Social Class, Individual Character
Inner Conflict and Defense.
by Daniel R. Miller and Guy E. Swanson.
Holt, Rinehart & Winston. 452 pp. $6.95.
It was Marx who in 1846 ridiculed the view of “Man in general, who belongs to no class, has no reality and subsists only in the realm of philosophical fantasy.” Since then, the influence of class on character, ideology, and style has been continually argued, though seldom demonstrated or explained with exactness. Indeed, the lack in Marxism—and most sociological theories—of any but a rudimentary account of the workings of personality makes its impossible to do much more than assume that some kind of “reflection” is going on, whereby individuals “reflect” either their social class, the productive process, or whatever else the prime influence is said to be.
Fifty years after 1846, Freud and his followers began to develop what has proven to be our most fruitful account of personality. To be sure this theory—with its aristocratic, value-maintaining superego, its bourgeois, practical-minded ego, and its proletarian, pleasure-seeking id—may itself have “reflected” the class structure of the time. But perhaps because of their own predominantly middle-class background and clientele, psychoanalysts until recently have attached far more importance to individual slips and falls along a predetermined psycho-sexual ladder than to the possibility that different social or cultural backgrounds might involve still other ladders. Emphasizing biologically determined sequences of development, most versions of psychoanalysis have remained theories of “Man in general, who belongs to no class,” while on the other hand, many latter-day sociologists have agreed with Marx that such a man subsisted only in fantasy, and all the theories about him are themselves reflections of more basic social positions.
In the past twenty years these two streams of thought have moved closer. Within psychoanalysis, interest in defenses and “character” has grown, and with it has developed the possibility of studying non-pathological characteristics in large populations. Cultural anthropologists have tried to apply Freud to tribes from Seattle to Samoa, and have gained a greater awareness of the importance of “culture” in personality development. Meanwhile, social psychology has burgeoned, and with it has begun the search for concepts that will bridge the theoretical gap between “Man-in-general” and the complex stratifications of men in society. Epidemiological studies have shown that lower-class areas produce more schizophrenic disorders than middle-class districts, where depressive psychoses predominate; and social anthropologists working in American communities have mapped the differences in outlook, child-rearing practices, behavior, and style of life among the social classes they differentiated. But perhaps because most American social scientists mean so much less by “social class” than did Marx, we have lacked careful empirical studies demonstrating exactly how and why class affects character—until Miller and Swanson’s Inner Conflict and Defense.
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The main thesis of this highly technical book is, stated simply, that both child-rearing practices and class position have visible effects on expressive style, defense mechanisms, and moral standards—in short, on character. Miller and Swanson argue that class affects character in two ways. In the first place, they reason that because a child’s “character” is determined by the way he is brought up and, further, because there exists ample evidence indicating the class differences in child-training methods, character patterns should differ therefore along class lines. Here, psychoanalytic hypotheses about the links between childhood experience and personality, should suffice to explain class differences. But Miller and Swan-son go on to argue that the same child-rearing technique will often have different effects, depending on the class in which it is used. In such instances, no Man-in-general theory of the relationship between upbringing and character will explain class differences: class position itself becomes a necessary explanatory principle.
Thus some of Miller and Swanson’s findings, as they themselves point out, can be explained on the basis of child-rearing techniques alone, without recourse to any notion of social class. For example, in their studies of expressive style, they found that middle-class children tend to solve problems conceptually, whereas working-class children are more likely to approach them through physical activity. This difference can be explained easily by child-rearing practices. The middle-class parents with conceptual children are the same parents who use psychological (and not corporal) discipline, who retain their self-control with their children, and who give frequent rewards. The parents of working-class children—who try to solve problems through physical activity—use child-training methods which encourage this approach. One, therefore, can explain class differences in expressive style by a Man-in-general theory of the effects of child-rearing.
But Miller and Swanson’s studies of defensive preferences also suggest that class by itself, unmediated by class differences in child-training, influences character. To establish this point, they begin by distinguishing two “families” of defenses, the first of which is characterized by the “obliteration of objective events and the substitution for them of more tolerable fantasies”; severe distortions, social difficulties, and disorders like schizophrenia are related to this family. The second family of defenses includes only relatively minor changes in some aspect of the person’s needs; defenses of this type, like displacement and the turning of hostility against the self, require less extensive distortions and create fewer or no social difficulties.
The authors find that working-class children tend to favor the first family of defenses, and middle-class children the second; but that class differences in child-rearing do not suffice to explain this selective preference. That is, there exists no class difference in child-rearing which will account for the severely distorting defenses of working-class children and the more “adaptive” defenses of middle-class children. Unlike differences in expressive style, class position alone appears to account for class differences in the use of defenses. Miller and Swanson note that the working class experiences greater hardships than the middle class—lower economic rewards and greater pressures to violate moral standards. These hardships, they imply, make it more difficult for the working-class child to utilize the “adaptive” defenses of his middle-class schoolmates.
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The double connection between class and character is probably even closer than Miller and Swanson’s difficult and sophisticated research techniques would imply. Their methodological scruples led them to select Detroit junior high school boys for their study in a way so as to minimize difference between the working and the middle class: thus, they eliminated working-class boys who came from broken homes, immigrant, or non-North European families, probably leaving themselves with a working-class group relatively similar to the middle class. Furthermore, their complex techniques for measuring defensive preference, expressive style, and moral standards are (as they point out) far from perfect; and (as they modestly do not point out) the inevitable imperfections of the social scientist’s techniques may lead him to underestimate the real relationships between the variables he studies. Indeed, when one considers the enormous methodological problems Miller and Swanson faced (and describe in great technical detail) in trying to measure such elusive concepts as defense mechanism or class position, it seems remarkable that so many significant differences did trickle through the distorting inaccuracies of their (as any) classifications and tests.
Miller and Swanson also studied the differences between “entrepreneurial” and “bureaucratic” families. In an earlier book, The Changing American Parent, they had argued that the older patterns of individual entrepreneurship are giving way to an emerging bureaucratic type of organization, characterized by the integration of functions performed by specialists. Class differences exist among children from both bureaucratic and entrepreneurial families, but the authors found that “Among the bureaucratic subjects, the differences between classes tend to be minimal. . . .”
There is thus a double irony in Miller and Swanson’s work. First, though they start from a highly psychoanalytic outlook (Marx is never cited), some of their findings support Marx’s critique of theories of “Man-in-general, who belongs to no class.” To be sure, the connection between class and character in Detroit turns out to be far more complex and far less invariant than Marx would have had it, yet the fact remains that class position accounts for character differences which child-rearing techniques cannot explain. The second irony is that after clearly demonstrating the influence of class on character, Miller and Swanson go on to suggest that this influence is decreasing: “The number of jobs in bureaucratic settings . . . will probably continue to [increase]. . . . It seems probable that status in a particular class will become decreasingly important as time passes and bureaucratization progresses.” It may be that just when the influence of class on character begins to be clearly demonstrated and explained, it will cease to operate: Marx was necessary to understand the entrepreneur, but perhaps Freud will suffice for the new bureaucrat.
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