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In Quest of Change: Comments on Robert Jay Lifton's “Individual Patterns in Historical Change”

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  03 June 2009

Frederick Wyatt
Frederick Wyatt
Affiliation:
University of Michigan
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Extract

The following comments on Dr. Lifton's paper will not concern themselves with the validity of his observations about the imagery of historical change in contemporary Japan – I would hardly be competent for such a task. My concern will be exclusively with the conceptual premises of Dr. Lifton's study, and, by implication, with the method of his observations. If psychology is used to explain change, can it be done by means of such categories as those Dr. Lifton has chosen? They, in turn, must inevitably refer to the more basic relationship between individual motives and trans-individual social determinants; or to the distinction between concepts pertaining to psychological, and to social systems. Thus, my comments would be much the same if Dr. Lifton had in a similar manner studied post-war changes in the Netherlands or in Italy.

Type
Psychology and Explanation of Historical Change
Information
Comparative Studies in Society and History , Volume 6 , Issue 4 , June 1964 , pp. 384 - 392
Copyright
Copyright © Society for the Comparative Study of Society and History 1964

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References

1 By the way, I don ' t intend in the least to preach what a zealous young psychologist, utterly unconscious of the irony, once called “ The Gospel of the Contingency Tables”. I am using here, and later, the statistical model purely as a schema for logical analysis.

2 For a detailed discussion of the elementary significance of collective orientations to time, see Kluckhohn, Florence R. and Strodtbeck, Fred L., Variations in Value Orientation, Roe, Peterson & Co., Evanston, 111., 1961.Google Scholar

3 I have a hunch that young people would have the same reaction in any contemporary, largely urbanized and industrialized society. We do not know what Japanese youth felt and did before the defeat; but we do know that a quasi-restorationist group held the reins of power and manipulated public opinion. How young people will vote or act, will depend on freedom and prohibition in the institutional structure of their country. This does not mean that their concern is not (at least in a rudimentary from) the same as that of all young people. The reaction of German youth of the twenties in an official framework of different transformationism, and the arguments of the young intelligentsia in present-day “ totalist” Russia would offer a stimulating comparison to Dr. Lifton 's analysis of Japanese youth.

4 For a comprehensive psychological investigation of this type, see: Adorno, T. W.Frenkel-Brunswik, , Else, , Levinson, D.J. & Sanford, R.N., The Authoritarian Personality, New York: Harper, 1950.Google Scholar

5 For a view according to which the conflict of generations is the major source of social change, see: Bettelheim, B., “The Problem of Generations”, Daedalus, 91 (Winter, 1962), pp. 68–96.Google Scholar

6 For a detailed discussion of this point, see: Wyatt, F., “The Reconstruction of the Individual and of the Collective Past”, in White, R.W. (ed.) The Study of Lives, New York: Atherton, 1963.Google Scholar

7 For a theory of mass behavior as a potential of historical change, see: Smelser, N.J., Theory of Collective Behavior, Free Press, New York, 1963.CrossRefGoogle Scholar