Personality Formation in the Kibbutz

Freud for his own reasons, was not too concerned with the problem of how the particular culture within which an individual grows up, shapes his personality. But Karen Horney, in the very title she gave her first book, The Neurotic Personality of Our Time,¹ stressed the time-bound, and by obvious implication, the culture-bound nature of our personality. I am sure Freud was aware that each culture determines its norms, and hence also what constitutes deviation from it. But, having been the first to illuminate how and why deviation occurs and how personality develops, he was more interested in what is universal to man rather than what is specific to one culture. Therefore, Horney's stressing the time-bound nature of the forms of neurosis was a signal contribution to our understanding of man in his society. This is why, when I was so singularly honored by being asked to present this, the Sixteenth Annual Karen Horney Lecture, I decided to ask you to consider with me how personality is formed differently from ours in a culture that is both extremely closely related to our own, and at the same time very different from it.

This selection of a topic was further suggested to me when, after having received your kind invitation, I thought best to look at what some of my predecessors in this series had to say. Here I found that Dr. Lidz,² in the Fifteenth Karen Horney Lecture, remarked that psychoanalysis “has not considered the influence of the totality of the interpersonal environment impinging upon the individual, causing reaction and counter-reaction which altered the behavior of the entire group and each member of it” I could not more heartily agree. But, after having thus stressed the culture-bound nature of behavior, and with it, I must assume, the particularity of a culture's ideas, he then relinquishes such sound views about the relativity of any culture's attitudes and proceeds to say: “The family is everywhere society's agent for protecting, nurturing and indoctrinati