Concept
Character orientation
In Man for Himself (1947), the relatively stable way in which a person relates to the world, both in acquiring and assimilating things and in relating to other people, which Fromm put in place of Freud's libidinal stages as the basis of character. He described four nonproductive orientations, the receptive, the exploitative, the hoarding and the marketing, and set the productive orientation against them; an actual character blends several, one of them dominant.
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- Introduced by
- Erich Fromm
- Key works
- 1
- Related
- Psychosexual development
introduced by
- Erich Fromm 1947 In Man for Himself (1947) Fromm classified character by its orientations, the receptive, exploitative, hoarding and marketing, which are nonproductive, and the productive.
diverges from
- Psychosexual development Fromm acknowledged that his receptive, exploitative and hoarding orientations correspond to Freud's oral and anal character types, but grounded character in a person's ways of relating to the world and to others rather than in the stages of libidinal organization.