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Introductory Note - This paper may still be of some interest as showing the attitude of people like myself just after the Second World War. But I now feel that, because of its selection of only a very few determinants out of a vast number of neglected and unknown ones, it is too oversimplified to be a reliable guide to action.
This paper, based as it is on some ‘field work’ in the Germany of 1946, may today in 1951 seem to have no more than an academic interest. I believe the results of work of this kind, incomplete and selective as they were, should be recorded, and from the point of view from which they were then obtained. But I also think they should be related to the very different practical problems that have arisen since. I have therefore added a postscript for this purpose.
It has always been known that character is the combined product of heredity and environment. But, before the psychoanalytic discoveries of Freud, almost the only environmental influences considered were the example and deliberate pressure of parents, teachers or companions. And as these often failed to produce their expected or desired results, the relative importance of the hereditary factors (which could always be postulated if only in the form of some long dormant but now reawakened trait) was much exaggerated. It was left to Freud to discover the enormous influence of those forgotten experiences of early childhood that so often far outweigh the influence of both heredity and deliberate education.