Social Structure & Person

Talcott Parsons

• Publisher: Free Press
• Year: 2010
• Print ISBN: 9781416577744
• eBook ISBN: 9781439138304
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Personality in Psychology
• Index: Social Sciences

A Collection of essays which studies the theoretical problem of relationships between social structure and personality, and how these different relationships merit distinct treatment for particular purposes.  Parsons concludes that in the larger picture, their interdependencies are so intimate that bringing them together in an interpretive synthesis is imperative if a balanced understanding of the complex as a whole is to be attained.

PART One
THEORETICAL PERSPECTIVES

1
The Superego and the Theory of Social Systems

IN THE broadest sense, perhaps, the contribution of psycho-analysis to the social sciences has consisted of an enormous deepening and enrichment of our understanding of human motivation. This enrichment has been such a pervasive influence that it would be almost impossible to trace its many ramifications. In the present paper I have chosen to say something about one particular aspect of this influence, that exerted through the psychoanalytic concept of the superego, because of its peculiarly direct relevance to the central theoretical interests of my own social-science discipline, sociological theory. This concept, indeed, forms one of the most important points at which it is possible to establish direct relations between psychoanalysis and sociology, and it is in this connection that I wish to discuss it.

Psychoanalysis, in common with other traditions of psychological thought, has naturally concentrated on the study of the personality of the individual as the focus of its frame of reference. Sociology, on the other hand, has equally naturally been primarily concerned with the patterning of the behavior of a plurality of individuals as constituting what, increasingly, we tend to call a social system. Because of historical differences of perspective and points of departure, the conceptual schemes arrived at from these two starting points have in general not been fully congruent with each other, and this fact has occasioned a good deal of misunderstanding. However, recent theoretical work1 shows that, in accord with convergent trends of thought, it is possible to bring the main theoretical trends of these disciplines together under a common frame of reference, that which some sociologists have called the “theory of action.” It is in the perspective of this attempt at theoretical unification that I wish to approach the analysis of the concept of the superego.

One of the principal reasons for the selection of this concept lies in the fact that it has been, historically, at the center of an actual process of convergence. In part at least, it is precisely because of this fact that Freud’s discovery of the internalization of moral values as an essential part of the structure of the personality itself constituted such a crucial landmark in the development of the sciences of human behavior. Though there are several other somewhat similar formulations to be found in the literature of roughly the same period, the formulation most dramatically convergent with Freud’s theory of the superego was that of the social role of moral norms made by the French sociologist Emile Durkheim—a theory which has constituted one of the cornerstones of the subsequent development of sociological theory.

Durkheim’s insights into this subject slightly antedated those of Freud.2 Durkheim started from the insight that the individual, as a member of society, is not wholly free to make his own moral decisions but is in some sense “constrained” to accept the orientations common to the society of which he is a member. He went through a series of attempts at interpretation of the nature of this constraint, coming in the end to concentrate on two primary features of the phenomenon: first, that moral rules “constrain” behavior most fundamentally by moral authority rather than by any external coercion; and, secondly, that the effectiveness of moral authority could not be explained without assuming that, as we would now say, the value patterns were internalized as part of personality. Durkheim, as a result of certain terminological peculiarities which need not be gone into here, tended to identify “society” as such with the system of moral norms. In this very special sense of the term society, it is significant that he set forth the explicit formula that “society exists only in the minds of individuals.”

In Durkheim’s work there are only suggestions relative to the psychological mechanisms of internalization and the place of internalized moral values in the structure of personality itself. But this does not detract from the massive phenomenon of the convergence of the fundamental insights of Freud and Durkheim, insights not only as to the fundamental importance of moral values in human behavior, but of the internalization of these values. This convergence, from two quite distinct and independent starting points, deserves to be ranked as one of the truly fundamental landmarks of the development of modern social science. It may be likened to the convergence between the results of the experimental study of plant breeding by Mendel and of the microscopic study of cell division—a convergence which resulted in the discovery of the chromosomes as bearers of the genes. Only when the two quite distinct bodies of scientific knowledge could be put together did the modern science of genetics emerge.

The convergence of Freud’s and Durkheim’s thinking may serve to set the problem of this paper, which is: How can the fundamental phenomenon of the internalization of moral norms be analyzed in such a way as to maximize the generality of implications of the formulation, both for the theory of personality and for the theory of the social system? For if it is possible to state the essentials of the problem in a sufficiently generalized way, the analysis should prove to be equally relevant in both directions. It should thereby contribute to the integration of the psychoanalytic theory of personality and of the sociological theory of the social system, and thus to the further development of a conceptual scheme which is essentially common to both.

