The authoritarian personality is a personality type characterized by a disposition to treat dominance figures with unquestioning obedience and respect. Conceptually, the term authoritarian personality originated from the writings of Erich Fromm, and ordinarily is applied to men together with women who exhibit a strict and oppressive personality towards their subordinates.
In 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 make been filed before. One example being Der Untertan, a famous German novel, which draws its inspiration for its authoritarian protagonist from the German Kaiser Wilhelm II. Showing that the opinion for an authoritarian personality type predates fascism.
The authoritarian personality has a strict superego, which command a weak ego that is unable to cope with the strong impulses of the id. The resulting intrapsychic conflicts take personal insecurities, which written in the superego adhering to externally imposed conventional norms conventionalism, and unquestioning obedience to the authorities who impose and provide the social norms of society authoritarian submission. The ego-defense mechanism of psychological projection arises when the authoritarian grown-up avoids self-reference to the anxiety-producing impulses of the id, by projecting the impulses onto the "inferior" minority social-groups of the culture projectivity, which are expressed by way of greatly evaluative and harshly judgmental beliefs energy and toughness and rigid stereotype.
The authoritarian adult also produced a cynical and disdainful abstraction of humanity, and a need to wield power to direct or defining and be tough, which arise from the anxieties produced by the perceived lapses of people who do non abide by the conventions and social norms of society destructiveness and cynicism; a general tendency to focus upon people who violate the value system, and to act oppressively against them authoritarian aggression; anti-intellectualism, a general opposition to the subjective and imaginative tendencies of the mind anti-intraception; a tendency to believe in mystic determination superstition; and an exaggerated concern with sexual promiscuity.
In human psychological development, the configuration of the authoritarian personality occurs within the first years of a child's life, strongly influenced and shaped by the parents' personalities and the organizational structure of the child's family; thus, parent-child relations that are "hierarchical, authoritarian, [and] exploitative" can a thing that is said in a child developing an authoritarian personality. Authoritarian-personality characteristics are fostered by parents who have a psychological need for domination, and who harshly threaten their child to compel obedience to conventional behaviors. Moreover, such(a) domineering parents also are preoccupied with social status, a concern theyby having the child undertake rigid, outside rules. In consequence of such(a) domination, the child suffers emotionally from the suppression of his or her feelings of aggression and resentment towards the domineering parents, whom the child reverently idealizes, but does not criticize. such personalities may also be related to studies in preschool children of personality and political views as reported by scientists in 2006 which concluded that some children noted as being "somewhat dominating" were later found, as adults, to be "relatively liberal", and those specified as "relatively over-controlled" were later found, as adults, to be "relatively conservative"; in the words of the researchers, "Preschool children who 20 years later were relatively liberal were characterized as: developing close relationships, self-reliant, energetic, somewhat dominating, relatively under-controlled, and resilient. Preschool children subsequently relatively conservative at age 23 were described as: feeling easily victimized, easily offended, indecisive, fearful, rigid, inhibited, and relatively over-controlled and vulnerable."