The use and abuse of instinct in social psychology.

Abstract

ISCUSSIONS of Instinct in Man have appeared so frequentlyof late in the journals as well as in books that many readers are, no doubt, tired of the topic and would like to see it strictly barred for ten or twenty years.Yet the discussion must go on until we can arrive at something like a consensus of expert opinion.For no one can deny the importance of the questions at issue.Until the psychologists can achieve such a consensus, the students of the social sciences must continue to build on most unstable foundations.Recent years have seen the publication of many books and papers the main theme of which has been the application of the notion of human instincts to the advancement of the various branches of social science.Still more recently these efforts have provoked a violent reaction,-and hardly a week passes without the appearance of some article which attacks these attempts, pours scorn or ridicule upon them, and proposes to repudiate completely the notion of Instinct in Man, or at least complains in severe terms of the abuse or excessive use of the notion by the social scientists.In most of these articles my 'Social Psychology' is pointed to as a main source of the trouble.I have no wish to repudiate the responsibility which is thus laid upon me.Since ceasing to be wholly absorbed in the tasks demanded by the war, and especially since coming to this country, I have been gratified to find that my little book has exerted a very considerable influence.The mere fact that the publishers have found it necessary to reprint it rather oftener 285' "A functional view of human Instincts," "Psychological Review," January, 1921.' s "We do not pet the means selected because of its future or implicit relation to the CP.J until the factor of meaning becomes effective."He writes also that man, as compared v..th animals, "must be capable of a much more complicated far-flung play of meaning."

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 38 citations exist upstream.