come to be called "depersonalization." In William A. White's
Outlines of Psychiatry [44], widely used as a basic text in the field
of abnormal psychology, the author sets the stage for his discussion
of "Disorders of Personality" as follows:

418 BREAKDOWNS OF THE EGO

The individual, besides receiving certain information from the en-
vironment and forming certain ideas, has beyond this a consciousness
of self, a feeling that all his perceptions and ideas are experiences of a
single self, a self that maintains its own individual identity through-
out, and which the individual calls "I." This problem of self-con-
sciousness, although the riddle of psychology, presents certain features
useful in elucidating the problem in hand. [44, 69]

And in this discussion, after indicating what is meant by "trans-
formation of the personality," White describes "depersonalization":

A lesser degree of the same sort of process results in a disorganiza-
tion, a breaking up of the personality. This is seen in many condi-
tions and is associated with a feeling of unreality, and occurs as a
part of the delirium of negation. The patients proclaim that they
are changed, they are not themselves. One of my patients would look
in the glass and stare in wonder at her reflection, saying her eyes
were not hers, they were cat's eyes. Another patient affirmed she had
no head, no arms, no body, no mind, nothing. The feeling of per-
sonal identity in these cases has become disrupted, the personality
disorganized. [44, 70]

Another description of this significant concept (depersonalization)
may be cited from Schilder: [39]

It is known that cases of this type [depersonalization] do not
experience other people as personalities, but as inanimate automatons
and dolls. Furthermore, the outward world looks dreamlike and
unreal. Their own selves seem to have disappeared. The patients
feeljhat they themselves act mechanically. They do not acknowledge
their perceptions, feelings, and emotions. "There is no real me.
I seem to myself like a puppet." [39, 188 f.]

Persons who are described by the very general label of "schizo-
phrenic" are characterized by the radical breakdown of the more
usual frames of reference they had developed to give meaning to
their environment. Somehow these frames have become inade-
quate and inconsistent When these standards for judgment and
action collapse, the ego collapses, because these frames with all the
emotional overtones of value judgments they contained were so
integral a part of the self. A case study by Paris [13] gives a good

EGO-BREAKDOWNS IN ABNORMAL AND PATHOLOGICAL CASES 419

example of how and probably why a young man was committed
to a state hospital with the diagnosis of schizophrenia. Paris
points out that

In the course of Albert's life there arose a number of conflicts and
problems which were a great source of torment. These tore at his
mind in a variety of ways. The confused mores in his culture, the
contrasting groups to which he held partial loyalty, and the incon-
sistencies of promise and achievement in his career — such elements
form the contribution of social disorganization to the personal dis-
organization he was suffering. His behavior during the period of
his psychosis represents an adaptation to these problems. It was a
poor adaptation, since it did not fit him to survive in the competition
of the contemporary civilization; but it was organized and for a time
seemed to promise better things. [13, 135 /., italics ours]

Among other conflicts Albert suffered were these:

He had acquired in his youth a violent anti-Semitic prejudice, only
to discover in his adulthood that his family was of Jewish descent.
. . . He had acquired a strong moral objection to commercial art,
which he considered "prostitution" of his talent; but he could earn
his living only by means of that kind of art. . . . During the first
part of his career his economic success was satisfactory and rapid, and
within five or six years after his start he was earning as much as $400
a month and had plans for projects which he hoped would carry him
further. His failures after the collapse of the Florida boom and in
the later major depression gave him considerable torment. [13, 136]

As Paris notes, the patient's

. . . conception of his status was derived not from a harmonious
social group of which he was a primary member but rather from
distant and mixed sources and partly derived from his reading and
daydreaming. . . . He could not find a group in which he could
achieve an integrated and harmonious personality. . . . Albert wast in
a sense, lost, since he was culturally marginal in several respects. . . .
The conflicts produced in Albert internal strains and an intolerable
sense of being internally divided. . . . The solution he found, while
undesirable from the point of view of survival in society, did have a
logical relation to the nature of Albert's particular problems. It did
not demand a change that he could not make. It resolved the conflicts
so that he could have unity in his character without pulling himself

420 BREAKDOWNS OF THE EGO

out of trouble by his bootstraps. An internal war thus came to a sud-
den end, and the conflicting elements temporarily came to rest. [13,
136 f., italics ours]

The particular solution this patient adopted to relieve his marginal
statul was to identify himself with a certain mystical semireligious
philosophy which the reading of a certain book stimulated his
imagination to create. Thereafter he acted as quite a different
person, claiming superhuman strength, the ability to stop any
speeding car or bullet, the ability to "be" any person he desired,
and so on.

Angyal describes another "schizophrenic" who had lost all the
ego reference of his experiences, especially those based on muscle
sensation: [3]

In my patient, as in many schizophrenic patients, the basic differ-
entiation between the ego and the external world is grossly impaired.
Parts of the patient's body and of his mental and physical activities
are excluded from self-awareness, arc not experienced as belonging to
his ego. The patient complains that the jaw he has is not his jaw,
"it is only set in." He complains that his arm feels "lifeless," does
not belong to him; that he has "no real skull but only a wooden
frame"; that his teeth are "false," etc. Some of the thoughts he has are
not his thoughts; "somebody gives them [to him] silently; they put
them into [his] head." Sometimes some words come to him; he does
not think them, "the words just show up in [his] system." It seems
to him also as if some one else thinks in him, "as if I had two or three
people with me." He has also the experience of having an alter ego
(Doppel ganger) . Sometimes even his emotions are experienced as
disconnected from his ego: "In my stomach there is something, it
feels like anger." "In the teeth it feels like anger, as if they would
want to bite, to grab everything." Another time he said: "They put
some glorious feeling inside of you, as if you had done something
great." [1035 f., italics ours]

In analyzing this particular case, Angyal writes in part as
follows:

The outstanding feature in the psychopathologic picture of the
patient is profound disturbances of self-awareness. The psychologic
experiences of the patient have partly lost their usual relation to the

EGO-BREAKDOWNS IN ABNORMAL AND PATHOLOGICAL CASES 421

ego: He feels that parts of his body, his thoughts and his feelings do
not belong to his ego but are things foreign to him.

Analogous disturbances are to be observed in regard to the psycho-
motor activity. The patient's actions have partly lost their usual rela-
tion to the ego. They are excluded from the self and appear to the
patient not as his own actions but as something "done" to him. The
muscular activities or tendencies to such activities generate changes
in the muscle tonus, which, because they have lost their ego-reference,
are psychologically accounted for as foreign forces acting on the body.
. . . Analysis of these symptoms clearly indicates their origin in mus-
cular activities which have become disconnected from the ego. . . .
The loss of ego-reference of muscular activity is a manifestation of a
more general disturbance of self -awareness. The latterMs not further
analyzed in this paper but is taken as a descriptive fact. From the
psychologic point of view, the loss of ego-reference seems to represent
a special \ind of defense mechanism. [3, 1052 f.f italics ours]

Some individuals are classified as "abnormal" when they become
so elated and euphoric that their behavior transgresses the bound-
aries of social tolerance. In such instances the usual ego-involved
standards of conduct and behavior dissolve. An illustration can
be taken from McDougall: [32]

A professional man in middle life, of good heredity, had shown no
previous trace of instability. His history would justify classing him
with the cyclo-thymic type. He had, when young, suffered some
periods of very mild depression and apathy, such as might be called
merely prolonged moods of discouragement. And at other times he
had displayed an almost excessive activity and energy, working ex-
tremely hard in preparation for examinations and achieving athletic
feats that required tremendous endurance and energy. He became
actively engaged in a Presidential campaign. He had long been
keenly interested in politics and in certain planks of his party's plat-
form; but he had never before taken an active part in electioneering,
whether State or Federal, and had never spoken in public. He ap-
proached his new task with considerable diffidence; but he very soon
found that he was an effective campaign orator. He was immensely
pleased, stimulated, and elated by his success. He worked with ex-
treme enthusiasm and energy. He sought and seized every oppor-
tunity for addressing public gatherings. At first his colleagues in the
particular local campaign were full of admiration; but after some days

422 BREAKDOWNS OF THE EGO

they were obliged to communicate with his relatives and ask them to
remove him from the scene. For his conduct had begun to pass the
bounds of the normal and the decorous, and he was beginning to
make himself a nuisance to them. He angrily resented all their sug-
gestions to the effect that he needed a rest and had done his share; he
was utterly impervious to their arguments and persuasion. Instead of
taking a long night's rest after his hard day's work, he would get up
very early in the morning and, appearing at the window of his hotel
bedroom, would gather a crowd in the street by his animated and
somewhat strange behaviour, and deliver to them a fiery address,
freely exchanging jokes and pleasantries with his auditors. As he
afterwards put it, he felt like a god; for he could sway his audience
as he wished, evoking enthusiastic agreement and applause. Such
admiring response from public gatherings is, as we know, strong
drink for any man. Even men long and gradually accustomed to
such successes suffer a kind of intoxication on such occasions; and, as
with drugs, they acquire a morbid need and craving for ever new and
larger doses; they cannot live without the "lime-light." And in this
hitherto quiet and retiring professional man the intoxication went to
the point of throwing him off his balance. He was brought home by
the exercise of much tact and patience. He refused to submit to
medical examination, declaring that he had never before been so fit
and strong. [32, 358 f.]

Cases of split and multiple personalities are, perhaps, the most
dramatic and well known in the abnormal literature. The same
individual can be two or more quite different "persons," each may
have complete amnesia for the experiences of the other and not
even recognize the other self. Franz's Persons One and Three [14]
can be taken as fairly typical. The individual involved had ap-
parently suffered various harrowing experiences during World
War I and was brought to Dr. Franz's office by the police who
had picked him up in a completely confused state of mind. "He
did not recognize his surroundings, he asked to have his name
supplied to him, and he did not know the approximate date." [1]
The fascinating story of Franz's successful effort to bring together
"persons One and Three" need not concern us here. (Person Two
was represented by a period of time separating persons One and
Three and remained a complete blank in the patient's conscious-

EGO-BREAKDOWNS IN ABNORMAL AND PATHOLOGICAL CASES 423

ness.) What docs concern us is that the individual as person One
was quite a different individual from what he was as person Three.

When asked about his nationality and birthplace he replied that he
did not know where he was born, nor how old he really was, although
he could approximate his age within a few years. He had no idea
what his father's occupation was, nor did he know what he himself
had been doing prior to April, 1915, at which time he became con-
scious of himself. [14, 26]

Even self-recognition was lacking:

Later I led him into another room in which there was a mirror, and
I suggested that he look at himself in the glass. He appeared to be
greatly upset at his appearance, and after having taken one look, he
said: "My God, is that me?" [14, 62]

Habit systems were altered, as the following indicates:

Twice also Jack was found to have purchased cigars, and to have
smoked them. In his so-called "normal" state he did not smoke cigars.
He had not smoked them since 1914. When, therefore, Jack re-
verted to his first personality the old habit came to the fore. [14, 131]

Franz's description of the first meeting of persons One and
Three is revealing. While the doctor was going over a map with
the patient in an attempt to help him reconstruct the course of his
wanderings as a soldier in World War I:

Suddenly he stopped, and with his finger directed to a point and a
name, said, "Voi! I was there. I had a monkey." His emotion was
obvious. He was greatly excited. Memory was trickling through.
The walled-off memories could not be kept impounded. The face of
the dam gave way, and there was an onrush carrying all before it.
It was irresistible. The memories were eddying, and tossing one over
another. His remarks came too rapidly to be recorded. He traveled
from Africa to France, to the United States, to England, and to Ire-
land, back and forth. Ideas were tumbling about in their mad rush
to come to the surface. In a few minutes he had lived fifteen years.
He had met, and he had recognized, himself. [14, 79, italics ours]

Although Franz was unable to learn much of the early history of
his strange patient, he writes at the end of his account that

424 BREAKDOWNS OF THE EGO

... it is worthy of note that every change which had been ob-
served, or of which we have had reasonable information, was known
to be preceded by a period in which he was under what is commonly
called "emotional strain." He was worried financially, or he was
irritated, or he was fearful, or he may have been too happy. [14, 188]

An example of several selves living together simultaneously in
the same person is seen from the following account which a
schizophrenic wrote of himself: 6

I am a peculiar person. In fact I do not know rather [whether]
you would call me a person or not. I did possess four (4) bodies that
were me. Unlike the twin Severins I do lack the middle brain they
possess. I do not know the origin of my specie or of any other specie.
I do know people call our specie Gouls. I have lined [linked?] eyes;
that is, when the four of me took hands we could see in four direc-
tions at once. I have heard the Twin Severins lack duplicate eyes and
bodies. I did possess thought transmission. As far as my early life
is concerned I do not recall very much; but about three years I can
remember all of my other segiments. When I was about 6 years old
I lost three of my segiments and received a braining at the same in-
stant. I do not imagine any of you people can understand the mixure
of being in different bodies and places at the same time. I have for-
gotten all about not being like other people.

After a very careful review of the "psychological deficits" of
psychotics, Hunt and Gofer [25] conclude that "we should like to
conceive this deficit in capacity in terms of a rigidity of set and a
reduction in the number of tasks or lines of activity that can be
sustained simultaneously or synthesized into a single complex
operation." [1014]

The deficit in the "functional" psychoses, and particularly in schizo-
phrenia, we conceive as an extinction of standards for performance
and of thought skills that have been socially rewarded. [25, 1022,
italics ours]

This conclusion is entirely in line with our formulation: "set,"
"standards for performance," and "thought skills," are familiar to

6 This is taken from one of a number of essays Professor Wendell Johnson of
the University of Iowa has collected from institutionalized people and which he
has kindly let us examine.

EGO-BREAKDOWNS IN ABNORMAL AND PATHOLOGICAL CASES 425

us as anchorages, standards of judgment, frames of reference, or
attitudes which have become ego-involved and whose "extinction"
is therefore bound to bring about the extinction of the normally
functioning ego.

Organic disturbances. So far in our discussion of abnormal
cases, we have considered instances commonly labeled as functional
rather than as organic. With the rapid development of neurology
toward the end of the 19th century, psychologists began to look
for the psychological effects of organic disturbances in the brain.
In this effort, Ribot was one of the pioneers. Stimulated by
Charcot's work in psychopathology, Ribot [36, 37] brought to
his work the physiological knowledge of his day. Although the
neurology of Ribot's time seems to us now somewhat crude, and
although Ribot tended to regard all psychoses as organic, he was
among the first to point out that disorders of brain functions could
cause a "dissolution of the personality" and a disintegration of the
unity of the ego (Le Moi). The ego was central in Ribot's formu-
lations. He regarded it as a "sum of conscious states" subjectively
known from coenaesthesis and from memory.

"An organic lesion," he wrote in 1881, "may transform the
coenaesthesis, substituting for the normal sensation of existence a
condition of melancholy, mental distress, and anxiety, of which
the patient is unable to discern the cause; or, on the other hand,
producing undue joyousness, exuberant emotions, and extreme
content." [36, 109] Anything that affects the vital processes upon
which "the sum of actual states of consciousness" depends will
necessarily affect the ego.

Feelings form the self; amnesia of the feelings is the destruction of
the self. It is logical, then, that a period should arrive when dis-
organization becomes so great as to disintegrate personality. [36, 121]

Ribot pointed out that gross injuries to the brain could and did
cause disturbances and deteriorations of the higher more abstract
mental processes (ideas and memories), and in this process of de-
terioration he observed that it was the more recently acquired most
highly developed intellectual abilities that tended to disintegrate
first with the adjustments and memories of childhood "the last to
disappear."

426 BREAKDOWNS OF THE EGO

With the increased precision of our knowledge of physiology
and with the development of more refined psychological tests, the
effects of more or less localizable lesions have become amenable
to more rigorous investigation. There is no need to review this
work here in detail.7 The outstanding work of Gelb and Gold-
stein is especially relevant to our problem of ego-breakdowns. [17]

From their tests of color discrimination among patients who had
suffered lesions in the frontal region as the result of war injuries,
Gelb and Goldstein concluded that there was a very definite
impairment of the ability to generalize or to make abstractions.
The patients tended to be limited to what the authors described
as a "concrete attitude." This effect of organic brain injuries on
abstract thinking has been confirmed by Weigl [43], Ry lander
[38], Halstead [23] and others. Goldstein and Scheerer have
more recently reported the results of further tests devised to study
this loss of the "abstract attitude." [20] Without taking sides one
way or another in the controversy concerning Goldstein's termi-
nology, it is significant for us to notice that in the description of
the "abstract attitude," Goldstein and Scheerer place as the first
characteristic in their list the loss of ego reference. All of the other
characteristics they describe refer in one way or another to the
deterioration of normal frames. They state:

The abstract attitude is the basis for the following conscious and
volitional modes of behavior:

1. To detach our ego from the outer world or from inner experi-
ences.

2. To assume a mental set.

3. To account for acts to oneself; to verbalize the account.

4. To shift reflectively from one aspect of the situation to another.

5. To hold in mind simultaneously various aspects.

6. To grasp the essential of a given whole; to break up a given
whole into parts, to isolate and to synthesize them.

7. To abstract common properties reflectively; to form hierarchic
concepts,

8. To plan ahead ideationally; to assume an attitude towards the
"mere possible" and to think or perform symbolically. [20, 4]

7 Thorough reviews of the literature on the psychological effects of brain lesions
will be found in [9] and [28].

EGO-BREAKDOWNS IN ABNORMAL AND PATHOLOGICAL CASES 427

The illustrations used by Goldstein and Scheerer to exemplify
these various characteristics of the abstract attitude which is lost
by those with a cerebral pathology are so illuminating that we
shall quote here in full the examples given of the deterioration of
the first three modes of behavior previously mentioned.

1. To detach our ego from the outerworld or from inner experiences.

Patient F. is asked to take a comb from a table and bring it to the
examiner. She cannot do this without combing her hair ("forced re-
sponsiveness"). A patient of Head says, "With me it's all in bits, I
have to jump like a man who jumps from one thing to the next; I
can see them, but I can't express them." Patient Sch. is asked to re-
peat the sentence: "The snow is black." He states he could not say it,
that it was not so. The examiner explained to him that such sense-
less phrases can be repeated even though they are not true, and then
urged the patient to repeat the sentence. Now the patient repeated
the requested sentence, but mumbled immediately afterwards: "No,
the snow is white." The same patient could not be induced to re-
peat the sentence "the sun is shining" on a rainy day. Patient Schor.
with a paralysis of the right arm was unable to repeat the sentence "I
can write well with my right hand." He replaced the word "right"
by the word "left." Another patient was well able to use eating uten-
sils while eating, whereas given these objects outside of the eating
situation, he produced only a jumble of senseless movements with
them. Another patient was unable to drink water out of a glass on
command, unless he was really thirsty.

2. To assume a mental set willfully and consciously.

A patient is unable to set the hands of a clock to the demanded
hour, but can recognize what time it is immediately if presented with
the clock. Another patient, whom the examiner started off on a
continuous task, e.g., counting or writing letters, is unable to proceed
spontaneously if once interrupted; he is unable to initiate an action
on his own, to assume a mental set willfully. A patient of Woerkom
could give the series of the week days and months of the year cor-
rectly, but if the examiner named a particular day or month, the
patient could not give the name of the one preceding or following.

3. To account for acts to oneself or to others.

A patient is well able to throw balls into three boxes which are
located at different distances from him. He never misses. Asked

428 BREAKDOWNS OF THE EGO

which box is further and which is nearer, he is unable to give any
account or to make a statement concerning his procedure in aiming.
Another patient points correctly to the source of a noise, but cannot
state the direction from which the noise originated. To do this re-
quires an abstract grasp of spatial relation and the concomitant capac-
ity to account for this understanding by verbalization. [20, 4 /.]

Their characterization of the "concrete" attitude indicates the
central position of this loss of ego reference.

We surrender to experiences of an unreflected character: we are
confined to the immediate apprehension of the given thing or situa-
tion in its particular uniqueness. . . . We surrender to the immediate
claims and particular uniqueness of thought and feelings in the same
way as to the outer world claims. [2/., italics ours]

Goldstein and Scheerer are careful to point out that the abstract
attitude must be regarded as a relatively recent evolutionary de-
velopment, as a "new emergent quality." [22] And that Goldstein
is not using the concept of the ego in any loose psychoanalytic
sense as a mysterious autonomous entity is indicated in another of
his publications [18] in which he writes, in a discussion of repres-
sion:

The factor, which actuates the so-called repressing, is formed neither
through prohibitions from without, nor by a censor, nor by an ego,
nor by a super-ego. Rather, through maturation, new patterns of the
organism are formed, conforming to the human species in general
and to the cultural pattern of that particular milieu in which the child
grows up. Of course, one can call this development "ego-formation"
and of course, the prohibitions, just li\e other processes in the environ-
ment, are co-determining factors in this formation. [18, 320, italics
ours]

A revealing illustration of the effect of a temporary concussion
on the ego is given by Koffka when he cites the report of a moun-
tain climber who had lost consciousness after falling into a chasm.
[29] The climber reported his "awakening" as follows (Koffka's
literal translation):

". . . fog . , . darkness ... fog ... whirring . . . grey veil with
a small lighter spot . . . fog . . . faint dawn ... a soft humming
. . . dull discomfort . . . fog . . . something has happened to some-

EGO-BREAKDOWNS IN ABNORMAL AND PATHOLOGICAL CASES 429

body . . . gloomy fog, and always that lighter point ... a shivering
shudder: something clammy . . . fog . . . how was it? ... an ef-
fort at thinking ... ah, still fog; but besides that light point there
outside, there emerges a second point inside : right, that is // . . . fog,
dull ringing sound, frost ... a dream? . . . Yes, indeed, a wild,
wild, wild dream! — It has dreamed — no, rather / have dreamed. . . ."
[29, 323 /.]

As Koflfka remarks:

Phenomenally quite a long period of time passed without an Ego.
. . . The Ego did not even emerge with the first articulation of the
field, the light point, not even with the first feeling of discomfort, and
apparently not even with the first conscious thought, though it was
this which led very soon to the momentary establishment of the Self,
which was, however, as yet quite unstable. [29, 324]

In his summary of the effects of brain lesions on personality,
Stanley Cobb [9] indicates that severe concussions or contusions
of the brain, while they have comparatively little effect on the "in-
tellectual" functions such as memory, are very likely to extinguish
those personal and social standards of judgment which determine
an individual's moral codes.

Persons who have had several concussions or contusions of the brain
often develop a clinical picture that is quite characteristic: after each
injury, but usually more conspicuously after the third or fourth, the
patient has persistent headache, increased by using the eyes or expo-
sure to the sun; transient diplopia is common. He avoids lifting or
leaning over because of increased headache and dizzy feelings. After
a few months this state becomes one of general invalidism with many
aches, easy fatigability, lack of initiative, and varying degrees of
apathy. Close psychiatric supervision may keep him socially ac-
ceptable, but he usually drifts off, becomes a "rolling stone" and
"irresponsible." Alcohol affects him strongly and may precipitate
epileptic attacks of various kinds. Psychological examination shows
little intellectual deficit in such fields as memory, retention, and alert-
ness, but as the process goes on, such symptoms of deterioration may
appear. During the first year of his disorder the patient seems to be
simply unreliable; later he becomes incorrigible, a pathological liar,
always taking the easy way out and avoiding sustained effort. Some

430 BREAKDOWNS OF THE EGO

of these patients are difficult to distinguish from the "ne'er do well*
and chronic delinquent diagnosed "psychopathic personality and
"moral imbecile!' [9, 557, italics ours]

In this same discussion, Cobb also reports the changed person-
ality brought about by encephalitis (an "inflammatory reaction
within the brain due to invasion by micro-organisms"). [559]

The patient may come first to the physician complaining of fatigue
and nervousness. . . . The family will complain that the patient is
becoming coarse and ill-mannered, irritable and forgetful. The jovial
megalomania so often described may be present, but it is not the rule;
a mood of depression is not uncommon instead of the textbook eu-
phoria. But when the elated, expansive mood is present, it is a most
remarkable phenomenon: one sees a man in the prime of life, who
has previously been modest and reliable, rather suddenly break forth
with ideas of omnipotence and actions dishonest and spectacular.
The usual picture, however, is less striking, with emphasis on the
gradual loss of culture and memory.

I remember well, when acting as clinical clerk at Queen Square for
Kinnier Wilson, I saw him present a new case to a group of students
in the out-patient clinic. I was seated at the table taking notes, Wilson
was standing, having just dismissed a patient, and there was an empty
chair beside my table. Wilson rang for the next patient, the door
opened and a man entered, followed by his wife. He walked across
the fifteen feet of classroom, smiled at the students and at me, and sat
down. Wilson turned to me instantly and said, "Write down G.P.I.
as the diagnosis." Probably my jaw dropped, for he went on, "Well,
Cobb, what else could it be? Here is a middle-aged man coming to
a nerve clinic. He enters the room smiling, pushes ahead of his wife,
does not take off his hat, takes the only chair without asking and likes
an audience!" Subsequent neurological and serological studies proved
the correctness of the diagnosis. [9, 559 /.]

Cobb remarks that the striking thing about those suffering from
general paresis is their loss of "good manners and culture" at the
outset of the disease. [560]

We saw in earlier chapters how the ego develops in childhood
and adolescence. We can see in cases of senility how the ego
breaks down and deteriorates in old age. Muncie describes senility
in his chapter dealing with "the acquired organic deficit reactions"
[34, ch. 10], and Kraines indicates that

EGO-BREAKDOWNS IN ABNORMAL AND PATHOLOGICAL CASES 431

The essential pathology of senile dementia is an abiotrophy of the
ganglion cells of the cerebral cortex. [30, 382]

The senile reaction

... is a gross caricature of the normal aging process with its
circumscription of interests, the backward glance at things long past,
and the garrulous reminiscences. [34, 409, italics ours]

Muncie describes how the "frontier of memory" is "pushed steadily
backward with the progress of the disease." [409]

Closely related to this disturbance of intellectual functions are
changes in personality which "are extremely common" according
to Kraines. Among these changes are increasing irritability, out-
bursts of anger and resentment, increasing egotism, acute excite-
ment or depression. Commenting on a senile patient whose case
he describes, Muncie summarizes as follows:

A simple decline in the assets, especially those of memory and
judgment, living in the remote past, and disoriented for the present.
The speech showed loss in the reverse order of its acquisition and
finally was reduced to unintelligible jargon. Emotional lability, with
fairly good social preservation; evasion and confabulation were
marked features. [34, 413]

This "second childhood" characteristic of so many senile patients
clearly shows the regression to a relatively simple narrow level of
ego functioning, the disintegration of the ego-attitudes of the more
normal adult.

How the ego is affected by surgical insult to the frontal lobes.
Brickner's well-known study of the effect of the removal of part of
both the frontal lobes of a New York stockbroker (referred to as
A in the following quotations) shows beyond the shadow of a
doubt that the loss of these higher areas of the brain also brings
about a loss of ego-involved standards for behavior and thought.
A mere listing of some of the title headings of chapters that con-
tain detailed recorded conversations with the patient indicates the
generalizations derived from hours of close observation: [8]

Impairment of Restraint in Controlling or Concealing Emotion.
Impairment of Restraint as Indicated by Boasting or Self-Aggran-
dizement.

432 BREAKDOWNS OF THE EGO

Impairment of Restraint as Indicated by Reminiscing Which Is

Utilized for Self-Aggrandizement.
Impairment of Restraint as Indicated by A's Free Expression of

Mild Hostility.
Impairment of Restraint as Indicated by the Free Expression of

Angry, Aggressive, Negativistic, Puerile Impulses Employed for

Superarrogation, Sometimes Combined with Hostility. [8, xiiif.]

Brickner concludes from his detailed analysis that

The most prominent symptomatic mark of A's conduct is the
relatively free exhibition of emotional and instinctive phenomena.
The three constantly recurring themes of A's action are self-aggran-
dizement, hatred and sexuality.

