Child Training & Personality: A Cross Cultural Study

I must disagree with the first reviewer. Yes, the psychoanalytic ideas are discredited, but a lot of the credit goes to this book. Whiting and Child tested Freud's notion of fixation at various psychosexual stages by looking at child-rearing practices in a wide range of cultures in relation to adult beliefs and behavior patterns. Only the oral fixation passed the test. Cultures with more difficult weaning procedures tend to have orally-based adult beliefs about sickness and health. The U.S. is a good example: we have very early weaning by world standards, and we also tend to think you get sick from ingesting something bad (germs, for example), and you get cured by taking pills. Supposed anal and genital fixations, however, seemed not to have implications for the adult. Whiting and Child's work remains a great example of an underused approach to cross-cultural research.