This is an intriguing question!

You are right that Adorno et al. (1950) started work leaning heavily on the psycho-analytic tradition of the 1930/1940's. A case in point is that they explicitly asked A.H. Maslow for his analysis of the authoritarian character (Maslow, 1943). Besides, their own work gives ample proof of where their ideas germinated.

However, this tradition seems to have been lost in what followed. The discussion, research and controversies after the launching of their work were focussed mainly on (1) the conceptual side (suggesting and researching alternative concepts like dogmatism); (2) measurement problems (various types of response set); (3) correlations with interesting attitudes and behaviour; (4) the impact on society. Potential relationships with individual psychic health and well-being were not part and parcel of what followed.

In the early years of this century, I happened to spend time studying the literature trying to take stock of what had been achieved. One thing I did was diving into the history of the subject and writing an overview-article. Doing so, I did not come accross publications directly relating authotitarianism to psychic well-being or anything psycho-analytic. Of course, I did not go through the enormous amount of tens of thousands of publications. May be, there are publications out there that were not noticed by sufficient other researchers to have come to the knowledge of reviewers and others in the field.

I stopped working around 2010, so, may be, someone got going on the subject more recently.

On the other hand, you may try a search in retrieval systems like Psyscan using several key-words to reveal what has been hidden up till now. There are thousands and thousands of publications. So, perhaps, you may find a few interesting articles that remained under the radar.

Puzzled by your question, I check my literature files as well as some relevant publications (Meloen, 1983, whose work is very precise and comprehensive, and the books by Altemeyer) but I did not find direct links to your question.

Thinking about it, there are perhaps some indirect links that might be of interest. The level of authoritarianism of the individual person is linked to patterns of up-bringing in ealy childhood and the time up to adolescence. These years are also important for developing one's personality in a broader sense, including all sorts of psychic problems and characteristics.

Summarising: in my view the subject you want to tackle is highly interesting; I don't expect you will find much in the mainstream of authoritarian research; you may perhaps find clews in the literature linking authoritarianism with patterns of upbringing; it is certainly worthwhile to do a imaginative search of the retrieval systems.

I wish you great luck with your interesting project.

Laurens

Dear Nikola,

indeed quite a challenging project.

I guess you can find interesting articles (sic!) on various types of autoritarianism in Political Psychology journal. Checking ToC there might give you some relevant hits.

You might also find interesting, hopefully relevant, an article by Smither, Robert D. (1993) in Human Relations, in which he discusses not only organisational autoritarianism but also a parental one. https://doi.org/10.1177/001872679304600103

Good luck

Michal

I have tested the hypotheses on a small sample via an internet survey. There is no correlation with social dominance orientation, only with submissive authoritarianism from the RWA scale. The sample was small though and bias to the left of the political spectrum, and I did not test for the superiority complex. So what I know for now is that there might not be anything here. I will keep posting on this thread if I have an opportunity to learn more. Thank you all or your contribution :)

Interesting question, I have also thought about the relationship between authoritarianism and feelings of inferiority/superiority. Quite similarly, I have once tested the relationship between authoritarianism and self-esteem but my work did not support this idea.

However, I think it might quite difficult to find evidence for your hypotheses, especially if you’re using only self-report measures. If you understand superiority complex as a defense mechanism against feelings of inferiority, you can think that authoritarianism might also serve a similar role (I think this because ideologies are usually associated with our psychological needs). People high in authoritarianism would not express superiority complex in your questionnaire as they are using different defense mechanism and would also not express inferiority complex as authoritarianism is their defense mechanism against these feelings. This might explain why you cannot find evidence of the link between these constructs using self-report measures. Or it might be only my wishful thinking for this relationship to exist, because even to me this idea sounds plausible “on the paper”.

This might be an off topic for you, but I think that you can get some inspiration from the literature that connects political ideologies with various psychological needs (for example: Jost, J.T. (2017), Ideological Asymmetries and the Essence of Political Psychology. Political Psychology, 38: 167-208. https://doi.org/10.1111/pops.12407).

Looking forward for your progress

Michal