Authoritarian character

Fromm's name for the sado-masochistic character structure that both admires and submits to authority above it and seeks to dominate those beneath it, and in which strivings for submission and for power are two sides of one inability to bear the independent self. He first studied it empirically in the Frankfurt Institute's survey of German workers and in Studies on Authority and the Family (1936), and in Escape from Freedom (1941) treated it as the social character of the lower middle class that made it receptive to Nazism.