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p Western sociologists usually interpret the process of interaction between the individual and society, between the individual and culture from a neo-Freudian standpoint. Lundberg, Young and Mack assert that in the course of 94 social interaction the social environment (social groups and culture) evokes a particular reaction in the perceiving subject, and the latter, in turn and depending on his anatomical, physiological or psychological idiosyncrasies, rejects or integrates the signals, thereby developing or retaining his personality traits, which is expressed in a particular form of social behaviour. As a result, this process of human consciousness is limited only to knowledge which is regarded as activity by which the person “reorganises” his behaviour or life.

p The American anthropologist Murdock claims that knowledge is limited essentially by the reactions evoked by biological drives (hunger, etc.), stimuli (social interaction), habits (traits that emerge under the influence of repeated action of the same stimuli) and restrictions of possible responses (cultural restrictions of instincts) [72; 128].

p Social behaviour and, consequently, the “knowledge” on which this behaviour is based are thus reduced to the purely executive activity of the human organism which reacts to particular signals received from the external world or to the biological drives and instincts conditioned by man’s biological nature, while the conscious aspect of this behaviour based on knowledge and active interaction with the objective material world is excluded.

p This view has found its clearest expression in the most recent works of bourgeois sociologists. In his definition of psychology the American sociologist A. Inkeles writes: “Psychology I take to be the study of the structure and functioning of the personal system, the system of action which characterises a particular biological organism, notably a human being" [41; 250].

p Despite all their talk about the “social” essence of man many Western sociologists, regardless of divergences on specific questions, agree on the biological influence of man’s psychic activity and, consequently, his social behaviour. Merrill writes: “Man comes into the world with the genetic potentialities for becoming a human being, and his personality is determined by the persons and groups with which he interacts" [52; 45].

p But man does not come into the world as either evil or good, but only with potentialities and abilities for both; 95 these develop in him according to his environment and to the education he receives in the family and society.

p Psychic activity is not a result of biological and physical processes caused by mechanical action of the external environment, but an organic unity of internal conditions and external (social) influences. It is primarily the activity of the human brain and at the same time a reflection, cognition of the world as objective reality, i.e., two inseparably connected aspects of one process, aspects depicting the connection between the psychic and the brain and of its activity with a reflection of the objective world. Numerous experiments and studies conducted by Soviet scientists, especially by P. Anokhin, G. Galperin, A. Leontyev, A. Luriya and S. Rubinstein, have confirmed that this psychic activity is nothing but a “function of the brain and a reflection of the external world because the activity of the brain is itself a reflex conditioned by the action of the external world" [73; 5].

p It is the interaction of a higher biological creature (monkey), possessing a biological potential for development, with the external world, its “life whose needs have led to the development of the brain as the organ of man’s psychic activity, and practice—such is the real material basis which reveals the cognitive relation to the world, such is the ’ontological’ basis on which the cognitive relation of the subject to objective reality is formed.... The material world is primordially concerned in the very origin of psychic phenomena and their determination" [73; 9].

p The materialist conception of nature and social and socio-psychological activity provide the scientific basis which makes it possible to establish the determinants of the formation of the individual as a social being and, consequently, to reveal the objective laws governing this process and to create the requisite conditions for control of this process.

p There are sociologists who agree that the personality and society are inseparably connected. Chinoy writes: “ Individuals cannot exist apart from culture and society and the latter takes on reality only in the personalities and behaviour of individuals" [49; 55].

p This is indisputable. Marx made this point over a hundred years ago. Man’s psychic activity and his consciousness 96 are determined by his individuality and the relationships in which he lives. But man is himself an aggregate of these relations as well as a reflection of social relations. On the one hand, the social relationships of individuals objectively countervail them as subjects, while, on the other, they assume personified form in the personalities of individuals because the latter are their material personification.

p It is also axiomatic that “the family largely determines both the personality and self-development" [16; 117] and that “if one finds differences in language, dress, voting, eating habits, relations between parents and children .. . the explanations are to be found, in part, in the contrasting norms of the groups to which men belong, or in the varied social experiences which people have" [49; 53].

p The basic methodological differences consist in the diametrically opposed views on the nature of forms and means of sqcial interaction of individuals and social groups in the process of socialisation, and on the nature of the latter’s mechanism of action.

p Sociologists often reduce the relationships between individuals and social groups to “projection” of the relationships which the child forms at an early age in contact with his parents and during games with other children; they reduce social interaction to the child’s instinctive activity interpreted in a neo-Freudian way. Green writes: “Culture is thus transmitted to the child in a personalised way. Culture is acquired as an accompaniment of the self which the child laboriously builds up with the help of others. Culture is introjected within and focused upon the self. Culture, in the present context, is fused with a given person’s selfconception, with the present roles he plays and those which he projects into the future, and with the goals of achievement he sets himself" [16; 120].

