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Humanism and Psychoanalysis

Erich Fromm
(1963f-e)

Presented at the dedication of the building of the Institute of the Mexican Society of Psycho-
analysis, Mexico, D.F., March 8, 1963. First published in Contemporary Psychoanalysis, New
York: Academic Press, Inc., Vol. 1 (No. 1, Fall 1964).
Copyright © 1963 by Erich Fromm; Copyright © 2011 by The Literary Estate of Erich Fromm,
c/o Dr. Rainer Funk, Ursrainer Ring 24, D-72076 Tuebingen / Germany. – Fax: +49-(0)7071-
600049; E-Mail: frommfunk[at-symbol]aol.com.

The title of this essay—humanism and psychoanalysis—may sound surprising to some

readers. They may ask, „What has a philosophical view, humanism, to do with psycho-
analysis, a therapy for mental illness?” It is precisely the purpose of this paper to show
the intrinsic connection between humanism and psychoanalysis, by discussing some es-
sential features of both systems.
What is humanism? The conventional definition is that it was a movement in the fif-
teenth and sixteenth centuries which represented a return to the study of classical antiq-
uity, specifically that of Greek and Roman literature and art. While this is true as far as it
goes, it is much too narrow and superficial. First of all, because humanism was not re-
stricted to the Renaissance, but was continued in the age of Enlightenment, and has
found a new revival in the humanist movement of our day. Secondly, because Renais-
sance humanism, like its continuation into the eighteenth, nineteenth, and twentieth
centuries, was the expression of a global philosophy which, in spite of many internal dif-
ferences, was characterized by fundamental ideas as well as by a certain human attitude
common to all humanist thinkers. Humanism, both in its Christian religious and in its
secular, non-theistic manifestations, is characterized by faith in man, in his possibility to
develop to ever higher stages, in the unity of the human race, in tolerance and peace,
and in reason and love as the forces which enable man to realize himself, to become
what he can be.
Let us examine the philosophy of humanism in somewhat greater detail. The most
important and the most fundamental thought of humanism is the idea that mankind—
humanity (humanitas)—is not an abstraction but a reality: that in each individual all of
humanity is contained; that each man is all men; that each individual represents all of
humanity and, hence, that all men are equal, not in their gifts and talents, but in their
basic human qualities. This concept of equality is rooted in the Judeo-Christian tradition.
The Old Testament tells us that only one man and one woman were created, and that
they were created in the likeness of God; the Talmudic interpretation is that the Bible
means to say here that if someone destroys an individual, it is as though he destroyed
the whole world; and if someone saves an individual, it is as though he saved all of hu-
manity. In the Christian tradition the idea of the unity of humanity is expressed in the

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figure of Christ, who is God and man, and as man he is not a Hebrew, or a Greek, but
he is just a man, the son of man.
It is precisely this tradition which is continued in Renaissance humanism, both in its
religious and in its secular forms. One of the most important representatives of Christian
Renaissance humanism, Nicholas de Cusa, taught that the fundamental concept of hu-
manity is embodied in Christ. The humanity of Christ, to him, becomes the bond of the
world and the highest proof of its inner unity. Different, and yet basically related to the
thinking of Nicholas de Cusa, is that of Leibniz and Spinoza. Leibniz says: „In our own
being is contained a germ, a footprint, a symbol of the divine nature and its true im-
age.” This means, quoting Cassirer, that „only the highest development of all human en-
ergies, not their leveling equalization and extinction leads to the truth of being in the
highest harmony and to the most intense fullness of reality.”
What Leibniz expressed here is an idea which has run through humanist thinking
since the Renaissance: that the individual and the universal are not contrasts, but can be
understood only in their mutual relationship; that the development of the universal is
based on the fullest development of the individual.
Spinoza expressed the idea of the unity of the human race in his concept of the
„model of human nature” to which certain laws apply, laws which neither completely
determine man nor leave him completely free. Instead of calling him, as is often done, a
determinist, it would be better to call Spinoza an „alternativist”; by this I refer to the
concept that man has freedom to choose, but that he can choose only between certain
alternatives which are determined from his nature in general, and from the character of
each individual, personally. Spinoza became the founder of modern scientific psychol-
ogy, and he is closely related to Freud not only through the concept of the model of
human nature, but also by his concept of the unconscious, by the idea that man is
guided by forces he is not aware of. As he put it, man believes himself to be free because
he knows his desires, but he is not aware of the causes for his desires.
The philosophers of the Enlightenment continued the thought of the theologians
and the humanists of the Renaissance of the seventeenth century.
The idea of the unity of the human race is expressed by Hume, who said: „Mankind
are so much the same in all times and places that history informs us of nothing new or
strange in this particular. Its chief use is only to discover the constant and universal
proofs of human nature.”
Herder said each animal achieves what it is supposed to achieve in accordance with
its instinctual organization. Man, on the contrary, does not. He is not born as a fully
human being, but he must develop himself into full humanity. According to Herder, the
specifically human is the highest flowering of cultural and natural development. The task
of man is to become human.
Lessing expressed the same idea similarly. He took up the concept of Joachim de
Fiori, „The Third Realm” (Das Dritte Reich, a title so cynically misused by Hitler), in
which he believed the conflict between man and man would be resolved by each per-
son's awareness of his humanity.
Perhaps nobody has expressed the humanist idea of the unity of mankind more pre-
cisely and clearly than did one of the greatest humanists, Goethe. He said: „Man carries
within himself not only his individuality, but all of humanity, with all its potentialities,
although he can realize all these potentialities only in a limited way because of the ex-

