Changed sexual behavior and new definitions of gender roles on the college campus

Joseph Katz

pp. 116-139

in: Freedman (ed), Social change and personality, Berlin, Springer, 1987

Abstract

The exploration of the impulse life has always been close to the center of Nevitt Sanford's work. Authoritarianism is impulse gone haywire, with the superego assuming the force of unconscious impulse, brutal and punishing. When Nevitt turned from authoritarianism to studies of the development of college students, his eye was again very much on the vicissitudes of impulse, from impulse-riddenness to free and creative expression. The Impulse Expression scale that he, Mervin Freedman, and Harold Webster developed at Vassar is one result of his abiding interest; the scale has proved itself extremely useful both in tracing the development of individual students and in assessing the differential impact of institutions. Nevitt has been fond of saying that higher education has relied too much on the superego and too little on the id. Enlisting the emotions and the imagination can be as freeing for the advanced scholar as for the entering freshman.