Meetings of the New York Psychoanalytic Society

DISCUSSION: Dr. Peter B. Neubauer noted that Dr. Wangh is one of the few analysts who study the relationship between social and cultural phenomena. As soon as one extends individual psychology to cultural dimensions, more complexity is introduced, and not all variables are equally verifiable by our analytic method. In this paper Dr. Wangh had addressed himself primarily to a specific middle-class group. Dr. Neubauer questioned whether the fear of the apocalypse also casts its shadow on the general population, or whether this fear becomes potent only when it is linked to an underlying developmental weakness, as Dr. Wangh suggested. Dr. Neubauer presented data regarding Sweden, which has economic security and stability of an unparalleled degree—yet there is much alcoholism, a high suicide rate, many learning disabled children, and a very high divorce rate. He also presented material about the Chinese population, in which many families have only one child. There is an overconcern with this one child by parents and grandparents, for the child represents their future, and there is great concern about the future generation. In both of these situations he felt Dr. Wangh could invoke his connection between the narcissistic problems and the overload of narcissistic investment in the children. However, Dr. Neubauer found it difficult to arrive at an explanatory statement which unifies the various disorders under the heading of narcissistic deviations. He also asked whether Dr. Wangh can similarly explain the children of Kibbutzim turning from the ideology of their parents toward a stronger family tie. Could these shifts represent corrective reaction formations to undo the narcissistic wounding of a social structure which gave the children primary significance? Dr. Neubauer's study of the one-parent child indicated that it is necessary to consider a wide variety of psychic constellations and conditions, and that only the search for the specific individual life hist