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In the past fifteen years or so, psychoanalysts, psychiatrists, social psychologists, anthropologists and sociologists have become increasingly aware of social, cultural, and historical aspects of personality disturbances.
They have noted shifts in the way personalities become organized (the rise of the other-oriented personality and the organization man? and they have noted changes in the incidence of mental disorders. Conversion hysteria, one of the classic disturbances in foundations of psychoanalysis, is now reported as a relatively minor symptom, while character disorders have been increasingly reported as the typical mental disturbance and middle class patients in the last two decades.
The social character of mental disturbances is more drastically revealed in reports of the class character of mental illness. By now it has been clearly demonstrated that the incidence of severe mental illness varies inversely with socio-economic class, and that the type of mental illness is also in part a function of class. Psychoneurosis and especially obsessive compulsions are the characteristic disturbances of the middle classes. The term, ‘status anxiety,’ is sometimes used to describe the class character of some of these neuroses.
Recognition of such facts demands a fuller understanding of the relationship between mental disorder and the organization of society. As a step in this process, we propose to select some of the major findings of economic analysis and attempt to relate them to the social-psychological