Psychology, individual, and society: An interview with Seymour Sarason

Abstract

The phenomenal unity of consciousness must flow from some element immutably present in each and every representation of the individual and binding the whole into one. To unearth and accurately define this phenomenal self becomes one of the fundamental tasks of psychology. We will assume that any kind of psychology that explains the behavior of the individual also explains the behavior of society, in so far as the psychological point of view is applicable to and sufficient for the study of social behavior. It is true that for certain purposes it is very useful to look away entirely from the individual and to think of socialized behavior as though it were carried on by certain larger entities which transcend the psycho-physical organism. But this viewpoint implicitly demands the abandonment of the psychological approach to the explanation of human conduct in society … Social behavior is merely the sum, or better, arrangement of such aspects of individual behavior as are referred to culture patterns that have their proper context, not in the spatial and temporal continuities of biological behavior, but in historical sequences that are imputed to actual behavior by a principle of selection. The life of a man is a double series—a series of effects produced in him by the rest of the world, and a series of effects produced in that world by him. A man's make-up, or nature, equals his tendencies to be influenced in certain ways by the world and to react in certain ways to it. To describe even one man's intellect and character fully, at even any one time, it would be necessary to list all the world's happenings that he might possibly encounter, and to state in each case how he would feel and think and act in response to that happening.