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ternal limitations of his individual existence.”

Had I the time, I would try to show how the concept of the unity of the human race,
and of humanity contained in each individual as a potential, is the theme underlying the
thinking of Kierkegaard, of humanist socialism, of Schweitzer, of Russell, and of Einstein.
But I forego this today. I might say only that humanism has always been a reaction to
the threat of dehumanization, to a threat to the existence, even, of the human race. In
the sixteenth century, humanism was the reaction to the threat caused by the fanaticism
and the destruction of the religious wars; in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, it
was a reaction to the threat of national wars, and the transformation of man into a
means for production. As the great humanist poet Hölderlin expressed it in these tragic
lines:
You see artisans, but you do not see human beings.
You see thinkers, but you do not see human beings.
You see priests, but you do not see human beings.
You see masters and serfs, old and young, but you do not see human beings.

In our time, humanism is a reaction to the threat of the total bureaucratization of man
and of an all-destroying nuclear holocaust which would destroy at least half of mankind,
and all of civilization.
The humanist thinkers speak of the humanity inherent in each individual; they
speak, to use another term, of the essence of man, but they do not imply by the word
„essence” a fixed substance which exists in man and which does not change in the his-
torical process. Their concept of the essence of man, that is to say, of that by virtue of
which a man is what he is—namely, human—refers not to an unalterable substance, but
to the potentialities and possibilities existing in all men. To them, the essence of man is a
configuration of the conditions specific for human existence. It is man who, in the proc-
ess of history, can and must develop this human potential by his own effort, and by his
own activity. Thus, beginning with the Renaissance philosophy, and increasingly so in
the following centuries, history becomes the dimension which enables man to develop
humanity or, to speak with Hegel, in which the subject translates itself „from the night
of possibility into the day of actuality.”
While the idea that all of humanity is contained in each man, and that man develops his
humanity in the historical process, is the most fundamental idea of humanism, I shall not
forego mentioning, even though ever so briefly, some other aspects of humanist thought
which, like the former ones, are found in the development from Renaissance to con-
temporary humanism. To mention only the most fundamental ones, they are the idea of
man's dignity, strength, freedom and joy, and of love as a fundamental force of all crea-
tion.
Speaking of the concept of the dignity of man, I want to mention two great Renais-
sance humanists, Gianozzo Manetti and Pico della Mirandola. Manetti wrote a book De
dignitate et Excellencia Hominis (On the Dignity and Excellence of Man), in which he
says that man is free, great, and dignified. In contrast to him, Pope Innocent, the repre-
sentative of medieval papal absolution, wrote De Miseriae Humanae Vitae (On the Mis-
ery of Human Life), which proclaims: man is dirt; he is weak and unstable, and hence he
must be directed by strong authorities. Manetti's contemporary, Pico della Mirandola, in
his Oratio de Hominis Dignitate (Speech on the Dignity of Man), wrote: „Neither heav-

