Authoritarian Personality

As I started to write this piece it was a bitter cold morning on January 20^th 2025. A day of celebration of a late revolutionary and rabble-rouser the great Dr. Martin Luther King. Jr. He gave voice to the voiceless and disenfranchised. This wasn’t accomplished through capitulation to the ruling class or by joining the state to fight within. He fought back by protest, conscience raising, organizing resistance, love, and direct action against centuries of injustice. Doing so, I believe, gave hope to millions for the first time in their lives. This helped treat, not cure, centuries of built up historical traumas due to slavery, racism, sexism, colonialism, class exploitation, and native genocide.

Hope for a better future that gave name to built up stresses and traumas written into colonized, traded, and oppressed bodies. We could name the sicknesses we were feeling daily in our aches, pains, and mental sufferings.

Disobedience to the ruling class and ruling order became liberating for our mental health. We could clearly name our oppressors and systemic oppressions. Yet the psychology field in the US couldn’t get behind liberation practices. They saw rebellion as a problem. So much so that they produced a new mental illness they called Oppositional Defiant Disorder.

Oppositional Defiant Disorder was first described in 1980 in the “Bible” of mental illness’s the DSM-III. The cluster of symptoms that need to be present in order to be diagnosed include anger, irritability, arguing back with authority figures, tends to defy the rules given by authority figures, and vindictiveness. This is so vague it basically is worthless as a diagnose. Yet it remains in the latest DSM-V. So those who feel anger over injustice are now considered mentally ill? Got it.

In contrast to dreams of liberation on this cold (metaphorically and actual) morning of January 20^th 2025 is the inauguration for the second term of President Trump. The man who had proclaimed he wants to be a dictator only on day one of his new administration. Authoritarianism is no longer an unforeseen right wing revolutionary fascist threat but voted in by mass approval. It has landed on our doorsteps.

In 2024 there was a population in the US of 244,000,000 eligible voters. 156,302,318 actually voted in the election. Trump won 77,284,118 of eligible voters. This accounts for only 31.7% of the US voting eligible population who voted for Trump. This is by no means a landslide victory. Yet a third of the population content with authoritarianism should be a wake up call. We must ask why is this going on? For psychotherapists we should be asking if there is a psychological reason?

“When Fascism came into power, most people were unprepared, both theoretically and practically. They were unable to believe that man could exhibit such propensities for evil, such lust for power, such disregard for the rights of the weak, or such yearning for submission. Only a few had been aware of the rumbling of the volcano preceding the outbreak.”

— Erich Fromm, Escape from Freedom

The late psychologist Erich Fromm had asked during World War II what helped create obedience to a genocidal and fascist state. Through his studies he coined the term Authoritarian Personality (Disorder). Authoritarian Personality Disorder was further researched and defined by Theodor W. Adorno in 1950. The basic symptoms of Authoritarian Personality Disorder is four fold.

• A rigid conformity to the rules.
• Zero tolerance to any out-group or group of people they perceive as different.
• A sadistic value system directed to those that they “other”.
• Lastly they hold a strong preference for what they perceive as traditional values and/or hierarchies.

Authoritarian Personality types tend to feel lost when they don’t know their ranking in a hierarchically arranged grouping. Imagine for example a family with a domineering patriarchy. Father knows best. Everyone in the family lives with daily intimidation if not fear. Another example is policing in the US with ranks such as Sargent, chief of police, or lieutenant. Police tend to refer to each other with the title of the rank and their name as a reminder of their place in the hierarchy. The interesting problem of Authoritarian Personality Disorder is that it is no where found in the DSM-V.

The psychology/psychotherapy field is filled with complicity of creating and re-traumatizing many of those seeking its services. From a long history of torture, lobotomies, forced electroconvulsive shock therapy, forced medications, and overuse of involuntary confinements. To being complicit in recommending techniques and overseeing torture practices in Guantanamo Bay and the secret CIA renditions during the Gulf War.

What is mainstream psychologies excuse for not adding Authoritarian Personality Disorder to the DSM-V when they include Oppositional Defiance Disorder? Is it because it would have to become self reflective of our own practices? That our field is in fact not geared toward mental health liberation but as a lucrative authoritarian tool?

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