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The following is conceptualized to be a component of the authoritarian personality
Main concepts behind authoritarian leadership
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Dehao Liu
Jeff McMahon
English 1C
16 Oct. 2014
The Fallacies of Domination The father in “Cleanness”, a short by James Lasdun in his book It’s Beginning to Hurt, exhibits corruptive fatherly love. The father in this story is insecure. He depends on one of his few social relationships. That is why he adopts an excessively paternalistic and authoritarian approach when dealing with his son, including controlling the various aspects of his son’s daily live. This essay will therefore apply Erich Fromm’s notion of Authoritarian Personality to explain the controlling attribute of the father and how this results in the corruptive fatherly love that he exhibits towards his son that ultimately deters his son’s maturation process, psychologically,
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But, these concerns are not genuine. These concerns are his means to control his son. The fatherly love in “Cleanness” is corruptive because it prevents the maturation of the son to become an independent individual, and similarly the deceased mother, from asserting control over themselves. The father in “Cleanness” is over-protective and adopts a paternalistic approach that is actually detrimental to the psychological and emotional development of the son, although the father insists that he is only protecting his son through his excessive guidance. Such revelation is evident in the passage when Roland, the son, tries to intervene at the wedding, confides with the young woman with whom his father is marrying. Roland provides this revelation about his father’s controlling and excessively paternalistic character by drawing the relationship “between his father’s vigor and his mother’s steadily decline.” (Lasdun 620) For example, Roland’s father “harangued Roland’s former mother for not pursuing a career, for not seeing a psychiatrist when she became depressed, for drinking too much, for smoking after she was diagnosed with cancer.” (Lasdun …show more content…
Lasdun uses the metaphor of the healthy plant to illustrate the notion. “A healthy plant requires the steady disintegration of the organisms in the soil around it in order to thrive” (Lasdun 623) However, the constant control that the father exerts on Roland and his mom is preventing their natural maturation towards psychological independence. In other words, through this complicated action of the soul, the father’s excessive paternalistic concern for Roland and his diseased mother has resulted opposite effects of what was originally intended. It had kept both Roland and his diseased mother “in thrall to her own failure” (Lasdun 609) In addition, the father claims his perfectionist standards. However virtually everything is far from perfect. By imposing perfectionist standards on them, Roland and his deceased mother are being setup to only fail. In turn, the failure will have significant adverse psychological effects on Roland, because this will undermine his self-esteem and sense of self-efficacy. Over time if this situation does not change, Roland would depend on his father to make decisions for him which I mention as a physical isolation but mental dependence; that he cannot trust himself in making own decisions. However, none of this Roland’s father is aware of.
In a restaurant, picture a young boy enjoying breakfast with his mother. Then suddenly, the child’s gesture expresses how his life was good until “a man started changing it all” (285). This passage reflects how writer, Dagoberto Gilb, in his short story, “Uncle Rock,” sets a tone of displeasure in Erick’s character as he writes a story about the emotions of a child while experiencing his mother’s attempt to find a suitable husband who can provide for her, and who can become a father to him. Erick’s quiet demeanor serves to emphasis how children may express their feelings of disapproval. By communicating through his silence or gestures, Erick shows his disapproval towards the men in a relationship with his mother as he experiences them.
The chapter “A Fathers Influence” is constructed with several techniques including selection of detail, choice of language, characterization, structure and writers point of view to reveal Blackburn’s values of social acceptance, parenting, family love, and a father’s influence. Consequently revealing her attitude that a child’s upbringing and there parents influence alter the characterization of a child significantly.
The narrator and his brother’s bear physical abuse from pap’s which led them to become more violent towards one another and people outside. The narrator and his brothers were abused by their father whe...
It leads him to not know how to love or how to act when he was in a relationship. It leads him to be in bad relationship just like his parents. He was starting to repeat the same environment that his mother and father created for him. He could not tell his girlfriends that he loved them even thought he knew that he did. When he was having an argument with Theresa he admitted he was afraid of intimacy. “I was in love—no, not in love, but possessed with her.” (Baca. 41) He didn’t know about love or how to love. He had even asked Lonnie to marry him but could not tell her that he loved her. His parents only showed him hatred and showed him what they both didn’t want him. He tried to break that chain with his family but he always remembered his parents. He was always having flashbacks to his childhood.