A's exaggerated need for ego aggrandizement is easy to perceive.
[275]

There is nothing about A's impairment of restraint which is not to
be found in any young child who has not yet learned enough about
the requisite appreciations to make choices and to plan his behavior.
[8, 280]

And he notes that "such highly derived attainments as 'moral
sense/ 'social sense/ 'character' and 'personality'" are dependent
on "judgment, critique, abstractive ability, generalizing capacity,
appreciation of situations, sense of humor and others." And it is
apparently these psychological capacities that were "removed"
along with the sections of A's frontal lobes. The author notes that
many earlier writers on the subject have used the term "inhibition"
to describe the psychological consequences of frontal lobe symp-
toms. Among these earlier writers were Elder and Miles (1902)
who stated that frontal lobe symptoms

... are exceedingly difficult to analyze and are even more difficult
to describe. The absence of such symptoms renders a man what he
is ... [their] presence . . . alters the ego of a man, takes away his
special mental characteristics and reduces him to a lower level. [8, 276]

Freeman and Watts have used frontal lobotomy as an admittedly
last resort cure for what they describe as "overwhelming conscious-
ness of the self." [15] Summarizing the results of 66 such opera-
tions, they write:

EGO-BREAKDOWNS IN ABNORMAL AND PATHOLOGICAL CASES 433

Prefrontal lobotomy bleaches the affective component connected
with the consciousness of the self. Patients who are afflicted with a
distressing consciousness of the self (either as a unit of society or as a
collection of organs) and whose preoccupation is fixed and unyielding,
will secure from prefrontal lobotomy definite relief even though cer-
tain of their ideas and actions may persist for a long time. Reduction
of the affective component allows the personality to appear in purer
form, divested of certain restraining features, but essentially un-
changed in regard to energy and intelligence, the principal change
being an alteration in the direction of interests from within, outward.
Prefrontal lobotomy is radical treatment, not only figuratively but
literally in that it reaches down to the roots of the personality. If the
neurosis or psychosis has its roots in an overwhelming consciousness
of the self, and if this consciousness is intractable and disabling, then
prefrontal lobotomy may bring peace to the warring mind and a new
lease on life. [15, 118 f.]

Here are some of their illustrations of the alteration in per-
sonality after prefrontal lobotomy:8

A timid, restrained hypochondriacal woman now joins in the party
with her daughter, is able to dance until after midnight with her
daughter's friends, cook supper for them, and send them home in
the midst of jests and wise cracks. She is no longer conscious of
the fatigue nor is she very much aware that there is such a thing as
dignity in the presence of young people. She boasts that the boys
come to the house on account of her. A former school teacher, hav-
ing suffered from involutional depression for six years, sits uncon-
cernedly among a group of physicians while we are describing to
them her suicidal attempts, chronic alcoholism, her erratic behavior,
and hare-brained plans for an artists' colony, her alcoholic father, and
her psychotic mother and sister, and then smilingly states to the doc-
tors: "I have to drink alone because I get perfectly nasty in public."
[15, 116]

Bennett, Keegan, and Wilbur have reported successful use of
the operation in four cases of "aggressive paranoid schizophrenia."
[6] And Hebb and Penfield have written of a patient who de-
veloped epileptic seizures after being struck on the forehead, who

s Other detailed accounts of the effect of the operation on social behavior will
be found in [16, ch. 13].

434 BREAKDOWNS OF THE EGO

was "irresponsible, childishly stubborn, restless and forgetful" [24,
422], and who showed considerable restoration of his normal per-
sonality and intellectual capacity after a partial lobectomy which
removed approximately one third of each frontal lobe. The dif-
ferent effects of surgical insult reported by Brickner as contrasted
to those reported by Freeman and Watts, Hebb and Penfield, and
other variations found in the literature are generally agreed to be
due to the particular nature of the operation performed. In spite
of the physiological mysteries that still baffle the expert concerned
with the mechanisms of the brain, there is no disagreement on the
fact that even partial removal of the frontal lobes can and does
significantly alter an individual's personality, significantly change
the behavior and thought that makes him his normal "self."

In this chapter we have seen that the genetically formed ego,
which is re-formed during adolescence and which is for the adult
so largely composed of a constellation of personal and social values,
can and does disintegrate, dissolve or break down, under certain
conditions. Definite signs of ego-deterioration or breakdown are
observable. These vary according to the particular situation to
which a person is exposed and, within limits, are subject to in-
dividual differences of temperament, ability, and the like. The
few examples of ego-breakdown reviewed here give further evi-
dence that the ego is not an innate entity, that it is not fixed and
static, and that its change and dissolution, like its formation and
re-formation, result from the relationship between the individual
and his social environment. And the cases of ego-breakdown re-
sulting from definite organic disturbances or physiological imbal-
ance are further evidence of the fact that ego-striving is rooted
in the human organism, is made possible because of its poten-
tiality for functioning on a conceptual level, and is therefore
neither a primary instinct in the sense of hunger or sex nor the
manifestation of some mystic force.

REFERENCES

1. ALLPORT, G. W., J. S. BRUNER, and E. M. JANDORF, Personality under social
catastrophe: ninety life-histories of the Nazi revolution, Character and Per-
sonality, 1941, 10, 1-22.

435

2. ANGELL, R. C., The family Encounters the Depression, New York: Scribner's,

3. ANGYAL, A., The experience of the body-self in schizophrenia, Arch. Neurology

and Psychiatry, 1936, 35, 1029-53.

4. BALES, R. F., Social therapy for a social disorder — compulsive drinking,

/. Social Issues, 1945, 1, 14-22.

5. BEISWANGER, G., Martha Graham: a perspective, in Martha Graham, by Bar-

6. BENNETT, A. E., J. J. KEEGAN, and C. B. WILBUR, Prefrontal lobotomy in

chronic schizophrenia, J. Am. Med. Assoc., 1943, 123, 809-13.

7. BETTELHEIM, B., Individual and mass behavior in extreme situations, /. Ab-

norm, and Soc. Psychol, 1943, 38, 417-52.

8. BRICKNER, R. M., The Intellectual Functions of the Frontal Lobes, New York:

Macmillan, 1936, quotations by permission of the author.

9. COBB, S., Personality as affected by lesions of the brain, in Personality and the

Behavior Disorders (J. McV. Hunt, ed.), vol. 1, New York: Ronald, copy-
right 1944, ch. 18.

11. DUBLIN, L. I., and B. BUNZEL, To Be or Not To Be, New York: Smith Sc

Haas, 1933.

12. EISENBERG, P., and P. F. LAZARSFELD, The psychological effects of unemploy-

ment, Psychol. Bull, 1938, 35, 358-90.

13. FARIS, R. E. L., Reflections of social disorganization in the behavior of a

schizophrenic patient, Am. J. SocioL, 1944, 50, 134-41.

14. FRANZ, S. L, Persons One and Three, New York: McGraw-Hill, copyright

1933.

15. FREEMAN, W., and J. W. WATTS, The frontal lobes and consciousness of the

self, Psychosomatic Med., 1941, 3, 111-19.
16. Psychosurgery, Baltimore: Thomas, 1942.

17. GELB, A., and K. GOLDSTEIN, Psychologische Analysen hirnpathologischer

Falle: X. Uber Farbennamenamnesie, Psychol. Forsch., 1925, 6, 127-86.
(Zbl ges. Neurol. Psychiat., 1925, 60, 577.)

19. GOLDSTEIN, K., and A. GELB, Psychologische Analysen hirnpathologischer

Falle: I. Zur psychologic des optischen Wahrnehmungs- und Erkennungs-
vorganges, Z. ges. Neurol. Psychiat., 1918, 41, 1-142. (Zbl. ges. Neurol.
Psychiat., 1919, 18, 105-08.)

20. GOLDSTEIN, K., and M. SCHEERER, Abstract and concrete behavior: an experi-

mental study with special tests, Psychol. Monogr., 1941, 53, no. 2.

21. GRINKER, R. R., and J. P. SPIEGEL, War Neuroses, Philadelphia: Blakiston,

23. HALSTEAD, W. C., Experimental analysis of the effects of pre-frontal lobectomy

in man, Psychol. Bull., 1938, 35, 687.

24. HEBB, D. O., and W. PENFIELD, Human behavior after extensive bilateral

removal from the frontal lobes, Arch. Neurol. Psychiat., 1940, 44, 421-38.

25. HUNT, J. McV., and C. N. COFER, Psychological deficit, in Personality and the

Behavior Disorders (J. McV. Hunt, ed.), vol. 2, New York: Ronald, copy-
right 1944, ch. 32.

436 BREAKDOWNS OF THE EGO

26. ISRAELI, N., Distress in the outlook of Lancashire and Scottish unemployed,

/. Appl. Psychol., 1935, 19, 67-9.

27. KISKER, G. W., and G. W. KNOX, The psychopathology of the ego system,

/. Nerv. and Ment. Diseases, 1943, 96, 66-71.

28. KLEBANOFF, S. G., Psychological changes in organic brain lesions and ablations,

Psychol. Bull, 1945, 42, 585-623..

29. KOFFKA, K., Principles of Gestalt Psychology, New York: Harcourt, Brace,

30. KRAINES, S. H., The Therapy of the Neuroses and Psychoses, Philadelphia:

32. McDoucALL, W., Outline of Abnormal Psychology, New York: Scribner's,

33. MOWRER, E. R., Disorganization: Personal and Social, New York: Lippincott,

1942.

35. New Yor% Times, September 29, 1945.

36. RIBOT, T., Diseases of Memory, New York: Appleton, copyright 1881.

37. Les Maladies de la personnalite , Paris: Alcan, 1895.

38. RYLANDER, G., Personality Changes after Operations on the Frontal Lobes: A

Clinical Study of Thirty-two Cases, Copenhagen: Ejnar Munksgard, 1939.

39. SCHILDER, P., Goals and Desires of Man, New York: Columbia Univ. Press,

40. SHOCK, N. W., Physiological factors in behavior, in Personality and the Be*

havior Disorders (J. McV. Hunt, ed,), vol. 1, New York: Ronald, copy-
right 1944, ch. 19.

41. STOUFFER, S. A., and P. F. LAZARSFELD, Research Memorandum on the Family

in the Depression, New York: Social Science Research Council, Bull. 29,
1937.

42. VAN DE VELDE, TH. H., Ideal Marriage, New York: Covici Friede, copyright

1931, quotations by permission of Random House.

43. WEIGL, E., Zur psychologic sogenannter Abstraktionsprozesse: Untersuchungen

iiber das "Ordnen," Z. Psychol., 1927, 103, 2-45; trans, by M. J. Rioch,
/. Abnorm. & Soc. Psychol., 1941, 36, 3-33.

44. WHITE, W. A., Outlines of Psychiatry, New York: J. Nervous and Mental Dis-

ease Publishing Co., 1913.

45. WILLIAMS, R. D., H. L. MASON, R. M. WILDER, and B. F. SMITH, Induced thia-

mine (Bj) deficiency and the thiamine requirement of man: Further observa-
tions, Arch, intern. Med., 1942, 69, 721.

46. ZAWADSKI, B., and P. LAZARSFELD, The psychological consequences of unem-

ployment, /. Soc. Psychol., 1935, 6, 224-51.

CHAPTER 13
SOME ILLUSTRATIONS FROM LITERATURE

It has often been pointed out that novelists and playwrights seem
to be better observers of "human nature" than professional psy-
chologists. And there is little doubt that in the vast storehouse
of literature the psychologist would find nearly all of his observa-
tions anticipated. But the very nature of the psychologist's job,
unlike that of the novelist, dramatist, or poet, imposes on him the
obligation of going beyond his observations, accounting for them
with consistent scientific concepts. His intellectual burden is
lightened only insofar as he can verify his observations, see what
general psychological principles can be drawn from them.

In literary works produced in different countries at different
periods of time, there is abundant illustration that novelists and
playwrights were fully aware of the fact that many a person's
interests and desires are ego-involved. Through the characters or
situations they build up, they reveal in dramatic proportions prop-
erties of the ego that are similar in their characteristics to those
we have already found in controlled investigations. And so, on
the basis of these controlled studies and the knowledge we have
gained of the development and components of the ego, we are in
a position to handle systematically the psychology of ego-involve-
ments as these appear in various literary works. We must, of
course, always recognize the subtle shadings and nuances given by
any author to the feelings, passions, and situations he portrays;
we must bear in mind that the literary artist is by and large deal-
ing with particular and unique qualities of personal experience.
But through the variety of intricate and distinct episodes and
characterizations, we can find underlying psychological principles
reflected.

In this chapter we must limit ourselves to a few of thousands
of examples that might be given in a more exhaustive analysis.

437

438 SOME ILLUSTRATIONS FROM LITERATURE

A thick book could be written on the use which Shakespeare's
genius alone made of the psychology of ego-involvements. We
shall proceed here, as we have before, from relatively simple to
relatively complex situations.

We saw in an earlier chapter how the boundaries of the child's
ego gradually expanded to include his body, his room, his clothes,
his toys, his house, and so on. Most of us, whether children or
adults, feel that there is some little space we can call ours, that is
part of our own psychological world, included in our own ego-
boundaries. The space may be some corner of a room where we
have a favorite chair, it may be some glade in the woods to which
we make recurrent visits, it may be a barrel in the woodshed we
like to sit on in the evening after dinner. Whatever it is, we come
to feel that that space is not only ours but is a part of us. If it is
pre-empted by someone else, destroyed, or intruded upon, we are
annoyed, we feel that our privacy, our selves have been violated,
injured, or insulted.

This ego-involvement a person has with a space which through
usage and association has become his, is illustrated in John Stein-
beck's Of Mice and Men. [14] Crooks is a Negro stablehand who
had his own little bunk in the harness room; Lennie, a big,
kindly, almost moronic individual who has a temporary job on
the place, looked after by a faithful friend, but generally isolated
from the rest of the men.

Crooks sat on his bunk. His shirt was out of his jeans in back. In
one hand he held a bottle of liniment, and with the other he rubbed
his spine. Now and then he poured a few drops of the liniment into
his pink-palmed hand and reached up under his shirt to rub again.
He flexed his muscles against his back and shivered.

Noiselessly Lennie appeared in the open doorway and stood there
looking in, his big shoulders nearly filling the opening. For a mo-
ment Crooks did not see him, but on raising his eyes he stiffened and
a scowl came on his face. His hand came out from under his shirt.

Lennie smiled helplessly in an attempt to make friends.

Crooks said sharply, "You got no right to come in my room. This
here's my room. Nobody got any right in here but me!'

Lennie gulped and his smile grew more fawning. "I ain't doing
nothing," he said. "Just come to look at my puppy. And I seen your
light,'1 he explained.

SOME ILLUSTRATIONS FROM LITERATURE 439

"Well, I got a right to have a light. You go on get outta my room.
I ain't wanted in the bunk house, and you ain't wanted in my room"
[14,

The favorite theme in the literature of all ages and all peoples
is, of course, the love of a man and a woman. Many authors have
shown that all-embracing passionate complete love means essen-
tially that a lover has merged his or her ego with the person loved,
that the self of one person includes the self of the other, that what
is one's is also the other's, that the separation of the lovers means
a separation of the self of each. Shakespeare, at the very end of
his Measure for Measure, has the duke say to his Isabel:

What's mine is yours, and what is yours is mine. [Act V, Scene 1]

And in Romeo and Juliet, Juliet tells Romeo that the more she
gives to him the more she has:

Juliet. What satisfaction canst thou have to-night?

Romeo. The exchange of thy love's faithful vow for mine.

Juliet. I gave thee mine before thou didst request it; And yet I
would it were to give again.

Romeo. Wouldst thou withdraw it? for what purpose, love?

Juliet, But to be frank, and give it thee again. And yet I wish but
for the thing I have: My bounty is as boundless as the sea,

My love as deep; the more I give to thee, the more I have, for both
are infinite. [Act II, Scene 2]

In Emily Bronte's Wuthering Heights [1], Catherine reveals her
complete identity with Heathcliflf, the man she loves:

. . . he's more myself than 1 am. Whatever our souls are made of,
his and mine are the same . . . My great miseries in this world have
been Heathcliff's miseries, and I watched and felt each from the be-
ginning: my great thought in living is himself. 'If all else perished,
and he remained, I should still continue to be; and if all else re-
mained, and he were annihilated, the universe would turn to a mighty
stranger: I should not seem a part of it. My love for Linton is like
the foliage in the woods: time will change it, I'm well aware, as win-
ter changes the trees. My love for Heathcliflf resembles the eternal
rocks beneath: a source of litde visible delight, but necessary. Nelly,

1 All italics in literary passages quoted arc ours. Words in bold type italicized
in originals.

440 SOME ILLUSTRATIONS FROM LITERATURE

I am Heathdiftl He's always, always in my mind: not as a pleasure,
any more than I am always a pleasure to myself, but as my own
being. [1, 68 f.]

Eugene O'Neill in The Great God Brown [10] at the end of the
play shows the undying love of a wife for her dead husband. In
this scene, Margaret, the wife, on a moonlight night nostalgically
revisits the scene where her husband, Dion, proposed to her. She
asks her boys to leave her, and in the last scene of the play she says:

So long ago! And yet I'm still the same Margaret. It's only our
lives that grow old. We are where centuries only count as seconds and
after a thousand lives our eyes begin to open — (she looks around her
with a rapt smile) — and the moon rests in the sea! I want to feel the
moon at peace in the sea! I want Dion to leave the sky for me! I
want him to sleep in the tides of my heart! (She slowly takes from
under her cloak, from her bosom, as if from her heart, the mask o£
Dion as it was at the last and holds it before her face) My lover! My
husband! My boy! You can never die till my heart dies! You will
live forever! You are sleeping under my heart! I feel you stirring in
your sleep, forever under my heart. (She kisses him on the lips with a
timeless kiss,) [10, 98]

The feeling of passionate lovers has been caught by Ernest Hem-
ingway in his moving story of the Spanish Civil War, For Whom
the Bell Tolls [4]. Robert Jordan, an American fighting with the
Spanish Republican forces, and the Spanish girl, Maria, whom he
affectionately calls "Guapa" and "Rabbit," are lying together at
night in the open woods.

Then they were together so that as the hand on the watch moved,
unseen now, they %new that nothing could ever happen to the one
that did not happen to the other, that no other thing could happen
more than this; that this was all and always; this was what had been
and now and whatever was to come. This, that they were not to
have, they were having. They were having now and before and
always and now and now and now. Oh, now, now, now, the only
now, and above all now, and there is no other now but thou now
and now is thy prophet. Now and forever now. Come now, now,
for there is no now but now. Yes, now. Now, please now, only
now, not anything else only this now, and where are you and where
am I and where is the other one, and not why, not ever why, only

SOME ILLUSTRATIONS FROM LITERATURE 441

this now; and on and always please then always now, always now,
for now always one now; one only one, there is no other one but one
now, one, going now, rising now, sailing now, leaving now, wheeling
now, soaring now, away now, all the way now, all of all the way
now; one and one is one, is one, is one, is one, is still one, is still one,
is one descendingly, is one softly, is one longingly, is one fyndly, is
one happily, is one in goodness, is one to cherish, is one now on earth
with elbows against the cut and slept-on branches of the pine tree
with the smell of the pine boughs and the night; to earth conclusively
now, and with the morning of the day to come. Then he said, for
the other was only in his head and he had said nothing, "Oh, Maria,
I love thee and I thank thee for this." [4, 379]

And at the end of the book when Jordan takes his final leave
of Maria, this identity of the two lovers as one is again brought
out.

"Guapa," he said to Maria and took hold of her two hands. . . .

"Listen. We will not go to Madrid now but / go always with thee
wherever thou goest. Understand ?"

She said nothing and pushed her head against his cheek with her
arms around him.

"Listen to this well, rabbit," he said. He knew there was a great
hurry and he was sweating very much, but this had to be said and
understood. "Thou wilt go now, rabbit. But I go with thee. As
long as there is one of us there is both of us. Do you understand?"

"Nay, I stay with thee."

"Nay, rabbit. What I do now I do alone. I could not do it well
with thee. // thou goest then I go, too. Do you not see how it is?
Whichever one there is, is both!'

"I will stay with thee."

"Nay, rabbit. Listen. That people cannot do together. Each one
must do it alone. But if thou goest then I go with thee. It is in that
way that I go too. Thou wilt go now, I know. For thou art good
and kind. Thou wilt go now for us both!'

"But it is easier if I stay with thee," she said. "It is better for me."

"Yes. Therefore go for a favor. Do it for me since it is what thou
canst do."

"But you don't understand, Roberto. What about me? It is worse
for me to go."

"Surely," he said. "It is harder for thee. But I am thee also now!9

She said nothing.

442 SOME ILLUSTRATIONS FROM LITERATURE

He looked at her and he was sweating heavily and he spoke now,
trying harder to do something than he had ever tried in all his life.

"Now you will go for us both," he said. "You must not be selfish,
rabbit. You must do your duty now."

She shook her head.

"You are me now," he said. "Surely thou must feel it, rabbit."

"Rabbit, listen," he said. "Truly thus I go too. I swear it to thee."
[4, 463]

In the libretto written for Richard Strauss's opera Der Rosen-
\avdier by Hugo von Hofmannsthal [15], Octavian in talking to
the Marschallin at the beginning of the first act, describes the
fusion which occurs between the "I" and the "You" of lovers.2

. . , You, you — what means this "you"? or "you and I"?

What sense has this?

These are words, mere words, are they not? It is for you to say!

But still, there is something in them;

A dizziness, a pulling, a longing and urging,

A languishing and burning;

The way my hand approaches yours,

The will toward you, the embracing of you,

I am what "wills" toward you;

But the "I" is lost in the "you" . . .

I am your boy, but when I lose sight and hearing —

Where is your boy? [15, 2]

In a familiar passage from the balcony scene of Romeo and
Juliet, Shakespeare shows how ego-involved a person's name can
become, how his name stands for his identification and status, how
difficult it is to separate the person from what his name stands for,
and how the fate of two people who loved each other was affected
by the established value judgments of families that were bitter
enemies. Romeo's ego is one constellation as a member of his
family, a different constellation as a lover. [Act II, Scene 2]

Juliet* O Romeo, Romeo! wherefore art thou Romeo?
Deny thy father, and refuse thy name;
Or, if thou wilt not, be but sworn my love,
And I'll no longer be a Capulet.

2 This passage was called to our attention by Oliver Strunk who also made the
English translation for us.

SOME ILLUSTRATIONS FROM LITERATURE 443

Romeo (aside). Shall I hear more, or shall I speak at this?

Juliet 'Tis but thy name that is my enemy;

Thou art thyself though, not a Montague.

What's Montague? it is nor hand, nor foot,

Nor arm, nor face, nor any other part

Belonging to a man. O! be some other name:

What's in a name? that which we call a rose

By any other name would smell as sweet;

So Romeo would, were he not Romeo call'd,

Retain that dear perfection which he owes

Without that title. Romeo t doff thy name;

And for that name, which is no part of thee,

TaJ(e all myself.

In a story of Frankie, a 12-year-old girl just entering adolescence,
Carson McCullers gives a penetrating account of the acute feeling
of isolation Frankie experienced as a result of the situation she
lived through during a summer. Frankie was too young to be
in girls' clubs; too old for John Henry, the six-year-old cousin
she had to be with; confused and angered by Berenice, the Negro
maid who talked about her four husbands and made fun of
Frankie. When her older brother returned from Alaska, married
a girl from Winter Hill, a city 100 miles from the home town,
Frankie identified herself romantically and completely with the
brother and his bride. McCullers shows us how Frankie's for-
merly lonely world suddenly expanded to include the bride and
groom, how for the first time in her life she felt she could now
regard herself as part of a "we/* and how the newly extended self
seemed to dissociate when this "we" she had become went to stay
in Winter Hill. [7]

For a long time now her brother and the bride had been at Winter
Hill They had left the town a hundred miles behind them, and now
were in a city far away. They were them and in Winter Hill, to-
gether, while she was her and in the same old town all by herself. The
long hundred miles did not make her sadder and make her feel more
far away than the knowing that they were them and both together
and she was only her and parted from them, by herself. And as she
sickened with this feeling a thought and explanation suddenly came to
her, so that she knew and almost said aloud: They are the we of me.
Yesterday, and all the twelve years of her life, she had only been

444 SOME ILLUSTRATIONS FROM LITERATURE

Frankic. She was an I person who had to walk around and do things
by herself. All other people had a we to claim, all other except her.
When Berenice said we, she meant Honey and Big Mama, her lodge,
or her church. The we of her father was the store. All members of
clubs have a we to belong to and talk about. The soldiers in the army
can say we, and even the criminals on chain-gangs. But the old
Frankie had had no we to claim, unless it would be the terrible sum-
mer we of her and John Henry and Berenice — and that was the last
we in the world she wanted. Now all this was suddenly over with
and changed. There was her brother and the bride, and it was as
though when first she saw them something she had known inside of
her: They are the we of me. And that was why it made her feel so
queer, for them to be away in Winter Hill while she was left all by
herself; the hull of the old Frankie left there in the town alone.
[7, 50]

The importance of ego-involvement with the same values if a
friendship or love relationship are to be lasting can be illustrated
in Sinclair Lewis' Cass Timberlane. [5] The following passage is
part of a conversation between Cass Timberlane and his wife,
Jinny, just after Jinny has admitted to Cass that she had become
Bradd Criley's mistress. She has told Cass she is going to leave
him and go back to Bradd whom she intends to marry. Here
Lewis points out how the allegiance of one person to a set of
norms another person does not respect makes for incompatibility;
how behavior (in this case Bradd's truthfulness) can be judged
only within a referential frame.

[Jinny] "Does charm seem to you such a bad quality for a girl to
have in a husband ?"

— I'm not coming off so well in the argument. And this is a life-
death struggle to hold her, not just a squabble. [Thinks Cass to him-
self]

"Yes, I think it is bad, when it's deliberately turned on and off, as it
is with a blackguard like Criley."

"You mean 'heel,' don't you? You know, when you say he's a heel,
you're talking like a man and it doesn't mean a thing to a woman,
unless she's half -man herself. Very few women care a hang about the
laws or the social rules. What they love in a man is the feeling that
he isn't merely with them, but that he is them, and feels and thinks as
they do before they've finished thinking it. What people like you

SOME ILLUSTRATIONS PROM LITERATURE 44$

detest about the heels, the outlaws, is that they don't give a hoot for the
idiotic rules that you've set up to protect your own awkwardness, which
comes from your never really being completely one with a woman, but
always remaining a little aside from her, noticing how good you a^re or
how bad. And expecting her to do what— Bradd just laughs when
I'm unpunctual, and maybe you can't trust what he says, but with me
he's always truthful!" [5, 335]

In the same book is exemplified the substitute ego-gratification
one person can have through another person's success. In this
instance, one woman puts herself in the place of another woman
who has won the affections of the man she herself loves. The
following conversation takes place at a dinner party given for Cass
Timberlane and Jinny. Cass asks his hostess to seat him beside
Chris Grau, a woman who loves him and whom everyone in town
had expected him to marry.

"Cass! Are you a competent husband for any girl as fine and win-
ning as Jinny?"

"I don't know. I hope so."

"You've got to be! For my sake, too. Cass, she's my understudy.
No, she's me; she represents me, she is me, in the only love-affair I'll
ever have. Are you gentle enough for her and tolerant enough and
imaginative enough and flexible enough?" . . .

"Cass, you do love her, don't you! I'm glad. Do love her. If you
ever for one minute wanted to love me or anything in me, then love
me now in her" [5, 179 /.]

A more complicated variation of this same theme is found in
The Great God Brown where Dion, shortly before his death,
taunts Brown for his love of Margaret, Dion's wife, and her chil-
dren, and for buying off Dion's mistress because they all love him,
Dion. Brown has just admitted his love for Margaret. Dion an-
tagonizes Brown by suggesting that Brown can have the love of
Margaret and the children only if Brown can make Margaret and
the children feel that Dion still lives through him.