Young and Mack have elaborated an organon of personality integration in primary and secondary groups [44; 121].

Primary-Group Situations 1. Resistance and hostility toward parental training and authority Secondary-Group Situations Conflict with out-groups, e.g., occupations, classes, races, churches, nations and any others that serve as outlets of hostility. 97 2. Sibling rivalry for status in home. 3. Conflict-competition with playmates, or resistance to adults in reference to play, or in other groups.

During the initial stage it would appear that personality integration is marked by opposition and hostility, and during the second stage by love and indentification.

Integration of Personality at Primary-Group Level 1. Love, affection and identification with mother, father. Integration of Personality at Secondary-Group Level 2. Co-operation and affection with reference to siblings. 3. Love and affection for friends and fellow members of same neighbourhood or primary community. Co-operation with in-groups, e.g., occupations, classes, races, churches, nations, and any others that serve as focal points for identification and mutual participation.

p With this scheme Western sociologists would like to prove that the main qualities of the personality (traits, habits, etc.), and the forms of social interaction under which these qualities are shaped in “primary” groups are reproduced on an enlarged scale and appear in “secondary” groups.

p At the first stage (in the “primary” groups) the individual’s consciousness and self-consciousness are shaped by his instinctive activity in his relations with parents and other children; at the second stage (in the “secondary” groups) consciousness and social consciousness of the personality are a manifestation of the personality’s qualities which are formed at the first stage. This is very close to the neoFreudian theory of instincts, combining the irrationalistic interpretation of social interaction with the subjective- idealist interpretation of the means of communication by which this interaction is effected.

p On the basis of J. Baldwin’s conclusion that “it is impossible to isolate his (individual’s—Ed.) thought of himself at any time and say that in thinking of himself he is not essentially thinking of the alter also . . . the ego and the alter are to our thoughts one and the same thing" [70; 16, 17], 98 C. Cooley conceives relations between the social group and the personality (“the reflected or looking-glass self”) [70; 37).

p Man’s attitude to his own character from the physical, psychological and social points of view is evidently determined chiefly by the attitude of others. The “looking-glass self" includes, according to Cooley, three fundamental elements: the effect of somebody’s presence on other persons; the effect of their evaluation on this presence; feeling of pride or vexation experienced by the first person [74; 152].

p If Cooley is saying that man comes to know himself through other people no one would object. On this point Marx wrote: “In a sort of way, it is with man as with commodities. Since he comes into the world neither with a looking glass in his hand, nor as a Fichtean philosopher, to whom ’I am I’ is sufficient, man first sees and recognises himself in other men. Peter only establishes his own identity as a man by first comparing himself with Paul as being of like kind. And thereby Paul, just as he stands in his Pauline personality, becomes to Peter the type of the genus homo" [5; I, 52].

p The only objection is not to the indisputable fact that the individual becomes aware of himself as a personality through a looking glass or the eyes of another person, but to Cooley explaining the process wholly by the “influence of others on the individual”; he ignores the development of man’s self-consciousness through interaction with the objective world. The individual becomes conscious of himself through the influence of other people, but this consciousness is necessarily refracted through his consciousness of the objects in his practical activities and, what is particularly important, through the consciousness of the products of his material and spiritual activities, through what he considers his own and in which he has realised his own consciousness—speech, drawing, clothing, etc. [see 75; 185-87).

p A vivid picture of the development of self-consciousness, the mind, in the process of man’s sensory-practical activities was painted by Karl Marx in Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844-. “It will be seen how the history of industry and the established objective existence of 99 industry are the open book of man’s essential powers, the exposure to the senses of human psychology. Hitherto this was not conceived in its inseparable connection with man’s essential being, but only in an external relation of utility, because moving in the realm of estrangement, people could only think man’s general mode of being—religion or history in its abstract-general character as politics, art, literature, etc.,—to be the reality of man’s essential powers and man’s species-activity. We have before us the objectified essential powers of man in the form of sensuous, alien, useful objects, in the form of estrangement, displayed in ordinary material industry (which can be conceived as a part of that general movement, just as that movement can be conceived as a particular part of industry, since all human activity hitherto has been labour—that is, industry—activity estranged from itself). A psychology for which this, the part of history most contemporary and accessible to sense remains a closed book, cannot become a genuine, comprehensive and real science. What indeed are we to think of a science which airily abstracts from this large part of human labour and which fails to feel its own incompleteness, while such a wealth of human endeavour unfolded before it means nothing more to it than, perhaps, what can be expressed in one word—need, vulgar needl" [6; 109-10].