The essential starting point of an attempt to link these two bodies of theory is the analysis of certain fundamental features of the interaction of two or more persons, the process of interaction itself being conceived as a system. Once the essentials of such an interactive system have been made clear, the implications of the analysis can be followed out in both directions: the study of the structure and functioning of the personality as a system, in relation to other personalities; and the study of the functioning of the social system as a system. It may be surmised that the difficulty of bringing the two strands of thought together in the past has stemmed from the fact that this analysis has not been carried through; and this has not been done because it has “fallen between two stools.” On the one hand, Freud and his followers, by concentrating on the single personality, have failed to consider adequately the implications of the individual’s interaction with other personalities to form a system. On the other hand, Durkheim and the other sociologists have failed, in their concentration on the social system as a system to consider systematically the implications of the fact that it is the interaction of personalities which constitutes the social system with which they have been dealing, and that, therefore, adequate analysis of motivational process in such a system must reckon with the problems of personality. This circumstance would seem to account for the fact that this subject has been so seriously neglected.

It may first be pointed out that two interacting persons must be conceived to be objects to each other in two primary respects, and in a third respect which is in a sense derived from the first two. These are (1) cognitive perception and conceptualization, the answer to the question of what the object is, and (2) cathexis—attachment or aversion—the answer to the question of what the object means in an emotional sense. The third mode by which a person orients himself to an object is by evaluation—the integration of cognitive and cathectic meanings of the object to form a system, including the stability of such a system over time. It may be maintained that no stable relation between two or more objects is possible without all three of these modes of orientation being present for both parties to the relationship.3

Consideration of the conditions on which such a stable, mutually oriented system of interaction depends leads to the conclusion that on the human level this mutuality of interaction must be mediated and stabilized by a common culture—that is, by a commonly shared system of symbols, the meanings of which are understood on both sides with an approximation to agreement. The existence of such symbol systems, especially though not exclusively as involved in language, is common to every known society. However the going symbol systems of the society may have developed in the first place, they are involved in the socialization of every child. It may be presumed that the prominence of common symbol systems is both a consequence and a condition of the extreme plasticity and sensitivity of the human organism, which in turn are essential conditions of its capacity to learn and, concomitantly, to mislearn. These features of the human organism introduce an element of extreme potential instability into the process of human interaction, which requires stabilizing mechanisms if the interactive system, as a system, is to function.

The elements of the common culture have significance with reference to all three of the modes of orientation of action. Some of them are primarily of cognitive significance; others are primarily of cathectic significance, expressive of emotional meanings or affect; and still others are primarily of evaluative significance. Normative regulation for the establishing of standards is characteristic of all of culture; thus there is a right way of symbolizing any orientation of action in any given culture. This is indeed essential to communication itself: the conventions of the language must be observed if there is to be effective communication.

That a person’s cathexis of a human object—that is, what the object means to the person emotionally—is contingent on the responsiveness of that object is a fact familiar to psychoanalytic theory. It may be regarded as almost a truism that it is difficult if not impossible in the long run to love without being loved in return. It is more difficult to see that there is an almost direct parallelism in this respect between cathexis and cognition. After all, a person’s cathexis of an inanimate object, such as a food object, is not directly dependent on the responsiveness of the object; it is surely anthropomorphism to suggest that a steak likes to be eaten in the same sense in which a hungry man likes to eat the steak. Similarly the cognition of the inanimate object by a person is not directly dependent on the object’s reciprocal cognition of the person. But where the object is another person, the two, as ego and alter, constitute an interactive system. The question is what, in a cognitive sense, is alter from the point of view of ego, and vice versa. Clearly the answer to this question must involve the place—or “status,” as sociologists call it—of ego and alter in the structure of the interactive system. Thus when I say a person is my mother, or my friend, or my student, I am characterizing that person as a participant in a system of social interaction in which I also am involved.

Thus not only the cathectic attitudes, but also the cognitive images, of persons relative to each other are functions of their interaction in the system of social relations; in a fundamental sense the same order of relationship applies in both cases.

Thus a social system is a function of the common culture, which not only forms the basis of the intercommunication of its members, but which defines, and so in one sense determines, the relative statuses of its members. There is, within surprisingly broad limits, no intrinsic significance of persons to each other independent of their actual interaction. In so far as these relative statuses are defined and regulated in terms of a common culture, the following apparently paradoxical statement holds true: what persons are can only be understood in terms of a set of beliefs and sentiments which define what they ought to be. This proposition is true only in a very broad way, but is none the less crucial to the understanding of social systems.

It is in this context that the central significance of moral standards in the common culture of systems of social interaction must be understood. Moral standards constitute, as the focus of the evaluative aspect of the common culture, the core of the stabilizing mechanisms of the system of social interaction. These mechanisms function, moreover, to stabilize not only attitudes—that is, the emotional meanings of persons to each other—but also categorizations—the cognitive definitions of what persons are in a socially significant sense.

