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Some Problems in the Study of Hostility and Aggression in Middle-Class American Families

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  07 November 2014

K. D. Naegele
K. D. Naegele*
Affiliation:
Cambridge, Massachusetts
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Extract

This paper is primarily an impressionistic sketch of an on-going piece of family research. No conclusions can as yet be offered. Instead, I intend briefly to suggest a frame of reference for the study of family hostility as well as enumerate some of the procedures of field work used in the present project.

Much has been written about the family by many sociologists of various persuasions. Yet a large part of this phase of sociological effort leaves one dissatisfied. Admittedly data on our own types of family structure are hidden from clear view precisely because of their familiarity as well as their privacy. But this fact is not sufficient to account for the disparity between the experienced complexity of family life and the sparsity of published details made significant by a sustained and incisive theoretic orientation. Headway could be made by the use of a frame of reference which combines sociological with psychological considerations, without confusing them, and which draws its vitality from the impassioned analyses of the structure of large-scale social systems and of individual character as begun by Weber and Freud. At the present time family research seems on the whole to have made little consistent use of the leads of kinship analysis and to have by-passed a cumulative effort at spelling out the empirical details of the social structure of various types of American families. As it is, we hear much about the family as a “unity of interacting personalities,” about processes of accommodation or conflict, or about the kinds of valuation that marital partners place upon one another; yet we hear little of the intervening details which, in their fullness, would give us a sense of how indeed a family as an on-going concern functions and how the inherent or emergent demands of its social structure are met, how the social structure of a family is related meaningfully or functionally to the rest of the social system, and how any given family of orientation dissolves into successive families of procreation.

Type
Research Article
Information
Canadian Journal of Economics and Political Science/Revue canadienne de economiques et science politique , Volume 17 , Issue 1 , February 1951 , pp. 65 - 75
Copyright
Copyright © Canadian Political Science Association 1951

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References

1 This is a considerably revised version of a paper given at the June, 1950 meetings of the Canadian Political Science Association in Kingston, Ont., Canada. The work, briefly reported on here, would have been impossible without the financial help of a Livingston Fellowship. Grateful acknowledgment is herewith made to the Anti-Defamation League which awarded this fellowship. Facilities for the field work itself were most generously provided by a project in preventive psychiatry directed by Dr. Erich Lindemann of the Massachusetts General Hospital. It was only through association with this project that access to the particular group of families here studied was possible and that the field work could proceed as smoothly and enjoyably as it did. As will be apparent throughout the paper, this piece of research was carried out in closest association with Dr. David F. Aberle of the Department of Social Relations, Harvard University, who also was on the staff of the preventive psychiatry project mentioned above. He interviewed the fathers of the families in which I interviewed the mothers. Though he is not directly to be held responsible for the content of this paper, his help has been very extensive and invaluable. Many of the ideas here expressed I owe to discussions with him.

2 The literature dealing with problems of “hostility” and “aggression” is extensive and cannot be surveyed here. Hostility and aggression are both assumed to involve (potential) injury, the former primarily in the medium of “hate” and the latter in the medium of “anger.” The following are the most important references for purposes of the present project: Davis, Allison, “American Status Systems and the Socialization of the Child,” American Sociological Review, VI, 1941, 345–56CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Davis, Kingsley, “Jealousy and Sexual Property,” Social Forces, XVII, no. 1, 1938 Google Scholar, and “The Sociology of Parent Youth Conflict,” American Sociological Review, I, 1940, 523–35Google Scholar; Dollard, J., “Hostility and Fear in Social Life,” Social Forces, XVII, no. 1, 1938 Google Scholar; Henry, J., “Some Cultural Determinants of Hostility in Pilaga Indian Children,” American Journal of Orthopsychiatry, X, 1940, 230–35Google Scholar; Hallowell, A. Irving, “Aggression in Saulteaux Society,” in Kluckholn, C. and Murray, H., eds., Personality: In Nature, Society and Culture (New York, 1947)Google Scholar; Levy, David M., “The Hostile Act,” Psychological Review, XLVIII, 1941, 356–61CrossRefGoogle Scholar, and “Hostility Patterns,” American Journal of Orthopsychiatry, XIII, 1943, 441–61Google Scholar; Lindemann, Erich, “Individual Hostility and Group Integration,” Human Organization, VIII, 1949, 5–9 CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Lippit, R., “An Experimental Study of the Effect of Democratic and Authoritarian Group Atmospheres,” in Lewin, K. et al., Studies of Topological and Vector Psychology, I (University of Iowa Studies, Studies in Child Welfare, XVI, no. 3, 1939)Google Scholar; Merton, R. K., “Social Structure and Anomie,” in Social Theory and Social Structure (Glencoe, 1949)Google Scholar; Newcomb, Th. M., “Autistic Hostility and Social Reality,” Human Relations, I, 1947, 69–85 CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Parsons, Talcott, “Certain Primary Sources and Patterns of Aggression in the Western World,” in Essays in Sociological Theory: Pure and Applied (Glencoe, 1949)Google Scholar; “Round Table on the Treatment of Aggression,” in American Journal of Orthopsychiatry, XIII, 1943, 384–440 Google Scholar; Sears, R., “Research Frontiers in Human Relations,” Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society, XC, 1948, 325–410.Google Scholar

3 Essays in Sociological Theory, especially X, XI, and XII; “Theoretical Problems in the Study of Social Mobility,” unpublished memorandum.

4 Human Society (New York, 1949).Google Scholar

5 The Family Revolution in Modern China (Cambridge, 1949).Google Scholar

6 For a systematic exposition of this point of view see Aberle, D. F., Cohen, A. K., Davis, A. K., Levy, M. J., and Sutton, F. X., ‘“The Functional Prerequisites of a Society,” Ethics, LX, 1950, 100–11CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Talcott Parsons, unpublished manuscripts.