p Green supplements Cooley’s premise with Freud’s theory of the role of the unconscious in personality formation. He writes: “Man is a social being, person and society interpenetrate and fuse; at the same time, there is some irreducible core of the self which resists socialisation" [16; 126].

p The single entity of man is thus divided into social and antisocial, the latter fully dominating the former. Western sociologists write that this duality is seen as the tragedy of modern man. People “do not love themselves”, “nor does one believe in the good-will of others" [16; 125]. Green writes that “studies of child behaviour corroborate Freud’s arguments ... that the self is at war with its social environment. ... No other animal is so deliberately cruel as man" [16; 124, 126].

p The more complex society becomes, the more dreadful the human fate. Referring to Freud Green states that “the price of progress in civilisation is paid in forfeiting 100 Emacs-File-stamp: "/home/ysverdlov/leninist.biz/en/1969/SPTM191/20070416/191.tx" happiness through the heightening of the sense of guilt" [16; 124]. The reason is that man has opposed nature and created an artificial world.

p The human entity really does become divided, but the cause of this duality lies not in the “world of symbols”, but in the duality of capitalism. Those sociologists who follow Freud absolutise the “unconscious” and deprecate the role of consciousness. Science has demonstrated, however, that man’s psychic life is a unity of conscious and unconscious elements [see 76; 105].

p The essence of mental reflection is that, by orienting man in a situation, it regulates his behaviour. This process simultaneously involves both realised and unrealised elements.

p The Soviet psychologist, S. Rubinstein, writes: “ Consciousness is the primary awareness of the objective world; the psychic process as a result of which the object is realised is not thereby also realised. Psychic processes and phenomena are realised mediately, through their correlation with the objective world. The realisation of one’s emotion presupposes its correlation with the object which evokes it and at which it is directed. That is why an unrealised feeling is possible. An unrealised feeling is, of course, not a feeling which is generally not experienced; an unrealised feeling is one in which the cause that evokes it and the object, the person at which it is directed, are unrealised. The feeling experienced by man actually exists even if unrealised; the reality of its existence as a psychic fact is in its effectualness, in its actual participation in the regulation of man’s behaviour and actions" [73; 277].

p Rubinstein rightly observes that it is not a question of unconscious and conscious elements participating in the regulation of human behaviour, but of realised and unrealised elements, even if they are unrealised at a given moment. At the same time realised elements of the psyche play the determining role, while the unrealised elements play a strictly subordinate role. Bourgeois sociologists, however, leave man at the mercy of his instincts by emphasising the dominating role of the “unconscious” in psychic activity.

p G. Mead has propounded a different theory. An individual’s behaviour is determined by his evaluation of his own 101 behaviour from points of view of other people, i.e., he takes on the role of other persons, wondering what he would think of himself under corresponding conditions. “The individual,” writes Mead, “enters his own experience as a self or individual . .. but only (my italics.—G.O.) in so far as he first becomes an object to himself just as other individuals are objects to him or his experience; and he becomes an object to himself only by taking the attitudes of other individuals toward himself within a social environment in which both he and they are involved" [77; 138].

p But this, Mead warns, is only the “first stage" of development of the “self” as a social product. The “second stage" in the development of “social consciousness" begins when the individual assumes the role of society as a whole. “If the given human individual is to develop a self in the fullest sense, it is not sufficient for him merely to take the attitudes of other human individuals toward himself and toward one another within the human social process, and to bring that social process as a whole into his individual experience merely in these terms: he must also, in the same way that he takes the attitudes of other individuals toward himself and toward one another, take their attitudes toward the various phases or aspects of the common social activity or set of social undertakings in which, as members of an organised society or social group, they are all engaged; and he must then, by generalising these individual attitudes of that organised society or social group itself, as a whole act toward different social projects which at any given time it is carrying out, or toward the various larger phases of the general social process which constitutes its life and of which these projects are specific manifestations" [78; 54]. This process Mead calls “putting himself in the place of the generalised other" [77; 162].

p It is this process that evidently gives the individual what “we term his principles, the acknowledged attitudes of all members of the community toward what are the values of that community. He puts himself in the place of the generalised other, which is the organised experience of all members of the group" [77; 162].