If the approach taken above is correct, the place of the superego as part of the structure of the personality must be understood in terms of the relation between personality and the total common culture, by virtue of which a stable system of social interaction on the human levels becomes possible. Freud’s insight was profoundly correct when he focused on the element of moral standards. This is, indeed, central and crucial, but it does seem that Freud’s view was too narrow. The inescapable conclusion is that not only moral standards, but all the components of the common culture are internalized as part of the personality structure. Moral standards, indeed, cannot in this respect be dissociated from the content of the orientation patterns which they regulate; as I have pointed out, the content of both cathectic-attitudes and cognitive-status definitions have cultural, hence normative significance. This content is cultural and learned. Neither what the human object is, in the most significant respects, nor what it means emotionally, can be understood as given independently of the nature of the interactive process itself; and the significance of moral norms themselves very largely relates to this fact.

It would seem that Freud’s insight in this field was seriously impeded by the extent to which he thought in terms of a frame of reference relating a personality to its situation or environment without specific reference to the analysis of the social interaction of persons as a system. This perspective, which was overwhelmingly dominant in his day, accounts for two features of his theory. In the first place, the cognitive definition of the object world does not seem to have been problematical to Freud. He subsumed it all under “external reality,” in relation to which “ego-functions” constitute a process of adaptation. He failed to take explicitly into account the fact that the frame of reference in terms of which objects are cognized, and therefore adapted to, is cultural and thus cannot be taken for granted as given, but must be internalized as a condition of the development of mature ego-functioning. In this respect it seems to be correct to say that Freud introduced an unreal separation between the superego and the ego—the lines between them are in fact difficult to define in his theory. In the light of the foregoing considerations, the distinction which Freud makes between the superego and the ego—that the former is internalized, by identification, and that the latter seems to consist of responses to external reality rather than of internalized culture—is not tenable. These responses are, to be sure, learned responses; but internalization is a very special kind of learning which Freud seemed to confine to the superego.

If this argument raises questions about cognitive function and therefore about the theory of the ego, there are implications, ipso facto, for the superego. The essential point seems to be that Freud’s view seems to imply that the object, as cognitively significant, is given independently of the actor’s internalized culture, and that superego standards are then applied to it. This fails to take account of the extent to which the constitution of the object and its moral appraisal are part and parcel of the same fundamental cultural patterns; it gives the superego an appearance of arbitrariness and dissociation from the rest of the personality—particularly from the ego—which is not wholly in accord with the facts.

The second problem of Freud’s theory concerns the relation of cathexis or affect to the superego. In a sense, this is the obverse of its relation to cognition. The question here is perhaps analogous to that of the transmission of light in physics: how can the object’s cathectic significance be mediated in the absence of direct biological contact? Indeed, embarrassment over this problem may be one source of the stressing of sexuality in Freudian theory, since sexuality generally involves such direct contact.

To Freud, the object tends, even if human, to be an inert something on which a “charge” of cathectic significance has been placed. The process is regarded as expressive of the actor’s instincts or libido, but the element of mutuality tends to be treated as accessory and almost arbitrary. This is associated with the fact that, while Freud, especially in his Interpretation of Dreams, made an enormous contribution to the theory of expressive or cathectic symbolism, there is a very striking limitation of the extension of this theory. The basis of this may be said to be that Freud tended to confine his consideration of symbolism in the emotional context to its directly expressive functions and failed to go on to develop the analysis of its communicative functions. The dream symbol remained for him the prototype of affective symbolism. It is perhaps largely because of this fact that Freud did not emphasize the common culture aspect of such symbolism, but tended to attempt to trace its origins back to intrinsic meanings which were independent of the interactive process and its common culture. More generally the tenor of the analysis of affect was to emphasize a fundamental isolation of the individual in his lonely struggle with his id.4

This whole way of looking at the problem of cathexis seems to have a set of consequences parallel to these outlined above concerning cognition; it tends to dissociate the superego from the sources of affect. This derives from the fact that Freud apparently did not appreciate the presence and significance of a common culture of expressive-affective symbolism and the consequent necessity for thinking of the emotional component of interaction as mediated by this aspect of the common culture. Thus, the aspect of the superego which is concerned with the regulation of emotional reactions must be considered as defining the regulative principles of this interactive system. It is an integral part of the symbolism of emotional expression, not something over, above, and apart from it.

The general purport of this criticism is that Freud, with his formulation of the concept of the superego, made only a beginning at an analysis of the role of the common culture in personality. The structure of his theoretical scheme prevented him from seeing the p...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Contents
• PART One THEORETICAL PERSPECTIVES
• PART TWO STAGES OF THE LIFE CYCLE
• PART Three HEALTH AND ILLNESS
• Index