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Some Aspects of the Psychology of the People of Great Russia*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  07 August 2018

Geoffrey Gorer
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Extract

Russian peasants do not appear to welcome children with particular enthusiasm, but once a child is born it is protected to the greatest possible extent from hunger and cold, often at the cost of considerable parental sacrifice. The infant and young child is fed by its mother generously and frequently, and for a very long period, often up to two years; if the mother is absent, a crying baby is given a comforter made of chewed and sweetened bread tied up in a rag by the person looking after it, typically a woman of a generation older than the parents—a babuška—though sometimes its older brothers and sisters have this duty.

Type
Research Article
Information
American Slavic and East European Review , Volume 8 , Issue 3 , October 1949 , pp. 155 - 166
Copyright
Copyright © Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies 1949

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Footnotes

*

This paper is a first report from the Russian section of the Columbia University project, Research in Contemporary Cultures, which was inaugurated by the late Professor Ruth Benedict in 1947, under a grant from the Office of Naval Research, and according to the terms of the contract, reproduction in whole or in part is permitted for any purpose of the U. S. Government. This research is conducted in area seminars and Mr. Gorer has drawn upon the work of collaborators: Dr. S. Benet, Mr. N. Calas, Dr. N. Leites, Dr. M. Mead, Dr. B. Schaffner, Dr. I. Telberg, Miss R. Zoglin, Dr. M.Wolfenstein, and Miss M. Marcovitz.

The methods employed are modeled upon the interviewing techniques of field anthropology and clinical intensive psychiatry, both of which rely upon the detailed and intensive study of living individuals, and the ordering of consistencies and inconsistencies in verbal statements in such a way as to obtain a systematic picture of the regularities in the character which identified individuals have built up within a series of life history experiences, which are related in turn to the institutions of the society within which they have been reared. Cultural anthropology provides the methods used to check the findings based on intensive interviewing of informants against the formal patterns of a culture, and also methods for analyzing folklore, social organization, ritual behavior, etc. Clinical and developmental studies of children, pursued intensively in our own society, provide the theoretical background used to interpret the dynamics of the character structure revealed by this intensive personal interviewing, and to systematize our understanding of the way in which specific child-rearing practices perpetuate a given culture. During the last ten years these methods have been applied in the study of contemporary cultures which were inaccessible to field study because of wartime conditions, and have proved a fruitful way of identifying patterns in the behavior of groups of people who share a common cultural tradition. They are necessarily inappropriate for the establishment of statistical frequencies of any sort, and are concerned with main regularities in character structure, not with establishing to what degree some particular facet of these regularities is manifested in any given group, or at any particular time, although they may be used as the basis of testable predictions.

The present study is based on intensive interviewing of Great Russians, including individuals with experience under the Soviets, and of individuals of non-Great-Russian origin with experience of Russian culture, and on intensive analysis of selected written materials, films, photographs, etc. As at present developed it applies only to the people of Great Russia of the selected groups discussed.

Margaret Mead

Director, Project om Research in Contemporary Cultures

References

1 For a discussion of contrasts in the attitudes associated with Eastern European swaddling practice, see Benedict, R., “Child Rearing in Certain European Countries, ”American Journal of Orthopsychiatry, XIX, No. 2 (April, 1949), 79–93 Google Scholar

2 I should like to stress as forcibly as possible that I consider the hypothesized derivatives from the swaddling situation only one of a presumably large number of antecedents to the development of Russian character. This statement is only a preliminary one and in it I have developed the implications of one aspect of infantile experience, and have neglected, through lack of time, other aspects of considerable potential import, such as the relations between parents and children, or between siblings. The vulgarizations and misinterpretations of my paper “Themes in Japanese Culture” (Transactions of the NewYork Academy of Sciences, Series II, V, No. 5 [March, 1943], 106-24) have falsely imputed to me a belief in a monistic antecedent to Japanese adult character—in that case the imposition of early toilet training. I trust that a similar error will not be committed in the present instance.

3 Pedagogy, D. P. Yesipov and N. K. Goncharov, Moscow, 1946. Translated by George Counts, S. and Lodge, Nicia P. under the title I Want to Be Like Stalin (New York, 1947) p. 70.Google Scholar,

4 Scattered evidence suggests that in contemporary Russia the rank-and-file members. of the Communist Party no longer have special authority or respect. This may be connected with the tripling of the number of Party members during the war years.