ABSTRACT
Built into psychology, part of its world view, is the polarity man and society. Call it a polarity or a dichotomy or even a distinction, it makes it easy for psychology to focus on one and ignore the other, to avoid dealing with the possibility that the distinction is arbitrary and misleading, that it does violence to the fact that from the moment of birth the individual organism is a social organism, that social means embeddedness in patterned relationships that are but a part of an array of such relationships rooted, among other things, in a social history and a distinctive physical environment. How, then, can you rivet on the individual and ignore that of which he is a part, that which is already part of him, that which is both cause and effect? How can you understand the one and ignore the other? For certain purposes that kind of riveting can be justified but only if one is ever on guard to the possibility that what one records may bear little or no relationship to what is experienced in the naturally occurring social matrix. But psychology began with a man and society distinction that made it seem natural to focus on one and ignore the other. And because it began this way psychology could ignore not only the study of the social order but social history as well. For all practical purposes psychology is ahistorical. It has its subject matter: The individual, and all else is commentary—interesting, but commentary, [pp. 175–176].
