The Psychological Frontiers of Society

New York: Columbia University Press, 1945. First edition. Hard cover. Fine in very good dust jacket. A Near Fine Copy In Very Good Dust Jacket xxiv, 475 p. : diagrs.; 24 cm. Includes Illustrations. "Abram Kardiner, American physician, psychoanalyst, psychiatrist, and psychocultural theorist, was born in New York City on August 17, 1891, and died in Easton, Connecticut on July 20, 1981. A member of the New York Psychoanalytic Society (founded in 1911), he was one of the founders in 1930 of the New York Psychoanalytic Institute, the first psychoanalytic institute in the United States. Kardiner was instrumental in bringing Sándor Rado from Berlin to be its Educational Director. In 1941, Kardiner left the New York Psychoanalytic Institute because of theoretical and political disputes, and in 1945, along with Rado, George Daniels, and David Levy founded the Columbia University Clinic for Psychoanalytic Training and Research, the first psychoanalytic institute that was part of a university medical school. Kardiner was its Director from 1959 to 1967, and Clinical Professor of Psychiatry at Columbia University. In the 1950s, Kardiner explored critical questions in psychoanalysis that later become integral to psychoanalytic thinking. His first major contribution concerned the impact of culture on personality. This interest arose out of his idea that the curriculum at the New York Psychoanalytic Institute should include Freud's sociological writings. Out of seminars he conducted there, in conjunction with anthropologists, he began to theorize the impact of particular social institutions on character formation in primitive societies. He developed a psycho-cultural model for the relationship between specific familial patterns and modes of mother-infant bonding and the formation of the "basic personality structure" in different cultures. Published in 1939 as The Individual and His Society, this work (along with later publications on the same subject) had a major influence on the emergence of the "culture and personality field" in anthropology and is considered to be a precursor of the object relations theory and ego psychology in psychoanalysis. Although Kardiner had obser.