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The major task of a culture is to meet the instinctual needs of its members. The personality development of individuals will reflect the distinctive way in which basic drives are handled. In Western agrarian-based societies paternalism, especially paternal authority, has been a major organizing theme of personality structure. With the advent of industrialization and urbanization, this tradition-oriented mode of behavior has undergone profound change.
This book explores the complex relationship between individual personality organization and culture in a period of transition. Writing from a psychoanalytic viewpoint, the author points out that the superego as a repository of a paternal code of conduct no longer has the same influence on behavior as it did in former times. When work is bureaucratized and becomes anonymous, not visible or understandable to children, traditional ways of doing and acting lose utility. Yet the problem of surplus aggressivity, stemming from the frustrations inevitably imposed by society on its members, still exists, as it did in times when paternal authority held sway. It is, in fact, elevated by the overwhelming potential for annihilation produced by advanced technology.
The author notes the emergence of regressive trends and the desire to avoid responsibility. The abundance of material goods makes society particularly vulnerable to the breakthrough of impulses which could culminate in the emergence of totalitarianism of various forms.
We cannot return to values that were effective in an agricultural society. In place of paternalism, the author argues for the emergence of the ego as the important force in personality structure. He opts for the “education of affect” and for the control of impulses growing from conscious knowledge and from an examination of the content from the unconscious. This, the author feels, is possible only in a society without the father, because authoritarian societies do not permit examination of the assumptions and i