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The growth of man's interest in himself is a critical development in the history of culture. In our present era, while our free societies are in crisis, Western man has arrived at self-scrutiny. When man's reliance on automatic, traditional behavior fails him, self-knowledge becomes imperative. A contrasting response to social stress is the universal state which relieves the citizen of increasingly difficult free choice. A free society, giving maximum opportunity for self-expression and guarding its members from infringing upon one another's interests, can be highly productive but, because it accelerates social change and complicates the problems of individual adjustments, it creates insecurity.
Social behavior in man is governed by two trends—one toward stability, the other toward adventure. Growth and propagation result from the surplus energy that remains over what is needed to survive and maintain homeostatic equilibrium.
Certain historical periods are dominated by search for security, obthers by an experimental spirit. The pioneer era of American democracy is a dramatic example of a rapidly changing free society driven by the spirit of mastery of challenges. Sociologists, anthropologists, and studies of public opinion now show a reversal of this trend. To difficulties of social adaptation, psychoanalysts attribute neuroses, and psychoanalysis has appeared as a self-curative reaction of Western society to the immense complexities of adjustment. A product of the deep respect of Western civilization for individual differences, psychoanalysis aids the individual to reconcile his own personality with his environment without sacrificing that which makes him different from others. Psychoanalysis may be Western man's last effort to save his individuality from the growing insecurity that drives him toward the universal state in which the central government takes over the problems of human society. Must the individual yield to the mass man? Surely technology ca