Page:Margaret Mead - Coming of age in Samoa; a psychological study of primitive youth for western civilisation.pdf/247

 sult. History, in the form of the last war, provided a stupendous illustration of the great number of maimed and handicapped individuals whose defects showed only under very special and terrible stress. Without the war, there is no reason to believe that many of these shellshocked individuals might not have gone through life. unremarked; the bad start, the fears, the complexes, the bad conditionings of early childhood, would never have borne positive enough fruit to attract the attention of society.

The implications of this observation are double. Samoa's lack of difficult situations, of conflicting choice, of situations in which fear or pain or anxiety are sharpened to a knife edge will probably account for a large part of the absence of psychological maladjustment. Just as a low-grade moron would not be hopelessly handicapped in Samoa, although he would be a public charge in a large American city, so individuals with slight nervous instability have a much more favourable chance in Samoa than in America. Furthermore the amount of individualisation, the range of variation, is much smaller in Samoa. Within our wider limits of deviation there are inevitably found weak and non-resistant temperaments. And just as our society shows a greater development of personality, so also it shows a larger proportion of individuals who have succumbed before the complicated exactions of modern life.

Nevertheless, it is possible that there are factors in the early environment of the Samoan child which are