Abstract
Cultism is the curse of the thinking classes! There has been no shortage of studies of the self, of individual psychology, of human nature--call it what you will. Yet instead of progressing toward the common goal of an understanding of man as man, the proliferation of investigators has given rise to narrower and narrower viewpoints, each seeking to explain all of behavior through its particular expertise. As a result, the numerous schools of psychology form a veritable tower of Babel. Paradoxically, in psychology and its allied fields the quintessence of being human, the ability to communicate experience symbolically has been lost--and with it what Korzybski (1933) has termed “time binding”, the ability to use and profit from the work of previous generations. Significant discoveries by one group, in one or another area of character formation, are unknown, misunderstood, or disregarded by others. Unnecessary duplication of effort is common, and the need to fit findings on the Procrustean bed of a favored theoretical construct undermines otherwise useful experimental efforts.
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Basch, M.F. (1983). The Concept of “Self”: An Operational Definition. In: Lee, B., Noam, G.G. (eds) Developmental Approaches to the Self. Path in Psychology. Springer, Boston, MA. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4613-3614-3_2
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4613-3614-3_2
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