Fromm pioneered a psychoanalytic reading of verbatim questionnaire responses

Evidence

Perhaps the key innovation of the study was the way in which the questionnaire itself was conducted. The answers were taken down verbatim by the interviewers and then analyzed, the way a psychoanalyst listens to the associations of a patient. Certain key words or recurrent patterns of expression were interpreted as clues to the underlying psychological reality beneath the manifest content of the answers. This technique, it might be noted in passing, was very different from that employed in the Institut’s collaborative project, The Authoritarian Personality, as we shall see when examining that work in Chapter 7. Fromm himself, however, was to turn back to it many years later in the analysis of Social Character in a Mexican Village, which he and Michael Maccoby conducted in the late fifties and early sixties. — Martin Jay, The Dialectical Imagination, 391

Categorization

• XREF: Directly foreshadows and contrasts with ‘The Authoritarian Personality’; also connects to Fromm’s later Mexican Village study. — connects to: Psychoanalytic theory converts correlated interview data into a personality structure — John T. Jost and Jim Sidanius, Political Psychology, 527; Psychoanalysis converts each behavior’s hidden revelation into conceptual form; Freudian psychoanalytic theory shaped the study of personality in politics — John T. Jost and Jim Sidanius, Political Psychology, 105 (+5 more)

Broader Connections

• Psychoanalytic theory converts correlated interview data into a personality structure #expands (0.85) — John T. Jost and Jim Sidanius, Political Psychology, 527
• Psychoanalysis converts each behavior’s hidden revelation into conceptual form #expands (0.82)
• Freudian psychoanalytic theory shaped the study of personality in politics #corroborates (0.80) — John T. Jost and Jim Sidanius, Political Psychology, 105
• Psychoanalytic hypotheses resemble scientific ones in being experimental ideas #expands (0.75)
• Allport borrowed psychoanalytic themes while avoiding purely analytic explanations #contradicts (0.72) — John F. Dovidio, Peter Glick, Laurie A. Rudman, On the Nature of Prejudice, 144