ABSTRACT
The anthropologist, like the psychologist and the psychiatrist, is trying to find out what makes people tick. The American middle classes suffer from psychosomatic disturbances such as ulcers related to conformance and repressed aggression. Anthropologists have studied not the uniqueness of each individual but rather personality as the product of the channeling of the desires and needs, both biological and social, of the members of social groups. Some sorts of behavior will be manifested by all human beings regardless of how they have been trained. The characteristics of the human animal which make culture possible are the ability to learn, to communicate by a system of learned symbols, and to transmit learned behavior from generation to generation. The comparative study by anthropologists of child rearing in various cultures has within the last few years had a profound influence upon pediatrics.
