Читать книгу Sex and Repression in Savage Society - Bronislaw 1884-1942 Malinowski - Страница 4

“After ignoring impulses for a long time in behalf of sensations, modern psychology now tends to start out with an inventory and description of instinctive activities. This is an undoubted improvement. But when it tries to explain complicated events in personal and social life by direct reference to these nature powers the explanation becomes hazy and forced ...

“We need to know about the social conditions which have educated original activities into definite and significant dispositions before we can discuss the psychological element in society. This is the true meaning of social psychology ... Native human nature supplies the raw materials but custom furnishes the machinery and the designs ... Man is a creature of habit, not of reason nor yet of instinct.

“The treatment of sex by psycho-analysts is most instructive, for it flagrantly exhibits both the consequences of artificial simplification and the transformation of social results into psychic causes. Writers, usually male, hold forth on the psychology of woman as if they were dealing with a Platonic universal entity ... They treat phenomena, which are peculiarly symptoms of the civilization of the West at the present time, as if they were the necessary efforts of fixed native impulses of human nature.”

JOHN DEWEY, in Human Nature and Conduct