ABSTRACT
Our reserve and uncertainty in the field of the scientific diagnosis of a period has a twofold root: a subjective one in our spiritual disposition and an objective one in the particular nature of the forces of society themselves, which always point in several, often contradictory directions. To make a clear diagnosis of the development of society is particularly difficult for our generation. Technological achievements themselves do not signify social progress. Only a society that, in its entire organization, even in its psychological structure, receives enrichment without loss, keeps pace with technological innovations. Psychoanalysis with its revelations of the psychic mechanisms which, full of resentment, dominate family life is only one of the forms in which we become aware of this conflict between home and world. The groups that first experienced the full weight of control of the mass society in their own bodies were also the first to grasp the necessity of coming to terms with these new problems.
