ABSTRACT
"The year 1927 may be taken as the beginning of the codification of the culture and personality position in anthropology," opined Francis Hsu, based on the publication of an essay by Edward Sapir titled "The Unconscious Patterning of Behavior in Society" and drafted for a symposium on the unconscious. This chapter discovers culture-and-personality anthropologists posed and sets out to answer some of the key questions in psychological anthropology, such as the effect of childhood and child-rearing on personality, the principle personality traits in any culture, the relationship between social institutions and personality, and the nature of personality deviance or "abnormality." Benedict's thinking in her 1932 article "Configurations of Culture in North America" and in her pivotal 1934 book Patterns of Culture conspicuously owes much to Oswald Spengler's model of history and to the Gestalt school of psychology. The years between 1927 and 1945 were a productive period for what was called then and since the culture-and-personality school of anthropology.
