In this same early essay, Freud deals with two orders of neuroses. In the case of the first of these, psycho-neuroses, he f ound inquiry into the current sexual practices of patients to be of little value. As early as 1898, Freud believed such psycho-neuroses to be rooted in the experiences of infancy and childhood […]

Perhaps more than anyone else, Freud must be given credit for placing sexuality on the intellectual and scientific agendas of the twentieth century. Within the body of his work there are persistent references to sexual motives and meanings, yet there is actually very little direct discussion of overt sexual behavior or the qualities of sexual […]

Unremembered youth INTRODUCTION Adolescence, a concept just a century old, encompasses dramatic variations across time and cultures at almost every level of application. Adolescence locates an age group at the margins of formal power in ways that legitimate the creation of a special social status. Like many social science concepts, adolescence can be assumed to […]

While not always specifying the full range of expected behaviors, no social role is without life-cycle requirements in the double sense of, first, either having entry and exiting requirements that are life-cycle stage-specific or, second, having expectations that systematically vary with life-cycle stage attributions. Some roles are very specific about age requirements: “you cannot until […]

The very concept of the scripting of sexual behavior implies a rejection of the idea that the sexual represents a very special, if not unique, quality of motivation. From a “scripting perspective” (Simon and Gagnon 1969), the sexual is not viewed as an intrinsically significant aspect of human behavior; rather, in this perspective the sexual […]

The relevance of the three levels of scripting—cultural scenarios, interpersonal scripts, and intrapsychic scripts—is far from identical in all social settings or for all individuals in any given setting. In traditional or paradigmatic settings, cultural scenarios and a limited repertoire of what appear to be ritualized improvisations may be all that is required for understanding […]

By the end of the nineteenth century, the idea of a “true self’—a self that existed behind the roles that persons performed in their changing daily lives, roles that existed somewhere between the self and the demands and confusions of social life—was in the preliminary stages of intellectual articulation and existential diffusion. Particularly critical to […]

When complexities, conflicts, and ambiguities become endemic at the level of cultural scenarios, much greater demands are placed on the actor than can be met by the adaptive possibilities of interpersonal scripts alone. The need to script one’s behavior, as well as the implicit assumption of the scripted nature of the behavior of others, is […]

The very possibility or necessity for creating interpersonal scripts transforms the social actor from being exclusively an actor trained in his or her role(s) by adding to his or her burdens of interaction the task of being a partial scriptwriter or adapter. Actors become involved in shaping the materials of relevant cultural scenarios into scripts […]

Cultural scenarios are the instructional guides that exist at the level of collective life. All institutions and institutionalized arrangements can be read as semiotic systems through which the requirements and practices of specific roles are given. Cultural scenarios essentially instruct in the narrative requirements of specific roles. They provide the understandings that make role entry, […]