You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
The author, a professor of economics and psychology at the University of Michigan, has set himself the task of studying economic processes as manifestations of human behavior, and succeeds notably.
The psychoanalyst sees certain forms of economic behavior in the daily problems of his patients. Attitudes toward money involve an important aspect of human relations, and spending and saving are frequently predicated upon irrational oral and anal needs. Such microanalysis of economic behavior is not Katona's topic. He deals with more macroscopic aspects, formulating tentative lawful propositions concerning the relations between income, saving, spending, and the specific choices of expenditures in a given environment.
It is on the actual choice of expenditure in the presence of 'enabling conditions' (income and liquid assets) that Katona has relatively least to say and that psychoanalysis may be able to contribute most. Katona has to restrict himself more or less to stating that the needs concerning choice of expenditures are primarily determined by the group. The relationship between psychoanalytic propositions concerning behavior and those of economics may be similar to the one which Talcott Parsons outlined (this QUARTERLY, XIX, 1950, pp. 371–384), and which may possibly be useful for all social science: economics supplies one level of integration as a framework. Within that framework, psychoanalytic formulations may describe another level of integration. By the dialectic principle of emergence, some interchanges take place from one level to the other.
Katona does not subscribe to naive, mechanistic behaviorisms. Between stimulus and response there is room for any number of intervening variables. His methodology is excellent and should be of interest to analysts since it concerns a study of forms of human conduct as elusive as those seen in their own fields, but seen from a different vantage point—including one's own economic behavior.
The book is very well writt