Dion (with a terrible composure). No! That is merely the appear-
ance, not the truth! Brown loves me! He loves me because I have
always possessed the power he needed for love, because I am love! . . .

Dion (sinking in his chair, more and more weakly). I'm done. My
heart, not Brown— (Mockingly) My last will and testament! Heave

446 SOME ILLUSTRATIONS FROM LITERATURE

Dion Anthony to William Brown — for him to love and obey — for him
to become me — then my Margaret will love me — my children will love
me—Mr, and Mrs. Brown and sons, happily ever after! (Staggering
to his full height and looking upward defiantly) Nothing more — but
Man's last gesture — by which he conquers — to laugh! Ha — (He
begins, stops as if paralyzed, and drops on his knees by Brown's chair,
his mask falling off, his Christian Martyr's face at the point of death)
Forgive me, Billy. Bury me, hide me, forget me for your own happi-
ness! May Margaret love you! May you design the Temple of Man's
soul! Blessed are the meek and the poor in spirit! (He kisses Brown's
feet— then more and more weakly and childishly) What was the
prayer, Billy? I'm getting so sleepy . . . [10, 64 /.]

In our formulations, the devotion one person has for another is
due to the fact that this other person is included within one's own
ego boundaries, has become a personal value constituting part of
one's own ego. Thus if our friend suffers, we suffer with him;
if he is successful and achieves a fame he desires, we are happy
and proud. Great friendships recorded in history or literature or
seen in everyday life, involve a mutual devotion, reveal an over-
lapping or inclusion of one person's ego with the other's. In his
tragedy Hippolytus [3], Euripides portrays the devotion of a nurse
for her mistress. The mistress, Phaedra, has fallen passionately
in love with Hippolytus, a proud individual, symbol of chastity
and asceticism. Phaedra, a married woman, has vowed to die
rather than let her passion for Hippolytus overcome her and dis-
grace her. The nurse is ignorant of the cause of Phaedra's deter-
mination to die. Phaedra sees that her own death will bring death
to her devoted nurse.

[Nurse] There then I cover thee; but when will death hide my body
in the grave? Many a lesson length of days is teaching me. Yea,
mortal men should pledge themselves to moderate friendships only,
not to such as reach the very heart's core; affection's ties should be
light upon them to let them slip or draw them tight. For one poor
heart to grieve for twain t as I do for my mistress, is a burden sore to
bear. Men say that too engrossing pursuits in life more oft cause dis-
appointment than pleasure, and too oft are foes to health. Wherefore
I do not praise excess so much as moderation, and with me wise men
will agree. . . .

SOME ILLUSTRATIONS FROM LITERATURE 447

(At the mention of his [Hippolytus'j name Phaedra's attention is
suddenly caught.)

Phaedra. Oh! Oh!

Nurse. Ha! doth that touch the quick?

Phaedra. Thou hast undone me, nurse; I do adjure by the gods,
mention that man no more.

Nurse. There now! thou art thyself again, but e'en yet refusest to
aid thy children and preserve thy life.

Phaedra. My babes I love, but there is another storm that buffets
me.

Nurse. Daughter, are thy hands from bloodshed pure?

Phaedra. My hands are pure, but on my soul there rests a stain.

Nurse. The issue of some enemy's secret witchery ?

Phaedra. A friend is my destroyer, one unwilling as myself.

Nurse. Hath Theseus wronged thee in any wise?

Phaedra. Never may I prove untrue to him!

Nurse. Then what strange mystery is there that drives thee on to
die?

Phaedra. O, let my sin and me alone! 'tis not 'gainst thee I sin.

Nurse. Never willingly! and, if I fail, 'twill rest at thy door.

Phaedra. How now ? thou usest force in clinging to my hand.

Nurse. Yea, and I will never loose my hold upon thy knees.

Phaedra. Alas for thee! my sorrows, shouldst thou learn them,
would recoil on thee.

Nurse. What \eener grief for me than failing to win thee?

Phaedra. 'Twill be death to thee; though to me that brings renown.

In one of Phaedra's speeches, Euripides reveals the tense and
tragic conflict that arises when sexual passions run counter to
highly cherished values that have become a part of one's self. In
the following speech we find Phaedra, convinced that she will not
be able to master and subdue her love for Hippolytus, deciding
on death rather than a life in which she could no longer identify
herself with values that to her were paramount. These values
include her status and position as the member of a noble family,
her adherence to the norms of marital fidelity, her love for her
children, and the unstained reputation she wants to leave behind
when she dies.

448 SOME ILLUSTRATIONS FROM LITERATURE

When love wounded me, I bethought me how I best might bear
the smart. So from that day forth I began to hide in silence what I
suffered. For I put no faith in counsellors, who know well to lecture
others for presumption, yet themselves have countless troubles of their
own. Next I did devise noble endurance of these wanton thoughts,
striving by continence for victory. And last when I could not succeed
in mastering love hereby, methought it best to die; and none can
gainsay my purpose. For fain I would my virtue should to all appear,
my shame have jew to witness it. I knew my sickly passion now; to
yield to it I saw how infamous; and more, I learnt to know so well
that I was but a woman, a thing the world detests. Curses, hideous
curses on that wife who first did shame her marriage-vow for lovers
other than her lord! Twas from noble families this curse began to
spread among our sex. For when the noble countenance disgrace,
poor folk of course will think that it is right. Those too I hate who
make profession of purity, though in secret reckless sinners. How can
these, queen Cypris, ocean's child, e'er look their husbands in the
face? do they never feel one guilty thrill that their accomplice, night,
or the chambers of their house will find a voice and speak? This it
is that calls on me to die, kind friends, that so I may ne'er be found
to have disgraced my lord, or the children I have borne; no! may they
grow up and dwell in glorious Athens, free to speak and act, heirs to
such fair fame as a mother can bequeath. For to know that father or
mother has sinned doth turn the stoutest heart to slavishness. This
alone, men say, can stand the buffets of life's battle, a just and virtu-
ous soul in whomsoever found. For time unmasks the villain soon or
late, holding up to them a mirror as to some blooming maid. 'Mongst
such may I be never seen! [3, 774]

Both laboratory experiments and other controlled investigations
have shown us how the particular constellation of social values
that forms so large a part of our egos gives us our particular status,
our anchoring and our identity in the network of social relation-
ships around us. Our standing in a group or community, our
reputation, generally stems from judgments made by others of our
status. If we are relatively satisfied or proud of the status or an-
choring we have achieved, then any reflection or disparagement
of our status disturbs our ego, upsets us, makes us feel insecure,
angry, deflated. Shakespeare shows this in the well-known pas-
sage, spoken by lago in Othello:

SOME ILLUSTRATIONS FROM LITERATURE 449

lago. Good name in man and woman, dear my lord,

Is the immediate jewel of their souls:

Who steals my purse steals trash; 'tis something, nothing;

'Twas mine, 'tis his, and has been slave to thousands;

But he that filches from me my good name

Robs me of that which not enriches him,

And maf(es me poor indeed. [Act III, Scene 3]

In those primitive and more advanced societies where class or
caste lines exist, we find that in nearly all established communities
one of the determinants of a person's status is the family he be-
longs to. The particular place one's own family has in the hier-
archy of community values can and very frequently does provide
an ego-anchorage. Hence one of the quickest and surest ways for
an individual in these societies to rise in the social scale is to marry
into a family already solidly established in a superior position. To
guard against a breakdown of class and status lines, it was the
accepted practice in many societies in earlier years for parents to
choose the husbands or wives for their children. Although this
custom has generally broken down in advanced countries, there
are still subtle and indirect methods parents can and do use to
minimize the danger that a child will fall in love with someone
"beneath" him and to maximize the opportunities for social inter-
course between children of the same class: A family will live in
the "right" neighborhood, children will be sent to the "right"
school or summer camp, and so on. But when, in spite of these
precautions, a child from a "superior" class breaks out of bounds
and decides to marry someone beneath him, considerable conster-
nation is likely to arise. Parents feel that their status will be low-
ered by any such action, they suffer an ego-disturbance, an ego-
failure.

The difficulties and conflicts arising either from the attempt of
a person to marry into a class he regards as "higher," or the threat
to the ego of a person in a "superior" class because a child is going
to marry "beneath" him, has been a recurrent theme in literature,
especially in American novels in the past few decades. We will
cite here only two of these more recent examples.

The first is from Marquand's The Late George Apley. [6] The
Apleys could count themselves among the uppercrust of Boston

450 SOME ILLUSTRATIONS FROM LITERATURE

society— they lived on Beacon Hill, sent their sons to Harvard,
and so on. For generations this had been the case, and George
Apley had sufficient independent means to maintain his position
well. His son John had secretly married the recently divorced
Louise McCullogh. The father was shocked when he heard the
news for, as he said, he had always believed that "J°hn was
basically sound." He thought Louise came from a "reasonably
good" New York family. On learning of John's marriage, George
Apley wrote to a close friend:

"I had hoped better things of John but now that he has in quite a
real sense left us, I feel more than ever a sense of responsibility toward
the family." [6, 307]

Later on George Apley learned more about Louise's family, and
his whole estimate of her changed. The following paragraph is
taken from a letter he wrote to John after acquiring the added
information:

"/ cannot for the life of me see why you did not tell me in the first
place that Louise, whom I am growing more and more anxious daily
to set eyes upon, was one of the Hogarths of Connecticut. This, of
course, maizes a very great difference, foolish, perhaps, in your eyes,
but not in mine. It has always been a most important thing with
me to place a person. Many of us are accused unjustly of being snob-
bish. This is not the case. The so-called snobbishness is generally
due to one's inability to place the subject of it in the accepted social
scale. Louise's being a Hogarth places her perfectly. I am sure that
the man McCullogh must have been a very bad hat." [6, 308]

Christopher Morley, in his Kitty Foyle [9], outlines in bold
relief the thoughts and feelings of an independent self-sufficient
girl, Kitty Foyle, the daughter of a former cricket club coach and
night foreman at a machine shop, who falls in love with Wynne-
wood Strafford VI, son of an old Main Line Philadelphia family.
Although Wyn also loves Kitty, she refused to marry him because
of her class consciousness and class pride, and he married a Phila-
delphia socialite in the approved fashion. The following excerpts
are from a few of the scenes Kitty recalls some years after Wyn's
marriage.

SOME ILLUSTRATIONS FROM LITERATURE 451

Wyn wanted to take me out to Darby Mill. He had planned it all
beforehand, they were throwing a house-party out there and I'd had
a note from his mother. Naturally I had some sense, I could even
see in the way her handwriting went up and down it was a fever
chart, but Wyn wouldn't take No.

It was a mistake. Of course Wyn had done what any man would,
told everybody to be lovely to me and they were so god damn lovely
I could have torn their eyes out. / was the only one that wasn't in
the union. That crowd, if they stopped to think about it, would
reckon that Ben Franklin was still a boy from the wrong side of the
tracks, so what would they think about me. Somebody wanted to
know if I was one of the Iglehart Foyles from Baltimore or the
Saltonstall Foyles from Pride's Crossing. I said no pride ever crossed
our family, except when the old man carried his bat against Merion
C. C. . . . / \new either I or the rest of them didn't belong, and the
embarrassment went around the dinner table all wrapped up in a
napkin like that wine bottle the butlers carried. [9, 787 /.]

Later in the book, Kitty recalls another episode.

"Well then I've got to tell you," Wyn said. "Uncle Kennett has a
big idea, he wanted to explain it to you himself. He says you're just
exactly the girl for me, Kitty, and the girl the family needs, and he
wants to send you back to college for a year and then maybe go abroad
a year and meanwhile I'll try to get some education myself and be
ready for you."

Oh Jesusgod I don't know exactly how you said it, Wyn. It was
something like that. My poor baby, how could you know what that
would do to me the way I was just then. Maybe that nice old man
with his thee talk could have sold it to me; I don't know. I had a kind
of picture of some damned family conference and the Straffords and
their advisers trying to figure out how the curse was going to be taken
off Kitty Foyle. So that was it, they were going to buy the girl with an
education, and polish off her rough Frankford edges, were they, and
make her good enough to live with stuffed animals' heads and get
advertised in the Ledger. I can still see your face, my poor baby, when
I turned on you. I felt hot inside my throat and on the rims of my
ears.

"You can tell Uncle Ken he's a white slaver. Listen, Wyn Strafford,
I'll be your girl whenever I feel like it because I love you from hell to
breakfast. But I wouldn't join the little tin family if every old Quaker
with an adding machine begged me to. No, not if they all went back

452 SOME ILLUSTRATIONS FROM LITERATURE

to college and got themselves an education. So they tried to sell you
the idea they'd trim up Kitty so she could go to the Assembly and
tna\e Old Philadelphia Family out of her, hey? Cut her out of a copy
of Vogue and give her a charge account and makf a Main Line doll
out of her. They can't do that to Kitty Foyle. Jesusgod, that's what
they are themselves, a bunch of paper dolls."

... By God, I'll improve you all I want but you can't improve me.
[9,2*lff.]

The way in which a person's status or role in society, rather than
any intrinsic characteristics or qualities of his personality, deter-
mines how others react to him, and, in turn, how he is deeply
influenced by them in his ego-inflations has often provided the
basis for comedy, tragedy, and for literature that aims to convey
a "moral." G. H. Mead has pointed out that we frequently judge
people by projecting ourselves into the status role we attribute
to the person being judged [8]. George Bernard Shaw seems to
take particular pleasure in showing up hypocrisy by bringing into
his plays pointed references to this effect of status on our evalua-
tion of an individual. In The Devil's Disciple [11], Richard
Dudgeon, who has been regarded by his mother and the rest of
the Puritan community as a renegade and dubbed "The Devil's
Disciple," is found unexpectedly to have inherited his father's
property. When Richard obeys the summons of the Presbyterian
divine, Anderson, and visits the latter's house, he finds to his sur-
prise that he is treated quite civilly for only recently Anderson
had roundly condemned him for his sins. Just before the follow-
ing incident, Richard is apologizing to the minister and his wife
for the wetness of his coat, due to his walk in the rain:

Anderson. Take it off, sir; and let it hang before the fire a while:
my wife will excuse your shirtsleeves. Judith: put in another spoonful
of tea for Mr. Dudgeon.

Richard (eyeing him cynically). The magic of property t Pastor!
Are even you civil to me now that I have succeeded to my fathers
estate?

Judith throws down the spoon indignantly. [11, Act II]

And not only is our judgment of a person affected by the status
he holds, but his own judgment of himself, what he regards him-
self to be, can be and often is determined by the reactions of

SOME ILLUSTRATIONS FROM LITERATURE 453

Others to him. If a person is treated as though he were a person
with high status, then he is likely to regard himself as such (at
least for the time being) ; if he is treated as though he had a low
status in the particular hierarchy of values used as the referential
framework, then he is disappointed, insulted, and so on. Shaw
calls attention to this form of ego-involvement in his Pygmalion
[12]. A poor London flower girl, Liza, is made into a lady by the
speech expert, Higgins, who teaches her in his Wimpole Street
studio to speak and act like a lady. Higgins treats Liza as an ex-
perimental subject and he is, as Shaw describes him, "careless
about himself and other people, including their feelings." Par-
ticipating in the experiment is a visiting speech expert, Pickering,
a sensitive man with the qualities of a gentleman. Just before
the following dialogue takes place, Liza is telling Pickering, in
front of Higgins, that although Higgins did teach her to speak
as a lady would "it was just like learning to dance in the fashion-
able way: there was nothing more than that in it." Liza con-
tinues with the question:

But do you know what began my real education?

Pickering. What?

Liza. Your calling me Miss Doolittle that day when I first came to
Wimpole Street. That was the beginning of self-respect for me. And
there were a hundred little things you never noticed, because they
came naturally to you. Things about standing up and taking off your
hat and opening doors—-
Pickering. Oh, that was nothing.

Liza. Yes: things that showed you thought and felt about me as if
I were something better than a scullery-maid; though of course I
know you would have been just the same to a scullery-maid if she had
been let into the drawing room. You never took off your boots in
the dining room when I was there.

Pickering. You mustn't mind that. Higgins takes off his boots all
over the place.

Liza. I know. I am not blaming him. It is his way, isn't it? But
it made such a difference to me that you didn't do it. You sec, really
and truly, apart from the things anyone can pick up (the dressing and
the proper way of speaking, and so on), the difference between a lady
and a flower-girl is not how she behaves, but how she's treated. I shall

454 SOME ILLUSTRATIONS FROM LITERATURE

always be a flower girl to Professor Higgins, because he always treats
me as a flower girl, and always will; but I know I can be a lady to you,
because you always treat me as a lady, and always will. [12, Act V]

A frequent theme of tragedies is the portrayal of the fate of
individuals who, obeying the edicts of their conscience or what
they regard as a higher law, run up against man-made laws or
established norms of their community. The individual in these
situations is shown to have so identified himself with a particular
value that compromise is impossible and death is preferable to a
life in which a radical realteration of the ego structure would be
forced. This is the situation in Sophocles' play Antigone [13].
Creon had assumed the throne of Thebes and had issued a procla-
mation that the corpse of one of Antigone's brothers who had led
an armed force against the city and who had been killed in com-
bat should remain unburied on the battlefield. Because of the
emphasis placed by the Greeks upon the necessity of proper funeral
rites, this action of Creon's was regarded with particular terror;
it ran completely counter to the divine laws accepted by the people
at that time. Antigone, deliberately disobeyed Creon's proclama-
tion by performing the necessary burial rites for her brother's body,
out of respect for her brother and for a higher law emanating from
the gods she believed in. For this action, Creon condemned her
to be buried alive in a vaulted grave. The following excerpt is
from a speech of Antigone after she learned Creon's judgment:

Tomb, bridal-chamber, eternal prison in the caverned rock, whither
I go to find mine own, those many who have perished, and whom
Persephone hath received among the dead! Last of all shall I pass
thither, and far most miserably of all, before the term of my life is
spent. But I cherish good hope that my coming will be welcome to
my father, and pleasant to thee, my mother, and welcome, brother, to
thee; for, when ye died, with mine own hands I washed and dressed
you, and poured drink-offerings at your graves; and now, Polyneices,
'tis for tending thy corpse that I win such recompense as this.

And yet I honoured thee, as the wise will deem, rightly. . . .

And what law of heaven have I transgressed? Why, hapless one,
should I look to the gods any more,— what ally should I invoke,-—
when by piety I have earned the name of impious ?* Nay, then, if

SOME ILLUSTRATIONS FROM LITERATURE 455

these things are pleasing to the gods, when I have suffered my doom,
I shall come to know my sin; but if the sin is with my judges, I could
wish them no fuller measure of evil than they, on their part, mete
wrongfully to me. [13, 447 f.]

To give up life for what is regarded as a "higher0 life, is, of
course, found in the precepts of various religious leaders. The
individual who completely accepts the principles of these religious
prophets, is promised a "new" life. In the Gospel of St. Matthew,
Christ's teaching is reported:

Then said Jesus unto his disciples, If any man will come after me, let
him deny himself, and take up his cross, and follow me.

For whosoever will save his life shall lose it: and whosoever will lose
his life for my sake shall find it.

For what is a man profited, if he shall gain the whole world, and
lose his own soul? or what shall a man give in exchange for his soul?
[Matt. 16:24-26]

And the disciple, Paul, in his epistle to the Galatians, tells of the
new life he has after his conversion.

For I through the law am dead to the law, that I might live unto
God.

/ am crucified with Christ: nevertheless I live; yet not I, but Christ
liveth in me; and the life which I now live in the flesh I live by the
faith of the Son of God, who loved me, and gave himself for me.
[Gal 2:19-20]

The transformation of personality under condition of extreme
stress, the deprivation of instinctual needs, or organic changes fur-
nish the story of many famous literary characters. Samuel Butler
in The Way of All Flesh [2] observed in simple language one of
the psychological conditions for the breakdown of the ego.

All our lives long, every day and every hour, we are engaged in
the process of accommodating our changed and unchanged selves to
changed and unchanged surroundings; living, in fact, in nothing else
than this process of accommodation; when we fail in it a little we
are stupid, when we fail flagrantly we are mad, when we suspend it
temporarily we sleep, when we give up the attempt altogether we die.
In quiet, uneventful lives the changes internal and external are so
small that there is little or no strain in the process of fusion and

456 SOME ILLUSTRATIONS FROM LtTERATORE

accommodation; in other lives there is great strain, but there is also
great fusing and accommodating power; in others great strain with
little accommodating power. [2, 343]

In Hamlet, Shakespeare portrays Ophelia's madness in part by
having her appear before the King and Queen and behaving in
quite unseemly fashion. Clearly her standards of respect for these
high personages had broken down as had her standards of decent
conduct. After Ophelia is ushered into the presence of the King
and Queen, the following scene occurs:

Ophelia. Where is the beauteous majesty of Denmark?

Queen. How now, Ophelia!

Ophelia. How should I your true love know

From another one?
By his cockle hat and staff,

And his sandal shoon.

Queen. Alas I sweet lady, what imports this song?
Ophelia. Say you ? nay, pray you, mark.
He is dead and gone, lady,

He is dead and gone;
At his head a grass-green turf;

At his heels a stone.
0,ho!

Queen. Nay, but, Ophelia,—
Ophelia. Pray you, mark.

White his shroud as the mountain snow, —

(Enter King)

Queen. Alas! look here, my lord.

Ophelia. Larded with sweet flowers;

Which bewept to the grave did go
With true-love showers.

King. How do you, pretty lady?

Ophelia. Well, God 'ild you! They say the owl was a baker's daugh-
ter. Lord! we know what we are, but know not what we may be.
God be at your table I

King. Conceit upon her father.

Ophelia. Pray you, let's have no words of this; but when they ask
you what it means, say you this:

SOME ILLUSTRATIONS FROM LITERATURE 457

Tomorrow is Saint Valentine's day,

All in the morning betime,
And I a maid at your window,

To be your Valentine:
Then up he rose, and donn'd his clothes,

And dupp'd the chamber-door;
Let in the maid, that out a maid

Never departed more.
King. Pretty Ophelia!

Ophelia. Indeed, la! without an oath, 111 make an end on 't:
By Gis and by Saint Charity,
Alack, and fie for shame!
Young men will do 't, if they come to 't;

By Cock they are to blame.
Quoth she, before you tumbled me,

You promised me to wed:
So would I ha' done, by yonder son,

An thou hadst not come to my bed.
King. How long hath she been thus?

Ophelia. I hope all will be well. We must be patient: but I cannot
choose but weep, to think they should lay him i' the cold ground. My
brother shall know of it: and so I thank you for your good counsel.
Come, my coach! Good-night, ladies; good-night, sweet ladies; good-
night, good-night. [Act IV, Scene 5]

Shakespeare's Hamlet, one of the most complicated and complex
characters in all literature, is many-sided. And Shakespeare has
Hamlet himself aware of the different constellations and patterns
of values which constitute the changing pattern of his ego, a fact
which further adds to the complication. Depending upon his
mood and the situation in which he finds himself, Hamlet is a
different person at different times. Right after his famous so-
liloquy, "To be or not to be," the following dialogue takes place
between Hamlet and Ophelia:

Ophelia. My lord, I have remembrances of yours,

That I have long longed to re-deliver;

I pray you, now receive them.
Hamlet. No, not I;

I never gave you aught.

458 SOME ILLUSTRATIONS FROM LITERATURE

Ophelia. My honour'd lord, you know right well you did;
And, with them, words of so sweet breath compos'd
As made the things more rich : their perfume lost,
Take these again; for to the noble mind
Rich gifts wax poor when givers prove unkind.
There, my lord.

Hamlet Ha, ha! are you honest?
Ophelia* My lord!
Hamlet. Are you fair?
Ophelia. What means your lordship ?

Hamlet That if you be honest and fair, your honesty should admit
no discourse to your beauty.

Ophelia. Could beauty, my lord, have better commerce than with
honesty?

Hamlet Ay, truly; for the power of beauty will sooner transform
honesty from what it is to a bawd than the force of honesty can trans-
late beauty into his likeness : this was sometime a paradox, but now the
time gives it proof. I did love thee once.
Ophelia. Indeed, my lord, you made me believe so.
Hamlet You should not have believed me; for virtue cannot so
inoculate our old stock but we shall relish of it: / loved you not. [Act
III, Scene 1]

And again at the end of the play, just before he duels with
Laertes, the one Hamlet asks Laertes forgiveness for any wrong
another Hamlet has done:

Hamlet Give me your pardon, sir; I've done you wrong;
But pardon 't, as you are a gentleman.
This presence knows,

And you must needs have heard, how I am punish'd
With sore distraction. What I have done,
That might your nature, honour and exception
Roughly awake, I here proclaim was madness.
Was 't Hamlet wrong' d Laertes? Never Hamlet:
If Hamlet from himself be tafen away,
And when he's not himself does wrong Laertes,
Then Hamlet does it not; Hamlet denies it.
Who does it then? His madness. If 't be so,
Hamlet is of the faction that is wrong'd;
His madness is poor Hamlet's enemy.

REFERENCES 459

Sir, in this audience,

Let my disclaiming from a purposed evil

Free me so far in your most generous thoughts,

That I have shot mine arrow o'er the house,

And hurt my brother. [Act V, Scene 2]

These are only a few scattered examples from literature of the
ways in which the novelist and playwright have pointed to the
problem of ego-involvement We have seen how people have be-
come attached to certain values, how these values have become a
part of them in the various situations described. The allegiance
to conflicting values within an individual is the basis of ego-dis-
turbance, ego-conflicts, just as the mergence and overlapping of
values within the single individual or between individuals is the
basis for ego-satisfaction, ego-expansion. Detailed and systematic
analyses of the literature of all peoples, both ancient and modern,
would surely pose for the psychologist wide varieties of ego-in-
volving situations, intricate patterns of ego constellations, stark
and subtle modifications of behavior due to ego-involved attitudes.
The self-appointed job of the novelist, the playwright, and the
poet is to portray life, analyze it impressionistically as a sensitive
observer. The self-appointed job of the psychologist is to explain
systematically and scientifically the thoughts, feelings, and actions
of men. Since so much of life is filled with ego-involved experi-
ences, the literary artist and the psychologist are bound to have
this common meeting ground.

REFERENCES

3. EURIPIDES, Hippolytus, in The Complete Gree\ Drama (Whitney J. Gates and

Eugene O'Neill, Jr., eds.), trans, of E. P. Coleridge, New York: Random
House, copyright 1938.

4. HEMINGWAY, E., For Whom the Bell Tolls, New York: Scribner's, copyright

1940; quotations by permission of the publisher.

tations by permission of the publisher.

6. MARQUAND, J. P., The Late George Apley, Boston: Little, Brown, copyright

1937; quotations by permission of the publishers.

7. McCuLLBRS, C., The Member of the Wedding, Boston: Houghton MifHin,

460 SOME ILLUSTRATIONS FROM LITERATURE

8. MEAD, G. H., Mind, Self and Society, Chicago: Univ. Press, 1934.

by permission of the publisher.

10. O'NEILL, E., The Great God Brown, New York: Boni & Liveright, copyright

1926; quotations by permission of Random House.

11. SHAW, G. P., The Devil's Disciple, in Three Plays for Puritans, New York:

Brentano, copyright 1906; quotations by permission of the author.
12. Pygmalion, New York: Dodd, Mead, copyright 1916; quotations by per-
mission of the author.

13. SOPHOCLES, Antigone, in The Complete Gree\ Drama (Whitney J. Gates and

Eugene O'Neill, Jr., eds.), trans, of R. C. Jebb, New York: Random House,
copyright 1938.

14. STEINBECK, J., Of Mice and Men, New York: Modern Library, copyright

1937; quotations by permission of Viking Press.

