| Summary: | "In 1941 Joseph W. Eaton a sociologist, expert on the subject of farmers' cooperatives visited a number of Hutterite colonies in South Dakota. What he saw convinced him that the colonies presented a unique opportunity for the study of a number of significant sociological and psychological problems. With the assistance of a grant from the National Institute of Mental Health of the United States Public Health Service, Eaton organized an interdisciplinary team which included Robert J. Weil a psychiatrist, and the writers who are psychologists, in order to evaluate the mental health of the Hutterites and to relate whatever facts were discovered to the unusual cultural pattern of the group. The present volume is a report on one part of the work of this team. Early in the project we decided that the study of the personalities of an adequate sample of normal Hutterites was essential to the understanding of the relationships between cultural pattern and mental health. The culture and personality aspect of the study therefore was the subject of a great deal of our time and energies. Underlying this interest was a keen curiosity about what lay beneath the surface of the apparently successful adjustment of Hutterites to a cultural pattern which seems to subordinate the individual to the group welfare in a rather extreme way. We anticipated that in Hutterite society, with its high evaluation of collectivism, we would find a particularly illuminating example of the way in which a group insures a high degree of conformity and minimizes disrupting deviance by its members. In the personality materials we hoped to discover what the mental health consequences of such a solution were. While the projective materials yielded a picture of Hutterite personality which was inevitably incomplete and one-sided, the side which they did reveal was particularly significant. Through these tests we were able to get behind what the Hutterites wanted to tell us about themselves and learned what they probably preferred us not to know or what they themselves were unaware of. At this covert level of personality we hoped to discover the real consequences, good and bad, of living in Hutterite society"--Foreword. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2014 APA, all rights reserved).
|
|---|