According to social sciences, an individual is chiefly a product of the society in which he or she lives. One's personality is shaped more by social circumstances than by biological factors. Gradually, these burgeoning social and cultural doctrines began to seep into psychology and psychoanalysis. A number of followers of Frivol who became dissatisfied with what they considered to be his myopia regarding the social conditions of personality withdrew their allegiance from classic psychoanalysis. Among those who provided psychoanalytic theory with the twentieth century look of social psychology are the four well known psychologists. Alfred Adler, Karen Horney, Erich Fromm and Harry Stack Sullivan. Alfred Adler, and the various concepts on which his theory of personality, which he called individual psychology, was formulated have been discussed in the previous chapters. The ideas and concepts of Fromm, Horney and Sullivan form the contents of the present chapter.
From acknowledged that Adler was the first psychoanalyst to emphasize the fundamental social nature of humans. Later, Horney and Fromm took up the cudgels against the strong instinctivist orientation of psychoanalysis and insisted upon the relevance of social psychological variables for personality theory. Finally, Harry Stack Sullivan, in his theory of interpersonal relations, consolidated the position of a personality theory grounded in social processes. Although each of the theories has its own distinctive assumptions and concepts, there are numerous parallels among them that have been painted out by various writers of the four theorists, Sullivan was the most independent of prevailing psychoanalytic decriers. Although, earlier he used the Freudian frame work, in his later work he developed a theoretical system that deviated markedly from the Freudian one. He was profoundly influenced by anthropology and social psychology. Both, Horney and Groom, on the other hand, kept well within the province of psychoanalysis in their thinking. Horey and Fromm are usually referred to as revisionists or neo-Freudians. Neither of them engaged in developing a new theory of personality: rather they regarded themselves as renovators and elaborators of an old theory. Sullivan was much more of an innovator. He was a highly original thinker.
Fromm was heavily influenced by the writings of Karl Marx. In his book, "Beyond the chains of Illusion". (1962), Fromm compared the ideas of Freud and Marx, noting their contradictions and attempting a synthesis. Formm regarded Marx as a more profound thinker than Freud and used psychoanalysis mainly to fill in the gaps in Marx. Although Fromm could be called a Marxian personality theorist, he himself preferred to be labeled as dialectic humanist. Fromm's writings have been influenced by his extensive knowledge of history, sociology, literature and philosophy.
The essential theme of Fromm's writings is that a person feels lonely and isolated because he or she has become separated from nature and from other people. This condition of isolation is not found in any other species of animal; it is the distinctive human situation.
In his book "Escape from Freedom" (1941), Fromm developed the thesis that as humans have gained more freedom through out the ages, they have also felt more alone. Freedom then becomes ergative condition from which they try to escape. The healthy strategy is for the prson to unite with other people in the spirit of love and shared work. The unhealthy option is for the person to attemp to "Escape From Freedom" one can attempt to escape through three means.
Authoritarianism Either-a masochistic to powerful others or a sadistic attempt?
To become a powerful authority. A second escape is through destructiveness the attempt?
To escape from powerlessness by destroying the social against and institutions that produce?
A sense of helplessness and isolation. The more one's urge to grow is frustrated, the more destructive he or she will become. This analysis corresponds very well to the increasing prevalence of wanton violence among members of disadvantaged classes in our society. The third mode of escape is through automation conformity, in which one renounces selfhood by adopting a "pseudoself" based on the expectations of others. In the healthy case, humans see their freedom to develop a better society. In the unhealthy cases, they acquire a new bondage.
Fromm pointed out that any form of society that humans have fashioned, represents an attempt to resolve the basic contradiction of humans. This contradiction consists of a person being both a part of nature and separate from it, of being both an animal and a human being. As an animal, one has certain physiological needs one must satisfy. As a human being one possess self-awareness, reason, and imagination. Experiences that are uniquely human are feelings of tenderness, love and compassion; attitudes of interest, responsibility, identity, integrity, vulnerability, transcendence and freedom and values and norms. The two aspects of a person being both animal and human constitute the basic conditions of human existence. The undertaking of man's psyche must be based on the analysis of man's needs stemming from the conditions of his existence.
Five specific needs rise from the conditions of human existence; the need for relatedness, the need for transcendence, the need for rootedness, the need for identity, and the need for a frame of orientation. The need for relatedness stems from the fact that humans, in becoming human, have been torn from the animals primary union with nature: the animals is equipped by nature to cope with the very conditions it is to meet, but humans with their power to reason and imagine have lost this intimate interdependence with nature. In place of those instinctive.
Ties with nature that animal possess, humans have to create their own relationships, the most satisfying being these that are based upon productive love. Productive love always implies mutual care, responsibility, respect and understanding.
The urge for transcendence refers to a person's need to rise above his or her animal nature, to become a creative person instead of remaining a creature. If the creative urges are thwarted, a person becomes a destroyer. Fromm pointed out that love and hate are not antithetical drives, they are both answers to a person need to transcend his or her animal nature. Animals can neither love nor hate, but humans can.