p Mead’s theory of “the generalised other" is nothing but an interpretation of the development of social consciousness (at various levels) and its relationship to individual 102 consciousness. The actions of any individual inevitably contain social-psychological features common to the majority of members of the same group. But these common features are not the result of subjective evaluations made by the individual, but are the product of the material relations which determine the character of the individual’s social group. The unity of individual and social psychology at various levels is shaped by the unity of the material world, which determines the content of the psyche. Differences between them result from the different degrees of reflection of the material world.

p Western sociologists overlook the essential factor that determines the mental make-up of a particular group of people—namely, the influence of everyday life and work on their personality. Rubinstein writes: “When social consciousness—ideas and concepts fixed in language and science—are regarded as products of interactions of individual consciousnesses, the fact that the objective content of language and science is actually determined by social being is overlooked. When individual consciousness is conceived merely as a projection of the ideal content of social consciousness, this concept is again based on severance of the consciousness of the individual from his own material being, from the real process of his life. The individual’s life determines his attitude to the social idea engendered by the course of historical development and dominating in the given society. The ideas which man adopts and how he really adopts them will depend on the real content of his life. It is impossible while circumventing being—social and personal—either to derive from individual consciousnesses the social consciousness, the ideology and ideas engendered by social being, or to interpret the individual consciousness, in which the social and personal elements are given in closest interaction, as a mere projection of social consciousness independent of the individual’s real life" [79; 330-31].

p The subjective idealist conception of the correlation of individual and social psychology is based on Ferdinand Tonnies’s hypothesis which identifies the concept of “social group" with that of primitive family when man had not yet separated himself from the family, had not manifested his “self” and constituted a sort of single organic whole with the family. But this identification is unjustified. Engels 103 has pointed out that “the single individual that must have experience is no longer necessary, its individual experience can be replaced to a certain extent by the results of the experiences of a number of its ancestors" [4; 267].

p Man’s consciousness has developed over the course of human history. The Soviet philosopher A. Spirkin writes that by determining his attitude to other people man “ thereby determined himself in the system of production and became aware of himself as an independent person. Through the realisation of his attitude to nature and other people man began to acquire an increasingly more conscious attitude to himself and his own activities. Man’s gradually formed self-consciousness manifested itself in the ability to project without, to alienate the content of his own reflective activity and analyse it as something else, separate, as it were, from the subject and at the same time realisable as his own, i.e., that which is included in his ’self, as something subjective in the sense that it belongs to the given subject" [75; 199].

p The essential feature of formation of the personality is the recognition not simply of the fact that the personality is a product of social relations and education, but that man himself is the force that establishes these relations and various forms of education. In his Theses on Feuerbach Marx considers the main shortcoming of all preceding materialism to be that the object, reality, sensuousness are taken only in the form of the object or the form of contemplation and not as man’s sensuous activity. “The materialist doctrine that men are products of circumstances and upbringing, and that, therefore, changed men are products of other circumstances and changed upbringing, forgets that it is men that change circumstances and that the educator himself needs educating. Hence this doctrine necessarily arrives at dividing society into two parts, of which one is superior to society (in Robert Owen, for example)" [2; II, 403-04].

p Marx maintains that the main problem of the science of society is precisely to explain how the environment may be altered by people who are themselves creatures of their environment. He showed that production relations are shaped by circumstances independent of human will. But the relations may not change in the desired direction. The 104 nature of the “economic structure" and the direction in which it changes are dependent not on human will, but on the state of the productive forces and on the changes in the production relations in consequence of the further development of these forces. Engels explains this as follows: “Men make their history themselves, but not as yet with a collective will, according to a collective plan or even in a definite, delimited given society. Their aspirations clash, and for that very reason all such societies are governed by necessity, which is supplemented by and appears under the forms of accident" [2; II, 505].

p When they speak of the significance of the economic factor in the formation of the personality, Marxist sociologists do not deny the important role of ideology. Social man creates his own social relations. But, if he creates just these and no other relations, it is because of the state of the productive forces. No person, however responsible his position in society, can force on society relations which no longer correspond, or do not yet correspond, to the state of the productive forces.

Plekhanov wrote: “Social relations have their own logic: as long as people are in particular mutual relations they are bound to feel, think and act precisely as they do. No public figure can combat this logic: the natural course of events (i.e., the same logic of social relations) would bring all his efforts to naught. But, if I know in what direction the social relations are changing because of changes in the social and economic process of production, then I also know in what direction the social psychology will change; hence I am in a position to influence it. To influence social psychology is to influence historical events. This means that in a certain sense / can still make history and do not have to wait until it ’is made’ " [14; II, 332].