15. VON HOFMANNSTHAL, H., Libretto for Richard Strauss' opera Der Rosenfyva-

CHAPTER 14
THE EGO IN PSYCHOANALYSIS

In casually patterned societies a social lag is created by the im-
pact of technological developments on established institutional
controls; on religious, political, and economic ideology; and on
norms of behavior. This is reflected in the turmoil that goes on
within the individual when he tries to make a satisfactory life
adjustment. Personal dilemmas, uncertainties, and crises are in-
variable by-products of periods of social change. In recent years,
laymen who have wanted some "scientific" help in meeting their
personal problems have turned to psychology. The psychology
they appeal to is very often some form of psychoanalysis. It is
perhaps the only kind of psychology they have ever heard of or,
at least, the only variety of psychology that seems to hold out any
promise of explanation or eventual resolution of their difficulties.
And many social scientists, too, quite properly thinking psychology
should be able to help in accounting for anthropological, eco-
nomic, or political phenomena, have turned especially to psycho-
analysis and, like the layman, have tended to equate it with psy-
chology.

Psychoanalysis has, therefore, a tremendous vogue. Its appeal
seems to increase with the general acceleration of social change.
This appeal comes partly from the fact that psychoanalysts have
had the courage to deal with problems of general interest and con-
cern to laymen and to social scientists, and that they attempt to
explain phenomena of everyday life experienced by the individual
or observed by the social scientist. The appeal is also due no doubt
partly to the fact that they use a dramatic and alluring method,
one that deals with "hidden" and unconscious motives, with sex
and with love, with hate and with fear. Once an individual has

been initiated into the psychoanalytical approach and terminology,

461

462 THE EGO IN PSYCHOANALYSIS

the search for the causes and cures of personal and social problems
takes on all the thrill and excitement of detective story fiction.

If psychoanalysis were concerned only with individual therapy,
we would not need to discuss it in social psychology. But psycho-
analysis does become relevant and important for us because it
deals with the problems of social psychology, offers explanations
of the various social phenomena that are the concern of the social
psychologist— with groups and institutions, with religion and other
ideologies, with war and revolution.

Here is the scope of psychoanalysis as seen by some of its ex-
ponents.

The relationship of psychoanalysis to social psychology was
made explicit by Erich Fromm. In 1930 he noted that psycho-
analysis made no false distinctions between individual and social
psychology. The basic method of social psychology is, he held,
the same as the method of psychoanalysis, an extension of Freud's
early emphasis on the importance of the environment to the child.
[22] Fromm felt that psychoanalysis, by making a comprehensive
analysis of the nature of man as it works itself out in a social
process, could be particularly useful in enriching and giving a
psychological basis to the historical materialism of Marx and En-
gels. [23, 45 /.] Others have made less cautious statements. Jones
writes that "the prevailing muddle" we see in man's social rela-
tions is due more than anything else to ignorance of "those un-
conscious forces on the nature of which psychoanalysis is throw-
ing so much light." [35, 194] Alexander relies on psychoanalysis
as the cure for our present social problems:

The methods and principles of dynamic psychology created an
entirely new field — the science of human relationships. ... In the
face of the present wholesale manifestation of irrational forces, all eyes
turn for an explanation to psychiatry, the science of irrational human
behavior. [4,22/.j

Kardiner tells us that if the conclusions he has reached in applying
psychoanalysis to the study of various cultures prove to be correct
"then it can be safely said that it has opened up a new chapter in
the understanding of human society," [37, 252]

FREUD'S FORMULATIONS 463

It is clear, then, that psychoanalysts have staked a claim to the
territory of social psychology. Because of this, psychoanalysis must
be watched carefully and checked for its scientific validity,

FREUD'S FORMULATIONS*
Freud begins his group psychology with the statement:

The contrast between Individual Psychology and Social or Group
Psychology, which at a first glance may seem to be full of significance,
loses a great deal of its sharpness when it is examined more closely.
[18, 1}

From the very first Individual Psychology is at the same time Social
Psychology as well. [2]

Whatever else the social psychologist may think of Freud's
formulations, he must acknowledge at once that the distinction
made by Freud between social demands on the one hand and the
instinctual urges of the individual on the other is to his everlasting
credit. This distinction between the superstructure of society and
the needs of the individual was not one of a rigid sharp dichotomy.
Although Freud did not carry the dialectics of his own methods
to its logical conclusion, did not follow through all its implications,

t-Note on Adler. We are deliberately centering our attention here on Freud
and psychoanalysts who stem from Freudian tradition. Our final evaluation of
the validity and adequacy of the psychoanalytic interpretation of social phenomena
will, in its fundamental respects, also apply to Adlcrian psychology. For, although
Adler rejects Freud's emphasis on sexual instincts and on the Oedipus complex,
there is for Adler, as for Freud, a universal explanation of behavior: As the result
of the child's feeling of inferiority to his parents and to the world at large, he
develops a longing for superiority, "this fiction of a goal of superiority so ridicu-
lous from the viewpoint of reality, has become the principal conditioning factor
of our life as hitherto J^nown. It is this that teaches us to differentiate, gives us
poise and security, molds and guides our deeds and activities and forces our spirit
to look ahead and to perfect itself." [1, 8] This goal of superiority "introduces
into our life a hostile and fighting tendency." [8] In addition to this goal of
superiority Adler believes that the individual has an "eternal, real and physio-
logically rooted community-reeling^ It is from this community feeling that we
develop "tenderness, love of neighbor, friendship and love, the desire for power
unfolding itself in a veiled manner and seeking secretly to push its way along
the path of group consciousness." [9/.] The ego develops as a result of this
early feeling of inferiority, of the compensating longing for superiority and the
impact of community feeling in the child.

464 THE EGO IN PSYCHOANALYSIS

he recognized the close interrelationship between social pressure
and the dynamic forces at work in the single individual. He
pointed out that the interaction of social demands on the individ-
ual was a process profoundly affecting his thought and action:
"an individual in a group is subjected through its influence to what
is often a profound alteration in his mental activity." [18, 33] He
saw that opposing forces were at work within the unity of a single
individual.

If a Psychology, concerned with exploring the predispositions, the
instincts, the motives and the aims of an individual man down to his
actions and his relations with those who are nearest to him, had com-
pletely achieved its task, and had cleared up the whole of these matters
with their inter-connections, it would then suddenly find itself con-
fronted by a new task which would lie before it unachieved. It would
be obliged to explain the surprising fact that under a certain condition
this individual whom it had come to understand thought, felt, and
acted in quite a different way from what would have been expected.
And this condition is his insertion into a collection of people which
has acquired the characteristic of a "psychological group." [18, 5/.]

The social psychologist is impressed, too, with Freud's honesty,
his willingness to follow his observations into whatever theoretical
formulation he thought they led him. He hesitated neither to
break away from the scientific and philosophical traditions of his
day, nor to disagree with his own earlier concepts when he thought
new evidence called for revisions.

Since the publication of Freud's The Ego and The Id (1923) the
ego has become especially important for psychoanalysis. Anna
Freud's The Ego and Mechanisms of Defence published in 1937
further highlighted the concept so that modern psychoanalytic
literature seems to be concerned with the ego to a significant
degree. After a sketch of Freud's own basic formulations we shall
see where this led him and his followers in their attempts to
explain social phenomena.

According to Freud, we begin with the unorganized, unrefined
id — the source of all instinctual, primal impulses, the original ini-
tiators of thought and activity. It is not necessary for us here to
review the changes in Freud's own thinking concerning the nature

FREUD'S FORMULATIONS 465

and number of instincts or to subscribe one way or another to the
often heated discussions of psychoanalysts concerning the relative
importance of the sexual instinct, the death instinct, and the like.
Freud himself has said that "there is obviously a great opportunity
here for arbitrary choice." [17, 66] Our concern here is with the
general formulation that the infant begins life with an undisci-
plined id, the core of his personality, the instinctual source of
energy. These instincts seek immediate gratification so that the
infant, before he has been affected by social processes, by social
pressures, is completely dominated by the pleasure principle. "In
the psychoanalytical theory of the mind we take it for granted that
the course of mental processes is automatically regulated by 'the
pleasure principle': that is to say, we believe that any given process
originates in an unpleasant state of tension and thereupon deter-
mines for itself such a path that its ultimate issue coincides with
the relaxation of this tension, i.e. with avoidance of 'pain* or with
production of pleasure." [19, 1] The child, then, is constantly
motivated to reduce the tension created by instinctual energy.

The ego develops when the child bucks up against the outside
world, when the instinctual impulses of the id cannot be immedi-
ately gratified.

The ego is that part of the id which has been modified by the direct
influence of the external world. [21, 29]

The ego is able to modify the id because the ego is affected by
perception — both by the "external perceptions" from the outer
world and by the "internal perceptions" yielded by sensations from
the id. The job of the ego, then, is that

... of bringing the influence of the external world to bear upon
the id and its tendencies, and endeavors to substitute the reality-
principle for the pleasure-principle which reigns supreme in the id.
In the ego perception plays the part which in the id devolves upon
instinct. [21, 29/.]

The ego sizes up for the individual his relation to the environment,
it has the capacity to suppress immediate pleasure (the reality
principle), to differentiate between the impulses coming from the
id and those coming from the outer world, and to distinguish
between those impulses of the id whose immediate gratification

466 THE EGO IN PSYCHOANALYSIS

will cause pain and those that can be gratified without fear of
punishment.

Perception for Freud "is not a merely passive process; we believe
rather that the ego periodically sends out small amounts of cathec-
tic energy into the perceptual system and by their means samples
the external stimuli, and after every such groping advance draws
back again." [20, 370] Thought and judgment are, for Freud,
extensions of this perceptual process of "groping forward." The
perceptual function of the ego has been clearly summarized by
Alexander:

What can be said with certainty about the ego is that it is a forma-
tion of two perceptive surfaces, one directed toward the instinctual
life (inner perception), the second directed toward external reality
(sense perception) . One main function of the ego is to confront the
facts of inner perception with the results of sense perception, i.e., to
bring subjective demands in harmony with the external circumstances.
Its tendency is to find satisfaction for as many of the subjective needs
and wishes as possible under existing external circumstances. [3, 147 /.]

The end result is, according to Freud, that what we know as
mind can be looked upon "as an unknown and unconscious id,
upon whose surface rests the ego, developed from its nucleus the
perceptual-systems." [21, 28] This ego is constantly defending
itself from the pain it fears from the instincts to which it is antag-
onistic. [15] Freud's ego includes consciousness and by controlling
"the approaches to motility, i.e. to the discharge of excitations into
the external world" it "regulates all its own constituent processes."
[21, 15 /.] It is the source of repressions. Alexander has summed
up the operation of the ego:

The functioning of the whole mental apparatus can be described
approximately as follows: Instinctual needs and tendencies arising
in the id tend to become conscious because the conscious ego controls
the motor innervations on which the satisfaction of the needs is de-
pendent. A great part of the instinctual demands becomes immedi-
ately conscious and finds its acceptance or rejection after a process of
conscious deliberation. This deliberation involves an estimate of the
external situation and a comparison of the inner demand in question
with other conflicting tendencies present in consciousness. [3, 148]

FREUD'S FORMULATIONS 467

The ego, then, gradually gets more and more control over the id.
And the particular pattern of the ego's adjustment of instinctual
forces to the external world becomes the fundamental trait of any
personality. [43]

The id, however, does not easily relinquish the objects which
will give it immediate gratification. The repression of instincts,
especially of erotic trends, is painful. In order to make "it easier
for an object to be given up" [21, 36] the ego substitutes one object
for another so the id can achieve cathexis. Thus the ego becomes
"a precipitate of abandoned object-cathexis" and "contains a rec-
ord of past object-choices." [21, 36]

"The ego is formed to a great extent out of identifications taking
the place of cathexes on the part of the id which have been
abandoned." [21, 68] If the ego's object-identifications become
too numerous and too incompatible with one another, intense
pathological conditions result, but even for the relatively normal
individual these "conflicts between the different identifications into
which the ego is split up" [21, 39] are accompanied by definite
affective properties.

The ego can gradually get control over the id through this
process of transforming erotic object-choices. Libido is gradually
withdrawn from the id as the object-cathexes of the id are turned
into "ego constructions." [21, 82] The ego thus becomes "the true
and original reservoir of the libido." [19, 66] This flow of the
libido into the ego gives rise to the Freudian mechanism of sec-
ondary narcissism. For Freud, not only self-love but love for
others is derived from this libido within the ego; being in love
means "that the object draws a part of the narcissistic ego-libido
to itself." [18,725]

The earliest and the most important identification a child makes
is with the parents who are "the first object-cathexes of the
id." [21, 69] When the child discerns that one parent is an ob-
stacle to the gratification of the sexual desire it has with respect to
the other parent, then the Oedipus complex appears. The ego's
transformation of this "first and most important identification of
all" [21, 39] precipitates within the ego itself a "special office" [68]
— the superego. The superego is the "heir to the Oedipus com-
plex." [21, 69] The cornerstone of the superego is, as Bychowski

468 THE EGO IN PSYCHOANALYSIS

has expressed it, "the Images of persons who have guided the child
and were its source of norms." [9, 313] Since the child was
dominated by its parents and compelled to obey them, the super-
ego becomes the arbiter of what shall and shall not be allowed,
the source of authority and prohibitions. When the superego
functions in consciousness it is known as conscience or guilt.

This precipitate, the superego, has for Freud a special position
within the ego:

The broad general outcome of the sexual phase governed by the
Oedipus complex may, therefore, be taken to be the forming of a
precipitate in the ego, consisting of these two identifications [father
identification and mother identification] in some way combined to-
gether. This modification of the ego retains its special position; it
stands in contrast to the other constituents of the ego in the form of
an ego ideal or superego. [21, 44, italicized in original]

Freud maintained that the Oedipus complex is universal. He
believed that the id could be inherited, that in it "are stored up
vestiges of the existences led by countless former egos" [21, 52],
that the identification with the father (parent) "takes place in the
prehistory of every person." [21, 39] Although many analysts do
not subscribe to Freud's phylogenetic theory, the universality of
the Oedipus complex derived from early parent-child relationships
is still a basic tenet for most psychoanalysts today.2 In a review of
the history of the Oedipus complex, for example, Boehm discusses
the fields of literature, biography, and the primitive myths re-
ported by modern ethnologists and concludes that all these various
types of data support the Oedipus complex as a phenomenon that
pervades everyone's unconscious. [7]

The commanding position of the superego in mental life is, for
Freud, due to the fact that it represents "not merely a deposit left
by the earliest object-choices of the id; it also represents an ener-
getic reaction-formation against those choices." [21, 44] To re-
press the Oedipus complex is "no easy task" for the individual.
The child sees the father "as the obstacle to realization of the

2 Some notable and important exceptions of the pervading psychoanalytic view
concerning the origin and function of the Oedipus complex are considered later
in this chapter.

FREUD'S FORMULATIONS 469

Oedipus wishes." [21, 45] In order to carry out this extraordi-
narily difficult repression, "the child's ego brought in a reinforce-
ment" [21, 45] : it created within itself the character of the father
to repress the Oedipus complex. And the more tense the Oedipus
complex was in the beginning and "the more rapidly it succumbed
to repression (under the influence of discipline, religious teaching,
schooling and reading) the more exacting later on is the domina-
tion of the super-ego over the ego— in the form of conscience or
perhaps of an unconscious sense of guilt." [21, 45] The ego at-
tempts to free itself from the dominance of the superego by sub-
stituting new persons or new relationships as representative of the
parents or parental relations that lie behind the superego. The
result is that "conflicts and struggles which had evolved during
childhood repeat themselves albeit between other players and in a
new shape." [9, 313]

In spite of Freud's characterization of the superego as something
with a "special position" within the ego, as something that "stands
in contrast to the other constituents of the ego," psychoanalysts and
even Freud himself sometimes seem to have difficulty in making a
clear distinction between ego and superego, in telling where one
leaves off and the other begins. For example, in correcting his
earlier view that the superego has the function of testing the reality
of things, Freud said:

The view that the testing of reality is rather one of the functions
of the ego itself would fit in perfectly with what we know of the
relations of the ego to the world of perception. [21, 34, italics ours]

And what Freud refers to as the "double aspects" of the ego ideal
(superego) inevitably introduces certain confusion in terms: for
the superego not only results from the repression of the Oedipus
complex but is itself the mechanism which effected the repression.
It is not infrequent to find the ego or the superego referred to in
psychoanalytic literature in the form of (super) ego. [33, 307]
Anna Freud says that the superego can be distinguished from the
ego only when it is obvious that the former is critical of the lat-
ter. [15] Alexander, referring to his earlier distinction between
the unconscious superego and the conscious ego ideal, says:

470 THE EGO IN PSYCHOANALYSIS

It seems to me questionable whether one should consider the ego-
ideal more closely connected with the super-ego, as its continuation in
the consciousness, or more allied to the actual ego . . . the ego-ideal
is not a completely separate unit, since it is hard to differentiate be-
tween conscious values, ideals, guiding principles and the rest of the
ego. On the other hand, it is also difficult to make a sharp distinction
between the entirely unconscious, almost automatic influences of the
super-ego and those more or less conscious ones which direct our
decisions and general conduct. [3, 145 f.]

Fromm believes that the difference between the ego and the super-
ego is that the latter has an emotional character derived from the
incompatibility of instinctual impulses and social necessities. [25,
95] Homey, rejecting Freud's conception of the origin of the
Oedipus complex, feels that the superego should be regarded as a
special need for neurotic individuals rather than as an agency
within the ego itself. The individual's standards of behavior
which Freud derives from the superego are, for Homey, "not ego-
alien but are an integral part of the self. To them the 'super-ego*
has but a superficial resemblance." [30, 230]

WHERE FREUDIAN THEORY LEADS IN SOCIAL PSYCHOLOGY

Our brief sketch of Freud's theory of ego development has been
necessary to give us a background for understanding the applica-
tion of his formulations to social phenomena. As we said previ-
ously, from the point of view of the layman and also of some social
scientists, one of the great attractions of psychoanalysis is its appar-
ent ability to explain almost any behavior— whether on the indi-
vidual or social level. We will cite here a few examples of Freudian
interpretations of problems that concern the social psychologist.

Consider, first of all, Freud's own interpretations of the forma-
tion and function of groups. Individual participation in a group
is one way in which a person can release his instinctual impulses.
All groups have, therefore, a "libidinal constitution." [18, 79 f.]
It is instinctual energy that makes group formation possible.

A group is clearly held together by a power of some kind: and to
what power could this feat be better ascribed than to Eros who holds
together everything in the world? [18, 40]

WHERE FREUDIAN THEORY LEADS IN SOCIAL PSYCHOLOGY 471

In group activity individuals substitute for their own ego ideals
a common object with which they identify themselves— hence indi-
vidual members of a group identify themselves with one another.

Social feeling rests on the foundation of identifications with others,
on the basis of an ego-ideal in common with them. [21, 49]

Freud thus accounts for institutional groupings such as the army
and the church. Since each individual "has built up his ego ideal
upon the most various models" [18, 101], an individual can become
part of a number of different groups. For Freud, identification
with more or less lasting groups (that is, racial or nationality) is
explained by his belief that the id can be inherited and that "when
the ego forms its superego out of the id, it may perhaps only be
reviving images of egos that have passed away." [21, 52]

For Alexander the whole process of an individual's adjustment
to his social environment is to be thought of in terms of the
incorporation of parental images into the personality:

This process of identification with the parents and the incorporation
of their image into the mental apparatus is the process which we
usually call adjustment to the social environment. [3, 143]

For Reik all social tendencies are transformations of the selfish and
aggressive drives of the ego, so that the ego seeks further gratifica-
tion in attempting to overcome group, nationality, and class differ-
ences. [46, 755] The highest fulfillment of this particular function
of ego-striving is, for Reik, what we call love. Love is the projec-
tion of our ego-ideal, it is "an escape from oneself" [46, 59], so that
we really fall in love with people whom we would like to be.

Another example of a psychoanalytic interpretation concerned
with one feature of social life is FenichePs carefully worked-out
account of the function of money in our society and our desire to
accumulate it. [12] Disagreeing with Ferenczi and Roheim that
money was originally invented for the specific purpose of satisfy-
ing an erotogenic (anal) instinct, Fenichel regards money as a
social institution first external to the individual. The reason the
individual in our society reacts to money as he does is as follows.
The infant considers its mother's breast and later its own faeces
as parts of its ego. Denial of the breast and loss of faeces therefore
become identified with injury to one's own bodily ego.

472 THE EGO IN PSYCHOANALYSIS

The desire to possess a great deal appears thus to be a direct expres-
sion of the narcissistic need to enlarge as much as possible the compass
of one's own ego. [12, 79/.]

Our possessions therefore "are an expanded portion of the ego."
[80] The accumulation of possessions is seen connected primarily
to anal eroticism because "in the anal sphere holding back and
accumulating can afford an experience of erogenous pleasure." [82]
The same author accounts for social class, the division into "haves"
and "have-nots," by the efforts of the "have-nots" to regain their
lost feeling of infantile omnipotence. This they can do by identi-
fying themselves with persons who represent characterizations of
their own superego. [13]

A psychoanalytic explanation of war has been offered by
Waelder [54]. All mass formation, he believes, is a process of
regression where external principles or authorities take the place
of more mature internalized demands which the individual's con-
science imposes upon him as a substitution, in their turn, of the
earlier commands and prohibitions of parents. In mass formations,
then, men can act like children again, giving vent to the impulses
of hate and destruction inherent in them. Social conflicts, includ-
ing wars, are therefore due to the "frailty of human reason" [46]
caused by this infantile regression.

The psychology of revolution has been given special attention
by Ernest Jones. [35] The characteristic of revolutionary change
is, he says, destructiveness. And the reason for this destructiveness
is the impulse "to displace the old, or, more specifically, the Oedi-
pus wish to kill the father." [198] Jones recognizes the important
role of revolutionary leaders whom he feels are people with no
qualms about murdering the "father figure." This is true of revo-
lutionary leaders, because they possess in high degree the para-
noid's mechanism of projection which is for them a "defence
against sex inversion, or— more strictly— against the incorporated
'bad objects' resulting from this inversion." [201] Led on by
leaders with these homosexual tendencies, participants in a revolu-
tionary movement substitute the "concept of society" for their own
parents whom they alternately loved and injured. Revolutionary
leaders have the appeal they do in critical times, because it is

WHERE FREUDIAN THEORY LEADS IN SOCIAL PSYCHOLOGY 473

during these critical times that individuals become most sensitive
to their own "deep seated sense of guilt."

The rise of Fascism has been accounted for on the basis of the
prolonged infantile sexuality said to be especially characteristic of
the working people and the Kleinbuergertum. The general frus-
trations of this group led them to accept the authority of a leader
as a compensating identification. [44] Their normal "id-drives"
were increasingly denied expression and the authority of the super-
ego was diminished. Hence people indulged themselves in ways
formerly forbidden. But such indulgences only created new guilt
feelings which demanded in their turn self -punishment or sadistic
punishment. The personal satisfaction accompanying this punish-
ment became itself a further reason for unconscious indulgence.
By creating enemies that could be chastised and attacked, there-
fore, Naziism was able to restore the feeling of self-righteousness.
All the hate and destructiveness of the infant was transferred to
new objects. In Hitler, the Kleinbuerger found an adequate pa-
rental symbol and by identification with Hitler was able to forget
the weakness of his own infantilism. [51, 106-109] Those most
susceptible to Nazi propaganda were "those who have neither
securely established their own manhood and independence of the
Father nor have been able to combine the instincts of sexuality and
love in their attitude towards the Mother or other women." [34, 6]

Another modern application of psychoanalysis is Jones's account
of the psychology of Quislingism. [34] The Quisling identifies
himself with the formidable father image which is so irresistible
that the individual by "devious and desperate devices" [4] trans-
forms the image of the evil father into the image of a good father.
In this process of self-deception the attempt is made to appease the
real enemy by "making suitable concessions." [5] Quislingism
thus becomes an "exquisitely homosexual" solution. [5] The
treachery and betrayal associated with Quislingism is due to the
fact that alliance with the enemy is a sadistic attempt "to overcome
the incest taboo by raping the Mother instead of loving her." [6]

The psychology of anti-Semitism has been variously treated
along psychoanalytic lines. One explanation is that anti-Semitism
is an "unconscious hostility" directed to Jews who are recognized
as the proponent of the "monotheistic God (superego God)"

474 THE EGO IN PSYCHOANALYSIS

whose acceptance has forced the renunciation of the instincts. [39]
A recent study of the personalities of anti-Semitic women con-
cludes that their prejudice is due to a very strict and conventional
superego in harmony with parental images so that instinctual
impulses must find their outlet in very devious expressions such as
anti-Semitism.

Our puritanical anti-Semites project their id impulses onto the Jew.
[14, 286]

The solution of anti-Semitism, according to these authors, there-
fore lies in the direction of a more intelligent and more lenient
child training on the part of the parents which would result in
greater emotional security and more psychological insight.

An apologist for a rigid Freudian interpretation of the develop-
ment and continuation of culture is found in Roheim. [47]
Although Roheim rejects Freud's contention that the collective
unconscious can be inherited, he feels that all of man's culture has
been developed "as a sublimation or reaction-formation to infantile
conflicts." [149] He substitutes an ontogenetic theory of culture
for Freud's phylogenetic theory. He notes that the distinctive
feature of man as contrasted to other animals is his prolonged
infancy. This plus the retarded development of dentition with
the consequence that there is in the infant considerable activity
unrelated to the acquisition of food, together with the "relatively
precocious sexual development" of the human infant, all adds up
to the fact that the long process of human maturation and the
characteristics accompanying it produce a set of conditions from
which culture develops. Institutions and ways of life not directly
connected with the acquisition of food are regarded as sublima-
tions of the infantile situation. His view is "that the bulk of
human culture, even in its adaptational or ego-aspects, arises out
of play or ritual activities. The reason for these activities lies in
the infantile situation, and they acquire survival values secondarily
by assimilating a part of the environment to man's needs." [163]

Therefore in the development of human adaptations the tendency
is for adaptations that are based on the infantile situation to replace
in an ever decreasing degree those based on the stimulus-reaction
pattern. [47, 163]

MODIFICATIONS WITH CULTURAL EMPHASIS 475

For example, according to Roheim, the art of making fire is "a
displaced play repetition of the genital act or of masturbation."
[163] Differences between different cultures are accounted for on
the basis of variations in the infantile situations which are them-
selves "probably based on constitutional variations of human
groups." Changes that occur within a culture are due to the fact
that a culture provides for the sublimation of only some of the id
trends and defense mechanisms of the individual and that what
tendencies the culture fails to sublimate provide the "psychic back-
ground" which makes for reform and change. But over the course
of generations, the culture adapts itself to the characteristics of the
infantile situation so that, even when the individual is affected by
the institutions of a culture, these institutions must be regarded
only as representing "the petrified strivings of past generations of
human beings." [166]

Fenichel is highly critical of Roheim's ontogenetic theory of
cultural development. He believes that social institutions, first
created by human beings who were satisfying their needs, then
become external realities themselves, part of the outer stimuli "that
modify the instinctual structure of mankind." [12, 70] The proc-
ess of socialization for Fenichel is a reciprocal action where social
influences modify the instinctual structure and the modified in-
stinctual structure itself "reacts again upon social reality." [71]
As we have seen in FenichePs account of the drive for wealth, he
accepts the orthodox view concerning man's instinctual structure
and regards culture and its institutions essentially as furnishing
objects for the displacement of instinctual impulses and their in-
fantile derivatives. For him the ego is a direct development of
the instincts as they are influenced by the outside world. He
objects to the psychoanalyst, such as Horney, who "takes from
psycho-analysis its biological basis— that of instinctual needs." [11,
418]

MODIFICATIONS WITH CULTURAL EMPHASIS

In the early 1930's there was increasing recognition on the part
of some analysts of the cultural variations of Freudian formula-
tions, a sensitivity to the data and concepts so rapidly accumulating
in anthropology and ethnology. Analysts such as Fromm, Sperber,

476 THE EGO IN PSYCHOANALYSIS

and Horney took vigorous exception to some of Freud's formula-
tions which, they argued, showed a neglect on Freud's part to fol-
low through the implications of the fact that the individual devel-
ops in and is modified by a social environment already fairly well
structured when the individual is born into it, an environment
that itself has certain characteristics and peculiarities the psycho-
analyst must be aware of if his explanations are to have any degree
of universality.