Human desire natural roots, they want to be an integral part of the world, to Feel that they belong. As children, they are rooted to their mothers, but if this relationship persists past childhood, it is considered to be an unwholesome fixation. A person finds the most satisfying and healthy roots in a feeling of skinship with other men and women. But one also wants to have a sense of personal identity, to be a unique individual. If one cannot attain this goal through individual creative effort, he or she may obtain a certain mark of distinction by identifying with another person or group The slave identifies with the master, the citizen with the country, the worker with the company. In this case, the sense of identity arises from belonging to someone and not from being someone.
Humans also need to have a frame of reference, a stable and consistent way of perceiving and comprehending the world. The frame of reference that they develop may be primarily rational, primarily irrational, or it may have elements of both.
Finally, Fromm (1973) introduced a sixth basic need, the need for excitation and stimulation. In describing this need, he drew a distinction between simple and activating stimuli. Simple stimuli produce an automatic, almost reflex, response, and they are best thought of in terms of drives, when we are hungry, we eat. Humans frequently become bored with simple stimuli. Activating stimuli, incontrast, entail striving for goals.
For Fromm, these needs are purely human and purely objective. They are not found in animals and they are not derived from observing what humans say they want. Nor are these strivings created by society; rather they have become embedded in human nature through evolution. Fromm believed that the specific manifestations of these needs, the actual ways in which a person realizes inner potentialities are determined by "the social arrangements under which he lives". One's personality develops in accordance with the opportunities that a particular society offers one. A person's adjustment to society usually represents a compromise between inner needs and outer demands.He or she develops a social character in keeping with the requirements of the society.
Fromm identified and described five social character types that are found in todays society; preceptive, exploitative, hoarding, marketing, and productive. These types represent the different ways in which individuals can relate to the world and to each other. Only the last of these was considered by him as healthy. Any given individual, is a blend of these types of orientations toward the world although one or two of the orientations may stand out prominently then others.
Fromm also described a six pair of character types, the necrophilous, who is attracted to and is in love with life. In his final book. Fromm added a distinction between the "having" and "being" orientations toward life. A 'having' orientation reflects a person's competitive concern with possessing and consuming resources. This orientation is fostered by technological societies. The 'being' mode, focus on what one is not what one has and on sharing rather than on competition. Such an orientation will develop only if society encourages it.
From the stand point of proper functioning of a particular society, it is absolutely essential that the child's character be shaped to fit the needs of the society. The task of the parents and of education is to make the child want to act as it has to act in a given economic, political, as social system is to be maintained. By making demands upon humans that are contrary to their nature, society warps and frustrates humans, It alienates them from this "human situation" and denes them the fulfillment of the basic conditions of existence.
Fromm also pointed out that when a society changes in any important aspect, the change is likely to produce dislocations in the social character of people. The old character structure does not fit the new society which adds to a persons sense of alienation and despair. One is cut off from the traditional ties, and until one can develop new roots and relations, one feels lost.
The problem of a person's relations to society was one of great concern to Fromm. He was utterly convinced of the validity of the following propositions: (1) humans have an essential inborn nature (2)) society is created by humans in order to fulfill this essential nature (3) no society that has yet been devised meets the basic needs of human existence and (4) it is possible to create such a society.
Fromm conducted one large-scale empirical investigation to illustrate that character (personality) affects and is affected b social structure and social change. In 1957, he initiated this social psychological study of a Mexican village to test his theory of social character.
Before the influence of Technology and industrialization teached the village, there were only to main classess; the land owners and the peasants. The productive exploitative type existed only as a deviant type (the business people). It was this type, that took an initiative in making the fruits of technology available to the villagers, becoming thereby symbols of progress and leaders of the community. They provided cheap entertainment in the form of movies, radio and television, and factory are commodities. As a consequence the poor peasants were weaned away from their cultural values and habits, without gaining many of the material advantages of a technological society. And three main social character types emerged: the productive-hoarding(land owners); the productive-exploitative (business people; and the unproductive-receptive the poor peasants or workers).
The basic evil experienced by the child provokes resentment of basic hostility. This in turn produces a dilemma or conflict for the child, because expressing hostility would risk punishment and would paradise his or her receipt of parental love and leads to repression of hostility. Repression exasperate the conflict, leading to a vicious cycle; anxiety produces an excessive need for affection; when these needs are not met the child feels rejected, and the anxiety and hostility intensify, and are once again repressed. The child is locked into a circle of intensifying distress and unproductive behaviour.
The insecure anxious child develops various strategies by which to cope with its feelings of isolation and helplessness. It may become hostile and seek to average itself against those who have mistreated it. The child may become overly submissive in order to win back the love it feels it has lost. It may develop an unrealistic, idealized picture of itself in order to compensate for its feeling of inferiority. The child may try to bribe others onto loving it. It may use threats to force people to love it. It may wallow in self-pity to gain people's sympathy. If the child does not got love, it may seek to obtain power, love, or may seek to obtain power over others. In that way it compensates for its sense of helplessness, finds an outlet for hostility, and is able to exploit people. Or the child becomes highly competitive, in which the winning is far more important than the achievement. It may turn its aggression on the world and belittle itself.
