Character Orientations

• personality is reflected in one’s character orientation, that is, a person’s relatively permanent way of relating to people and things
• Fromm (1947) defined personality as “the totality of inherited and acquired psychic qualities which are characteristic of one individual and which make the individual unique”
• The most important of the acquired qualities of personality is character
• Nonproductive Orientations People can acquire things through any one of four nonproductive orientations:

  (1) receiving things passively,

  (2) exploiting, or taking things through force,

  (3) hoarding objects, and

  (4) marketing or exchanging things
• Receptive characters feel that the source of all good lies outside themselves and that the only way they can relate to the world is to receive things, including love, knowledge, and material possessions. They are more concerned with receiving than with giving, and they want others to shower them with love, ideas, and gifts.
• exploitative characters believe that the source of all good is outside themselves. Unlike receptive people, however, they aggressively take what they desire rather than passively receive it. In their social relationships, they are likely to use cunning or force to take someone else’s spouse, ideas, or property.
• The negative qualities of receptive people include passivity, submissiveness, and lack of self-confidence. Their positive traits are loyalty, acceptance, and trust
• On the negative side, exploitative characters are egocentric, conceited, arro gant, and seducing. On the positive side, they are impulsive, proud, charming, and self-confident
• hoarding characters seek to save that which they have already obtained. They hold everything inside and do not let go of anything. They keep money, feelings, and thoughts to themselves. In a love relationship, they try to possess the loved one and to preserve the relationship rather than allowing it to change and grow. They tend to live in the past and are repelled by anything new.
• marketing character is an outgrowth of modern commerce in which trade is no longer personal but carried out by large, faceless corporations. Consistent with the demands of modern commerce, marketing characters see themselves as com modities, with their personal value dependent on their exchange value, that is, their ability to sell themselves.
• Negative traits of the hoarding personality include rigidity, sterility, obsti nacy, compulsivity, and lack of creativity; positive characteristics are orderliness, cleanliness, and punctuality
• Only through productive activity can people solve the basic human dilemma: that is, to unite with the world and with others while retaining uniqueness and individuality. This solution can be accomplished only through productive work, love, and thought.
• productive orientation has three dimensions— working, loving, and reasoning.
• Healthy people value work not as an end in itself, but as a means of creative self-expression.
• Productive love is characterized by the four qualities of love discussed earlier—care, responsibility, respect, and knowledge. In addition to these four char acteristics, healthy people possess biophilia: that is, a passionate love of life and all that is alive.
• Productive thinking, which cannot be separated from productive work and love, is motivated by a concerned interest in another person or object. Healthy people see others as they are and not as they would wish them to be. Similarly, they know themselves for who they are and have no need for self-delusion