Personality develops in the context of culture, just as culture only exists through the thoughts, feelings, and behaviors of concrete people. One would thus expect that the dynamics of individual mental life and action dovetail with the dynamics of cultural life and action. The motives of individual actors press for solutions within the socio cultural context, and the dynamics of culture reciprocally condition both cognitive evaluative mismatches and methods for their resolution. The present chapter will examine the relationship between the structure and dynamics of personality and of culture. It will first discuss the relation between psychological motives and cultural processes. It will focus in particular on the way culture helps fulfill psychological motives through the patterning of individual and collective responses. Secondly, it will try to show how a single model can account for both stasis and change and will explore evolutionary processes in culture and personality.

Psychological Motives and Cultural Processes

Chapter 2 argued that motivation at the psychological level can be understood in terms of cognitive-affective schemas, and that people form affect laden set-goals of desired states. A mismatch between the goal or ideal and cognized reality produces an aversive feeling that motivates action. Much of this process can occur without actual affective mediation through cognitive anticipation of affective consequences of actions or through cognitive processes serving a feedback function, as when a person recognizes and corrects minor divergences from a plan, script, or goal.

At the societal level, Chapter 6 proposed that collectivities form setgoals as well, and that divergences from these set-goals similarly evoke control mechanisms to eliminate the mismatch.

In one of the most impressive essays ever written on the common ground between psyche and society, Malinowski comments,

The aim of Part III is to integrate the theory of personality of Part I and the theory of culture of Part II to move a step closer, albeit a small step, to the fulfillment of Malinowski's prescription. The present chapter will begin by reviewing past and present approaches to the study of personality and culture. Chapter 9 will examine the relationship between psychic and sociocultural structure and dynamics, placing the model of set-goals, affects, and control mechanisms in cultural context. Chapter 10 will discuss the psychology of communitarian collectivism. Chapter 11 will explore the psychodynamics of modernization, and Chapter 12 will examine some aspects of personality and social change, reinterpreting data relating to a crisis surrounding a ritual in changing times in Java. Chapter 13 explores the relation between personal identity and cultural integration, and the final chapter examines the psychology of individuated collectivism, concluding with some comments on morality and individuation.

The Totem-Pole-Is-a-Symbolic-Penis Approach

One can find historical antecedents to any school of thought; all contemporary ideas are, no doubt, a detailed footnote to Plato, and Plato's thought is probably itself a footnote to some magnificent anonymous australopithecine.

The first requirement of any social theory is that it elucidate the dynamic forces which energize a society and motivate its individual actors. For Marx, these forces are competing class interests, though why anyone desires anything other than food is unclear in his system because it lacks a systematic psychology. Marx himself astutely argued against the imputation of universality to historically specific valuations of various social goods; one is left with a theory that sees classes as aggregates pursuing what are ambiguously called their “interests.” The dynamic behind social life for Durkheim and most of the functionalists is the quest for solidarity, which is actualized in such institutions and practices as religion and ritual. For Weber, people pursue power, status, wealth, and other unspecified values.

Early evolutionists were less concerned with dynamic forces than with descriptive evolutionary schemes, though one could, with ahistorical hindsight, view natural selection as the dynamic process responsible for societal evolution. The culture pattern theorists argued for a consistency principle in culture itself which rearticulates a diffused cultural element in order to assimilate it into the cultural gestalt. Structuralists tend to avoid dynamics and focus instead on cultural cognition, though this is an oversimplification, particularly for anthropologists, like Victor Turner, who wed structural, symbolic, and functional analysis. Turner, in analyzing the Isoma ritual of the Ndembu, points out that the symbols and their relations in this fertility ritual are not simply “a set of cognitive classifications for ordering the Ndembu universe. They are also, and perhaps more importantly, a set of evocative devices for rousing, channeling, and domesticating powerful emotions …” (1969, pp.42–3).

The theory of affect proposed here is not in itself a complete theory of either motivation or psychodynamics. Such a theory must include an explication of the enduring configurations of motives (i.e., of set-goals, mismatches, and other cognitive-affective schemas), as well as an examination of the way an individual carries out these motives in an environmental context and resolves conflicts between various wishes, ideals, mismatches, prohibitions, and affects.

I will now propose such a model and in so doing will utilize the metaphor of psychic “structure.” Different theorists in the social sciences have used this term, and in order to avoid ambiguity I will define “structure” at the outset as referring to constellations of functionally related processes. This view is probably closest to the psychoanalytic notion of structure embodied in Freud's structural model, though I have defined the term as above to avoid the kind of reification of structures that has plagued psychoanalytic theory. As many writers, both within and without psychoanalysis have pointed out, psychic structures are repeatedly concretized in psychoanalytic literature, often treated as organs instead of constructs.