Any one of these strategies may become a more or less permanent fixtures in the personality. A particular strategy may assume the character of a drive or a need in the personality dynamics. Horney presented a list of ten needs that are acquired as a consequence of trying to find solutions for the problem of disturbed human relationships She called these needs "neurotic" because they are irrational solution to the problem:
Alienation:in her later books, Horney emphasized an alternative coping strategy on the part of the neurotic. That is, the neurotic may defensively turn away form the real self toward some idealized alternative. In the process, Horney emphasizes alienation as the consequence of the child's attempt to cope with basic anxiety. Anxiety and hostility lead the child to regard his or her "real self" as inadequate, unworthy and unlovable. Given his negative self image a "despited self" emerges. The child responds defensively to this despicable self by creating and striving to obtain an idealized image of the person he or she should be This "idealized self" exists in conjunction with a series of stringent self expectations creating what Horney termed "the tyranny of the should" and the "search for glory". The neurotic pursues the self-esteem he or she is lacking by striving to achieve an unrealistic version of the person he or she ought to be.
In addition to these central strategies, Horney described a series of auxiliary approaches to the neurotic conflict. Thus, neurotics may defensively develop "blind spots" or "compartments" as they choose not to see discrepancies between their behaviour and their "idealized self". Or they may engage in "rationalization", "cynicism", or "Obsessive self-control" As a final strategy, the neurotic may attempt to deal with inner conflicts by externalizing them. That is, they hold the external factors responsible for their difficulties, in the process creating more conflicts between themselves and the outside world.
All of these conflicts are avoidable and resolvable if the child is raised in a home where there is security, trust, love, respect, tolerance, and warmth that is Horney did not feel that conflict is built into the nature of humans and is therefore inevitable. Conflict arises out of social conditions.
Is that "personality is the relatively enduring pattern of recurrent interpersonal situations which characterize ha human life". Personality is a hypothetical entity that cannot be isolated from interperdonal situations, and interpersonal behaviour is all that can be observed as personality. From the first day of life, the baby is a part of an interpersonal situation, and throughout the rest of its life it remains a member of a social field.
Sullivan was born on a farm near Norwich, New York, on February 21, 1892 and died on January 14, 1949 in Paris France. He received his medical degree from the Chicago College of Medicine armed forces during world war I. From 1923 until the 1930's he was associated with the medical school of the university of Maryland and with the Sheppard and Enoch Prait Hospital in Towson, Maryland. It was during this period of his life that Sullivan conducted investigations of schizophrenia. He had 75 hours of analysis while he was a medical student later he had formal analytic training with Clara Thompson. In 1936 helped found and became director of the Washington School of Pscychiatry. The journal "Psychiatry" began publication in 1938 to promote Sullivan's its co-editor and editor until his death. Sullivan began to formulate his theory of interpersonal relations in 1929 and had consolidated his thinking by the mid 1930's.
Sullivan invested repeatedly that personality is a purely hypothetical entity, "an illusion" that cannot be observed as studied apart from interpersonal situations The unit of study is the interpersonal situation and not the person. The organization of personality consists of interpersonal events rather than intrapsychic ones. Personality only manifests itself when the person is behaving in relation to one or more other individuals, who may be present or not present, real as illusory figures. Perceiving, remembering, thinking, imagining and all of the other psychological processes nocturnal dreams are interpersonal, since they usually reflect the dreamer's relationship with other people.
Although Sullivan granted personality only hypothetical status, none of the less he asserted that it is a dynamic centre of various processes that occur in a series of interpersonal fields. The principle ones are dyanmism, personifications and cognitive processes.
Dynamisms: A dynamism is the smallest unit that can be employed in the study of the individual. It is defined as the relatively enduring pattern of energy transformations, which recurrently characterize the organisms in its duration as a living organism. An energy transformation is any form of behaviour. It may be overt and public, like talking, or covert and private, like thinking. Because a dynamism is a pattern of behaviour that endures and recurs, it is about the same thing as habit. The dynamisms that are distinctively human in character are those that characterize one's interpersonal relations. A child who is afraid of strangers has a dynamism of fear. Any habitual reaction toward one or more persons, whether it be in the form of feeling, an attitude or an overt action, constitutes a dynamism. All people have the same basic dynamisms, but the mode of expression of a dynamism varies in accordance with the situation and the life experience of the individual. A dynamism usually employs a particular zone of the body by means of which it interacts with the environment. Most dynamic serve the purpose of satisfying the basic needs of the organism. However there is an important dyanmisms that develops as a result of anxiety. This is called the dynamism of the self or self system.