In 1927 Malinowski published his Sex and Repression in Savage
Society, the first part of which appeared as two articles in 1924.
Here he specifically directed his evidence against the fundamental
Freudian tenet of the Oedipus complex as a universal human phe-
nomenon existing independently in any social environment.
Malinowski based his argument on his study of the Trobriand
Islanders who lived in a matrilineal society and who developed a
matrilineal complex "entirely different in its genesis and its char-
acter from the Oedipus complex." [40, 83] Malinowski could find
no evidence among the Trobrianders of rivalry or friction between
the father and the son. If there was any ambivalent attitude of
love and hate it was "felt between a man and his mother's brother,
while the repressed sexual attitude of incestuous temptation can be
formed only towards his sister." [80]

Malinowski's interpretation of the cultural relativity of the
Oedipus complex was vigorously attacked by Jones [32] who
maintained that Malinowski's findings could be interpreted "as a
mode of defence against the primordial Oedipus tendencies."
Malinowski felt that orthodox analysts such as Jones who place
"a certain causal or metaphysical stress" [40, 139] on the Oedipus
complex as the cause, rather than as the effect, of a social structure
were unnecessarily divorcing psychoanalytic theory from empirical
anthropology which, to Malinowski, clearly shows that "the nu-
clear family complex is a functional formation dependent upon
the structure and upon the culture of a society." [143]

Other anthropologists, looking toward a fruitful and productive
relationship between psychoanalysis and anthropology, urged psy-
choanalysts to adapt themselves to the implications which the fact
of cultural variation had for their discipline. Sapir was an early
and outstanding protagonist of this point of view. In a series of

MODIFICATIONS WITH CULTURAL EMPHASIS 477

brilliant articles, he pointed out that the mechanisms with which
the psychoanalyst was concerned should not be regarded as "closed
systems imprisoned within the biological walls of isolated indi-
viduals" [49, 233] and could be studied realistically only when
related to deeply ingrained cultural patterns and the various sub-
cultures and personal interactions with other people that consti-
tute the external social world for the single individual. [48, 49, 50]

An early and particularly vigorous attack on psychoanalysis and
psychotherapy in general for its neglect of man's social relation-
ships was made by Sperber in 1932. [53] Sperber's criticism is
from a Marxist point of view, and it is not without significance
that the editor of the journal in which his article appeared felt
obliged to point out to the readers that, although Sperber's com-
ments took on the nature of a political tract and therefore were
unusual for a scientific journal, it was only proper that a "bour-
geois" journal should show it could tolerate this attack.

Sperber maintained that the intellectual efforts of any given
period always function in the interests of the ruling class. He saw
modern psychotherapy as a strictly bourgeois outgrowth with its
emphasis on the individualism produced by capitalist society and
its complete neglect of the fact that personality and individual
consciousness are socially determined, are not a product of irra-
tional forces working themselves out in isolated individuals. Since
life in the bourgeois capitalist class is traditionally regarded as a
battle against competitors, neuroses become inevitable: for the goal
of individualism is itself an anachronism, incapable of fulfillment.
The individual can only be understood, then, as a part of the whole
social process. In neglecting this, modern psychotherapy has
become a mystical quest for drives, not a real social psychology.
Therapy has become related to a sentimental code of ethics, not
to any real understanding of the need to socialize the individual,
to show him how he is a product of society, to help him undei>
stand the particular role he is playing in this transitional period.
It is no wonder then, says Sperber, that the formulations of current
psychotherapy, which approach the problems of mass psychology
from an individualistic point of view, have failed to create any
valid explanation of social behavior, have substituted in their stead

478 THE EGO IN PSYCHOANALYSIS

shadowy theories of a collective unconscious which separate the
individual from social reality.

One of the most systematic and closely reasoned revisions of
Freud's formulations to accommodate the psychoanalytic neglect
of social and cultural influence is that of Erich Fromm. Begin-
ning in 1930 with his account of the function of religion, Fromm
has carefully spelled out what he regards as the weaknesses and
blindspots of Freudian theory and what must be done by psycho-
analysis to remedy them. [22-26]

Fromm points out that for Freud man was regarded as a closed
system endowed with certain drives which "were looked upon as
eternal forces rooted in the biological constitution of man." [26,77]
Although Freud understood the biological-physiological condi-
tions of drive, Fromm feels that Freud did not comprehend the
extent to which drives could be modified by social factors. [23, 34]
Because of the naivete of Freud and most of his disciples concern-
ing the actual development and functioning of social processes,
Fromm believes that most of Freud's "applications of psychol-
ogy to social problems were misleading constructions." [26, 9]
Freudian mechanisms such as the super-ego and the ego, sado-
masochistic impulses, Fromm regards not as givens of human
nature but as end products resulting from particular social struc-
tures. [25, 92] He denies the universality and inevitable develop-
ment of the Oedipus complex, arguing that this psychoanalytic
construction is based on false sociological assumptions. The Oedi-
pus complex can only be seen as a development in a particular
type of culture. [23, 38 /.; 25, 88] He notes that there are many
societies where the father is not a sexual rival of the child or an
all-powerful authority. But even though the psychoanalytic sup-
position concerning the Oedipus complex is false, Fromm believes
that this error should not be laid against psychoanalytic method
as such— the essential failure of psychoanalysis was that it did not
carry its methods far enough and study the interdependence of the
individual in groups, classes, and cultures. [23, 38] In their em-
phasis on the family, their tendency to equate the family to society,
psychoanalysts have failed to see that the family is only a carrier
of a particular culture. Hence they have tended to identify society

MODIFICATIONS WITH CULTURAL EMPHASIS 479

as a whole with the bourgeois capitalist family, and they have
failed to see the enormous implications of their error.

The psychological make-up of members of any group or any
social situation can, according to Fromm, only be understood if
the common experiences of group members are studied, if we
know how the social, political, or economic structure of a society
affects the individual.

The key problem of psychology is that of the specific kind of
relatedness of the individual towards the world and not that of the
satisfaction or frustration of this or that instinctual need per sc.
(26, 12]

Particularly important for Fromm is the necessity of recognizing
the objective economic conditions that dominate the particular
society in which an individual lives.

Thus the mode of life, as it is determined for the individual by the
peculiarity of an economic system, becomes the primary factor in
determining his whole character structure, because the imperative
need for self-preservation forces him to accept the conditions under
which he has to live. [26, 18]

In one of his earlier papers [23], Fromm pays tribute to Marx and
Engels for pointing out how objective conditions determine men-
tality. He holds that the interrelatedness of man to his social
environment is a dialectical process, that society has not only a
suppressing function but also a creative function.

Fromm points out that, since psychoanalysis must itself study
the conditions of a society and the way they affect an individual,
it cannot jump suddenly from individual to social psychology and
transfer bodily to social phenomena explanations that may be satis-
factory in dealing with certain individual neuroses. He severely
criticizes those analysts who, reasoning by tenuous analogy, re-
construct the psychology of men by studying their ideologies in a
vacuum: we cannot reconstruct men from their ideology, we must
learn how and why specific ideologies arise as products of
men. [22] A particularly prevalent error of psychoanalysts,
Fromm notes, arises from their assumption that their own bour-
geois society is "normal/' They have dealt primarily with neu-
rotics within that class and have assumed that the particular

480 THE EGO IN PSYCHOANALYSIS

background common to these bourgeois neurotics is identical to
social background in general. [23, 35 ff.]

Different societies or classes within a society have a specific social
character, and on its basis different ideas develop and become power-
ful [26, 279]

Karen Horney's criticism of Freud and his orthodox followers
closely parallels Fromm's. In her several widely read books she
has clearly and ably stated her qualifications of Freudian theory.
[29-31] Freud, she writes, "has assumed that the instinctual
drives or object relationships that are frequent in our culture are
biologically determined 'human nature' or arise out of unalterable
situations (biologically given 'pregenital' states, Oedipus complex).
Freud's disregard of cultural factors not only leads to false general-
izations, but to a large extent blocks an understanding of the real
forces which motivate our attitudes and actions. I believe that this
disregard is the main reason why psychoanalysis, inasmuch as it
faithfully follows the theoretical paths beaten by Freud, seems in
spite of its seemingly boundless potentialities to have come into a
blind alley, manifesting itself in a rank growth of abstruse theories
and the use of a shadowy terminology." [29, 20 /.] She sees
Freud's blindness to cultural factors "in his inclination to regard
certain environmental influences as the incidental fate of the indi-
vidual instead of recognizing the whole strength of cultural influ-
ences behind them." [30, 170] And she notes with Fromm that
psychoanalysis has stemmed from the study of middle-class neu-
rotics of our western civilization and has assumed that the trends
pervading in this particular class in this society are biological
factors inherent in human nature. [30, 168 /.]

More recently Abram Kardiner, Coordinator of Psychiatry with
the Social Sciences at Columbia University, has also rejected
Freud's contention of a specific and variable instinctual basis
behind all human nature but defends psychoanalysis as the only
technique that can fruitfully study problems of personality and
culture. Kardiner believes that his concept of basic personality
structure— "the precipitate of the reactions of the individual to
specific institutions in the order in which they affect him" — is
the key to our understanding of social problems.

WHY PSYCHOANALYTIC FORMULATIONS MUST BE REJECTED 481

Freud did not regard this concept of basic personality as necessary
because it was assumed to be the same in all human beings irrespec-
tive of culture. [36, 484]

The task of the psychologist who wants to understand social
problems and the relation of the individual to his society is for
Kardiner that of discovering the basic personality structure formed
in a given society and then tracking down the influences of this
basic personality structure on the culture itself. [36, 37]

WHY PSYCHOANALYTIC FORMULATIONS MUST BE REJECTED

In evaluating psychoanalytic formulations, it should be pointed
out that if we are to have a real science of psychology we must
always avoid any theory or concept which either does not have or
does not sometime seem capable of having a naturalistic explana-
tion. The ultimate source of explanations for the scientist must
come from his knowledge of the real world. It cannot be the
product of unbridled imagination.

From his Survey of Objective Studies of Psychoanalytic Con-
cepts, Sears concludes that

By the criteria of the physical sciences it [psychoanalysis] is not a
good science. . . . The experiments and observations examined in this
report stand testimony that few investigators feel free to accept
Freud's statements at face value. The reason lies in the same factor
that makes psychoanalysis a bad science — its method. Psychoanalysis
relies upon techniques that do not admit of the repetition of observa-
tion, that have no self-evident or denotative validity, and that are
tinctured to an unknown degree with the observer's own suggestions.
These difficulties may not seriously interfere with therapy, but when
the method is used for uncovering psychological facts that are required
to have objective validity it simply fails. [52, 133]

Sears ends his report with the statement "that other social and
psychological sciences must gain as many hypotheses and intui-
tions as possible from psychoanalysis but that the further analysis
of psychoanalytic concepts by nonpsychoanalytic techniques may
be relatively fruitless so long as those concepts rest in the theoretical
framework of psychoanalysis." [143]

482 THE EGO IN PSYCHOANALYSIS

Freud's original formulations have undergone and are still
undergoing considerable modification and extension with the
growing realization on the part of certain analysts of the impact
of social realities on the individual and the close interrelationship
between the individual and the immediate society around him.
So psychoanalysis at the present time is in a state of flux and
development. It is apparent from the tone of many of the articles
and reviews appearing in its journals that the divergency of some
members of the psychoanalytic family from Freud's original pre-
cepts is not calmly accepted. Debate is often acrimonious, innu-
endoes are frequent, and criticism of one analyst by another is not
always restrained. We mention this situation here only because it
seems to reflect a fundamental inability to agree on formulations
which can be scientifically verified, which will stand up on their
own merits as demonstrable and unequivocal, and which cannot
be shaken or reinterpreted by this or that observation of a given
analyst.

Simple and sovereign principles. One of the noteworthy and
startling impressions left from a reading of psychoanalytic litera-
ture is the ease and glibness with which the more orthodox analysts
juggle their various concepts around to explain quite diversified
phenomena. By appealing to the same mechanisms, they explain
such opposites as love and hate, aggression and submission, the
development and function of contrasting ideologies such as Fascism
and Communism, Catholicism and atheism. They never seem to
be stumped in finding a cause for any variety of thought or be-
havior, whether on the individual or the social level. Further-
more, a great many of them (persons of Fromm's and Horney's
stature excluded) seem able to explain the cause of social phe^
nomena without having to make detailed and painstaking investi-
gations of the phenomena they are accounting for. We saw
previously, for example, how comparatively easy it was for the
psychoanalyst to explain war and revolution, Quislingism and
Fascism.

Sometimes, to be sure, their reasoning seems particularly tortu-
ous but they wind up in the end with the phenomenon to be
accounted for neatly placed on top of the pedestal which they have

WHY PSYCHOANALYTIC FORMULATIONS MUST BE REJECTED 483

built by putting together their simple and sovereign principles.
Sapir noted that the cultural anthropologist's quarrel with psycho-
analysis was due to the fact that

The psychoanalyst has confused the archaic in the conceptual or
theoretical psychologic sense with the archaic in the literal chrono-
logical sense. . . . The service o£ cultural anthropology to psychiatry
is not as mysterious or remote or clandestine as psychoanalytic mys-
ticism would have us believe. [49, 235]

Murphy, Murphy, and Newcomb point out that

The psychoanalyst digs into the details of infinitely complex symp-
tom complexes (syndromes) and invariably comes up with a "cause,"
which, just as invariably, is only another symptom (another part of
the same syndrome). Because these symptoms are parts of a syn-
drome they are always found to be correlated and present at the same
time or in a certain sequence; they are then thought to be cause and
effect. [41, 306]

Freud posited certain instincts and mechanisms he regards as
universal. Without reviewing here the old controversy concern-
ing instincts, we should point out, however, that Freud's various
conceptions of instinct (that is, death and destruction and other
dramatic instincts) seem particularly abstract, particularly difficult
ever to find a definite locus for in the organism. And no solid
contribution to our understanding of motivation seems to be served
by indulging in the verbal magic of creating a whole host of needs,
each endowed with motivational properties, as has been done by
Murray and his followers. [42]

We have already noted that evidence from anthropology indi-
cates that Freud's Oedipus complex, so crucial in his derivation of
the "superego," can be regarded only as a product of a particular
set of cultural conditions. Furthermore, various empirical studies
reviewed by Sears concerned with parent preferences and other
heterosexual cathexes in our own culture "cast doubt on the alleged
universality of the Oedipus situation" [52, 44] and lead Sears to
the summary conclusion that

These data again argue against any universal pattern and re-empha-
size the point that has proved itself time and time again in the exam-

484 THE EGO IN PSYCHOANALYSIS

ination of such studies as these— that the structure of the little societies
in which people grow up are too detailed ever to permit of the kinds
of generalizations that Freud has made concerning the role of specific
members of the family. [43]

Freud has assumed the Oedipus relationship to exist universally,
and while other investigators have found instances of it, no indications
of a universal cross-sex parental preference have been discovered in
either children or adults. [52, 134 f.]

While Sears finds that infantile sexuality as such is supported
by various investigations, he writes that

There is no evidence, however, to confirm Freud's assumptions
about the inter-relationship between the various erotogenic zones.
Whether one zone can serve as a substitute for another is still unde-
termined. [52, 135]

Sears also reports from his survey:

There is no indication that the castration complex is common.
Quite the contrary. Children whose sex information is adequate show
little tendency toward fears or curious beliefs about the sexual process.
It seems probable that Freud's notion about children's attitudes to-
ward sex were based on a small sample that was far from characteristic
of contemporary American children. [52, 136]

Furthermore, in chapter 9 we saw that the ideas of masculinity
and femininity are largely culturally derived and that variations in
adult-youth conflicts significantly affect attitudes toward sex.

In spite of the divergence of some analysts such as Fromm and
Horney, who seem to have worked out the most careful and
cautious reformulations of Freud, and the great advance they have
made in their formulations by taking cultural influences into
account, they have still by no means sufficiently emancipated them-
selves from Freudian influence to arrive at motivational concepts
much less abstract, or much less sovereign than Freud's.

Fromm's great contribution is his recognition of the fact that
character structure within a society develops from a set of economic
conditions. But he accepts a general Freudian interpretation of
the dynamics of character as the only useful one. [25, 80] And he
subscribes in general to the psychoanalytic thesis that the founda-
tion of character is determined by the sublimation of drive as a

WHY PSYCHOANALYTIC FORMULATIONS MUST BE REJECTED 485

result of childhood experiences. [24, 254] In brief, Fromm does
not seriously question Freud's basic formulations or Freudian
mechanisms such as the libido, masochistic and sadistic strivings,
but he does feel that these mechanisms develop as end products of
particular social structures; that they cannot be regarded merely
as human endowments. Basic in Fromm's own formulation is the
concept of libidinal structure, derived from instinctual energies,
especially sexuality. The particular libidinal structure of any
individual can only be understood with reference to his early
conditioning and the particular pattern of economic and social
pressures in the society in which he lives. The libidinal structure,
then, shifts with objective conditions. [23] Because of the push
of these libidinal forces, there is in everyone a "need to avoid
aloneness"— a need "not rooted in bodily processes but in the very
essence of the human mode and practice of life." [26, 19] Fromm
feels that the development of industrial capitalism and the emer-
gence of the religious freedom of Protestantism have greatly in-
creased the individual man's sense of aloneness and isolation.
Various neurotic strivings as well as social phenomena are, then,
for Fromm to be explained as attempts to escape from this feeling
of loneliness which increased freedom brings. Love and work are
seen as types of spontaneous activity which make it possible for
the individual to satisfy his need to avoid aloneness by uniting
himself with others. [26, 260]

In accounting for man's "tendency to grow, to develop and
realize potentialities" [26, 257] Fromm posits two abstract and
universal motivational mechanisms — the striving for justice and
the striving for truth.

The striving for justice and truth is an inherent trend of human
nature, although it can be repressed and perverted like the striving for
freedom. [26, 288]

Fromm recognizes that in making these assumptions he is on
theoretically dangerous ground. But he feels these drives can be
accounted for.

Every individual in childhood goes through a period which is
characterized by powerlessness. It seems to us that in this state of
powerlessness traits like the sense of justice and truth develop and

486 THE EGO IN PSYCHOANALYSIS

become potentialities common to man as such. We arrive therefore
at the fact that, although character development is shaped by the basic
conditions of life and although there is no biologically fixed human
nature, human nature has a dynamism of its own that constitutes an
active factor in the evolution of the social process. [26, 289]

We can thoroughly agree and applaud Fromm's point that the
feeling of aloneness characteristic of modern man is a by-product
of the mode and practice of life. But the analysis needs to be
brought up to date in terms of the complications, differentiations,
and conflicts found in contemporary social life. For example, we
saw in chapter 10 that sociologists have accumulated a wealth of
material dealing with the marginal position, the conflicting sta-
tuses experienced by many people today. Furthermore, if such
mechanisms as the "need to avoid aloneness" and the Oedipus
complex can be shown to be by-products of social relationships,
why should Fromm not also apply this same derivation to the
strivings for "justice" and "truth"? For these, too, when found,
result only from the reciprocal relationships of social life. As
previously noted (pp. 334^.), Piaget has shown that such concepts
of "morality" can and do develop spontaneously as a child begins
to see its own place in a constellation of social relations.

Horney, too, in spite of her reformulations, is weighted down
with her allegiance to Freud who has, she believes, "shown us the
direction in which to move." [29, 61] Although highly sensitive
to Freud's lack of a cultural orientation, she is so anchored to
Freud's basic approach that, like Fromm, she is forced into the
creation of new abstractions in order to free herself from Freud's
libidinal approach. Her fundamental concept is that of "basic
anxiety" which results from the conflicts, insecurities, and hostili-
ties the individual meets in society, an anxiety generated by the
individual's feeling of lonesomeness in a competitive world. On
the basis of this hypothesis, she undertakes to reformulate familiar
Freudian mechanisms such as masochism, narcissism, and the
Oedipus complex. Anxiety she sees as the driving force behind or
accompanying two "guiding principles"— safety and satisfaction—
that also "rule" man. [30, 73] She only questions Freud's deriva-
tion of these concepts, not their validity.

WHY PSYCHOANALYTIC FORMULATIONS MUST BE REJECTED 487

Kardiner accepts uncritically Freud's statement of problems and
attempts to find cultural derivations for the traditional Freudian
mechanisms. Kardiner's own abstraction — basic personality struc-
ture— seems, however, much less precise, less consistent than
Fromm's need to avoid isolation or Horney's basic anxiety. Unlike
Fromm and Horney, Kardiner does little more than pay lip service
to social determinants. He resorts to rather orthodox Freudian
mechanisms in accounting for the basic personality structure of any
society — the Alorese are what they are largely because "maternal
care is sporadic, inconsistent, and undependable," whereas Plain-
villers are what they are largely because maternal care is good.
And once Kardiner uncovers some psychoanalytic key by perusal
of ethnological data, it seems a relatively simple matter for him to
account for almost any and all behavior: the quest for prestige and
wealth, the genesis and function of rivalry and authority, the ap-
peal of ideologies.

From our point of view, as we emphasized in chapter 5, a par-
ticularly dangerous abstraction is that of ego drive. Freud's own
writings are rife with such phrases as "the ego strives," the "ego
tries," or "the ego introjects into itself." Bychowsky writes that

The Ego tries in vain to liberate itself from contributions which it
had received from its environment a long time ago. [9, 324]

Alexander says that

One main function of the ego is to confront the facts of inner per-
ception with the results of sense perception. [3, 147]

Reik constantly speaks of "ego-drives." [46] We have seen in
previous chapters that the ego is a genetic formation, made up in
large part of social values. To reify the ego, endow it with its own
drive, is to indulge in a psychological redundancy which com-
pletely obscures the real genesis, characteristics, composition of the
ego, and its functional role.

Neglect of emergent qualities in personal and group interactions.
A fundamental reason why psychoanalysis seems to us not to
account in any realistic way for the variety and contrast of social
phenomena, for the relative strength and permanency of some
social developments, the weakness and transiency of others, for

488 THE EGO IN PSYCHOANALYSIS

the rise of new norms, for social change, and the like, is due to
its complete failure to recognize the real relationship between the
individual and his environment, especially the fact that new social
products, new social values, as well as new individual orientations,
can and do emerge in the continuous process of social evolution.
Social change can best be seen as a series of successive stages with
each new stage derived from or heaved up by what have proved
to be the limitations or contradictions of an earlier stage. Because
of this failure to recognize that emergence can and does take place
on the psychological and social level as well as on the physical and
biological level, analysts have been forced to create their various
abstractions and to account for individual and social behavior
with circuitous derivations. Indeed, as we pointed out at the very
beginning of this chapter, the problems of the neurotic with whom
psychoanalysts are primarily concerned, as well as psychoanalytic
formulations themselves, can be seen as emergents of a particular
set of conditions that obtain in a particular form of society at a
particular point in man's history.

Freud himself minimized this fact of the emergence of new
qualities with new characteristics and explained what he termed
"apparently new characteristics" as only fresh manifestations of
unconscious mechanisms.

From our point of view we need not attribute so much importance
to the appearance of new characteristics. For us it would be enough
to say that in a group the individual is brought under conditions
which allow him to throw off the repressions of his unconscious in-
stincts. The apparently new characteristics which he then displays
arc in fact the manifestations of this unconscious, in which all that is
evil in the human mind is contained as a predisposition. [18, 9/.,
italics ours]

In this statement Freud not only neglects the mutual dependence
and die reciprocal relationship between the individual and other
individuals that constitute the group; he neglects too the facts of
cognition and perception which, as we saw in previous chapters,
unequivocally demonstrate the relatedness of one stimulus to
another, of one experience to another.

WHY PSYCHOANALYTIC FORMULATIONS MUST BE REJECTED 489

For Freud, the whole psychology of judgment is regarded essen-
tially as a

. . . derivation of an intellectual function from the interplay of the
primary instinctual impulses. Judging has been systematically de-
veloped out of what was in the first instance introduction into the ego
and expulsion from the ego carried out according to the pleasure-
principle. Its polarity appears to correspond to the opposition between
the two groups of instincts which we have assumed to exist. Affirma-
tion, as being a substitute for union, belongs to Eros; while negation,
the derivative of expulsion, belongs to the instincts of destruction.
[20, 370]

Although the relationship between the individual and his social
environment has been explicitly recognized by analysts such as
Fromm and Fenichel, their failure to take into sufficient account
the characteristics of stimulus situations (relatedness, degree of
structuration), their failure to recognize the full implications of
the fact that well-structured situations can and do develop cogni-
tive frames for the individual, together with their failure to take
full account of the consequences that arise when old frames prove
inadequate to account meaningfully for new objective conditions
with the consequent high suggestibility of the individual faced
with an ambiguous stimulus, all boil down to the generalization
that even those reformulators of Freud who are anxious to give due
place to social influences are either neglectful of or ignorant of
established facts in the psychology of perception. Fenichel writes,
for example,

The statement that the production and dissemination of the ideol-
ogy of a society must be understood from the actual economic condi-
tions of this society, the "super-structure" of which is the ideology;
that further they are to be understood from the fact that this "super-
structure," by means of the actions of human beings, reacts back again
upon the "foundation," the economic conditions modifying them —
these statements are correct but general. They become more specific
when we succeed in comprehending scientifically the details of the
mechanisms of these transiformations, and only psychoanalysis is able
to help us in that. [12, 94]

490 THE EGO IN PSYCHOANALYSIS

Without denying in any way the tremendous insight Freud has
provided us for the understanding of unconscious motivation, it is
our contention that these "more specific" and more scientific
details Fenichel quite properly feels are necessary, can only be
provided when the psychology of cognition, together with a
realistic psychology of motivation, are brought together.

It is instructive, in this regard, to see how the psychology of
perception and cognition is handled by Kardiner. It is clear from
the preface of his first volume [36] that Kardiner equates psy-
chology with psychiatry or psychoanalysis and that in his cursory
review of psychological approaches and his defense of psycho-
analysis later on in the book he specifically states "we are omitting
the experimental psychologies." [356] On page 1 of his first book
devoted to his basic orientation, he writes :

A psychology which elects to study the cognitive and apperceptive
functions of man does not make contact at any point with sociology.
[36]

This statement is, at best, plausible only if we accept as "psychol-
ogy" a narrow 19th century variety. Any modern elementary
textbook of psychology will show that cognition and apperception
cannot be thought of as distinct and isolated processes somehow
insulated from aflfectivity and emotion or that somehow occur
independent of temperament or of motivational factors, many of
which are socially determined. We can refer back here to our
discussion of F. C. Bartlett's impressive experiments (pp. 32 ff.)
and repeat again his conclusion that

It [the perceptual reaction] is directed by interest and by feeling,
and may be dominated by certain crucial features of the objects and
scenes dealt with. [6, 31]

On the first page of his book Kardiner also says:

On the other hand, a sociology whose chief concern is to correlate
the phenomena resulting from the behavior of human beings in
groups does not need psychology. [36]

This would seem to mean, then, that for Kardiner the whole
problem of frame formation and the effects of frame formation on

WHY PSYCHOANALYTIC FORMULATIONS MUST BE REJECTED 491

perception and judgment are irrelevant. Yet Kardiner himself,
in the final chapter of this book dealing with principles and
techniques, is forced to include as one of the major elements of
personality "perception: of the outer world, of oneself, and of
oneself in relation to the outer world." [461] And he further
states that

The complicated forms of attitudinized perceptions both of other
individuals and of oneself are the most important for our considera-
tion. [36, 463]

In his second volume Kardiner writes that

Direct experience involves all the coordinative functions, such as
discrimination and judgment. [37, 8]

And he uses as the only source of data other than his "psycho-
dynamic" approach the Rorschach technique, a technique wholly
designed to study apperceptive functions. Thus Kardiner bows
to perception and cognition as important psychological processes
to be taken into account, employs enthusiastically a technique to
study perception, but deliberately omits any examination of the
rich literature on perception found in experimental psychology.
It is no wonder that he fails completely to see the relevance the
psychology of perception has for any valid and systematic account
of the relationships that he himself has posed as the objects of
investigation.

