An Individual's Role In Society

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individual,' the individual is both a product of society and seeks to individually shape society and stand outside of its confines. But it is a worthy caveat that even the individualistic practice of psychology and psychoanalysis, although it may be seen as one of the first creative responses to such a development of a concept of 'an individual' located in society, suggested that society created mechanisms to ensure social control of individual human instincts. Freud stated that the individual's will did not operate outside of the society of the family. At the root of familial, controlling mechanisms Freud believed was the prohibition against incest and hence the evolution of the Oedipal complex within the human mind. The collective, shaping needs of society for order and limits upon human desires spawned the incest taboo and stifled the individual's desire to continually supplant his father's role.
But rather than focusing on the so-called Freudian family marriage, it is also ...

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as having rights beyond family and function. But to achieve personal happiness often means meeting the norms and needs of one's family, peer group, and even one's nation and group identification.
After Freud, later sociologists attempted to achieve a more creative balance between the needs of the individual in past, family oriented primitive cultures and today's atomized yet still collectively generated modern life. Durkheim, although influenced by Freud saw human societal constructs as what made the human individual unlike other animals. Humans were not satisfied with mere biological satiation but strove for social approbation as well as survival. In fact, the more one human had, ...

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