The Self System:
Anxiety is a product of interpersonal relations, being transmitted originally from the mother to the infant and later in life by thread to one's security. To avoid or minimize actual or potential anxiety, people adopt various types of protective measures and supervisory controls over their behaviour. These security measures form the self system that sanctions certain forms of behaviour, forbids other forms, and excludes from consciousness still other forms that are too alien and disgusting to even be considered. Through these processes, the self system acts as a filter for awareness Sullivan employed the term selective attention for the unconscious refusal to attend to anxiety generating events and feelings. The self system as the guardian of one's security tends to become isolated from the rest of the personality, it excludes information that is incongruous with its present organization and fails thereby to profit from experience. Since the self guards the person from anxiety, it is held in high esteem and is protected from criticism. As the self system grows in complexity and independence, it prevents the person from making objective judgments of his or her own behaviour and it glosses over obvious contradictions between what the person really is and what the self system says he or she is. The more experiences people have with anxiety, the more inflated their self system becomes and the more it becomes dissociated from the rest of the personality. Although the system serves the useful purpose of reducing anxiety, it interferes with one's ability to live constructively with others.
Sullivan believed that the self system is a product of the irrational aspects of the society.
Personifications:
A personification is an image that an individual has of him or herself or of another person. It is a complex of feelings, attitudes and conceptions that grow out of experiences with need satisfaction and anxiety. The baby develops a good personification of the mother by being nursed and cared for by her. Any interpersonal relationship that involves satisfaction tends to build up a favourable picture of the satisfying agent. On the other hand, the baby's personification of a bad mother results form experiences with her that evoke anxiety. The anxious mother becomes personified as the bad mother. Ultimately, these two personifiactions of the mother along with any others that may be formed, such as the seductive mother or the overprotective mother fuse together to form a complex personification. These pictures that we carry in our heads are rarely accurate descriptions of the people to whom they refer. They are formed, in the first place to cope with people in fairly isolated interpersonal situations but once formed, they usually persist and influence our attitudes toward other people. Thus, a person who personifies his or her father as a mean and dictatorial man may project this same personifiaction on to other older men.
Consequently, something that serves an anxiety-reducing function in early life may interfere with one's interpersonal relations later in life.
Personifications of the self, such as good-me or bad-me follow the same principles as personifiactions of other. The good-me personification results form interpersonal experiences that are rewarding in character, the bad me personification from anxiety arousing situations. And like personifications of other people, these self personifications tend to stand in the way of objective self evaluation.
Personifications that are shared by a number of people are called stereotypes. Those are consensually validated conceptions that have wide acceptance among the members of a society and are handed down from generation to generation.
Cognitive Processes:
Sullivans unique contribution regarding the place of cognition in the affairs of personality is his threefold classification of experience. Experience, he said occurs in three modes: prototaxic, parataxic, and sytaxic. Prototaxic experience may be regarded as the discrete series of momentary states of the sensitive organism. They have no necessary connection among themselves and possess. No meaning for the experiencing person. The prototaxic mode of experience is found in its purest form during the early months of life and is the necessary precondition for the appearance of the other two modes.
The parataxic mode of thinking consists of seeing causal relationship between events that occur at about the same time but are not logically related. Sullivan believed that much of our thinking does not advance beyond the level of parataxic; we see casual connections between experiences that have nothing to do with one another. All superstions are examples of parataxic thinking.
The third and highest mode of behaviour is syntaxic, which consists of consensually validated symbol activity, especially of a verbal nature. A consensually validated symbol is one that has been agreed upon by group of people as having standard meaning. Words and numbers are the best example of such symbols. The syntaxic mode produces logical order among experiences and enables people to communicate with one another.
In addition to this formulation of modes of experience, Sullivan emphasized the importance of foresight in cognitive functioning. Fore right depends upon one's memory of the past and interpretation of the present.
Erich Fromm
Erich Fromm was born in Frankfurt, Germany in 1900 and studied psychology and sociology at the universities of Heidelberg, Frankfurt and Munich. After receiving a Ph. D degree from Heidelberg in 1922 he was trained in psychoanalysis in Munich and at the famous Berlin Psychoanalytic Institute. He went to the United States in 1933 as a lecturer at the Chicago Psychoanalytic institute and then entered private practice in New York city. He taught at a number of universities and institute in the U.S and in Mexico. He moved to Switzerland in 1976, where he died in 1980.Fromm was heavily influenced by the writings of Karl Marx. In his book, "Beyond the chains of Illusion". (1962), Fromm compared the ideas of Freud and Marx, noting their contradictions and attempting a synthesis. Formm regarded Marx as a more profound thinker than Freud and used psychoanalysis mainly to fill in the gaps in Marx. Although Fromm could be called a Marxian personality theorist, he himself preferred to be labeled as dialectic humanist. Fromm's writings have been influenced by his extensive knowledge of history, sociology, literature and philosophy.
The essential theme of Fromm's writings is that a person feels lonely and isolated because he or she has become separated from nature and from other people. This condition of isolation is not found in any other species of animal; it is the distinctive human situation.