We have already shown how the first stage in the actual forma-
tion of an attitude is a perceptual stage, how an individual can
and does evolve some frame of reference when repeatedly faced
with a stimulus situation, how the structuredness of a stimulus
situation must be regarded as a gradation where the less ambigu-
ous the stimulus situation itself is, the more likely is it to compel
the formation of a frame. On the other hand, the more ambiguous
the stimulus situation itself is, the more likely is the frame to be
generated by internal and internalized factors. And in addition
to the gradation of structuredness in the stimulus field, the selec-
tivity of perception is often determined by the organism's in-
stinctual tensions and by other motivational and affective factors
as was stressed in earlier chapters.

492 THE EGO IN PSYCHOANALYSIS

The fact that the individual's perception of new relationships
between himself and the environment does cause the emergence
of new, perhaps "uncharacteristic," reactions has been observed by
Murphy, Murphy, and Newcomb in their review of experimental
social psychology. They write:

It is all too often forgotten that the condition of general arousal or
excitement brought about by any object may not only permit new
forms of experience but tap new drives, leading to intense activity in
reference to the object utterly different from that prevailing the
moment before. [41, 105]

We have already discussed in some detail the outstanding studies
of Piaget on the development of a constellation of reciprocal rela-
tions in which an individual locates himself psychologically, (pp.
334 #.) Piaget's conclusions must be mentioned again here since
they bear so pointedly on the psychoanalytic conception of the
development of the "superego." As the result of painstaking inves-
tigation on hundreds of cases, Piaget showed that the first stage in
the development of the child's morality was, indeed, a result of
his identification with grown-ups and his acceptance of their
standards as the criteria of what is right and wrong — the stage of
moral realism. However— and this is the important part of the
story for psychoanalysis — the child's morality does not remain on
this level alone. It merges, rather, into what Piaget regards as a
different stage where rules and regulations lose their reified reality
and where right and wrong are judged in terms of a feeling of
reciprocity that develops under the influence of group situations.
From this stage there emerges still another stage where increasing
maturity and further social relationships developed in Piaget's
children a sense of equity. What is happening here is that the
original frames derived from the parents sooner or later prove
themselves inadequate for any satisfactory adjustment to the group
situation. These frames are, then, at least in part, discarded in
favor of new standards imposed on the individual by his relation-
ship to others in the group.

Piaget's studies are exceedingly well documented and, within
the framework of the culture in which they were made, exceed-
ingly convincing. Norms that arise in the group situation become

WHY PSYCHOANALYTIC FORMULATIONS MUST BE REJECTED 493

interiorized in the individual as his standards: they become part
of his ego. These results of Piaget, together with the data from
cultural anthropology which show the extreme variation of the
Oedipus complex even within a single culture, indicate that the
psychoanalytic concept of the universal development of a "super-
ego" in human beings has no basis in fact as a special part of the
ego with a special function.

It is significant that, although Piaget's studies are extremely
well known and generally highly regarded by psychologists, they
are very seldom referred to by psychoanalysts. Analysts are either
ignorant of Piaget's work or else refuse to come to grips with its
implications. Either state of affairs is inexcusable in a discipline
that has scientific pretensions.

We have seen that one of the inevitable psychological emergents
of an individual's participation in a group is his group conscious-
ness, his awareness of his relationship to the group, and the modi-
fication of his own frames or attitudes by group norms (ch. 10).
We have seen how the individual becomes extremely suggestible
to new formulations, new orientations, new anchorages if and
when he becomes aware of a wide disparity between his old frames
and new situations or if he is confronted with new and unstruc-
tured situations which none of his established frames give meaning
to or adequately serve as a readiness for response. Change is one
of the outstanding characteristics of the world in which men live;
sometimes change follows long periods of comparative stability;
sometimes it is violent, sometimes relatively gradual. New inven-
tions, new technological developments, new discoveries of nature's
resources and secrets continually affect and bring into new relation-
ships the external stimuli that constitute man's environment.
Under the impact of such events and occurrences, old frames fre-
quently prove inadequate for interpretation or adjustment: new
frames take their place or modify them, new frames formed either
as the result of the perception of well-structured stimulus situations
or as the result of the acceptance of new norms, new orientations
provided by a leader or emerging as a product of social inter-
course. As we have said earlier, these new formulations either
may or may not account objectively for the new situations. What
happens when new formulations do not adequately account for

494 THE EGO IN PSYCHOANALYSIS

new situations cannot be gone into here. Nor can we consider in
detail now the psychological conditions that give rise to new
norms. Here we are only pointing out the fact that new norms
do emerge, that in critical times the role of leadership as a source
of new orientations is accentuated, that the individual is by no
means always unaware of changes taking place in his external
world.

A typical explanation of this process of social change by an
outstanding orthodox Freudian psychoanalyst, Ernest Jones, is as
follows:

The outstanding discovery of psycho-analysis in this context [evo-
lution and creative change] has been that many — and some analysts
would be inclined to say all — of the original discoveries and better-
ments and improvements of all kinds that previously were attributed
to the action of purely creative impulses arc rather to be regarded as
by-products resulting from the action of certain defensive mental
mechanisms. The endeavor to escape from unconscious guilt and
anxiety leads to infinitely varied mental activities, some of which
produce what may socially be called "improvements." To the ideal-
ism and self-esteem of mankind it is a chastening reflection that so
much of what he is most proud of is merely an accidental result of
the flight from fear and painf that a bad conscience should prove to
be one of the prime motors in even our loftiest strivings. [35, 203,
italics ours]

There is here a complete neglect of the fact of emergence on the
social level and of demonstrable psychological principles that at
least in part explain this emergence. It is no wonder then that the
only advice Jones can give to speed human progress is to improve
the "libidinal" basis of human nature.

As a specific example of the consequences of the failure of
psychoanalysts to recognize the emergence of new products under
new conditions, we might refer back to Jones's account of the
appeal of revolutionary leaders during critical times. It will be
remembered that leaders arise in critical situations, according to
Jones, because the latent sense of guilt all human beings have is
"stirred by any great misfortune or privation." [206] Without
seeing the full implications of what it means for a human being
to be "stirred by any great misfortune or privation," Jones tells us

WHY PSYCHOANALYTIC FORMULATIONS MUST BE REJECTED 495

that revolutionary leaders have homosexual tendencies which re-
sult in a paranoid defense, and as a consequence they have no
compunctions against violence (which for them is the murder of
the father).

We reach thus the conclusion that a successful revolutionary must
be more than a little mad. [35, 200]

By identifying himself with the leader, substituting the concept
of society for the image of the parent, the individual who takes
part in a revolution is explained. While it may, to be sure, be true
that certain leaders during critical times such as Hitler, Roehm,
and Goering had homosexual tendencies, it would seem to be
stretching the argument beyond the breaking point to account for
the leadership of such men as Washington, Jefferson, Lincoln,
Lenin, Stalin, or Franklin Roosevelt on similar grounds. As
J. B. S. Haldane has said:

Hitler may well be a neurotic. But it is only in particular circum-
stances that a great people chooses a neurotic of this kind as its leader.
[28, 15]

There seems little doubt that, if Hitler and his satellites had never
been born, under these same circumstances other leaders would
have arisen in Germany who may or may not have been free of
homosexual suspicions.

Failure to recognize full implications of an individual's place-
ment in a culture. We repeat again that social norms — institu-
tional controls, symbols of authority, social values — are all first
external to the individual in any culture. Among these norms
are the ethical codes of society or of a group which do seem in
most cultures to be transmitted by the parents. In reviewing the
learning process in social situations, Murphy, Murphy, and New-
comb describe the situation as follows:

On the whole, most values seem to be "taken" and used by the
child because of a positive response to those whose values come within
his ken. The process by which many values are transmitted from one
generation to the next is largely a process, we believe, involving rela-
tively little coercion, relatively little Freudian repression. It is more
of the character of the "Look, see!" pattern. The world is so full of a

496 THE EGO IN PSYCHOANALYSIS

number of things both lovely and hateful that, unless the child's in-
terests are in gross conflict with the adult, the parent has relatively
little trouble in enabling the child to see why one game is fun for
three-year-olds and another is dangerous for three-year-olds. Even
without benefit of identification, which, of course, plays its powerful
part in forming values, the parent helps the child to structure the
world in terms of his own values simply by pointing out the palpable
and inherent goods and bads. [41, 238 /.]

As we have mentioned, Piaget's studies unequivocally show that
in the first stage of morality the child accepts as good or bad, as
fair or unfair, the types of behavior so judged by his parents or by
other adults who constitute his immediate social world (code of
heteronomy). But there is for the individual no psychological
difference either in the genesis of or the function of "moral" codes
which psychoanalysts separate out as the "superego" and other
norms of behavior the individual learns. The emerging develop-
ing ego is in large part composed of all these interiorized social
values.

The important question, the question psychoanalysts have not
squarely faced, is the question of what norms arc interiorized by a
given individual in a society. For it should be clear that by no
means all persons in a given "society" are exposed to the same
standards, values, or norms, except, perhaps, in extremely primi-
tive and small societies. And, even if exposed to the same norms,
individuals acquire ego-attitudes only in relation to certain refer-
ence or membership groups. As Sapir has pointed out:

The culture so carefully described in our ethnological and sociologi-
cal monographs are not, and cannot be, the truly objective entities
they claim to be. No matter how accurate their individual itemiza-
tion, their integrations into suggested structures are uniformly falla-
cious and unreal. [50, 411]

The psychologist, then, who speaks glibly of a "culture" or
"society" is speaking of an abstraction.

The term "society" is itself a cultural construct which is employed
by individuals who stand in significant relations to each other in order
to help them in the interpretation of certain aspects of their behavior.
The true locus of culture is in the interactions of specific individuals

WHY PSYCHOANALYTIC FORMULATIONS MUST BE REJECTED 497

and, on the subjective side, in the world of meanings which each one
of these individuals may unconsciously abstract for himself from his
participation in these interactions. Every individual is, then, in a
very real sense, a representative of at least one sub-culture which may
be abstracted from the generalized culture of the group of which he
is a member. Frequently, if not typically, he is a representative of
more than one sub-culture, and the degree to which the socialized
behavior of any given individual can be identified with or abstracted
from the typical or generalized culture of a single group varies
enormously from person to person. [49, 235 f.]

This warning of Sapir's becomes increasingly important when the
psychologist is concerned with the study of individuals who live
in complex societies, characterized by definite class, status, racial,
or interest group relationships. If we are to understand the full
force of the social environment on the psychological makeup of
the individual, we must analyze precisely the interconnections be-
tween the individual and the social stimuli he is confronted with.
And we must furthermore constantly bear in mind that the social
environment is seldom, if ever, completely static, that it is, espe-
cially these days, in a process of flux and change, due to the impact
of new technological developments, new discoveries, and new
inventions.

When psychoanalysts use the concept of "culture" they seem to
equate it either with intrapersonal (such as familial, parent-child
relationships) or with broad "cultural patterns" transmitted to the
child through the family. There is a general neglect of different
class, status, racial, or group relationships which have their own
characteristic standards or norms. As a consequence of this failure
to give sufficient emphasis to an individual's identification with a
certain class, status, or group, there follows the failure to recognize
the important fact that individuals can and do seek to satisfy their
own egos through the preservation of or the enhancement of a
larger class, status, or group interest. And this implies that indi-
viduals can be and are conscious of their class, status, or group
affiliation and identification, that this consciousness of oneself as
a part of a larger social unit can be and is a relative matter, a
consciousness of identification or belongingness that will vary in
different situations and develop according to different conditions.

498 THE EGO IN PSYCHOANALYSIS

The relative degree to which different groups of people are con-
scious of their group belongingness is given little attention by
psychoanalysts who, if they recognize group or class problems at
all, generally assume that members of a group behave uncon-
sciously and rather automatically as such.

In a penetrating analysis of the cultural orientations of Fromm
and Horney, Green has pointed out that "no individual participates
in the total cultural complex totally." [27, 534]

Complex cultures do not lend themselves easily to the explaining of
behavior in general-cultural terms. Since individuals interact within
a small segment of a differentiated society and are inculcated with the
specialized values of their various segments as well as with the general-
cultural values, extreme caution is required in the use of such a
concept as "modern man." [27, 536]

We can illustrate the use of "culture" in a relatively abstract
sense with reference to the formulations of Fromm and Horney
who, as we have seen, compared to the bulk of psychoanalysts, are
distinguished for their attempt to put psychoanalytic theory in a
cultural framework. Fromm, for example, speaks of the "social
character" of a people in a society and equates this with majority
characteristics. [26, 283] In discussing education as a mechanism
for transmitting the social character of society, he points out that
the family "may be considered to be the psychological agent of
society." [257] But he does not give due emphasis to the enor-
mously different types of family relationships found in our society
and the widely differing values that may be transmitted by differ-
ent families, as, for example, the values transmitted to a child in
the family of a Wall Street banker contrasted to those transmitted
in the family of a Pittsburgh steel worker or an Alabama Negro
sharecropper. Another example of the tremendous variations
overlooked within our own culture by Fromm is reflected in his
statement that "all normal persons today have about the same
impulse to work" [252] — surely a questionable thesis if one com-
pares, for example, the motivation of a highly educated and com-
petent young engineer with a career ahead of him and a young
man whose education stopped after the first year of high school,
who has no special skills, mediocre abilities, and who is looking

WHY PSYCHOANALYTIC FORMULATIONS MUST BE REJECTED 49$

for any kind of job that will enable him to make ends meet. And
as Green indicates, this "impulse to work" posited by Fromm may
be expected to undergo radical changes "in a period of contracting
capitalism, with increasing emphasis upon consumption outlets
and state-guaranteed economic security rather than upon expand-
ing production, saving, and individual responsibility." [27, 536]
Speaking of modern man's freedoms, Fromm says:

He has become free from the external bonds that would prevent
him from doing and thinking as he sees fit. He would be free to act
according to his own will, if he knew what he wanted, thought, and
felt. But he does not know. [26, 255]

This statement, too, appears unrealistic when one glances, for
example, at newspaper accounts of industrial strife where both
labor and management seem very definitely to know what they
want or when one reads in the same newspaper of efforts to create
legislation to prevent job discrimination for reasons of racial back-
ground.

Horney sees basic anxiety as a driving force that leads to a
craving for affection and for power on the part of the individual
and says that "craving for affection may be restricted to certain
groups of persons, perhaps to one with which there are interests in
common, such as a political or religious group." [29, 118] It
seems to us that Horney has the cart before the horse, except in
the cases of certain isolated individuals. The evidence we have
reviewed in earlier chapters indicates that the values, standards, or
norms of a group which become interiorized in the individual as
his loyalty structure are not generally due to a basic anxiety under-
lying a craving for affection which is then simply attached to a
group because of common interests, but, rather, that these loyalty
structures develop, are learned because of an individual's placement
in the social context due to the accident of birth, the role he has as
employer or employed, the type of work he is engaged in or some
other circumstances that define his social role.

We should perhaps in passing also mention the abstract use
Kardiner makes of culture. The basic personality structure in any
society is, he holds, derived from influences of primary institutions

500 THE EGO IN PSYCHOANALYSIS

and is' dependent on rather identical influences. For example,
Kardiner says that "good maternal care is a feature of our cul-
ture/' [37, 20] Deviations from this supposed common cultural
feature are passed off as atypical or accidental. Although Kardiner
does notice that "in studying basic personality structure in our
culture, new differentiations must be made not only for sex and
age, but especially for status," [38] this important confession does
not force any modification of Kardiner's concept of the ego or
basic personality structure. Status differences, no matter how
great, are rationalized as different manifestations of the same basic
personality structure:

A king and a commoner may be on opposite sides of a certain
situation with regard to subsistence or prestige. But the roles of both
are merely different facets of the same ego structure . . . both are
reacting from different polarities to the same ego situation. [36, 132]

That Kardiner's formulation is both inadequate and invalid is seen
particularly clearly in his discussion of "Plainville," a modern
community in the United States. He notes that "the heterogeneity
of our culture becomes a troublesome question wherever we dis-
cover that within the same range of basic personality structure
differences in character become involved with serious mtra-social
tensions and clashes of interest." [37, 339] But, he continues, "the
heterogeneity of our culture in no way invalidates the attempt
to establish the general characteristics of Western man." [339]
Kardiner minimizes these troublesome questions and dismisses the
problems raised through cultural diversity by creating "charac-
terological types." [345]

Because the psychoanalytic formulations fail to take into full
account the implications of social stratification they also fail, as
Francis Bartlett has forcefully pointed out, to take into account the
fact that individuals within our society can and do develop alle-
giances to social values that are themselves conflicting and con-
tradictory and that individuals can and do become sensitive to
contradictions between established social values and everyday life
experiences. Bartlett illustrates his point with the following
schematic example:

WHY PSYCHOANALYTIC FORMULATIONS MUST BE REJECTED 501

Imagine that toward the end of the depression an auto worker gets
a job as foreman in a plant. He identifies himself with his men,
works side by side with them from time to time, knows some of them
socially and treats them as equals. At the same time, he has a new
authority over them, must order them to do what the employer
requires and can fire them if they refuse. He begins to find that the
exertion of his authority in the employer's interests threatens his
friendships. And his identification with the interests of his men
threatens his ambition to get ahead and might cost him his job. Here
is a simple case of the contradictions inherent in a middle-class posi-
tion. It is an unstable situation. The foremen have not yet organized
their own union, and a fraternal bond with the U.A.W. has not been
established. Our foreman may in time begin to develop the feeling
that the other men are not his equals, partly because he attributes his
advancement to his own superiority and partly because the men,
whose interests are no longer identical with his, may behave in what
seems to him a most unreasonable manner. His relations to the men
are impaired. While still regarding himself as one of the gang, he
develops feelings of contempt and tendencies to disparage them. He
still wants them to like him, but he no longer does like them, at
least as formerly, as equals. His friendliness becomes more and more
a cloak for exerting his authority. He thinks that a pat on the back
and a smile make up for real injuries. At the same time, he becomes
hesitant about exerting his authority or administering rebukes. He
conceals his disparaging tendencies, his instability, and his ambition
behind a facade of irreproachability and imperturbable calm. He
may even refrain from reasonable and necessary criticism, only to
burst out with tangential criticism which may then have an irrational
quality. With the further impairment of his relations to the men and
his failure to get ahead with the employer, he develops an increasing
need for affection which he seeks from one woman or another.

At this point, our imaginary individual is hardly distinguishable
from a neurotic personality. An analyst might well be able to ferret
out his neurotic trends; his striving for power, his need for affection,
his disparaging tendencies and his perfectionism. He would probably
attribute these trends to a "basic anxiety." If so, is it not clear that he
has substituted a convenient abstraction for a concrete analysis of the
primary conflicts and the social situation underlying them? This
hypothetical illustration shows how necessary it is to understand the

502 THE EGO IN PSYCHOANALYSIS

relation between the conflicts which appear in a neurosis and the
contradictions which inhere in the practical everyday life of our
society. [5, 220 f.]

That Bartlett's example is not wholly imaginary, is suggested by
the findings reported on p. 144 that foremen in the United States
tended to identify themselves with management in spite of earlier
allegiances to the workers. Fromm has noted (particularly in
his 1936 study of authority and the family [25]) that, the greater
the contradictions of society become, the less chance will there be
for an individual to develop a strong and well-integrated ego. But
for Fromm it is the inherent human striving for justice and truth
that resolves these contradictions and discrepancies arising from
conflicts between objective conditions and old norms. He does not
recognize that sooner or later new norms arise and are accepted
by the individual as an apparent resolution of the contradiction or
conflict.

Neglect of situational determination. Our last two criticisms of
psychoanalysis — its failure to recognize that new standards, new
codes of behavior, or new norms can and do emerge in certain
social situations and its failure to see the full implications of social
stratification and the often contradictory and conflicting role the
individual is in because of this stratification — add up to the more
general criticism that psychoanalytic concepts are unrealistic, in-
adequate, and invalid, partly because of their neglect of the effect
which external situations have on the individual and on the precise
relationships between the individual and his external social world.
In pointing out the dangers of the analogy of the unconscious as
a storehouse, Koffka stresses the fact that whatever the contents of
the unconscious may be that are functioning at the moment, these
are constantly being transformed, put together in new patterns,
according to the situation presented:

Things do not simply fall into those places into which they are
being thrown, they arrange themselves in coming and during their
time of storage according to the many ways in which they belong
together. And they do more; they influence each other, form groups
of various sizes and kinds, always trying to meet the exigencies of the
moment. [38, 66, italics ours]

SUMMARY 503

While this criticism is especially true of orthodox psychoana-
lysts, it still holds for those who have tried to reformulate orthodox
concepts with reference to cultural variables. In terms of therapy
this means that the way to "solve" social problems and the personal
problems of the neurotic is to change those external conditions" that
give rise to contradictory values or that create wide discrepancies
between actual experience and established norms. Haldane has
suggested that this would not be a much more staggering task
than that of psychoanalyzing everybody, for, he calculates, in
England alone 50,000 psychoanalysts would be necessary to keep
even the people in that small country relatively free from neu-
roses. [28, 15] It might be noted in passing that the efforts of
responsible experts to prevent wars, depressions, and other major
social catastrophes all lie, one way or the other, in the direction of
removing what they believe are the conditions that give rise to
situations which cause these catastrophes. On the personal side, it
is obvious that a neurosis due to sexual maladjustment is not nearly
so likely to arise in the case of a pretty girl who attracts men as in
the case of a homely girl whom men avoid; that a young man who
is economically secure enough either to marry or to have girl
friends is not nearly so likely to get tangled up with problems of
sex as is a young man similarly motivated biologically but who
cannot afford the normal sexual outlets of our society. Wortis
[55] has pointed out that many modern women may suffer from
the conflict between their desire for business or professional suc-
cess and their interest in conforming to orthodox patterns of
femininity.8

SUMMARY

Psychoanalysis at the present time has a tremendous vogue.
This is due to the fact that its method is dramatic and alluring as
well as to the fact that psychoanalysts do have the courage to tackle
those personal problems and to explain those social phenomena

8 One does not have to imagine instances of individuals who are caught in the
net of circumstances that constitute their own relationships to their social world.
For example, Professor Edwin G. Boring of Harvard University has written an
account of his own psychoanalysis, of the personal dilemma he faced and of the
emotional entanglements he hoped his psychoanalysis would resolve. [8]

504 THE EGO IN PSYCHOANALYSIS

brought about in our present age of rapid social change. If psycho-
analysis were concerned only with individual therapy, we would
not need to consider it in social psychology. But psychoanalysts
do deal with problems that fall within the social psychologist's
domain, and psychoanalysis must, therefore, be closely examined.

For the social psychologist, Freud's great contribution was that
he saw clearly that social demands of one's surroundings, on the
one hand, and instinctual impulses, on the other, created conflicts
in the individual and that no sharp distinction could therefore be
made between individual and social psychology. On the basis of
Freud's theories, he and his followers have attempted to account
for a variety of social phenomena — groups are held together by
their libidinal constitutions, by the substitution of a common object
for ego-ideal; adjustment is viewed as the incorporation of parental
images into the mental apparatus; war is viewed as an infantile
regression; revolution is seen as an outlet for an inherent sense of
guilt, revolutionary leadership being motivated by a paranoid
mechanism which is a defense against homosexual tendencies;
Fascism is accounted for as the unconscious indulgence of frus-
trated persons, largely of the lower middle class, who substitute a
leader for the parental symbol to compensate for the weakness of
their own infantilism; anti-Semitism is a projection of id impulses,
and so on.

Freud's own formulation of the ego developing out of the un-
organized id and of the superego as a precipitate of an inevitable
Oedipus complex has been modified by later analysts who point
out that Freud failed to recognize the facts of cultural variations,
that the Oedipus complex, for example, is not universal but devel-
ops only under a particular set of cultural conditions as Malinow-
ski demonstrated. They hold that Freud posited as instinctually
closed systems certain psychological mechanisms that can be more
accurately conceived as cultural products derived from a restricted
middle class capitalist economy.

Although certain of these analysts, such as Fromm and Horney,
have made considerable advance over their more orthodox col-
leagues in recognizing the general facts of social determination,
they have yet by no means emancipated themselves from Freudian

SUMMARY 505

concepts which are for them still the basis of explanation even
though their genesis in the individual is viewed as culturally de-
rived. Hence criticisms of psychoanalysis as a scientifically valid
and adequate formulation hold for them as well.

Scientific procedure demands that concepts must ultimately be
capable of naturalistic explanation, that the validity of theories
must be demonstrable, and that the rule of scientific parsimony
is violated when a whole host of concepts is created without some
basis in fact. On these grounds, psychoanalysis does not meet the
test of scientific method. This is reflected in the frequently bitter
and prolonged disputes that rage among psychoanalysts themselves,
disputes which clear-cut verifiable empirical evidence should be
able to settle.

Specifically, psychoanalysis is open to three major criticisms from
the point of view of systematic social psychology. First, it em-
ploys simple, sovereign, and abstract explanatory principles of
motivation which enable it to account for the most diversified and
contrasting phenomena merely by juggling its concepts around.
Freud has his universal Oedipus complex and superego, his as-
sumptions concerning the interrelationships of erotogenic zones,
in addition to his abstract instincts; Fromm posits the need to
avoid aloneness derived from the libidinal structure and is also
forced to assume a universal striving for justice and truth; Horney
posits a basic anxiety which lies behind the guiding principles of
safety and satisfaction; many analysts speak of ego-drives as self-
propelled entities.

In the second place, psychoanalysts fail to take into account the
fact that new psychological products such as new ego-attitudes
can and do emerge under new conditions or that frames are in-
evitably developed after repeated exposure to stimulus situations.
Psychoanalysis completely neglects, in this regard, demonstrable
facts from the psychology of perception, as well as demonstrable
facts from genetic psychology, such as Piaget's findings that moral
codes can and do arise spontaneously in children's social groups.
There is a continuous dialectical relationship not precisely seen by
psychoanalysts between the individual and his social environment,
with old orientations constantly giving way to new and apparently
more adequate ones, with these in turn proving unsatisfactory to

506 THE EGO IN PSYCHOANALYSIS

meet changes brought about by events, technological developments,
and the like, which affect the structure of the social environment.
The social environment, as well as the individual's adjustment to
it, must both be regarded as processes where changes are contin-
ually taking place, where new norms are arising on the stimulus
side, new frames are emerging on the subjective side.

Finally, psychoanalysts — when they do not neglect the role of
culture altogether— fail to recognize the full implications of an
individual's placement in a culture, fail to see the consequences of
social stratification, and thus use the word "culture" in an obscure
and functionless way. A characteristic of most western societies
is its stratification according to class, status, racial background, or
some other group interest. It is therefore quite misleading to
assume that all persons in a culture are exposed to or acquire the
same standards, values, or norms. Furthermore, since the values
or norms of different groups or classes within the society are fre-
quently in conflict with each other, and since the norms of any one
group by no means always conform to objective conditions, the
values or norms an individual interiorizes and that become so
important a part of his ego, create within him contradictory
orientations (frames) which can and do give rise to personal
dilemmas and maladjustments or which seem unsatisfactory to
him in accounting for his own experience.

