ABSTRACT
The great behaviorist John B. Watson believed that all emotions are learned, and did a series of experiments during the 1920s in which he attempted to prove his thesis. Human behavior, however, is much more vulnerable to shaping by experience. A man who kept his own sanity when in concentration camps during World War II by forcing himself to make clinical observations of the inmates' behaviour, Bruno Bettelheim is famed for his treatment of severely emotionally disturbed children at the University of Chicago's Sonia Shankman Orthogenic School. Although both aspects of the self develop concurrently and with mutual impact, Bettelheim persuasively advocates the viewpoint which places the affective component slightly ahead of the cognitive. "Personality" is the complex of characteristics that individualizes a person in his relationships with others. One of its keystones is one's concept of self; and "self" is the composite of all affective feelings and all cognitive perceptions.
