Chapter 8 Fromm: Humanistic Psychoanalysis 245social character in Chiconcuac, a Mexican village about 50 miles south of Mexico
City. The team interviewed every adult and half the children in this isolated farming
village of 162 households and about 800 inhabitants. The people of the village were
mostly farmers, earning a living from small plots of fertile land. As Fromm and
Michael Maccoby (1970) described them:
They are selfish, suspicious of each others’ motives, pessimistic about the future,
and fatalistic. Many appear submissive and self-deprecatory, although they have the
potential for rebelliousness and revolution. They feel inferior to city people, more
stupid, and less cultured. There is an overwhelming feeling of powerlessness to
influence either nature or the industrial machine that bears down on them. (p. 37)
Could one expect to find Fromm’s character orientations in such a society?
After living among the villagers and gaining their acceptance, the research team
employed an assortment of techniques designed to answer this and other questions.
Included among the research tools were extensive interviews, dream reports,
detailed questionnaires, and two projective techniques—the Rorschach inkblot test
and the Thematic Apperception Test.
Fromm believed that the marketing character was a product of modern com-
merce and that it is most likely to exist in societies where trade is no longer personal
and where people regard themselves as commodities. Not surprisingly, the research
team found that the marketing orientation did not exist among these peasant villagers.
However, the researchers did find evidence for several other character types, the
most common of which was the nonproductive-receptive type. People of this orienta-
tion tended to look up to others and devoted much energy in trying to please those
whom they regarded as superiors. On paydays, working men who belonged to this type
would accept their pay in servile fashion, as if somehow they had not earned it.
The second most frequently found personality type was the productive-
hoarding character. People of this type were hardworking, productive, and inde-
pendent. They usually farmed their own plot of land and relied on saving part of
each crop for seed and for food in the event of a future crop failure. Hoarding,
rather than consuming, was essential to their lives.
The nonproductive-exploitative personality was identified as a third character
orientation. Men of this type were most likely to get into knife or pistol fights,
whereas the women tended to be malicious gossipmongers (Fromm & Maccoby,
1970). Only about 10% of the population was predominantly exploitative, a sur-
prisingly small percentage considering the extreme poverty of the village.
An even smaller number of inhabitants were described as productive-
exploitative—no more than 15 individuals in the whole village. Among them were
the richest and most powerful men in the village—men who had accumulated
capital by taking advantage of new agricultural technology as well as a recent
increase in tourism. They had also taken advantage of the nonproductive-receptive
villagers by keeping them economically dependent.
In general, Fromm and Maccoby (1970) reported a remarkable similarity
between character orientations in this Mexican village and the theoretical orien-
tations Fromm had suggested some years earlier. This anthropological study, of
course, cannot be considered a confirmation of Fromm’s theory. As one of the
study’s principal investigators, Fromm may simply have found what he had
expected to find.