In brief, psychoanalysis by appealing to simple and sovereign
principles and by failing to see the precise way in which the indi-
vidual is related to and affected by his external situation fails to
account realistically for man's social behavior.

REFERENCES

1. ADLER, A., The Practice and Theory of Individual Psychology, trans, by P.
Radin, New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1925.

2. Problems of Neurosis (P. Mairct, ed.), New York: Cosmopolitan, copy-
right 1930.

3. ALEXANDER, R, Development of the ego-psychology, in Psycho-analysis Today:
Its Scope and Function (S. Lorand, ed.), New York: International Univer-
sities Press, copyright 1944.

5. BARTLETT, F., Recent trends in psycho-analysis, Science & Society, 1945, 9,
214-31.

REFERENCES 507

6. BARTLETT, F. C., Remembering: A Study in Experimental and Social Psychol-

7. BOEHM, R, The history of the Oedipus complex, Intern. /. Psycho-analysis,

1931, 12, 431-51.

8. BORING, E. G., Was this analysis a success?, /. Abnorm. & Soc. Psychol.t 1940,

35, 3-16.

9. BYCHOWSKI, G., On relations between the ego and the super-ego, Psychoanalytic

Rev., 1943, 30, 313-24.

10. FENICHEL, O., Fruhe Entwicklungstadien der Ichs, Imago, 1937, 23, 243-69.
U. Ego-disturbances and their treatment, Intern. /. Psycho-analysis, 1938,

19, 416-38.

12. The drive to amass wealth, Psychoanalytic Quart., 1938, 7, 69-95.

13. Ubcr Trophae und Triumph, Intern. Z. Psychoanalysis, Imago, 1939, 24,

258-80.

14. FRENKEL-BRUNSWIK, E., and R. N. SANFORD, Some personality factors in anti-

semitism, /. Psychol, 1945, 20, 271-91.

15. FREUD, A., The Ego and Mechanisms of Defence, London: Hogarth, 1937.

16. FREUD, S., Formulations regarding the two principles in mental functioning

(1911), Collected Papers, vol. 4, 1925.

17. Instincts and their vicissitudes (1915), Collected Papers, vol. 4, 1925.

18. Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego, London: Intern. Psycho-
analytical Press, 1922.

19. Beyond the Pleasure Principle, London: Intern. Psycho-analytical Press,

1922.

20. Negation, Intern, f. Psycho-analysis, 1925, 6, 367-71.

22. FROMM, E., Die Entwicklung des Chrustusdogmas: cine psychoanalysischc

Studie zur sozialpsychologischen Funktion der Religion, Imago, 1930, 16,

305-73.
23. Uber Methodc und Aufgabe einer analytischen Sozialpsychologie, Z. So-

zialforschung, 1932, 1, 28-54.
24. Die psychoanalytische Charakterologie und ihre Bcdeutung fur die

Sozialpsychologie, Z. Sozialforschung, 1932, 1, 253-77.
25. Theoretische Entwiirfe uber Autoritat und Familie: Sozialpsychologischer

Teil, in Studien uber Autoritat und Familie (M. Horkheimer, ed.), Paris:

Alcan, 1936, 77-135.

by permission of the publishers.

27. GREEN, A. W., Sociological analysis of Horney and Fromm, Am. f. Sociol.,

1946, 51, 533-40.

28. HALDANE, J. B. S., Psychology, a Marxist Survey, Dialectics, 1938 (?), 7, 1-15.

29. HORNET, K., The Neurotic Personality of Our Time, New York: Norton, 1937.
30. New Ways in Psychoanalysis, New York: Norton, 1939.

31. Our Inner Conflicts, New York: Norton, 1945.

32. JONES, E., Mother-right and the sexual ignorance of savages, Intern. /. Psycho-
analysis, 1925, 6, 109-30.

33. The origin and structure of the super-ego, Intern. /. Psycho-analysis,

1926,7,303-11.

34. The psychology of Quislingism, Intern. f. Psycho-analysis, 1941, 22, 1-6,

508 THE EGO IN PSYCHOANALYSIS

35. JONES, E., Evolution and Revolution, Intern. J. Psycho-analysis, 1941, 22, 193-

208.

36. KARDINER, A., The Individual and His Society, New York: Columbia Univ.,

37. The Psychological Frontiers of Society f New York: Columbia Univ.,

38. KOFFKA, K., On the structure of the unconscious, in The Unconscious: A Sym-

39. LOEBLOWITZ-LENNARD, H., A psychoanalytic contribution to the problem of

anti-semitism, Psychometric Rev., 1945, 32, 359-61.

40. MALINOWSKI, B., Sex and Repression in Savage Society, New York: Harcourt,

Brace, 1927.

41. MURPHY, G., L. B. MURPHY, and T. NEWCOMB, Experimental Social Psychology,

42. MURRAY, H. A., et aL, Explorations in Personality, New York: Oxford, 1938.

43. REICH, W., The characterological mastery of the Oedipus complex, Intern. J.

Psycho-analysis, 1931, 12, 452-67.
44. Massenpsychologie des Faschismus: Zur Sexualoefynomie der politischen

Reaction und zur proletarischen Sexualpoliti^, Copenhagen, 1933.
45. REIK, T., A Psychologist Loo fa at Love, New York: Farrar & Rinehart, 1944.
46. Psychology of Sex Relations, New York: Farrar & Rinehart, 1945.

47. ROHEIM, G., The psychoanalytic interpretation of culture, Intern. /. Psycho-

analysis, 1941, 22, 147-69.

48. SAPIR, E., The unconscious patterning of behavior in society, in The Uncon-

scious: A Symposium (E. S. Dummer, ed.), New York: Knopf, 1927, 114-42.

49. Cultural anthropology and psychiatry, /. Abnorm. & Soc. PsychoL, 1932,

27, 229-42.

50. The emergence of the concept of personality in a study of cultures,

/. Soc. PsychoL, 1934, 5, 408-15.

51. SCHUMAN, F. L., The Nazi Dictatorship, New York: Knopf, 1936, 2d ed.

52. SEARS, R. R., Survey of Objective Studies of Psychoanalytic Concepts, New

York: Soc. Science Research Council, 1943.

53. SPERBER, M., Schulen und Sekten: sozioanalytische Bemerkungen zur Situation

der Pathopsychologie, Zentbl. f. Psychotherap., 1932, 5, 579-93.

54. WAELDER, R., Psychological Aspects of War and Peace, Geneva Research Centre,

Geneva Studies, 1939.

55. WORTIS, J., Freudianism and the psychoanalytic tradition, Am. /. Psychiatry,

1945, 101, 814-20.

NAME INDEX

(Italicized numbers are reference pages)

Abromson, F., 88

Adler, A., 93, 463, 506

Alexander, F., 462, 466, 4*9, 471, 487,

506
Allport, F. H., 11, 30, 57, 79, 82, 88, 90,

281, 345
Allport, G. W., 9, 11, 18, 23, 27, 65, 70,

88, 148, 151, 153, 381, 383. 403, 404,

434

Alper, T. G., 128, 129, 153
Ames, A., Jr., 16, 27
Anderson, H. H., 124, 153
Anderson, N., 310, 345
Angcll, R. C., 402, 435
Angyal, A., 420, 435
Ansbacher, H., 73, 74, 88
Asbury, H., 308, 345
Asch, S. E., 47, 53, 54, 55, 68, 69, 83,

88, 153
Averill, L. A., 228, 229, 241, 255, 277

Bain, R., 11, 177, 196

Baldwin, B. T., 277

Baldwin, J. M., 17, 27, 119, 151, 153,

161, 162, 164, 196
Bales, R. F., 392, 393, 435
Barker, R. G., 796, 197, 279
Bartlett, F., 500, 502, 506
Bartlett, F. C., 32, 41, 45, 57, 63, 64, 75,

88, 130, 490, 507
Bayley, N., 229, 277
Bayton, J. A., 138, 755
Bean, L. H., 79, 88
Beaver, A. P., 184, 187, 796
Beebe-Center, J. G., 38, 57, 58
Beiswanger, G., 435
Bellak, L., 83, 88
Benary, W., 58
Bennett, A. E., 433, 435
Berelson, B., 78, 90

509

Bcrl, C., 241

Berman, N., 345

Berne, E. V. C., 186, 796

Bess, D., 384

Bcttelheim, B., 399, 404, 405, 406, 407,

408, 409, 410, 435
Beynon, E. D., 345
Birch, H. G., 77, 88, 127, 75J
Blake, R., 70, 88
Block, H., 68, 83, 88, 153
Blondel, C., 52, 58, 280, 345
Bios, P., 228, 229, 252, 253, 263, 264,

277

Blumer, H., 11, 12, 27, 280, 345
Boas, F., 11
Boehm, F., 468, 507
Bogardus, E. S., 11,27
Boll, E. S., 220
Bonney, M. E., 796
Boring, E. G., 58, 72, 88, 503, 507
Bossard, J. H. S., 220
Botsford, R. V., 395
Bradley, P., 277
Braly, K., 71, 72, 90
Brandt, H. F., 124, 153
Brcslaw, B. J., 78, 88
Brickner, R. M., 431, 432, 434, 435
Bridges, K. M. B., 183, 184, 796
Bronfenbrenner, U., 341, 345
Bronner, A. F., 95, 775, 331, 332, 333,

334, 346

Bronte, E., 439, 459
Brooks, F. D., 277
Broun, H., 82
Brown, A. R., 220
Bruce, A. A., 311
Bruner, J. S., 74, 75, 88, 129, 130, 403,

404, 434

Bruniwik, E., 73, 88
Buck, P., 378, 383

510

NAME INDEX

Buhlcr, C., 171, 196, 249, 277

Bunzcl, B., 398, 435

Burgess, E. W., 314

Burks, F. W., 230, 257, 264, 269, 278

Butler, S., 455, 459

Bychowsky, G., 487, 507

Cameron, W. J., 244, 257, 272, 275
Campbell, H. M., 265, 270, 271, 278
Cantril, H., 18, 23, 27, 32, 47, 58, 73,

76, 77, 79, 88, 89, 90, 91, 115, 132,

139, 141, 151, 153, 154, 155, 282,

345, 383

Carlyle, T., 349, 383
Centers, R., 73, 89, 140, 141, 142, 145,

146, 153, 368, 383
Chaffey, J., 243, 256, 260, 270, 279
Challman, R. C., 186, 196
Chandler, A. R., 58
Chapman, D. W., 32, 36, 46, 47, 53, 55,

58, 67, 89, 121, 123, 129, 153
Charcot, J. M., 425
Child, I. L., 286, 345
Claparede, E., 129, 153
Clark, K. B., 191, 193, 194, 796
Clark, M. K., 191, 193, 194, 196
Clemmcr, D., 286, 345
Cobb, S., 429, 430, 435
Cofer, C. N., 424, 435
Coffin, T. E., 46, 53, 58, 61, 62, 75, 89
Cohen, N. E., 38, 57, 58
Coleridge, E. P., 459
Conklin, E. S., 234, 250, 275
Cooley, C. H., 119, 151, 152, 153, 161,

166, 176, 177, 196, 381, 383
Cousins, S., 387, 388, 389, 435
Crcssey, P. G., 257, 258, 275

Dallcnbach, K. M., 59, 91

Darwin, C., 159, 160, 196

Dashiell, F., 281, 345

Davis, A., 179, 195, 196, 249, 275, 364,

365, 384

Davis, J., 69, 59, 138, 153
Davis, K., 216, 218, 220, 275, 287, 288,

346

Davis, M. H., 797
Dearborn, G. V., 45, 55
Dennis, W., 70, 55

Dickson, W. J., 366, 370, 380, J55
Diven, K., 81, 59
Dobb, M., 384
Dollard, J., 796, 249, 275
Droba, D. D., 11
Dublin, L. I., 398, 435
Dummer, E. S., 505

Durkheim, E., 49, 52, 55. 280, 281, 337,
346

Ebbinghaus, H., 129

Edwards, A. L., 65, 76, 59, 127, 153

Eisenberg, P., 401, 435

Eisenhower, D. D., 411

Elder, W., 432

Ellis, W. D,, 55

Engels, F., 102, 775, 462, 479

Euripides, 446, 447, 459

Paris, R. E. L., 418, 419, 435

Fauset, A. H., 346

Feldstein, M. J., 346

Fenichel, O., 471, 475, 489, 490, 507

Ferenczi, S., 471

Fernberger, S. W., 59

Festinger, L., 138, 754

Fisher, M. S., 177, 796

Fitc, M. D., 188, 797

Flugel, J. C., 349, 350, 384

Folsom, J. K., 27

Frank, J. D., 39, 55, 120, 122, 124, 754

Franklin, J. H., 59

Franklin, M., 128, 754

Franz, S. I., 422, 423, 435

Freeman, W,, 432, 434, 435

Frenkel-Brunswik, E., 507

Freud, A., 469, 507

Freud, S., 99, 281, 462, 463, 464, 465,
466, 468, 469, 470, 471, 474, 476, 478,
480, 481, 482, 483, 484, 485, 486, 487,
488, 489, 490, 494, 504, 505, 507

Fried, E., 59

Fricdrich, G., 384

Frisch, R., 87, 59

Fromm, E., 462, 470, 475, 478, 479, 480,
482, 484, 485, 486, 487, 489, 498, 499,
502, 504, 505, 507

Furfey, P. H., 186, 796

NAME INDEX

511

Gallup, G. H,, 383

Gardner, B. B., 364, 365, 384

Gardner, G. E., 220, 236, 278

Gardner, M. R., 364, 365, 384

Gaudet, H., 78, 90

Gelb, A., 426, 43$

Gcsell, A., 172, 173, 174, 176, 796

Gist, N. P., 307, 346

Gittler, L. R, 396, 397

Golden, C. W., 154

Goldstein, K., 426, 427, 428, 435

Goodenough, F. L., 176, 177, 180, 196,

797, 233, 241, 252, 254, 262, 278
Goodman, C. C., 89
Gould, R., 39, 58, 122, 138, 154,
Graham, M., 391
Green, A. W., 498, 499, 507
Green, E. H., 187, 797
Grcenberg, P. J., 124, 154
Greulich, W. W., 275
Grinker, R. R., 358, 384, 393, 411, 412,

413, 414, 415, 435
Groves, E. R., 227
Groves, G. H., 227

Haggard, E., 58

Hagman, E. P., 186, 797

Halbert, L. A., 307, 346

Halbwachs, M., 52, 58

Haldanc, J. B. S., 495, 503, 507

Hall, G. S., 202, 213, 214, 227

Hallowell, I. A., 276

Halstead, W. C., 426, 435

Hankins, D., 227

Hanson, H., 291

Harding, J., 77, 89

Hartley, E., 62, 89

Hartley, R., 62, 89

Hartmann, G. W., 27, 65, 77, 89, 90, 91,

385
Healy, W., 95, 775, 242, 27$, 316, 331,

332, 333, 334, 346
Heathers, L. B,, 126, 154
Hebb, D. O., 433, 434, 435
Hemingway, E., 440, 459
Henri, V., 42, 5*
Hcrtzman, M., 53, 68, 83, 88, 138, 153,

154

Hilgard, E, R., 125, 135, 154
Hollingworth, H. L., 36, 58, 75
Hollingworth, L., 223, 228, 239, 248, 250,

260, 278
Holt, R. R., 125, 152, 754, 352, 353, 354,

356, 384

Honzik, M. P., 797
Hoppc, F., 39, 58, 120, 754
Horkheimer, M., 507
Horney, K., 119, 754, 470, 475, 476, 480,

482, 484, 486, 487, 498, 499, 504, 505,

507
Horowitz, E. L., 23, 27, 69, 70, 72, 89,

171, 172, 797

Horowitz, R. E., 191, 192, 193, 797
Hoskins, R. G., 278
Hughes, E. C., 287, 346
Hunt, J. McV., 424, 435, 436
Hunt, W. A., 57, 58
Huntley, C. W., 128, 754
Hurlock, E. B., 180, 797, 349, 384
Huxley, J., 14, 27, 106, 107, 110, 775
Hyman, H. H., 137, 138, 754, 223

Ilg, F. L., 172, 173, 196
Isaacs, S., 164, 170, 797
Israeli, N., 4J6

Jack, L. M., 187, 797

James, W., 13, 27, 92, 118, 119, 134,

754, 162

Jameson, A. T., 273, 275
Jandorf, E. M., 403, 404, 434
Janet, P., 417
Jannis, J., 278
Janowitz, M., 227
Jcbb, R. C., 460
Jennings, H. M., 346
Jcrsild, A. T., 178, 188, 194, 797
Johnson, C. S., 136, 754
Johnson, H., 384
Johnson, W., 424

Jones, E., 462, 472, 473, 494, 507
Jones, H. E., 214, 227, 230, 231, 240,

252, 265, 266, 268, 270, 271, 278
Jones, M. C., 230, 243, 256, 260, 270,

271, 279
Jung, C. G., 10, 27f 30, 58

512

NAME INDEX

Kardincr, A., 462, 480, 481, 487, 490,

491, 499, 500, 508
Karsten, A., 126, 154
Katona, G., 86, 89, 90
Katz, D., 11, 27, 71, 72, 76, 79, 90, 134,

145, 154

Katzaroff, D., 99, 115
Kay, L. W., 23, 27, 68, 90, 154
Kccgan, J. J., 433, 435
Kelly, D. M., 58
Kcynes, J. M., 84, 85, 90
Kirkpatrick, C., 237, 278
Kiskcr, G, W., 417, 436
Kitay, P. M., 238, 27*
Klcbanotf, S. G., 436
Klein, G. S., 125, 154
Klineberg, O., 13, 27, 203, 204, 227
Klopfer, B., 58
Knapp, R., 66, 82, 90
Knox, G. W., 417, 436
Koch, H. L., 197
Koffka, K., 42, 58, 93, 99, 115, 126, 129,

754, 171, 797, 417, 428, 429, 436, 502,

508

Kohlcr, W., 58, 171, /97
Komarovsky, M., 227, 246, 278
Kornhauser, A. W., 75, 90, 139, 140
Kounin, J. S., 196, 797, 279
Kraines, S. H., 430, 431, 436
Kramer, B. M., 65, 70, 88
Kubie, L. S., 230
Kiilpc, O., 31, 32, 58

Landesco, J., 297, 304, 305, 307, 311, 312,

346

Langer, S., 797
La Picrc, R. T, 280, 346
Lasker, B., 11, 70, 90
Lazarsfeld, P. R, 65, 78, 90, 400, 401,

435, 436

Lc Bon, G., 280, 346
Lcpkin, M., 82, 88
Lcvine, J. M., 65, 90, 127, 154
Uvy-Bruhl, L., 384
Lcwin, K., 171, 797, 281, 344, 345, 346,

362, 384

Lewis, H. B., 53, 90t 128, 138, 152, 154
Lewis, J. L., 380
Lewis, S., 444, 459

Likert, R., 11, 71, 80, 90

Lilienthal, D. E., 362, 374

Lincoln, J. F., 371, 372, 373, 384

Linton, R., 105, 776

Lippitt, R., 344, 345, 346

Lippmann, W., 90

Littlepagc, J. D., 384

Loeb, L., 112, 776

Locblowitz-Lennard, H., 508

Long, L., 36, 59

Lorand, S., 506

Lowie, R. H., 776

Luchins, A. S., 45, 53, 55, 59

Lumpkin, K. du P., 776

Lynd, H. M., 215, 216, 227, 235, 236,

246, 278
Lynd, R. S., 215, 216, 227, 235, 236, 246,

278, 288, 346

MacArthur, D., 361, 362

Maccurdy, J. T., 129, 755

MacDonald, L., 367, 384

MacFarlane, J. W., 797

Macintosh, A., 139, 755

Magaret, G. A., 125, 754

Magce, E. S., 227

Mairet, P., 506

Majumdar, D. N., 227

Makarenko, A. S., 284, 338

Malinowski, B., 11, 476, 504, 508

Mangum, W. R., 384

Marks, E., 136, 137, 755, 194, 365

Marquand, J. P., 219, 227, 449, 459

Martin, E. D., 280, 346

Martin, J. B., 330, 346

Marx, K., 462, 479

Mason, H. L., 436

Matcer, F., 797

Mauldin, B., 285, 346, 357, 358, 384t

394, 436
Mayo, E., 370
McCarthy, D., 176, 797
McCullers, C., 443, 459
McDougall, W., 276, 421, 436
McGarvey, H. R., 36, 38, 59, 63, 90
McGchce, W., 126, 755
McGranahan, D. V., 227, 397, 398
McGregor, D., 90, 369, 384
McKay, H. D., 308, 330, 347

NAME INDEX

513

McNarney, J. T., 359

Mead, G. R, 161, 197, 452, 460

Mead, M., 116, 203, 204, 205, 206, 207,

209, 221, 235, 278
Meenes, M., 72, 90
Menefce, S. C., 76, 90
Miles, A., 432
Miller, G. A., 38, 59
Miller, H. A., 286, 347
Mizanoglu, N., 279
Mocde, W., 281, 346
Molotov, V. M., 376, 384
Moor^ K. C., 163, 164, 176, 177, 797
Moore, T. V., 23
Moreno, J. L., 265, 281, 340, 341, 342,

346

Morgan, B., 435
Morgan, L. H., 102, 116
Morlcy, C., 450, 460
Mosteller, F., 79, 88, 91
Mowrer, E. R., 436
Muncie, W., 430, 431, 436
Murchison, C., 196, 197, 198, 277, 278,

345
Murphy, G., 9, 17, 27, 33, 43, 59, 65, 71,

80, 90, 99, 776, 118, 127, 154, 155,

281, 346, 483, 492, 495, 508
Murphy, L. B., 9, 17, 27, 99, 116, 118,

155, 178, 183, 184, 185, 186, 797, 281,

346, 483, 492, 495, 508
Murray, H. A., 45, 59, 89, 483, 508
Myrdal, G., 365, 384

Nelson, E., 12, 27

Ncwcomb, T. M., 9, 27, 73, 90, 99, 116,

118, 155, 281, 343, 346, 385, 483, 492,

495, 508

Newell, T. E., 384
Newsletter, W. L, 342, 346
Nutt, A. S., 227

Dates, W, J., 459, 460
Ogden, E., 279
Ogden, M. B., 259, 279
O'NeiH, E., 440, 460
O'Neill, E., Jr., 459, 460
Orth, J., 28

Oigood, C. E., 69, 97, 755
Oudand, G. E., 346

Page, M. L., 187, 797

Park, R. E., 286, 307, 345, 347

Parten, M. B., 181, 182, 184, 797, 198

Pavlov, I, P., 51

Penficld, W., 433, 434, 435

Piaget, J., 161, 164, 167, 168, 169, 170,
178, 795, 281, 335, 336, 337, 338,
347, 486, 492, 493, 496, 505

Postman, L., 38, 59, 134, 755

Pratt, C. C., 59

Preston, M. G., 138, 755

Prcyer, W., 157, 159, 160, 161, 163, 164,
166, 176, 177, 795

Prince, M., 417

Proshansky, H., 33, 43, 59

Puffer, J., 292, 347

Radcliffe-Brown, A. R., 103, 104, 776

Radin, P., 211, 212, 213, 227, 506

Reich, W., 508

Reik, T., 471, 487, 508

Reuter, E. G., 347

Ribot, T., 425, 436

Rioch, M. J., 436

Rivers, W. H. R., 102, 776, 227

Roethlisberger, F. J., 366, 370, 380, 385

Rogers, S., 36, 39, 40, 41, 42, 59, 63, 97

R6heim, G., 471, 474, 475, 508

Roosevelt, F. D., 361, 362, 380

Rose, G. J., 55

Rosenzweig, S., 124, 128, 755

Ross, E. A., 280, 281, 347

Rubinstein, S., 378, 379, 385

Ruttenberg, H. J., 754, 369

Rylander, G., 426, 436

Sait, E. M., 125, 754

Salusky, A. S., 179, 189, 190, 795

Sands, G., 165

Sanford, R. N., 507

Sapir, E., 11, 309, 347, 476, 483, 496,

497, 508

Scheerer, M., 426, 427, 428, 435
Schilder, P., 418, 436
Schoenfcld, N., 125, 754
Schonbar, R. A., 53, 57, 59
Schrodinger, E., 100, 107, 776
Schumao, F. L., 508

514

NAME INDEX

Schwab, S. I., 279

Scars, P. S., 122, 123, 129, 155

Scars, R. R., 481, 483, 484, 508

Seclcman, V., 64, 97, 127, 755

Seward, G. H., 238, 279

Shackle, G. L., 84, 85, ?!

Shakespeare, W., 438, 439, 442, 448, 456,

457
Shaw, C. R., 291, 292, 293, 297, 308,

310, 313, 315, 316, 322, 324, 325,

326, 328, 329, 330, 333, 347
Shaw, F. J., 128, 755
Shaw, G. B., 19, 452, 453, 460
Sheldon, W. H., 10, 28
Sherif, M., 17, 28, 33, 34, 48, 52, 53, 55,

56, 59, 72, 82, 88. 91, 116, 150, 755,

281, 347, 385
Shinn, M. W., 157, 162, 163, 164, 166,

177, 198

Shock, N. W., 396, 436
Shohle, R., 347
Sidis, B., 417
Skinner, M., 227
Smith, B. F., 436
Smith, G. H., 66, 97
Sophocles, 454, 460
Sorenson, R., 227
Spcrber, M., 475, 477, 50*
Spiegel, J. P., 358, 384, 393, 411, 412,

413, 414, 415, 435
Spooncr, A., 128, 755
Spranger, E., 10, 28, 51, 59
Stagner, R., 69, 76, 79, 97, 755
Stalin, J., 375, 377, 385
Steinbeck, J., 438, 460
Stern, B. J., 104, 105, 776
Stern, W., 65, 97, 93, 94, 776, 166, 167,

198

Stimpfl, J,, 166, 790
Stoddard, G. D., 178, 795
Stolz, H. R., 243, 256, 260, 270, 279
Stone, L., 356
Stoncquist, E. V., 286, 347
StoufFcr, S. A., 132, 755, 401, 436
Strauss, A., 12, 28
Strauss, R., 442, 460
Strunk, O., 442
Sully, J., 164, 165, 198

Tanncnbaum, P., 347

Thomas, W. L, 11, 24, 28, 273, 279

Thompson, H., 172, 796

Thrasher, F. M., 290, 291, 292, 293, 294,

295, 296, 297, 298, 299, 300, 303, 309,

347

Thurstonc, L. L., 11
Tiedemann, D., 157, 158
Titchener, E. B., 12, 13, 28t 60
Tolman, E. C., 23, 51
Tracy, F., 166, 795
Trcssclt, M. E., 41, 42, 43, 52, 59
Tryon, C. M., 233, 234, 268, 279
Tuddcnham, R., 229, 277
Turnbull, W., 755

Van dc Velde, T. H., 390, 436

Van Gennep, A., 227

Veblen, T., 140, 349, 350, 385

Veeder, B. S., 279

Vettcr, G. B., 79, 97

Volkmann, J., 36, 39, 42, 43, 46, 47, 52,

53, 55, 57, 58 , 59, 67, 89, 121, 123, 129,

75J

von Hofmannsthal, R, 442, 460
Voth, A., 45, 59

Waelder, R., 472, 508

Wallen, R. W., 127, 128, 755

Wallon, H., 95, 776, 169, 170, 179, 795

Walsh, W. B., 80, 97

Ward, H. F., 385

Warden, C. J., 109, 776

Warren, H. C., 17, 28

Watson, G., 369, 385

Watson, W. S., 65, 97

Watson, W. T., 381, 385

Watt, H. J., 28

Watts, J. W., 432, 434, 435

Weaver, P,, 214, 227

Weber, E. H., 75, 129

Webster, H., 227

Wcdell, C. H., 37, 59

Weigl, E., 426, 436

Weld, R P., 23

Welles, O., 81

Wellman, B. L., 178, 198

Wcrtheimcr, M., 35, 44, 59

NAME INDEX

515

Wcvcr, E. G., 37, 38, 40, 59

Wharton, E., 258, 279

White, R. K., 345, 346

White, R. W., 230, 279

White, W. A., 417, 418, 436

Whiting, J. W. M., 210, 221

Whyte, W. R, 291, 292, 293, 294, 295,

297, 303, 347
Wilbur, C. B., 433, 435
Wilder, R. M., 436
Wile, I. S., 235, 262, 279
Williams, R, 214, 221
Williams, R W., 79, 88. 91
Williams, R. D., 436
Wilson, N. R, 385
Winch, R. R, 279
Wolff, W., 128, 155
Wood, C,, 64, 91

Woodworth, R. S., 31, 59, 91
Words, J., 508
Wright, B., 53, 54
Wright, H. R, 196, 197, 279
Wundt, W,, 31, 163

Yokoyama, M., 32

Zachry, C. B., 221, 224, 226, 227, 229,
230, 236, 239, 240, 242, 250, 252,
253, 257, 261, 263, 279

Zawadski, B., 400, 436

Zener, K. E., 37, 38, 40, 59

Zillig, M., 65, 72, 91, 127, 155

Zimmerman, C., 134, 155

Znaniecki, R, 11, 24, 2S

Zorbaugh, H. W., 290, 291, 297, 310, 311,
347

SUBJECT INDEX

Absolute judgment, 39
Absolute scales, 38 #.
Absolute scries, 38
Absolute stimuli, method of, 38
Adolescence (See also "Maturation")
different cultures and times, in, 201 ff.
duration of case or difficulty of, 202 ff.
problem of, in sociological and psycho-
logical setting, 199 ff.
Samoa, in, 203 /.
social structure, and the, 218
Adolescent culture, 252, 267 (See also

"Peer-culture")

Adolescent drives (See "Drives")
Adolescent transitions, diverse types of (See

"Transition")
Adolescents, efforts of, to re-establish

themselves, 248/7.

