There are consequences in attitudes, behaviors, and capacity for feeling, thinking, and intuiting in children raised in authoritarian dynamics in the hands of caregivers and/or mesocentric influences. Such tendencies persist in adulthood, sometimes explicitly or through pervading unconscious patterns. I will endeavor to delineate a few of these tendencies, and I don’t pretend to be exhaustive.
1. A rebel develops: Experiencing her own sense of radiant and healthy personal power frustrated at a young age, the child—and later adult— rebels against requests, demands, orders, and rules; “Who are you to tell me what to do?,” “You are just like my mother!.” “I am not asking for your advice,” are softer versions that can amplify into “F..k off!,” “Go to hell!,” “I’ll kill the mother f…r!,” and displays of rage that can lead to violence. Existential psychologist Rollo May (1998) explained in Power and Innocence that every individual needs to feel she has some influence. He wrote that “Influence in interpersonal relations with significant others is crucial for the maintenance of self-esteem and for the process of maturity” (p. 36). Later on, he added that “The fact that people change because of your influence also gives you the feeling of being ‘beyond yourself’, in other words a kind of ecstasy of low intensity” (p. 166). Being able to influence another person’s feelings, decisions, attitudes, and behaviors is a legitimate way to feel one’s place in the world, to develop adequate self-esteem and self-respect as well as a sense of agency. When a child isn’t given the opportunity to have their say, express a preference or a desire, this legitimate desire for radiating influence is frustrated and the child or adult may express their pain through anger, rage, and sometimes defiance. Instead of seeing the child or adult as problematic, “bad,” “deviant,” inobedient, or as a little “terror,” attention needs to be given to the dynamics leading to the rebellion. Unfortunately, the authoritarian figure or entity is intrinsically incapable of takin responsibility for being part of the problem.
For the rebel, the direction of psychological health consists in responding rather than reacting. In her book Embodied Activism, Dr. Ray Johnson (2023) wrote:
Responsiveness allows us the breathing space to generate interventions that are creative, not just destructive. And like reactivity, responsiveness opens us up to the possibility of disarming rather than attacking, enlisting rather than alienating, and it encourages the kind of inner alignment that allows us to embody integrity. When directed inward, responsiveness supports us in metabolizing our shame, so it does not poison us, inspires us to anchor our rage in purpose, and allows us to navigate the complex dynamics of our own lived history of oppressive social systems with more grace. When directed outward, responsiveness supports compassion and courage in equal measure. (p.14)
2. Another response to authoritarianism expresses itself in gentler or meek personalities as subservience. The child, and later adult, fawns, obeys, and self-effaces. Adults are likely to demonstrate codependence traits and attract friends and companions with authoritarian, and sometimes emotionally or physically abusive tendencies. Jay Frankel (2022) wrote:
In the moment of trauma, children instinctively submit and comply with what abusers want—not just in behavior but in their perceptions, thoughts, and emotions—in order to survive the assault; afterwards they often continue to comply, out of fear that the family will turn its back on them. Notably, a persistent tendency to identify with the aggressor is also typical in children who have been emotionally abandoned by narcissistically self-preoccupied parents, even when there has not been gross trauma. Similarly, large groups of people who are economically or culturally dispossessed by changes in their society typically respond by submitting and complying with the expectations of a powerful figure or group, hoping they can continue to belong.
Such individuals avoid taking space in all ways: physically, emotionally, and mentally. They often don’t think of voicing their preferences or alternatives to what is being suggested or demanded. They characteristically feel lost or incapable without the direction of the dominant person in their lives, be it a spouse, parent, mentor, guru, boss, or friend. Conforming individuals also tend to think in polarized manners (paranoid split-off), such as “good or bad,” and “right and wrong,” normal or abnormal.” C. Georghe (2022) wrote:
Binary (polarized) thinking – a primal, yet efficient and convenient, way of viewing the world, related to our ‘reptilian’ brain – is responsible for our inability to use a larger palette of options and choices, and integrate them into a functional whole. Binary thinking seems to be correlated to radical (fundamentalist) individualism, as well as with a neoliberal, colonial mentality, which are adopted rapidly by many other social systems (nations, cultures), in order to remain competitive economically at a global level.”
