Abstract
This and the remainder of the book deal with therapy. This chapter begins with a discussion of principles of social learning theory and a critique of the concepts of personality, society, and culture. It goes on to expand the scope of social learning theory to include elements from anthropology, sociology, and the other social sciences so that it can account for social and cultural patterns of behavior in addition to unique individual patterns. Therapeutic applications of this broader conceptualization are discussed.
An earlier version of this chapter appeared in pp. 139–158 of my 1996 book Culture and therapy: An integrative approach. It was published in Northvale, NJ by Jason Aronson, Inc., Publishers. © 1996 by Jason Aronson, Inc., Publishers, and is used with permission.
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Notes
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This discussion attempts to make subject matter distinctions rather than traditional theoretical distinctions to highlight the social aspects of the argument. Thus, terms like “reward,” “punishment,” and “information” are used, rather than “positive reinforcement, “negative reinforcement,” “punishment,” and “extinction” (nor are the informational aspects of these processes discussed), and the discussion does not allude to other social psychological and cognitive processes. The aim in doing so is to focus attention on the social phenomena rather than on the intricacies of their theoretical explanation. Persuasive power is extremely complex, since the ability to convince others that one possesses economic or political power can be as important in influencing their behavior as the actual possession of that power.
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This taboo can be seen as the counterpart to the incest taboo—the larger social group can best be maintained by discouraging alliances both with those who are too close, since this could lead to the breaking away of subgroups, and with those who are too distant, since this could lead to the fragmentation of the larger group. This social explanation—that prohibitions against both incest and intermarriage serve to maintain the integrity of the larger social group—has two advantages over Freud’s explanation that the incest taboo is based on the universality of the Oedipus complex. First, it explains more by bringing together two apparently unrelated phenomena. And second, it avoids the Lamarckian assertion of the inheritance of the experiences of previous generations. Instead, one need merely argue that both prohibitions exist because of their social consequences in the past.
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Fish, J.M. (2011). Sociocultural Theory and Therapy. In: The Concept of Race and Psychotherapy. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4419-7576-8_6
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