Though some of his disciples have carried this practice to extremes (reifying drives as well), Freud was often guilty of this himself, which has caused a popular misconception that Freud posited a set of homunculi within the brain. Psychoanalytic writers often speak of “the ego” as experiencing anxiety or depression, when it is the person, not the ego, who is anxious or depressed (see Mendelson's [1974] criticism of Bibring's otherwise excellent paper on depression, 1953). Reification is not, however, inherent in a structural approach.

The aim of Part III has been to integrate the theory of personality A proposed in this book with the theory of culture. The last four chapters have examined the relationship been personality processes, communitarian collectivist culture, and social change. This final chapter will explore the psychology of individuated collectivism and will conclude with a brief discussion of moral individuation in psychological and socio cultural perspective.

The literature on the psychodynamics of modernization discussed in Chapter 11 provides one set of indicators of a shift toward self-orientation that occurs with modernization. A second line of evidence, especially convincing because of its methodological rigor and the broad scope of its authors' knowledge, comes from the Six-Culture study by John and Beatrice Whiting and their colleagues. This research involved intensive field work over a number of years by a team of researchers interested in the relationship between child rearing, personality, and culture. The investigators coded interpersonal interactions on a number of dimensions for children and their parents in six cultures with varying subsistence patterns. Particularly relevant from the standpoint of the thesis developed here is the variable of altruistic versus egoistic children's social behavior. Whiting and Whiting (1973, 1975) found a strong correlation between this dimension and sociocultural complexity (institutional differentiation and technological development), such that egoistic social behaviors correlated highly with complexity. The Whitings suggest that a key variable in explaining that difference is the mother's workload. In simpler societies, the mother has less time for the child, and the child must take on more household responsibilities, such as caring for younger children.

Chapter examined a number of issues related to cultural stasis and change, arguing for the presence of self-regulating control mechanisms and processes that can account for minor as well as extraordinary sociocultural changes. Cultural institutions – including the beliefs, political organizations, and economic institutions of culture real and the ideas, ideals, and moral mandates of culture ideal – synthesize multiple and often competing demands. To the extent that the solutions encoded in culture can no longer meet these demands, the culture is likely to experience a crisis of integration, i.e., a psychocultural crisis in which cultural beliefs and values no longer seem satisfying to members of the culture and patterns of behavior and social interaction are substantially disrupted (cf. Wallace, 1956).

A crisis of cultural integration may occur for a number of reasons. Altered set-goals relating to member-needs (e.g., a threat to life or security) or group-needs (such as shifting units of attachment, which often accompanies modernization) may impose new requirements on the culture and disrupt various aspects of the culture real or force a resynthesis of the culture ideal. In terms of culture real and ideal, cultural diffusion may produce altered norms; institutional changes in the culture real may have unintended consequences for cultural integration; political dynamics may alter the culture ideal; innovations may have intended and unintended consequences for culture real and ideal; societal control mechanisms may have unintended effects when reverberating though the psychocultural “system” (cf. Smelser, 1963, p.11); and demographic factors may have cultural consequences that ultimately prove disruptive.

Throughout psychology's brief history the notion of “stages,” invariant sequences of unfolding needs or competences, has been an integral part of theorizing about psychological development. The field's two most imposing intellectual figures, Freud and Piaget, both proposed stage theories, one of psychosexual, and the other of cognitive development.

In recent years psychologists have begun to wonder whether in fact the invariance and orderliness of stages is a property of the object of study or an artifact of the schema-building of the observer (see Flavell, 1971, 1982; Keil, 1981). Of course, it is both: science, like all human cognition, entails the imposition of categories of thought upon sensory experience to make it meaningful and manageable. It was Piaget's genius that allowed him to discern an orderly sequence in cognitive development, but he was surely constrained by the “facts” to put something like formal operations at the end and not at the beginning of that sequence.

When a theorist introduces a term such as stage, just as when he introduces a concept like “structure,” he must be careful to delineate precisely what he means, so that the concept does not, like a malevolent spirit, live on beyond its usefulness, wreak havoc on those who make its acquaintance, and elude the grasp of even those who invoke it frequently. In this chapter I will, indeed, invoke this charmed metaphor in a way perhaps best described through another metaphor. The conception is of sequential sets of processes that shape current functioning much as a series of waves shapes a shoreline.