Are you an EPFL student looking for a semester project?
Work with us on data science and visualisation projects, and deploy your project as an app on top of Graph Search.
Concept
Authoritarian personality
Summary
The authoritarian personality is a personality type characterized by a disposition to treat authority figures with unquestioning obedience and respect. Conceptually, the term authoritarian personality originated from the writings of Erich Fromm, and usually is applied to people who exhibit a strict and oppressive personality towards their subordinates.
In his 1941 book Fear of Freedom, a psychological exploration of modern politics, Erich Fromm described authoritarianism a defence mechanism.
In The Authoritarian Personality (1950), Theodor W. Adorno, Else Frenkel-Brunswik, Daniel Levinson, and Nevitt Sanford proposed a personality type that involved the "potentially fascistic individual." The historical background that influenced the theoretical development of the authoritarian personality included the rise of fascism in the 1930s, the Second World War (1939–1945), and the Holocaust, which indicated that the fascistic individual was psychologically susceptible to the ideology of antisemitism and to the emotional appeal of anti-democratic politics. Known as the Berkeley studies, the researches of Adorno and Frenkel-Brunswik, and of Levinson and Sanford concentrated upon prejudice, which they studied within psychoanalytic and psychosocial frameworks of Freudian and Frommian theories.
Although the term was first coined in 1950, different portrayals of the authoritarian personality type have been made before. One example is Heinrich Mann's novel Der Untertan, which draws its inspiration for its authoritarian protagonist from the German Kaiser Wilhelm II. The book shows that the idea for an authoritarian personality type predates fascism.
The authoritarian personality has a strict superego, which controls a weak ego that is unable to cope with the strong impulses of the id. The resulting intrapsychic conflicts cause personal insecurities, which result in the superego adhering to externally imposed conventional norms (conventionalism), and unquestioning obedience to the authorities who impose and administer the social norms of society (authoritarian submission).
Official source
About this result
This page is automatically generated and may contain information that is not correct, complete, up-to-date, or relevant to your search query. The same applies to every other page on this website. Please make sure to verify the information with EPFL's official sources.