In his book "Escape from Freedom" (1941), Fromm developed the thesis that as humans have gained more freedom through out the ages, they have also felt more alone. Freedom then becomes ergative condition from which they try to escape. The healthy strategy is for the prson to unite with other people in the spirit of love and shared work. The unhealthy option is for the person to attemp to "Escape From Freedom" one can attempt to escape through three means.
Authoritarianism Either-a masochistic to powerful others or a sadistic attempt?
To become a powerful authority. A second escape is through destructiveness the attempt?
To escape from powerlessness by destroying the social against and institutions that produce?
A sense of helplessness and isolation. The more one's urge to grow is frustrated, the more destructive he or she will become. This analysis corresponds very well to the increasing prevalence of wanton violence among members of disadvantaged classes in our society. The third mode of escape is through automation conformity, in which one renounces selfhood by adopting a "pseudoself" based on the expectations of others. In the healthy case, humans see their freedom to develop a better society. In the unhealthy cases, they acquire a new bondage.
Fromm pointed out that any form of society that humans have fashioned, represents an attempt to resolve the basic contradiction of humans. This contradiction consists of a person being both a part of nature and separate from it, of being both an animal and a human being. As an animal, one has certain physiological needs one must satisfy. As a human being one possess self-awareness, reason, and imagination. Experiences that are uniquely human are feelings of tenderness, love and compassion; attitudes of interest, responsibility, identity, integrity, vulnerability, transcendence and freedom and values and norms. The two aspects of a person being both animal and human constitute the basic conditions of human existence. The undertaking of man's psyche must be based on the analysis of man's needs stemming from the conditions of his existence.
Five specific needs rise from the conditions of human existence; the need for relatedness, the need for transcendence, the need for rootedness, the need for identity, and the need for a frame of orientation. The need for relatedness stems from the fact that humans, in becoming human, have been torn from the animals primary union with nature: the animals is equipped by nature to cope with the very conditions it is to meet, but humans with their power to reason and imagine have lost this intimate interdependence with nature. In place of those instinctive.
Ties with nature that animal possess, humans have to create their own relationships, the most satisfying being these that are based upon productive love. Productive love always implies mutual care, responsibility, respect and understanding.
The urge for transcendence refers to a person's need to rise above his or her animal nature, to become a creative person instead of remaining a creature. If the creative urges are thwarted, a person becomes a destroyer. Fromm pointed out that love and hate are not antithetical drives, they are both answers to a person need to transcend his or her animal nature. Animals can neither love nor hate, but humans can.
Human desire natural roots, they want to be an integral part of the world, to Feel that they belong. As children, they are rooted to their mothers, but if this relationship persists past childhood, it is considered to be an unwholesome fixation. A person finds the most satisfying and healthy roots in a feeling of skinship with other men and women. But one also wants to have a sense of personal identity, to be a unique individual. If one cannot attain this goal through individual creative effort, he or she may obtain a certain mark of distinction by identifying with another person or group The slave identifies with the master, the citizen with the country, the worker with the company. In this case, the sense of identity arises from belonging to someone and not from being someone.
Humans also need to have a frame of reference, a stable and consistent way of perceiving and comprehending the world. The frame of reference that they develop may be primarily rational, primarily irrational, or it may have elements of both.
Finally, Fromm (1973) introduced a sixth basic need, the need for excitation and stimulation. In describing this need, he drew a distinction between simple and activating stimuli. Simple stimuli produce an automatic, almost reflex, response, and they are best thought of in terms of drives, when we are hungry, we eat. Humans frequently become bored with simple stimuli. Activating stimuli, incontrast, entail striving for goals.
For Fromm, these needs are purely human and purely objective. They are not found in animals and they are not derived from observing what humans say they want. Nor are these strivings created by society; rather they have become embedded in human nature through evolution. Fromm believed that the specific manifestations of these needs, the actual ways in which a person realizes inner potentialities are determined by "the social arrangements under which he lives". One's personality develops in accordance with the opportunities that a particular society offers one. A person's adjustment to society usually represents a compromise between inner needs and outer demands.He or she develops a social character in keeping with the requirements of the society.
Fromm identified and described five social character types that are found in todays society; preceptive, exploitative, hoarding, marketing, and productive. These types represent the different ways in which individuals can relate to the world and to each other. Only the last of these was considered by him as healthy. Any given individual, is a blend of these types of orientations toward the world although one or two of the orientations may stand out prominently then others.
Fromm also described a six pair of character types, the necrophilous, who is attracted to and is in love with life. In his final book. Fromm added a distinction between the "having" and "being" orientations toward life. A 'having' orientation reflects a person's competitive concern with possessing and consuming resources. This orientation is fostered by technological societies. The 'being' mode, focus on what one is not what one has and on sharing rather than on competition. Such an orientation will develop only if society encourages it.
