Bakan’s Bi-Polar Constructs: Agency and Communion

Abstract

This paper concerns itself with a presentation of Bakan's bi-polar constructs—agency and communion—and the Inventory purporting to measure these. Agency is seen as individualism, separation, selfishness, alienation, mastery, denial, masculine and a correlate of dysfunction. Communion is viewed as alterocentric, participation, community, mystery, affirmation of feeling, feminine and the mitigator of agency. Differential response to the Inventory by well-differentiated groups reflects on the credibility of Bakan's key theoretical assumption that the behavioral correlates of unmitigated agency were worthy of the psychologist's concern.