Polarized opinions present a threat to critical thinking. Henderson Hurley & Hurley (2013) commented that “Engaging [..] authoritarian students in the classroom is no simple task. Right-wing students have been trained to and prefer to be docile, to not question, to be told what to think and why to think.” A sense of confidence, identity, and psychological security is often sought for in group ideology, in which psychoanalyst Jay Frankel (2022) reported that “Submission must meet narcissistic standards of perfection: ideological purity is expected, critical or even independent thinking is unacceptable, and obedience and true belief are required.” Psychoanalytic professor Karl Figlio remarked that “For a democracy to thrive, society must be able to tolerate ambivalence. But groups eliminate ambivalence by pressing individuals into schismatic factions.”
3. Another response to the unilateral oppression of authoritarianism can manifest as dissimulation. A strategy develops in the child or adult to be apparently compliant and submissive, but the legitimate need to assert oneself underlies the apparent obedience. The child lies, hides his or actions, for fear of retaliation. What is first a natural defense to avoid punishment or berating can become so pronounced that the child or adult starts believing their lies or covert actions as the “truth,” which is by all means, a subjective concept. It becomes difficult for such individuals to be accountable because interactions and dynamics are quickly distorted through the immediate reconstruction of memory. In this respect, a client of Otto Fenichel (1939) disclosed,“‘If I can make others believe that things I know to be untrue are true, then it is also possible that my memory is deceived and what I remember as true is untrue’” (p.136). I will return to the subjective nature of memory in another article.
4. NO is another response, insuperable. In his work Kinds of Power (2012), philosopher and psychologist James Hillman remarked that “He or her veto power can […] thwart the will of an entire family and throw its organization into wild disorder. The single syllable offers ultimate control, repressing the intentions of the community, bringing the wheel to a stop” (p. 197). It is as categorical as authoritarianism and will infuriate the authoritarian. It will lead him to punish, retaliate, and in systemic contexts, humiliate, imprison, torture and justifying the death of the resistant protagonist. It is the ultimate clash of two powers that will not soften, two dense wills that are too sure of their hegemony. Thus, the authoritarian model contains in itself the seed of violence and clashes, through its inability to be relational and its insistence on control. It is harmful at an individual, familial, or social level, and ironically destroys the creative force: What it is intrinsically afraid of, the annihilation of the ego, death of material existence, or unquestioned power and control at a psychological level, will inevitably occur, and so in a violent way. In his book Kinds of Power (2012), Hillman demonstrated that all documented dictators known to current history, experienced frustrated power as a child and teen either because they were frail, mocked, or abused. All suffered violent consequences for their oppressive treatment of their people.
5. Another consequence of authoritarianism on the ones who are submitted to it can be a tendency to seek to belong to a group that, because of their perceived lack of power at a personal level, will give them the sense of collective power, superiority, and agency that was not experienced in childhood. Frankel (2022) commented:
On the mass level, large groups of people can share fantasies of being superior: exempt from expectations to get along with others outside their special group or to treat them decently.” He added, “An authoritarian strongman’s disciples, intoxicated with their leader, eagerly submit and identify with him and imagine his power to be their own. They drink in the certainty and order he seems to personify and fill themselves with the vengeance and cruelty he embodies.
Nevertheless, regarding freedom, which is not the same as license, Rollo May reminded us in its foreword to his work Freedom and Destiny (1999): “Political freedom is to be cherished, indeed, but there is no political freedom that is not indissolubly bound to the inner personal freedom of the individuals who make up that nation, no liberty of a nation of conformists, no free nation made up of robots”.
Gheorghe, C. (2022). Decolonization, polarization, psychoanalysis, privilege: Toward a cosmopolitan and culturally intelligent psychotherapist. In Analysis, 6(2), 128-133.
Fenichel, O. (1939) The Economics of Pseudologia Phantastica. In The Collected Papers of Otto Fenichel. Second Series. NY: W. W. Norton & Company, pp. 129 – 140.
Figlio, K. (2021). Lying in Autocratic Society: A Challenge to Democracy. Free Associations, (83), 15-27.
Frankel, J. (2022). The narcissistic dynamics of submission: The attraction of the powerless to authoritarian leaders. American Journal of Psychoanalysis, 82(3), 384.
Johnson, R. (2023). Embodied activism: Engaging the body to cultivate liberation, justice, and authentic connection–a practical guide for transformative social change. North Atlantic Books.
Henderson Hurley, M., & Hurley, D. (2013). Enhancing Critical Thinking Skills Among Authoritarian Students. International Journal of Teaching and Learning in Higher Education, 25(2), 248-261.
Hillman, J. (2012). Kinds of power: A guide to its intelligent uses. Crown Currency.
May, R. (1999). Freedom and destiny. WW Norton & Company.
May, R. (1998). Power and innocence. WW Norton & Company
