Social Identity and Self-Control

• Main Author: Opler, Marvin K.
• Other Authors: BUFFALO UNIV NY DEPT OF PSYCHIATRY
• Format: Text
• Language: English
• Published: 1962
• Subjects: Psychology; *PSYCHIATRY; *SELF TREATMENT; STRESSES; ACCURACY; CLASSIFICATION; CULTURE; NORMALITY; MENTAL DISORDERS; Benedict; Indian; eskimo*
• Online Access: http://www.dtic.mil/docs/citations/ADA366076; http://oai.dtic.mil/oai/oai?&verb=getRecord&metadataPrefix=html&identifier=ADA366076

A plan of research in any field of science must depend in the last analysis, upon the phenomena being investigated. By this we mean that if psychopathological states are the concern of social psychiatry as they are the concern of any branch of psychiatry we must begin with the character of such states at least insofar as present-day psychiatry understands them. It has been argued that "what is normal", or some relativistic concept of normality, lies at the root of such questions since conduct and behavior vary noticeably from one community to another. A few decades ago, Ruth Benedict stated that the "normals" of one culture might seem to be the "abnormals of another, that is, their behavior would seem strange in alien cultural contexts. This passing and plausible observation had added to it the astonishing corollary that out-and-out abnormals of one cultural context could "fit in" somewhere else, something which the author had occasion to test. and which he found to be incredibly naive, in studies among Northwest Coast Indian schizophrenic 5, found together with Eskimo and White psychotics in the Morning side Clinic and Hospital, a federal institution in Oregon. Illness, in short, represents impairments in functioning destructive of any individual's integration in his adaptation to any context or to his adjustment in any scene. The accurate point, from culture to culture, is not that such deviancy can find a haven elsewhere, but that it is etiologically traceable to stresses implicit in a social and cultural background. Presented at Self-Control under Stressful Situations Conference, Washington, DC September 9-10, 1962.