Articles / Artikel
A longitudinal study of early attachment and social character development of 14 Nahuat mother-infant dyads -since the infants were 11 months, having assessed them at 9 years of age and again in their late adolescence- show a significant improvement on the youngsters’ emotional development. The study conducted by the Seminario de Sociopsicoanálisis within a 40-year-long humanizing project in the village, called >Intercultural Participation Project,< suggests the benefit of promoting the rescue of their indigenous Nahuat culture and tradition.
The theory of social character developed by Erich Fromm asserts that the significance of experience is intimately linked to the material conditions under which persons, located in a specific economic system, live. The shared character traits thus correspond to the social role that these persons play. In the case of women, existing literature does not focus on their function as reproducers of the work force within the family, although this is a generalized function and additional to out-of-home work. This function has a transcendent importance to the development and emotional health of children, as has been established in longitudinal research of attachment theory.
This study explores Mexican mothers’ shared character traits, a systematized appraisal of their attitudes towards their lives and their children, their states of mind, and the quality of care they provide as well as their relationship to attachment patterns of their infants; some come from urban Middle, Middle-upper and Upper-class families and others from Poor in-digenous peasant families.
The fundamental focus is on the woman’s participation inside the family, although it does not exclude the possibility that some of these mothers handle not only the care giving and housework but also work outside of the home (the "double shift”). It concludes that the daily material conditions of existence are closely related to shared character traits and that these are in turn related to patterns of attachment in their infants, their sensitivity in the treatment of their babies, and the results of their Adult Attachment Interviews. Women have been the sup-port and pillar of subsistence for urban populations as well as the most poor and disadvan-taged communities. This role played by women is as widespread as undocumented in litera-ture.
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.
>Mexikanische Zeit. Erich Fromm in Mexico<: Die Art, wie in Mexiko mit der Zeit umgegangen wird, unterscheidet sich beträchtlich von der westeuropäischen oder nordamerikanischen: Der Mexikaner >hat< oder >nimmt sich< mehr Zeit; die in der Ländern der protestantischen Arbeitsethik hochgeschätzte Tugend der Pünktlichkeit ist ihm fremd. In der >mexikanischen Zeit<, zu der viele Feste gehören, bekundet sich eine dem matrizentrischen Komplex zugehörige Art von Gesellschafts- Charakter. Man lebt unbekümmert in den Tag hinein, erwartet, dass immer genug zum Leben vorhanden ist, und sucht das verlorengegangene Paradies wiederzufinden. Wie kam Fromm mit dieser Art von Lebenseinstellung zurecht? Anfangs galt er – der aus Deutschland emigrierte Psychoanalytiker, der in den USA praktiziert und gelehrt hatte – bei vielen seiner Schüler als >autoritär<. Schon die Forderung nach pünktlichem Beginn und die Begrenzung der analytischen Sitzung auf 50 Minuten galten ihnen als unannehmbar. Mit der Zeit kam jedoch ein fruchtbarer Austausch zustande: Seine Schüler erlernten von Fromm nicht nur die psychoanalytische Technik, sondern sie waren auch zutiefst von der dahinterstehenden Persönlichkeit beeindruckt. Umgekehrt sind Fromms ganzheitliche Sicht des Menschen und seine biophile Grundhaltung nicht ohne die Erfahrungen, die er während seiner langjährigen Tätigkeit in Mexiko machte, zu verstehen. So trug die >mexikanische Zeit< viel zur Entwicklung der >humanistischen Psychoanalyse< bei.
>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.