Erich Fromm

HUMANISTIC PSYCHOANALYSIS
ERICH SELIGMANN FROMM
• Born in March 23, 1900
• German - American Social Psychologist
• Psychoanalyst
• Belongs to Neo-Freudian school of psychoanalytical thought

Influenced by - Karl Marx

Main interests -
• Humanism
• Social theory
• Marxism
BIOGRAPHY

Family background

• Born in Frankfurt, Germany to a middle class Orthodox Jewish

parents and was a only child to his parents.
• His father - Naphthali Fromm was the son of a rabbi and was the
grandson of two rabbis.
• His mother - Rosa Krause Fromm was the niece of a well known
Talmudic scholar, Ludwig Krause.
Fromm’s family was very religious, but later on he abandoned
religion.
Childhood

• Fromm had stated that his childhood was less than ideal.
• He had also commented that he had “very neurotic parents” and that
he was “probably a rather unbearably neurotic child”.
• He saw his father as being moody and his mother as prone to
depression.

Fromm grew up in two very distinct worlds, one the traditional Orthodox
Jewish world and the other Modern Capitalist world.
THE 3 LIFE EVENTS!
The suicide of a beautiful young artist who killed
herself after the death of her father.
Fromm was 12 years old when this happened.

1914 - 1918
Hatred between people - Germany & England

Training by Talmudic teachers.

Compassionate and redemptive tone of the Old
testament prophets.
Seeking answers

• During adolescence, Fromm was deeply moved by the writings of Freud

and Karl Marx, but he was also stimulated by differences between the
two.
• He had stated that he “wanted to understand the laws that govern the
life of the individual man, and the laws of society”.

• The suicide of a beautiful young artist who killed herself after the
death of her father.
THE SUICIDE

How was it possible that this young woman could prefer death to being “alive to the
pleasures of life and painting”?

• This question haunted Fromm for the next 10 years and eventually led to an
interest in Sigmund Freud and psychoanalysis.
• As Fromm read Freud, he began to learn about the Oedipus complex and to
understand how such an event might be possible.
• Later, Fromm would interpret the young woman’s irrational dependence on her
father as a nonproductive symbiotic relationship, but in those early years he
was content with the Freudian explanation.
WORLD WAR I
He was sure that the British and French were equally irrational, and once again
he was struck by a troubling question: How could normally rational and peaceful
people become so driven by national ideologies, so intent on killing, so ready to
die?
“When the war ended in 1918, I was a deeply troubled young man who was
obsessed by the question of how war was possible, by the wish to understand the
irrationality of human mass behavior, by a passionate desire for peace and
international understanding”

After the war, Fromm became a socialist, although at that time,

he refused to join the Socialist Party.
Education

Year Focused in University

Jurisprudence (the theory of philosophy of

1918 University of Frankfurt am Main
law)

1919 Sociology, Philosophy & Psychology University of Heidelberg

PhD in sociology
1922 University of Heidelberg
"On Jewish Law"

• From 1925 until 1930 he studied psychoanalysis, first in Munich, then in

Frankfurt, and finally at the Berlin Psychoanalytic Institute
Professional Life
1934 to 1941 • Worked as the Faculty of Columbia University

1941 • Joined the Faculty at Bennington College in Vermont

1951 • Was the Appointed professor of psychoanalysis at the National

Autonomous University of Mexico

1957 to 1961 • Held a concurrent professorship at Michigan State University

•
Marital Life
1926 - Married Frieda Reichmann
1930s to Early 1940s - Was in a Romantic affair with Karen Horney
1944 - Married Henny Gurland
1953 - Married Annis Freeman
His best-known books are
• Escape from Freedom (1941)
• Man for Himself (1947)
• Psychoanalysis and Religion(1950)
• The Sane Society (1955)
• The Art of Loving (1956)
• Marx’s Concept of Man(1961)
• The Heart of Man (1964)
• The Anatomy of Human Destructiveness (1973)
• To Have or Be (1976)
BASIC ASSUMPTIONS

Fromm believed that humans, unlike other animals, have been “tornaway”
from their prehistoric union with nature.

• They have no powerful instincts to adapt to a changing world; instead, they have
acquired the facility to reason—a condition Fromm called the human dilemma.
• People experience this basic dilemma because they have become separate from
nature and yet have the capacity to be aware of themselves as isolated beings.
 The human ability to reason, therefore, is both a blessing and a curse.

On one hand, it permits people to survive, but on the other, it forces them to attempt to
solve basic insoluble dichotomies. Fromm referred to these as “existential
dichotomies” because they are rooted in people’s very existence.

• The first and most fundamental dichotomy is that between life and death.
• A second existential dichotomy is that humans are capable of conceptualizing the
goal of complete self-realization, but we also are aware that life is too short to
reach that goal.
• The third existential dichotomy is that people are ultimately alone, yet we cannot
tolerate isolation.
HUMAN NEEDS

As animals, humans are motivated by such physiological needs as hunger, sex, and
safety; but they can never resolve their human dilemma by satisfying these animal
needs.
Only the distinctive human needs can move people toward a reunion with the
natural world.
Emergence of human needs (existential needs)

These existential needs have emerged during the evolution of human culture, growing
out of their attempts to find an answer to their existence and to avoid becoming insane.
 The human needs include
• need for relatedness
• need for transcendence
• need for rootedness
• need for a sense of identity
• need for a frame of orientation
Why are these needs important?

These needs have evolved from human existence as a separate species and are aimed at
moving people toward a reunion with the natural world.

Fromm believed that lack of satisfaction of any of these needs is unbearable and
results in insanity.
Summary of Fromm’s Human Needs

Fromm’s Human Needs Negative Components Positive Components

Submission or
Relatedness Love
domination

Transcendence Destructiveness Creativeness

Rootedness Fixation Wholeness

Sense of identity Adjustment to a group Individuality

Frame of orientation Irrational goals Rational goals

BURDEN OF FREEDOM

Historically, as people gained more and more economic and political freedom,
they came to feel increasingly more isolated
• People were anchored to prescribed roles in society, roles that provided security,
dependability, and certainty.

• Then, as they acquired more freedom to move both socially and geographically, they
found that they were free from the security of a fixed position in the world.
• As children become more independent of their mothers, they gain more freedom to
express their individuality, to move around unsupervised, to choose their friends,
clothes, and so on
• At the same time, they experience the burden of freedom; that is, they are free
from the security of being one with the mother.
• On both a social and an individual level, this burden of freedom results in basic
anxiety, the feeling of being alone in the world.

Because basic anxiety produces a frightening sense of isolation and

aloneness, people attempt to flee from freedom through a variety of
escape mechanisms.
In Escape from Freedom, Fromm (1941) identified three primary mechanisms of
escape
• authoritarianism
• destructiveness
• conformity.

Fromm’s mechanisms of escape are the driving forces in normal

people, both individually and collectively.
CHARACTER ORIENTATION
In Fromm’s theory, personality is reflected in one’s character orientation,
that is a person's relatively permanent way of relating to people and things.

Fromm 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.
• Fromm believed that character is a substitute for lack of instincts. Instead of
acting according to their instincts, people act according to their character.
The two character orientations are
• Non - productive orientation
• Productive orientation

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
(4) marketing or exchanging things
• Nonproductive orientations are, however, not entirely negative; each has both a
negative and a positive aspect.

• Fromm used the term “nonproductive” to suggest strategies that fail to move
people closer to positive freedom and self-realization.

• Personality is always a blend or combination of several orientations, even though

one orientation is dominant.

• People relate to the world in two ways—by acquiring and using things
(assimilation) and by relating to self and others (socialization). In general terms,