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Max Horkheimer (Hrsg.): Zeitschrift für Sozialforschung, 3. Jg 1933, Heft 3 |
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patriotism on an economic basis. Loyalty toward the tribe, which is cultivated by tradition, by religious and other ideas, is grounded upon the economic interest of every member in the efficient cooperation of the tribesmen in obtaining the means of subsistence and defending the territory against the assaults of competitors. Thus the sentimental bonds which bind the groups have their ultimate basis in economic facts.
There is another social sentiment which cannot be left out of account in considering the psychical basis of primitive human social groups. The original source of aggregation, both human and animal, is the association of offspring under maternal care. The maternal family formed by mother and brood is the biological foundation of any social group. The basis of the sentiment which gives rise to maternal behaviour is, in the true sense, instinctive, for its development can be followed in the animal kingdom through purely physiological provisions, reflex reactions, the organised chain reflexes of insect behaviour, and the analogous behaviour of vertebrates up to the highly developed maternal behaviour of quadrumana. The forms of maternal behaviour in the lower cultures are strikingly similar to those exhibited by quadrumanous females. We are therefore justified in using here the much abused term "instinct", which after being grossly misapplied has rightly tended to be discarded from scientific speech in referring to human behaviour.
The operation of the maternal instinct in behaviour, as we may observe it in animals, presents certain very definite features. In most mammals it is periodic. Its manifestations are correlated with pregnancy and delivery, and it ceases to operate when the offspring has reached a condition of independence. In birds, rodents, ungulates, and carnivora, the offspring which has been tended with solicitude is driven away as soon as it reaches maturity, and the instinct is completely obliterated. The periodicity and transiency of the maternal function appears to be less sharply marked in the quadrumana among which, owing to more prolonged infancy, maternal care is also more continuous.
There is another very definite and notable character about the operation of the maternal instinct. There exists no correlation whatsoever between that operation and the fact of physiological kinship. Among all animals which manifest maternal behaviour, that behaviour is identical whether the young are own offspring of the mother or not. The strangest spectacles result from maternal solicitude for substituted offspring of entirely different species. Such foster-mother behaviour is common and marked in proportion to the high development of maternal behaviour. Commonly
Max Horkheimer (Hrsg.): Zeitschrift für Sozialforschung, 3. Jg 1933, Heft 3. Librairie Felix Alcan, Paris 1933, Seite 367. Digitale Volltext-Ausgabe bei Wikisource, URL: https://de.wikisource.org/w/index.php?title=Seite:Zeitschrift_f%C3%BCr_Sozialforschung_Jahrgang_2_Heft_3.pdf/49&oldid=- (Version vom 7.6.2022)
