The paradigm of the relations of property

According to one of the assumptions of the production-centered theory of personality (see above), social formations make progress through crises, in the course of which person·ality also develops.

At the lowest ebb of its crisis, the Department of Personality Psychology might have realized (which it did not, however, since this kind of realization is apt to take place only retrospectively) that it had made some progress in a purely psychological conceptualization social categorization and categorizational signification and in elaborating a purely psychological method, combining developmental and social psychological methods.

The crisis had not come to an end, however, as became explicit during the periodic thematic discussions held in the Department: none of the members wished to give up motivation research, nor to put up with the professional-ideological illusions which a purely psychological research on motivations would have imposed upon them.

The production-centered theory of personality considered the motivated development of personality in its relation to crisis and revolutionary transformations of social totality. At the same timc, the Department involved in a crisis of its own microsocial formation, undertook its transformation in a way which resulted in development. While running the field investigations which had been launched at that time (see below), the Department members were also confronted by microsocial forms in which as a rule they found that, if their accumulating crisis failed to erupt, development of the personality might stagnate or that an evolving but prolonged crisis might lead to self-destruction and ultimately to suicide, while the resolution of the crisis could bring about the development of the personality. It was thus with reference to microsocial forms that a hypothesis was set forth suggesting that the realization of these possibilities did not depend on what typological characteristics mediate as "inner conditions" the external effect of the "social environment" in a given person. The earlier conception was that the mediating positiòn was that "held by the person in the global social structure of the relations of production", in particular, with respect to belonging to the class of the propertied or the propertyless. It was vital for the prospects of a productioncentered study of personality that microsocial forms and the processes that take place within them should be deseribable by the paradigm of relations of property.

The model, whose possible application to microsocial relationships is being examined, shows the following relationship, revealed by Marx's production-centered philosophy of history historical materialism: possession of certain means of production ensures certain positions in the global social structure, positions permitting ruling this structure by political and ideological means; the aim of such a rule is essentially to maintain the very structure in which precisely the possession of the means of production is what reinforces the dominant position. This is a paradoxical formation, whose principle of organization is determined by those who occupy dominant positions and who in turn are determined to occupy dominant positions by the principle of organization itself. An investigation into the question of whether such paradoxical formations are to be found in microsocial relationshisp as well leads at first to the result that there are only paradoxical formations since this principle of organization proves in a first analysis to be that which serves to perform social categorizations which, then, is characterized by the categorization paradox (Garai, 1976b; 1977a; Erœs and Garai, 1978). This is so because the subject who performs the categorization belongs to the object he categorizes, and at the same time is only detached from it as a result of this categorization (as "we" or "I").

After closer investigation, it turned out that within all formations (groups, roles) which in social psychology have traditionally been regarded as possessing their given principles of organization, independently of the persons composing them, a dominant position exists which in fact determines the principles of organization. Thus, for example; the principle of organization of a role relationship like that between doctor and patient is determined from the position of the doctor: it is always here that is decided what the criteria are for being doctor or patient (Garai, 1975).

The perspectives of the motivated development of the personality are mediated by the position a person occupies in the structure analyzed by the paradigm of property relations during the given historical phase (consolidated, pre-crisis, in crisis, or consolidating after crisis) of the microsoeial formation (Járó, 1975a; Járó and Veres, 1976a and 1976b).

The possibilities offered by å paradigmatic approach to the relations of property resolved the dilemma of a "production-centered,

approach" vs. "concrete research" and also the crisis that stemmed from it.

Thus came to an end the period in the work of the Department of Personality Psy­chology during which its principal task had been to promote the assimilation of the non (or ñot mainly) psychological set of production-centered concepts into psychology. This effort had specifically concerned the problem areas not tackled by the Vygotsky school.