From the stand point of proper functioning of a particular society, it is absolutely essential that the child's character be shaped to fit the needs of the society. The task of the parents and of education is to make the child want to act as it has to act in a given economic, political, as social system is to be maintained. By making demands upon humans that are contrary to their nature, society warps and frustrates humans, It alienates them from this "human situation" and denes them the fulfillment of the basic conditions of existence.
Fromm also pointed out that when a society changes in any important aspect, the change is likely to produce dislocations in the social character of people. The old character structure does not fit the new society which adds to a persons sense of alienation and despair. One is cut off from the traditional ties, and until one can develop new roots and relations, one feels lost.
The problem of a person's relations to society was one of great concern to Fromm. He was utterly convinced of the validity of the following propositions: (1) humans have an essential inborn nature (2)) society is created by humans in order to fulfill this essential nature (3) no society that has yet been devised meets the basic needs of human existence and (4) it is possible to create such a society.
Fromm conducted one large-scale empirical investigation to illustrate that character (personality) affects and is affected b social structure and social change. In 1957, he initiated this social psychological study of a Mexican village to test his theory of social character.
Before the influence of Technology and industrialization teached the village, there were only to main classess; the land owners and the peasants. The productive exploitative type existed only as a deviant type (the business people). It was this type, that took an initiative in making the fruits of technology available to the villagers, becoming thereby symbols of progress and leaders of the community. They provided cheap entertainment in the form of movies, radio and television, and factory are commodities. As a consequence the poor peasants were weaned away from their cultural values and habits, without gaining many of the material advantages of a technological society. And three main social character types emerged: the productive-hoarding(land owners); the productive-exploitative (business people; and the unproductive-receptive the poor peasants or workers).
Karen Horney
Karen Horney was born in Hamburg, Germany, n September 16, 1885 and died in New York City, on December 4, 1952. She received her medical training in the university of Berlin and was associated with the Berlin Psychoanalytic Institute from 1918 to 1932. She came to the United States and was the Associate Director of the Chicago Psychoanalytic Institute for two years. In 1934 she moved to New York,, where she practiced psychonalysis and taught at the New York Psychoanalytic Institute. Becoming dissatisfied with orthodox psychoanalysis, she and other of similar convictions founded the Association for the Advancement of Psychoanalysis and the American Institute of Psychoanalysis.Basic Anxiety:
According to Horney, children naturally experience anxiety, helplessness, and vulnerability, in much the some way that Alder described inferiority as a childhood experience without loving guidance to help children to cope with threats imposed by nature and society, they may develop the basic anxiety, that is Horney's primary theoretical concept. Basic anxiety refers to a feelings the child has of being isolated and helpless in a potentially hostile world. A wide range of adverse factors in the environment, which Horney terms as basic evil, can produce this insecurity in a child, indifference, lack of respect, lack of proper guidance and so on. In general anything that disturbs the security of the child in relation to his or her parents produces basic anxiety.The basic evil experienced by the child provokes resentment of basic hostility. This in turn produces a dilemma or conflict for the child, because expressing hostility would risk punishment and would paradise his or her receipt of parental love and leads to repression of hostility. Repression exasperate the conflict, leading to a vicious cycle; anxiety produces an excessive need for affection; when these needs are not met the child feels rejected, and the anxiety and hostility intensify, and are once again repressed. The child is locked into a circle of intensifying distress and unproductive behaviour.
The insecure anxious child develops various strategies by which to cope with its feelings of isolation and helplessness. It may become hostile and seek to average itself against those who have mistreated it. The child may become overly submissive in order to win back the love it feels it has lost. It may develop an unrealistic, idealized picture of itself in order to compensate for its feeling of inferiority. The child may try to bribe others onto loving it. It may use threats to force people to love it. It may wallow in self-pity to gain people's sympathy. If the child does not got love, it may seek to obtain power, love, or may seek to obtain power over others. In that way it compensates for its sense of helplessness, finds an outlet for hostility, and is able to exploit people. Or the child becomes highly competitive, in which the winning is far more important than the achievement. It may turn its aggression on the world and belittle itself.
The neurotic needs:
Any one of these strategies may become a more or less permanent fixtures in the personality. A particular strategy may assume the character of a drive or a need in the personality dynamics. Horney presented a list of ten needs that are acquired as a consequence of trying to find solutions for the problem of disturbed human relationships She called these needs "neurotic" because they are irrational solution to the problem:
- The neurotic need for affection and approval: This need is characterized by an indiscriminate wish to please others and to live up to their expectations. The person lives for the good opinion for others and is extremely sensitive to any sign of rejection or unfriendliness.
- The neurotic need for a "partner" who will take over one's life: The person with this need is a parasite. He or she overvalues love and is extremely afraid of being deserted and left alone.
- The neurotic need to restrict one's life within narrow borders: Such a person is undemanding, content with little, prefers to remain inconspicuous, and values modesty above all.
- The neurotic need for power: This need expressess itself in craving for power for its own sake, in an indiscriminate glorification of strength and a contempt for weakness. People who are afraid to exert power may try to control others through intellectual exploitation and superiority.
- The neurotic need to explit others.
