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In many ways modern science is attempting to find the cause of what has been called 'national character' or, preferably, 'cultural characteristics'. Professor Potter has, without doubt, opened a new road which will lead us closer to an understanding of certain attitudes and patterns of behavior. He explores, in particular, the history of economic conditions to give new meaning to some features in American culture.
Potter considers Horney, Mead, and Riesman his leaders in this research into historical sociology. He emphasizes the phenomenon of competitiveness (in Riesman's terminology, 'other-directedness') in American life and personality. According to his view, the abundance of America offers the fundamental condition for the development of political ideals, greater social mobility, free enterprise, and educational goals. 'Abundance and the circumstances arising from abundance have already dictated a whole range of basic conditions which, from its birth, are constantly at work upon this child and which will contribute in the most intimate and basic way to the formation of its character.'
Potter next mentions the type of feeding, the conditions of housing, the organization of the family, the kind of toilet training, and the opportunities available to every child and adult. It is beyond question that these conditions have a far-reaching influence on the personality as well as on personal relationships; and I doubt that any serious psychoanalyst ever overlooked them. But what Potter is describing are largely surface deflections which result from the social, economic, and political situation and have a merely general effect,—an effect to which Horney turned her attention in her later years. Avoiding psychoanalytic elucidation, Potter does not differentiate between those of our characteristics that result from normal development, under particular cultural circumstances, of ego and superego, and those others—guilt, reaction-formation, and defensive attitudes—that a