After reading Into the Wild by Jon Krakauer, a novel that exposes the short life of Chris McCandless and the clues to the mystery of his untimely death, we as readers can comprehend and fathom the actions and thoughts of Chris McCandless if we are able to perceive and distinguish the characteristics and results of a family that is dysfunctional. More specifically, a dysfunctional family in which there is an authoritarian parent that greatly impacts the life and actions of the other members in the family. This parent may employ a perfectionist attitude on the children which can be debilitating in the long run. The lack of proper parenting can force children to take up nontraditional roles to facilitate proper family functioning. This unnecessary
They loved them so much even though the parents didn’t deserve it most of the time. That is unconditional love. They grew up very poor and were often forgotten about. There dad was an alcoholic who disappeared for days at a time, and bouncing from job to job. When he was home and drinking he “turned into an angry-eyed stranger who threw around furniture and threatened to beat up [their] mom or anyone who got in his way”(23). Most of her memories of her dad are him being drunk, which turns him abusive and rude. They don’t have much money so she looks at is as good opportunity for her father to stop drinking. Jeannette never only sees her dad as an alcoholic like she should, she still cherishes his love. Along with her father’s drinking problem, her mother’s lack of rules and parental skills are out of the norm. She believes "people worry.... “people worry too much about their children. Suffering when they are young is good for them”(28). Her mother believes that they can learn on their own, showing that she does not care about the hardships her children are constantly dealing with in their environment. With this negligence the children are often forgotten about as well. Jeannette was put in many situations where she thought her parents “might not come back for her or they might not notice she was missing”(30). That is not how a child is suppose to feel about her parents yet she constantly
Junot Diaz's short story “Fiesta, 1980” gives an insight into the everyday life of a lower class family, a family with a troubled young boy, Yunior and a strong, abusive father, Papi. The conflict, man vs. man is one of the central themes of this story. This theme is portrayed through the conflicts between Papi and his son. Papi asserts his dominance in what can be considered unfashionable ways. Unconsciously, every action Papi makes yields negative reactions for his family. Yunior simply yearns for a tighter bond with his father, but knows-just like many other members of his family-Papi’s outlandish ways hurts him. As the story unfolds it becomes obvious that the conflicts between Papi and himself-along with conflicts between Yunior and himself-affect not only them as individuals, but their family as a whole.
...erson will hinder any affection he believes he will receive from his father. While the reader gets the feeling of love and desire for the father the reader is also bombarded with feelings of distrust and hatred towards the man.
The role of a father could be a difficult task when raising a son. The ideal relationship between father and son perhaps may be; the father sets the rules and the son obeys them respectfully. However it is quite difficult to balance a healthy relationship between father and son, because of what a father expects from his son. For instance in the narratives, “Death of a Salesman,” and “Fences” both Willy and Troy are fathers who have a difficult time in earning respect from their sons, and being a role model for them. Between, “Death of a Salesman,” and “Fences,” both protagonists, Willy and Troy both depict the role of a father in distinctive ways; however, in their struggle, Willy is the more sympathetic of the two.
...e treated his family. The kids were raised in an environment of fear and punishment. This affected every relationship, even with other children, they had established. Being bound to one’s culture is not necessarily a bad thing. The kids are disciplined and respectful, at least in the presence of other adults. The problem with the father was not understanding that some values are expired and do not fit society's norms. Traditions that bring families together should be kept not the opposite. Since society's norms are constantly changing, we have to keep traditions alive that correlate. Good traditions and cultural values should be passed on from generation to generation not the traditions that bring children down.
The premise of traditional parenting is one of the key ideologies behind Nathaniel Hawthorne’s Rappaccini 's daughter; the passage of multiple generations however, has rendered this notion impractical and irrational due to societal shifts that have changed the mentality of parents throughout history. In effect, I will apply psychological criticism to investigate the effects of the declining traditional parenting.
She believes that a child’s feeling and personal goals is locked away, and instead is replaced with their parent’s expectations and desires. The child soon begins to develop narcissistic traits, in which the parent should allow the child to express feelings such as jealously and anger. In the novel Miller (1996) states “he develops something the mother needs…but it nevertheless may prevent him, throughout his life, from being himself” (p. 34). Allowing children to experience feeling such as anger and jealously provides an understanding on the child is not always perfect. However narcissistic disturbance occurs when a parent projects their own narcissistic desires onto their child, unfortunately suppressing their desires and acquiring their parents. Incidentally several students from Princeton University conducted a research in order demonstrate how narcissism is cultivated by the parents’ overvaluation and parental warmth. Eddie Mrummelman and colleagues (2014) stated, “When parents overvalue their child, they see their child as “God’s gift to man”…children might internalize the belief that they are special individuals who are entitled to privileges” (p 2). The article suggested that parents, who prevent their child from experiencing failure, encourage narcissistic attitudes. The important implication from this study demonstrates how a parent can overly evaluate their child’s
Absolute in every child’s mind is the belief that they are right, despite all the evidence to the contrary. Until children grow up to raise children own their own, a parent’s disputation only inflates that desire to prove. Part and parcel to this, as one may find out through personal experience or by extension, cruelty towards parents is a reflection of a child’s own inadequacy (whether in large or small scale). In this sense, King Lear is a story of children with a desire to break past their hierarchal status. Whether it is the belief that a woman shall take a husband, and with that guard her inherited land, or what role bastards truly deserves in a society that preemptively condemns them. Cruelty at the hands of children accounts for almost
The boy appears to play the role of the responsible adult more so than the father does. The boy has typical signs of a child from today’s broken family relationships; he does not want to disappoint either parent. The boy s...
Having inherited the myth of ugliness and unworthiness, the characters throughout the story, with the exception of the MacTeer family, will not only allow this to happen, but will instill this in their children to be passed on to the next generation. Beauty precedes love, the grownups seem to say, and only a few possess beauty, so they remain unloved and unworthy. Throughout the novel, the convictions of sons and daughters are the same as their fathers and mothers. Their failures and accomplishments are transferred to their children and to future generations.