ABSTRACT

In the previous chapter the suggestion was put forward that the social conditions prevailing in Ship Street have resulted in ego weakness or insufficiently structurated egos in the inhabitants. A further assumption was made that any individual who is going to function adequately in whatever society to which he happens to belong must learn a minimum number of roles. Now constellations of roles can only be learned by people whose egos are reasonably well developed. This implies a definite relationship between the psychological state of the individual and the social conditions of the society in which he lives. That this relation exists is not, of course, a new assumption; it is the basic one of both Mead and Kardiner. However, this chapter is an attempt to tackle the problem of this interaction from a rather different angle. The basic assumptions developed in this research and in my previous work in Jamaica are as follows:

The first is that any individual has an optimum number of roles he can play. These roles are like the parts an actor plays on the stage. They are internally consistent and linked into configurations. Being asked to play either too few or too many roles may be disastrous for the individual's mental security and balance.