- The neurotic need for prestige: One self-evaluation is determined by the amount of public recognition received.
- The neurotic need for personal admiration: People with this need have an inflated picture of themselves and wish to be admired on this basis, not for what they really are
- The neurotic ambition for personal achievements: Such person want to be the very best and drive themselves to go greater and greater achievements.
- The neurotic needs for self-sufficiency and independence: Having been disappointed in attempts to find ward, satisfying relationships with people, the person sets him or herself apart from others and refuses to be tied down to anyone or anything.
- The neurotic need for perfection and in assail ability: Fearful of making mistakes and of being criticized, people who have this need make the themselves impregnable and infallible. They are constantly searching for flaws in themselves so that they may be covered up before they become obvious to others.
- Compliance: moving towards people
- Withdrawal: moving away from people and
- Agrgression: moving against people
Alienation:in her later books, Horney emphasized an alternative coping strategy on the part of the neurotic. That is, the neurotic may defensively turn away form the real self toward some idealized alternative. In the process, Horney emphasizes alienation as the consequence of the child's attempt to cope with basic anxiety. Anxiety and hostility lead the child to regard his or her "real self" as inadequate, unworthy and unlovable. Given his negative self image a "despited self" emerges. The child responds defensively to this despicable self by creating and striving to obtain an idealized image of the person he or she should be This "idealized self" exists in conjunction with a series of stringent self expectations creating what Horney termed "the tyranny of the should" and the "search for glory". The neurotic pursues the self-esteem he or she is lacking by striving to achieve an unrealistic version of the person he or she ought to be.
In addition to these central strategies, Horney described a series of auxiliary approaches to the neurotic conflict. Thus, neurotics may defensively develop "blind spots" or "compartments" as they choose not to see discrepancies between their behaviour and their "idealized self". Or they may engage in "rationalization", "cynicism", or "Obsessive self-control" As a final strategy, the neurotic may attempt to deal with inner conflicts by externalizing them. That is, they hold the external factors responsible for their difficulties, in the process creating more conflicts between themselves and the outside world.
All of these conflicts are avoidable and resolvable if the child is raised in a home where there is security, trust, love, respect, tolerance, and warmth that is Horney did not feel that conflict is built into the nature of humans and is therefore inevitable. Conflict arises out of social conditions.
Harry Stack Sullivan
Harry Stack Sullivan was the creator of a new viewpoint that is known as the interpersonal theory of psychiatry. Its major tenet as it relates to the theory of personality.Is that "personality is the relatively enduring pattern of recurrent interpersonal situations which characterize ha human life". Personality is a hypothetical entity that cannot be isolated from interperdonal situations, and interpersonal behaviour is all that can be observed as personality. From the first day of life, the baby is a part of an interpersonal situation, and throughout the rest of its life it remains a member of a social field.
Sullivan was born on a farm near Norwich, New York, on February 21, 1892 and died on January 14, 1949 in Paris France. He received his medical degree from the Chicago College of Medicine armed forces during world war I. From 1923 until the 1930's he was associated with the medical school of the university of Maryland and with the Sheppard and Enoch Prait Hospital in Towson, Maryland. It was during this period of his life that Sullivan conducted investigations of schizophrenia. He had 75 hours of analysis while he was a medical student later he had formal analytic training with Clara Thompson. In 1936 helped found and became director of the Washington School of Pscychiatry. The journal "Psychiatry" began publication in 1938 to promote Sullivan's its co-editor and editor until his death. Sullivan began to formulate his theory of interpersonal relations in 1929 and had consolidated his thinking by the mid 1930's.
Structure of Personality:
Sullivan invested repeatedly that personality is a purely hypothetical entity, "an illusion" that cannot be observed as studied apart from interpersonal situations The unit of study is the interpersonal situation and not the person. The organization of personality consists of interpersonal events rather than intrapsychic ones. Personality only manifests itself when the person is behaving in relation to one or more other individuals, who may be present or not present, real as illusory figures. Perceiving, remembering, thinking, imagining and all of the other psychological processes nocturnal dreams are interpersonal, since they usually reflect the dreamer's relationship with other people.
Although Sullivan granted personality only hypothetical status, none of the less he asserted that it is a dynamic centre of various processes that occur in a series of interpersonal fields. The principle ones are dyanmism, personifications and cognitive processes.
Dynamisms: A dynamism is the smallest unit that can be employed in the study of the individual. It is defined as the relatively enduring pattern of energy transformations, which recurrently characterize the organisms in its duration as a living organism. An energy transformation is any form of behaviour. It may be overt and public, like talking, or covert and private, like thinking. Because a dynamism is a pattern of behaviour that endures and recurs, it is about the same thing as habit. The dynamisms that are distinctively human in character are those that characterize one's interpersonal relations. A child who is afraid of strangers has a dynamism of fear. Any habitual reaction toward one or more persons, whether it be in the form of feeling, an attitude or an overt action, constitutes a dynamism. All people have the same basic dynamisms, but the mode of expression of a dynamism varies in accordance with the situation and the life experience of the individual. A dynamism usually employs a particular zone of the body by means of which it interacts with the environment. Most dynamic serve the purpose of satisfying the basic needs of the organism. However there is an important dyanmisms that develops as a result of anxiety. This is called the dynamism of the self or self system.
