The Reaction to Behaviourism and Refusal of Alternatives

Abstract

Personality theorists who opposed themselves to Freud because of what they regarded as his psychological bias could take up the aim of creating a more social definition of self, and find in this a clear goal which made relevant a body of knowledge and an area of research to occupy them for many years. In retrospect this work can be seen to have reinforced a dichotomy between person and society and to have brought about some reworking and attenuation of the original contributions by Freud; nevertheless, as a theme it unified one of the neo-Freudian groups, leading to a certain amount of genuinely interdisciplinary research between anthropology and psychoanalysis.