Adult-youth conflict and changing ego,
239 ff. (See also "Parent-youth
conflict")

Advertising, psychology of, 352
Affectivity, frame of reference in, 34
Age-mate groups, 219 (See also "Status")
children's relationships with, 186
degree of influence in adolescence, 208 /.,

252

effects on, ego formation, 178#.
re-formation of ego-attitudes, 251 ff.
Aggression, 482 (See also "Personality

traits")

Allegiance, conflicting, 286 (See also
"Bclongingncss," "Identifications,"
"Loyalties")

Alonencss, feeling of, 239 /., 485 /., 505
Altruism, 1, 152, 281 (See also "Identi-
fications," "Loyalties," "Personality
traits")

Anchorages, 35 ff., 40tf., 87, 129, 425
(See also "Frame of reference,"
"Reference points")

516

Anchorages, ego-involved and non-cgo-
involvcd, 126

new, 410 /.

provided by values, 135
Anchoring point, 41 /., 120, 122, 138
Anchoring stimulus, 41 /., 63
Anchoring value, 63
Anchorings, social, 309
Anxiety, 425 (See also "Basic anxiety")
Arapesh, 205 /.
Arunta, 212

Ascendance, 187/., 343 (See also "Person-
ality traits")

Aspiration level (See "Level of aspiration")
Assertiveness, 105

Attitudes, 4ff.t 93 ff. (See also "Ego-
attitudes," "Frame of reference")

adolescent, standardized toward adults,
243 /.

adult gang members, of, 304 ff.

affective properties of, 20

change of, 73

characterization of, 17-27

class, 75 /.

classification of, 23 /.

content of, 19

definitions of, 17/.

derived from material conditions, 195

discriminative nature of, 43

enduring state of readiness, 21 /.

everyday life, in, 60-88

experimental facts concerning, 29-57

formation, 19 /.

in-groups and out-groups, toward, 297

intensity of, 130tf.

memory, and, 63 ff.

scales, 132 /.

selectivity of, 34

social, 10, 61 ff.

social and economic issues, toward,
140/7.

SUBJECT INDEX

517

Attitudes, special cases of, 26
status, related to, 21, 61
stimuli, range referred to, 23
studies and methodological considera-
tions, 1 1 /.

subject-object relationship, imply, 19
value judgments, formed from, 55 /.

Authority, 336 f.

Autism, stage of, 168

Autokinesis, 33, 45, 49
group experiments in, 52 ff.

Autonomy, 336

Basic anxiety, 486, 499

Basic personality structure, 3, 480 /., 487,

499 /.

Behavior, conforming, 336
Behavior norms, 172 ff.
Belongingness, 5 /., 253, 262 /., 497 /. (See

also "Identifications")
badges of, 261
feelings of, 275, 297 /.

Castration complex, 484
Characterological types, 500
Class, 219 /., 257 ff., 287 /., 310 £, 449 /.,
472, 497, 506

attitudes, 75 /.

consciousness, 145/., 450

contradictions, 284

identifications in America, 139 ff.

interests, 361

working, 141 ff.
Classes, children of different, 195

ego-involvements, as, 134 ff.
Cliques, 261 ff., 282 (See also "Gangs,"
"Groups," "Status")

embryonic gangs, as, 309

formations of, girls and boys compared,
265 ff.

girls, among, 270 /.

goals of, 289

names of, 270

standing in, 249
Clothes, 348 £

Codes, 296tf., 321 (See also "Norms,"
"Rules")

criminal gang, of, 304

ethical, 495 /.

Codes, moral, 505
Coenesthesis, 425
Cognition, psychology of, 490
Cognitive components in attitude forma-
tion, 22

Cognitive reactions, 33
Collective behavior, 2, 51 /., 179 ff., 281 ff.

(See also "Group")
Collective products, 296 ff. (See also

"Group")

Community centrism, 201 /.
Competition, 124, 276

capitalist, 105

socialist, 105, 376
Competitive behavior, 105/.
Competitive standards, 311 f.
Concept, 3

formation, 109#.

hierarchic, 426
Conceptual level, 3, 108 #., 113, 434 (See

also "Language")
Conceptual thought, IWff. (See also

"Language")
Confidence, 125, 139
Conflict situations, 236 /.
Conflicts, infantile, 474
Conforming behavior, 29
Conformity, 252

established, 10

group, 257 #.

specific roles, to, 179

tendency to, on nonsecret ballots, 132
Consanguinity, 102
Conscience, 95
Contrast, 36 ff.
Convergence, 53 /.
Co-operation, 186/., 276, 336 ff.
Co-operative behavior, 105 /., 156, 185
Co-operative group play, 181 /.
Co-operative relationships, 344
Co-operative tendencies in gangs, 298
Crisis situations, 48, 82 /., 201
Cultural lag, 246 /. (See also "Social lag")
Culture apologists, 44

Defense mechanisms, 475
Delinquency, 310
acceptance of ideas of, 331 ff.

518

SUBJECT INDEX

Delinquency, group, 308, 313, 331
Delinquent girls, 273 /.
Depersonalizadon, 4170.
Depression, psychological effects of, 216/.,

247, 399tf.

Dialectical materialism, 52
Dialectical method, 189
Dichotomy, experimental and cultural psy-
chology, of, 51 /.

individual and society, of, 283, 313, 334
Domination, 3
Drives, 96, 223

adolescent, 275 /.

Ego, 1*0. (See alto "I," "Self")
anchoring of, 286
boundaries of, 152, 438
breakdowns of (See "Ego-breakdowns")
changing, and adult-youth conflict,

components of, 94, 98 ff. (See also "At-
titudes," "Ego-attitudes," "Norms,"
"Values")

conceptual delineation of, 164
constituents derived from established

society, 191 ff.

descriptions of, 92/., 1490.
development, 102
dissociation of, 3870.
dissolution of (temporary), 391 ff.
emergence of, at human level, 3, 108 ff.,

160 /.
experiences from stimulation of group,

188 /.

formation, 94, 113, 156-195
effects of some social factors on, 178 ff.
language development, and, 176$.
some effects of age-mate groups on,

instability of, in adolescence, 222 ff.
localization of, 171
masculinity-feminity, incorporation of

norms of, 232 ff.
psychoanalysis, in, 461 ff.
re-formation of, in adolescence, 199 ff.
reification of, 412
word, much abused, 1, 92
Ego aspirations, 276, 355

Ego-attitudes, 4/., 920, 1560., 212,
386 ff. (See also "Attitudes," "Ego,"
"Norms")

age-mate groups on, effects of, 251 ff.
constellation of, 92, 405
contradictory, 238
disintegration of, 431
group norms, from, 321 ff.
group situations, structured or modified

in, 334
reference and membership groups,

formed in relation to, 496
Ego-breakdowns, 95/., 107, 153, 3860,
455 (See also "Personality,"
"Schizophrenia")
abnormal and pathological cases, in,

4170.
collapse of established norms, because

of, 396 ff.

extreme deprivation, under, 393 ff.
surgical insult to frontal lobes on, ef-
fect of, 431 ff.
war-created situations on, effect of,

412 ff.

Ego distances, 102
Ego-disturbance, 139, 417, 449
Ego drives, 4, 101 ff., 274, 505
Ego-enhancement, 153, 350, 354
Ego-frustration, 153, 156
Ego-gratification, 105, 153, 156, 350,

445 /.

Ego ideal, 468£, 504
Ego-inflation, 452
Ego-insecurity, 139
Ego-involvements (See also "Ego," "I,"

"Self")

characterization of, general, 92-115
co-operative work, in, 152
degree of, 134

determined by situation, 3570.
experimental literature on, 1470.
experiments on, 117-153
intensity of attitudes, and, 1300.
laboratory tasks, in, 1180.
lack of, 389 /.
learning, as set for, 126 ff.
status and class identifications, and,

1340.
thresholds of, 4

SUBJECT INDEX

519

Ego level, 39, 120, 126

Ego-misplacement, 153

Ego need, 101 ff.t 152

Ego reference, 100 /., 417, 420 ff., 426

Ego relationships, changing nature of, 95 /.

Ego shifts, 200

Ego-striving, 3 ff.t 277, 312, 434

individual differences in, 98, 106 /.

not instinctive, 101-115

opposite goals, towards, 105 /.
Ego-values, 122, 252, 283 /.
Egocentricity, 136, 173

coefficients of, 178, 224
Egoccntrism, stage of, 168
Egoistic, 151 /.
Emergence, neglect of, on social level, 494

new qualities, of, 51 /.
Emergent, conceptual level as, 108/.

human culture as, 109/.

neglect of, qualities, 487 ff.
Encephalitis, 430
Erotic trends, 467
Eroticism, anal, 472
Expectations, 84 #.

Extraversion, 187 (See also "Personality
traits")

Failure, group, 123

tasks, in assigned, 124
Fantasy, 167, 249, 284, 335
Fascism, 7, 473, 482
Fixations, personal, 150
Foremen, study of, 142/.
Forgetting, selective, 127/. (See also

"Memory")

Frame of reference, 30 ff., 40 ff., 129, 425
(See also "Anchorages," "Refer-
ence points,'* "Reference scale")
arTectivity, in, 34
artists', 30 /.

breakdown of usual, 41 8 ff.
economic works, in some recent, 83-87
ego-involving, 120 ff.
established, 62
expectations, and, 86 /.
experimental inculcation of, 55 ff.
formation of, 48 ff.
in group situations, 51 ff.
in unstructured situations, 48 ff.

Frame of reference, formation of, problem
of, 490 /.

individual, 55

judgment, effect upon, 121 ff.

laboratory situations, in, 50 ff.

memory, in, 63 /.

new, 410 /.

perceptual and judgmental activity, in,
34-43

personal, 68 /.

prisoner's life, of, 406 /.

structured and unstructured situations,
in relation to, 43 #.

unstable and conflicting, 286

use of term, 34 /.
Fraternities and sororities, 259/.
Frontal lobes, surgical insult to, 431 ff.

Gangs, 282 (See also "Age-mate groups,"
"Cliques," "Groups," "Status")

adult, 304

areas of, 292

control of members of, 302

developing from play groups, 293/.

disintegration of, 303 /.

function of, 291 ff.

goals of, 289

impact of society on, 3Wff.

names of, 296

number of members of, 295 /.
Goals, 8, 176

cliques or gangs, of, 289

ego-striving, of, 105 /.
Gorki Colony, 284, 338 /.
Grcgariousness, 333 /. (See also "Person-
ality traits")

Group (See also "Collective behavior,"
"Collective products," "Loyalties")

allegiances, 98 /.

behavior, differential, 281, 299

formations in everyday life, 269 ff.

"group decision," 362 /.

identifications, 99, 287 ff., 314 ff.

influence earlier for maturing girls, 256 /.

interactions, development of, 334#.

loyalty, 299

members influenced by group norms,
, 317 tf.

520

SUBJECT INDEX

Group, norms, 124 /., 493

pressure, 125, 296, 298

relationships, reciprocal, 102

situation, formation of frame of refer-
ence in, 51 ff.

slogans, 297

solidarity, 269, 297

Groups (See also "Age-mate groups,1*
"Cliques," "Gangs," "Membership
groups," "Reference groups," "Sta-
tus")

artificiality of sharp lines between, 309 /.

democratic and autocratic, 344 /.

deviant behavior, prolonging, 329 /.

escapist solutions, with, 284

generality of, 307 ff.

isolated, 286, 321

psychological properties of, 266 ff.,
317 ff.

spontaneous, 307 #., 316 ff.

structural properties of, 288#.

values of, 284, 327
Guilt, sense of, 494

Hero worship, 260

Heteronomy, 336

Higher mental processes, 31

Homosexual tendencies of revolutionary

leaders, 495

Hostility, unconscious, 473
Human nature, 1, 156, 283, 382 /., 437,

480, 485 /.
libidinal basis of, 494

'I" (Sec also "Ego," "Self")
concept of, 113

self- or social consciousness, as, 166
Id, 464 ff.

inheritance of, 471

Identifications, 7, 115, 184, 290, 443 /.
(See also "Ego-involvements," "Loy-
alties")

conflicting, 264, 288
group, 287 #, 307, 358 #, 374/7.,

392 /., 415 /., 497 /.
individuals, with, 260 /,
Jn-groups, with, 194

Identifications, movie stars, with, 351

objects, with, 467

parents, with, 467

racial, 191 ff.

Soviet workers, of, 377 ff.
Idol worship, 3
Idols, 250 /.
Imagining, 32 /.
Impulse to work, 498 ff.
Inadequacy, feelings of, 331 /.
Income group, 139 ff.
Individual, behavior, direction of, 330

group norms and identifications, as i

flucnced by, 312$.

Individual differences, 6/., 10, 115, 15
274 /., 284, 379, 386

ego-striving, in, 98, 106/.

gang members, of, 291 ,

status and leadership, and, 182, 294
Individualism, 276 /.

goal of, 477

Individualistic behavior, 106
Individualistic methods, 337
Individualistic standards, 31 If.
Individuality, biological basis of, 112/.

breaking down of, 408 /.
Infantile regression, 504
Infantile sexuality, 200, 473, 484
Inferiority, feeling of, 93, 463
In-groups, 345 (See also "Cliques,"
"Gangs," "Membership groups")

attitudes toward, 297

identifications of, 194

members of, 270

solidarity of, 340
Inhibition, 432
Initiation ceremonies, 202 ff.
Ink blots, 45

Insecurity, feelings of, 216, 288
Instincts, 96

death and destruction, 483

erotogenic, 471
Intensity scale, 132
Internal factors, 32 /., 45 ff.
Interpersonal relationships, reciprocal,
108 ff. (See also "Relationships")
Interviewers, working and middle class,
145

SUBJECT INDEX

521

Job satisfaction, 368 ff.
Judgment, 68

affective, 57

distribution of, 40 /.

everyday life, in, 61 ff.

expressive behavior, of, 128

frame of reference in, 34 ff.

ill-defined situations, of, 69

lability of, 47

level of aspiration, and, 126

physical characteristics, of, 136/.

psychology of, 489

relativity of, 37 ff.

social and non-social stimuli, of, 52

social, 73

stereotypes on, effects of, 72

value dimensions, and, 63
judgmental activities, 29

referential nature of, 36 ff.

Kinship, constellations, 102
relationships, 102 #.
systems, 103 /.

Laboratory, everyday life, and, 12 ff., 16

situations, social factors in, 50#.
Language, 109 ff., 164 /., 181 (See also
"Concept," "Conceptual level")

development, 163

ego formation, and, 176 ff.
Learning, 22, 30

classical laws of, 129

ego-involvements as "set" for, 126 ff.

ego- versus non-ego-involved situations,

in, 130

Leadership, democratic and autocratic,
344 /.

development, 182

individual differences in, 182, 294 /.
Level of aspiration, 39, 67/., 120$.

experiments on, 129

frame of reference, and, 36, 121, 123 /.

generality of, 126

judgment, and, 121, 126

lowering of, 403 /.

Negro college men, of, 138/.
Level of performance, 124
Libidinal constitution of groups, 470 /.
Libido,

Lobectomy, 113, 434
Lobotomy, 113, 432 /.
Loyalties (See also "Allegiances," "Belong-
ingness," "Identifications")

conflict of, 380

groups, to, 269 /., 299

national, mixed, 367 /.

reciprocal, 320
Love, 439 ff., 471

Marginal man, 7, 238, 286 /.

Marginal position, 365, 486

Marginality, 5, 222, 248, 251, 264, 419

Martyrs, 356 /.

Marxism, 127

Masculinity-feminity (See "M-F test")

Masculinity complex, 238

Material surroundings, 179 ff.

Maturation, 3

adolescence, early and late in, 229 ff.
Member-character, 34, 37, 44
Membership groups, 7, 114/., 223, 274/7.,
496 (See also "Cliques," "Gangs,"
"Status")

adolescent ego-attitudes, effects on,

psychological functions of, 309

status in, 97, 99
Memory, experiments on, 32 /.

finished and unfinished tasks, of, 128

frame of reference, and, 63 /.
Mental chemistry, 31
M-F test, 233
Middle class tradition and ideology in

America, 140
Moieties, 104

Moral development, 161, 335 ff.
Motion pictures, 350 /.
Motivation, 20, 51, 87/., 113/., 274 tf.

Names, ego-involvement with, 442 /.

psychology of, 352 ff.

transition to adulthood, in, 202
Narcissism, 99
Needs, 96, 165, 168

narcissistic, 472
Neurotics, bourgeois, 480
Nonconformity in adolescent groups,
262 ff.

522

SUBJECT INDEX

Norms, 11, 97 ff.t 114/., 130 (See also

"Standards of conduct," "Values")
adolescent, 251 ff.
adolescent cliques, of, 271 /.
body proportions and growth, of, 227 ff.
breakdown of, under stress, 394 #.
collapse of, effect on ego, 396 ff.
contradictory, 201, 239
established social order, of, 179, 191 ff.
evaluation of, 14 /.

group, 257, 281 #., 289 #., 304, 320
highly differentiated societies, of, 203
imposed, 335
individual, 54
majority group accepted by minority

group, of, 364 ff.
masculinity-feminity, of, 200, 225,

232 If.
social, 68

society and gangs, of, 326 /.
spontaneous emergence of, in age-mate

activities, 336
superstructure of, 47 /.
survival of, 47/., 236 /., 246 /.

Object-cathcxis, 467

Oedipus complex, 247, 463, 467 #., 476,

478, 483 #.,493, 504
Organic disturbances, 425 ff.
Out-groups, 345
attitudes toward, 297

Panic, 81 /.
Paranoid defense, 495
Parent-youth conflict, 217, 224 (See also
"Adult-youth conflict and chang-
ing ego")

gang membership, and, 329

sociological analysis of, 287/.
Parental images, 471
Paresis, general, 430
Participation in groups, 470 /.

progressive development of, 1790.
Peer-culture, 253 (See also "Adolescent

culture")

Peers, 229 (See alto "Age-mate groups")
Perception, frame of reference in. 34 ff.

new relationships, of, 492

psychology of, 490 f.

Perception, selectivity of, 30 ff.

social, 129, 136

value and need, effects on, 73 /.
Perceptual objects, 131
Perceptual reactions, 33 ff.
Perceptual stage in attitude formation

19/., 43

Pcrsonalistic psychology, 93
Personality, 7, 95, 235, 328, 403 /., 410,
432 (See also "Individual differ-
ences")

brain lesions, effects on, 429 /.

characteristics, 97
body changes in adolescence, and, 231

culture, and, 480

differences, 45, 56

dissolution of, 425

factors, 400

frame of reference in, 34

social determination of, 477

split and multiple, 422 ff.

transformation of, 418
Personality traits, 114, 178, 187, 295,
299 /., 328 (See also "Aggression,"
"Traits")

Phantasy (See "Fantasy")
Physiological changes in adolescence, 225 /.

changing self, and, 226 ff.
Physiological imbalance, 434
Pleasure principle, 168, 465
Points of reference (See "Reference

points")

Political interest, intensity of, 134
Prejudice, 102, 194, 284

characterized, 26
Primacy effect, 52, 56
Primary groups, 297, 342 (See also
"Cliques," "Gangs," "Groups,"
"Membership groups")
Profit motive, 374
Progressive education, 339 ff.
Protective techniques, 45
Prostitution, 258, 387 ff.
Psychoanalysis, appeal of, 461

interpretation of ego in, 412, 464 ff.

science, as, 481

social psychology, relationship to, 462
Psychodrama, 341 '

SUBJECT INDEX

523

Psychological deficits of psychodcs, 424
Psychological properties generated in group

situations, 280 #.

"Psychological weaning," 223, 241, 287
Puberty, 199, 224 ff.

rites, 213
Public opinion, measurement, 11

poll results, 71, 77, 79 ff., 134, 139 ff.

Quislingism, 473

Radicalism-conservatism, 145 /.
Reality principle, 465
Recall, 128 /. (See also "Memory")
Recapitulation theory, 161
Recidivism, 329 /.

Reference frame (See "Frame of Refer-
ence")

Reference groups, 7, 114/., 137/., 217,
223, 274 ff., 326, 496 (See also
"Status")

adolescent ego-attitudes, effect on, 252 ff.
gangsters, of, 305 tf.
status in, 97, 99
Reference idols, 223

Reference points, 41 /., 49, 62, 73, 93, 97,
122, 137 (See also "Anchorages,"
"Anchoring point")
ascription of status, for, 105
Reference scale, 49tf., 52, 57, 131 ff., 136
Regression, 404, 409, 415
Relationships, reciprocal, 6, 108^., 170,

179tf., 334 ff.

Representations, collective, 49
Repression, 467, 469
Responsibility, inner, 337
Retention, 128 /.

Role, 134 ff., 168, 289 #., 402, 452
Rorschach test, 45, 61 /. (See also "Ink

blots," "Protective techniques")
Rules (See also "Norms," "Values")
game, of the, 322, 335
observance of, 179

practice of and consciousness of, 335 ff.
Rumors, 66/., 82

Sadomasochistic impulses, 478
Samoa, 106, 203 /., 276

Schizophrenia, 250, 418#., 424, 433 (See
also "Ego-breakdowns" "Person-
ality")

Security, feeling of, 299
Self, 151 /., 164, 420 /. (See also "Ego,"
"Ego-breakdowns," "Ego-involve-
ments," "I," "Personality," "Schizo-
phrenia")

changing, 224 ff,

-competition, 122

conception of, 124

consciousness of, 118/., 161, 169

-destruction (See "Suicide")

-discovery, 174

-esteem, 119 /., 121, 152, 350

-evaluations, 127 /.

experience of, 169

-interest, 131

-judgments, 122

-respect, 400

social, 119, 134

somatic, 162

-words, 166

Selfish interests and needs, 151 /.
Senility, 430 /.

Set, 26, 31#, 1260,, 426 1
Situation (See also "Stimulus situation")

closed, 338

ego-involving, 117/., 125

medium and high structure, of, 53

stress, 399 ff.
Situation-set, 31
Situational approach, 343
Situational determination, 7, 178/., 275

ego-involvements, of, 357 ff.

leadership, of, 295

neglect of, 502 /.

parent-child relationships, of, 247
Situational factors, 300
Slogans, 82 /., 297
Social factors in laboratory, 50 ff.
Social lag, 461 (See also "Cultural lag")
Social movements, 83, 86, 282, 312
Social norms (See "Norms")
Social perception (See "Perception")
Social pressure, 122 ff.
Social stratification, 264 (See also "Class")
Sociality, 186/., 334 (See also "Personality
traits")

524

SUBJECT INDEX

Society, impact of, 310 /?.
Sociogram, 265 ff., 340 /.
Sociology, authoritarian, 337

spiritualistic, 52
Sociomctry, 341 /.
Solidarity, 262, 296 If., 320
Soviet Union, 127, 138, 189, 284, 338

adolescents in, 218

personality characteristics in, 235 /.

roie of worker in, 375 /.
Stakhanov movement, 376 /.
Standards o£ conduct, 421 /., 456 /. (See

also "Norms")
Status, 6, 252 ff., 375 ff., 448 ff., 497

adult, 200 ff.

changes in, 200 ff.

conception of, 419

contradictions in, 211, 217, 287

criteria of, 137/.

differences, 500

dimension of, 137

gang, in, 294 ff.

genesis of, 137/.

group, in, 363 ff.

hierarchy of, 364 /.

identifications, 134 ff.

loss of, 400 /.

marginal, 420 (Set also "Marginal man,"
"Marginal position," "Marginality")

meaning of, 137/.

measurement of, 343

men and women, of, 233 ff.

obligations of, 295

reference and membership groups, in,
97 ff.

reference points of, 105

relationships, 168
effect of unemployment on, 401 /.

satisfaction with, 137/.

standards and society, 311

treatment, and, 452 ff.
Stereotype, 26, 69 ff., 80
Stimulus scale, 42
Stimulus situation (See also "Situation")

ambiguous, 62

gradations of structuration in, 45/7.

prestige labeling, and, 77

structured, 43/., 68, 137

unstructured, 33 /., 44 ff., 68

Stratification (See "Class," ''Social strati-
fication," "Status")
Striving, justice and truth, for, 485 /., 505

masochistic-sadistic, 485
Subjectivity, 335
Sublimation, 474, 484 /.
Submission, 3, 105, 482 (See alto "Per-
sonality traits")
Subnormal individuals, 107
Substitutive activities, 284, 331 /.
Success, Assigned tasks, in, 124

definition of, individual's, 138

group, 123

Suggestion, 46, 61 /., 82 /.
Suicide, 250, 356 /., 398 /., 408, 454 /.
Superego, 467 ff., 505
Superiority, longing for, 93, 463
Superstructure, 44, 205, 489
Supra-local qualities, 37
Sympathetic behavior, 183/f.
Systems, closed, 340, 478

Technology, advancement of, 368

changes in, 104, 287, 493

impact of, on less developed peoples, 201

level of, 179
Temperament, 106, 404
Testimony, psychology of, 65
Thematic apperception test, 45
Traits, 309, 343 (See also "Personality
traits")

divergence of sexes in, 233 /.

infantile, 337

stability of, 403 /.
Transition, 218

adolescence, in, 200-205, 213 (See also
"Adolescence")

country in, 244

rites, 212 /.

U-shaped curve, 132
Unconscious, collective, 474, 478

instincts, 488

storehouse, as, 502 •
Underworld, 305 /., 312
Unemployment, 399 ff.
Unstructured situations (See "Stimulus
situation")

Internet Archive Audio

Featured

Top

Images

Featured

Top

Software

Featured

Top

Books

Featured

Top

Video

Featured

Top

Mobile Apps

Browser Extensions

Archive-It Subscription

Save Page Now

Full text of "The Psychology Of Ego Involvements"

See other formats