The Self System:
Anxiety is a product of interpersonal relations, being transmitted originally from the mother to the infant and later in life by thread to one's security. To avoid or minimize actual or potential anxiety, people adopt various types of protective measures and supervisory controls over their behaviour. These security measures form the self system that sanctions certain forms of behaviour, forbids other forms, and excludes from consciousness still other forms that are too alien and disgusting to even be considered. Through these processes, the self system acts as a filter for awareness Sullivan employed the term selective attention for the unconscious refusal to attend to anxiety generating events and feelings. The self system as the guardian of one's security tends to become isolated from the rest of the personality, it excludes information that is incongruous with its present organization and fails thereby to profit from experience. Since the self guards the person from anxiety, it is held in high esteem and is protected from criticism. As the self system grows in complexity and independence, it prevents the person from making objective judgments of his or her own behaviour and it glosses over obvious contradictions between what the person really is and what the self system says he or she is. The more experiences people have with anxiety, the more inflated their self system becomes and the more it becomes dissociated from the rest of the personality. Although the system serves the useful purpose of reducing anxiety, it interferes with one's ability to live constructively with others.
Sullivan believed that the self system is a product of the irrational aspects of the society.
Personifications:
A personification is an image that an individual has of him or herself or of another person. It is a complex of feelings, attitudes and conceptions that grow out of experiences with need satisfaction and anxiety. The baby develops a good personification of the mother by being nursed and cared for by her. Any interpersonal relationship that involves satisfaction tends to build up a favourable picture of the satisfying agent. On the other hand, the baby's personification of a bad mother results form experiences with her that evoke anxiety. The anxious mother becomes personified as the bad mother. Ultimately, these two personifiactions of the mother along with any others that may be formed, such as the seductive mother or the overprotective mother fuse together to form a complex personification. These pictures that we carry in our heads are rarely accurate descriptions of the people to whom they refer. They are formed, in the first place to cope with people in fairly isolated interpersonal situations but once formed, they usually persist and influence our attitudes toward other people. Thus, a person who personifies his or her father as a mean and dictatorial man may project this same personifiaction on to other older men.
Consequently, something that serves an anxiety-reducing function in early life may interfere with one's interpersonal relations later in life.
Personifications of the self, such as good-me or bad-me follow the same principles as personifiactions of other. The good-me personification results form interpersonal experiences that are rewarding in character, the bad me personification from anxiety arousing situations. And like personifications of other people, these self personifications tend to stand in the way of objective self evaluation.
Personifications that are shared by a number of people are called stereotypes. Those are consensually validated conceptions that have wide acceptance among the members of a society and are handed down from generation to generation.
Cognitive Processes:
Sullivans unique contribution regarding the place of cognition in the affairs of personality is his threefold classification of experience. Experience, he said occurs in three modes: prototaxic, parataxic, and sytaxic. Prototaxic experience may be regarded as the discrete series of momentary states of the sensitive organism. They have no necessary connection among themselves and possess. No meaning for the experiencing person. The prototaxic mode of experience is found in its purest form during the early months of life and is the necessary precondition for the appearance of the other two modes.
The parataxic mode of thinking consists of seeing causal relationship between events that occur at about the same time but are not logically related. Sullivan believed that much of our thinking does not advance beyond the level of parataxic; we see casual connections between experiences that have nothing to do with one another. All superstions are examples of parataxic thinking.
The third and highest mode of behaviour is syntaxic, which consists of consensually validated symbol activity, especially of a verbal nature. A consensually validated symbol is one that has been agreed upon by group of people as having standard meaning. Words and numbers are the best example of such symbols. The syntaxic mode produces logical order among experiences and enables people to communicate with one another.
In addition to this formulation of modes of experience, Sullivan emphasized the importance of foresight in cognitive functioning. Fore right depends upon one's memory of the past and interpretation of the present.
Summary
- The essential theme of Frumm's writings is that a person feels lovely and isolated because he or she has become separated from nature and from other people. The health strategy is to unite with other people in the spirit of love and shared work. The unhealthy option is an attempt to "escape from freedom".
- Horney speaks of "basic axiety", which children naturally experience because of the influence of the "basic evil" which leads to "basic hostility. If the anxiety is not resolved, it leads to the development of certain neurotic needs, which are irrational solutions to a problem, and do not give complete satisfaction.
- Sullivan is the creator of a new viewpoint that is known as the "interpersonal theory of sychiatry". He said that the personality of a person is a product of social interactions. The behaviour is an outcome of the influences of the interpersonal relationships. Sullivan says that a person has been drastically altered and transformed largely by means of interpersonal relations from an animal organism into a human person.
