ABSTRACT
In the middle decades of the last century Erich Fromm may well be identified as having worked most consistently to bring psychologists towards a fuller recognition of the extent to which the experience of anxiety results not so much from weaknesses in our innate capacities for coping, but more as a response to the socio-economic and cultural conditions in which we find ourselves. For the purposes of critical analysis, he proposes that it is possible for us to identify our thoughts, feelings and actions as being determined by ‘ideal-types’ of social character which develop as a product of our shared experiences of day-to-day life (Fromm 1942: 239-53; 1947: 54-117; Fromm and Maccoby 1970). A social character functions to provide us with a common way of relating towards the world; that is, it conditions us into ‘seeing’ certain attitudes and forms of behaviour as both rational and desirable. Moreover, Fromm would further emphasise that it is through a dominant form of social character that a society moulds individuals into ‘wanting to act as they have to act’ so as to preserve the prevailing economic order and the way of life it sustains (Fromm 1956: 79). Accordingly, where it is possible to identify groups of people who are committed to a shared understanding of the truth, meaning and morality of their relationships at work and in the home, he would direct us towards the extent to which this conforms to the dominant socio-economic and political interests of society.
