ABSTRACT
What can we learn from psychoanalysis that can be used in the comparative study of personality and sociocultural environment? In the previous chapter 1 suggested that psychoanalysis is first and foremost “a procedure for the investigation of mental processes,” and that this procedure in its standard clinical form contains a solution to the central problem in personality assessment, that of distinguishing between the enduring behavioral dispositions of individuals and their reactions to transient environmental conditions. If psychoanalytic clinical method does indeed solve that problem, it deserves careful examination, foras I argued in Chapter 12—the confounding of enduring disposition with situational reaction in observable behavior is inherent in adaptation and has given rise, in the field of culture and personality, to the dispute over sociogenic and psychogenic interpretations of cultural behavior.
