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A group of psychoanalysts led the Seminario de Sociopsicoanálisis to broaden their clinical perspective gained through working with patients in the setting of a private practice. In this paper we describe participatory action research initiated by a community. We started by interviewing impoverished and economically disadvantaged children, first from a miner's village and later on from a center for children living in the streets. A study on Attachment and Social Character of mothers and children as well as the systematic appraisal of the unconscious motivations in the individual's responses to the Social Interpretative Questionnaire are presented. We strive to bring the findings of our social character studies back to the communities themselves. Our purpose is to support or foster possibilities for initiating participatory community-based action projects, aimed at transforming the quality of life and to confront the difficulties and obstacles that emerge on the path to change; furthermore we hope that our research will help to stimulate the development of childcare health policies.
>Die Dritte Welt und der Gesellschafts-Charakter<: Die von Erich Fromm aufgestellte Theorie des Gesellschafts-Charakters gibt uns die Möglichkeit, uns die emotionalen Prozesse zu erklären, die sich in den Individuen im Verlauf des sozialen Anpassungsprozesses entwickeln und verändern. Nach Fromms Schema, das von den sozialen Strukturen ausgeht, ist der Gesellschafts-Charakter zwischen der ökonomischen Basis und den Ideen angesiedelt. Wenn man in Rechnung stellt, dass die sozio-ökonomischen Faktoren den Charakter beeinflussen und determinieren, kann man nicht von einem gleichartigen Charakter in der Ersten und der Dritten Welt sprechen – Differenzen, die in empirischen Studien aufgewiesen wurden, haben das gezeigt. Im vorliegenden Beitrag wird die Dynamik des Geschlechterkampfes geschildert, der nicht nur für die Dritte Welt zu gelten scheint. Die Studien zum Gesellschafts- Charakter haben unterschiedliche Charaktertypen beschrieben; in diesem Text werden Charaktertypen dargestellt, die bei führenden Persönlichkeiten in einer mexikanischen Provinzgemeinde angetroffen wurden. Ebenso werden einige theoretische Aspekte untersucht, wie z.B. der Einfluss der sozio-ökonomischen Bedingungen, das kapitalistische Modell und der Zusammenbruch der totalitären Regime in den Ländern des Ostens. Schließlich erfolgt eine kurze Zusammenfassung des praktischen sozialpsychoanalytischen Prozesses, im Anschluss an eine methodologische Studie, die der Anwendung des interpretativen Fragebogens in der erwähnten Provinzgemeinde voraufging.
Salvador Millán's main thesis is that social character--the way patients and therapists internalize the values, cultural beliefs, and class structure of their society--is always present in the consulting room and often becomes manifest as transfer-ence and counter-transference reactions. Indeed, according to Millán, transference and countertransference are just another name for developmental processes of so-cial adaptation as it be-comes expressed in a particular relationship between an analyst and his/her patient. Millán takes us through the origin of the concept of transference in Freud, with its patriarchal and authoritarian overtones, to its classical definition in Fenichel's work. With its surgical metaphors, Fenichel crystallized an approach to technique and the handling of the transference. Analytical technique re-quired a neutral and detached observant role, with precise interpretations directed at the psyche, similar to a surgeon's skilled incisions into the patient's body. Millán compares this approach with the guidance Fromm offered to the students of the Mexican Psychoanalytic Institute during supervision and in his seminars in Cuer-navaca during the 1960s. Fromm's point of departure was like Freud's. Transference has to do with the experience of infancy that is repeated in the presence of the ana-lyst. Fromm (1968) thought that this definition of transference, while true, was lim-ited, since it took into account only one source of irrational strivings based on infan-tile longings. However, if one looked at transference as an experience in which the patient deposits in the person of the analyst the origin of >all of his expectations and fears,< (p. 2) a much broader range of transferential reactions is taken into consid-eration. Some of these reactions may be traced to parental influence. Others may have origins that are broadly social, in which the parents' influence is based on be-ing representatives of societal norms, or parental roles may even be irrelevant. In this definition, transference is not just based on childhood experience, but repre-sents the whole experience of the patient's life. Millán points out that one of the limi-tations of psychoanalysis is that it is primarily based on the experience of working with clinical populations. Millán briefly reviews a series of social character studies that have been conducted in the last two decades in factories, in corporate environ-ments, and in rural communities with normal populations, and that have broadened our understanding of the process of social adaptation beyond the consulting room. According to Millán, these studies provide support for Fromm's more inclusive con-cept of transference.