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enly nor earthly, neither mortal nor immortal have we created thee, so that thou might-
est be free according to thy own will and honor, to be thy own creator and builder. To
these alone we have growth and development depending on thy own free will. Thou
bearest in thee the germs of a universal life.”
There is a continuity between the Renaissance concept of the dignity of man to Al-
bert Schweitzer's „reverence for life;” while the two concepts are not identical they are,
nevertheless, part of the same respect for the greatness of man which characterizes hu-
manist thinking. It is the same feeling which is expressed in Antigone when she says:
„There are many wonderful things, but there is nothing more wonderful than man.”
Closely related with the idea of man's dignity is the humanist faith in man's potenti-
ality for goodness and in man's capacity for freedom. This does not mean the belief that
man is good, but that he has a potentiality for goodness, that he can be good; that he
has the capacity for self-perfection. Early humanism, as Cassirer pointed out, „never
dared openly to assail the dogma of the fall of man, but its basic intellectual tendency
was toward undermining the force of this dogma. The influence of Pelagianism in the re-
ligious position of humanism becomes increasingly evident. Efforts to throw off the yoke
of Augustinian tradition became more and more deliberate.”

It is important to mention in passing that Luther and the mainstream of Reformation

thought fundamentally differed from humanism. Luther was a man of fear, superstition,
and hate. The humanists were men of human self-affirmation, confidence, and toler-
ance. Precisely because of their faith in man's potentialities, they could believe in man's
freedom. Not only in the freedom from political servitude, bot also in the freedom to
realize his humanity.
One more feature of humanistic thought must be mentioned even in this brief ac-
count, because it is so crucial for the understanding of humanism in the past and of the
role of humanism today. Precisely because humanists believed in the unity of humanity,
because they had faith in the future of man, because they were universalists, they were
not fanatics. More than that, they saw the limitations of both the Catholic and the Prot-
estant positions, because they judged not from the narrow angles of one particular or-
ganization and power group, but from the interest of humanity. For this very reason,
the humanists were tolerant. Their aim was to avoid religious wars, and to arrive at co-
existence between Catholics and Protestants, or even, as one of their great representa-
tives, Postel, declared, with the Hussites and the Turks. The title of a book Postel wrote
is characteristic: De Orbis Terraei Concordia (1544) (On Global Mutual Understanding).
He was looking for a simplified form of Christianity which could unify all religions and
confessions, and in 1547 he tried to found a league of nations and confessions, a league
of all men of good will and honesty. Erasmus and the other humanists recognized to
what frightful results religious fanaticism could lead. They tried to prevent the outbreak
of religious wars by preaching tolerance and mutual understanding, but they failed. The
Thirty Years' War brought unimaginable suffering to Central Europe, and the religious
tolerance which was eventually achieved in the Westphalian Peace was only a partial
realization of the humanists' aim Had they won in the battle of ideas, not only would
the Thirty Years' War with its inhuman fanaticism not have taken place, but it is possible
that the fate of Europe and of all of mankind would have taken a different course.

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We come now to the question: What is the relation of psychoanalysis to humanism?

First of all, one must not forget that Freud considered psychoanalysis not only a therapy
for the cure of neurosis; it was also a theory of man; and beyond that, it was a reform
movement in the spirit of Enlightenment humanism, with the aim of enabling man to
control the irrationality of his nature by reason and self-awareness; this aim Freud once
expressed in the words: „Where there is Id there shall be Ego.” The optimal develop-
ment of man as a rational and independent being was the aim of Freud's humanism.
It may be said that in his concepts of the child, Freud sometimes seems to speak the
language of Augustine, rather than that of Pelagins and the humanists. But while this is
true (and there is no time for a detailed analysis of this point), it does not alter the fact
that on the whole Freud shares in the tradition of Enlightenment humanism. The hu-
manist attitude of Freud finds an interesting expression in his whole concept of psycho-
analytic therapy. In this period of ever greater mechanization and mass culture, Freud
proposed a method in which the analyst spends hundreds of hours, with one patient,
with the intention of understanding him and helping him. I am not praising the fact that
analytic therapy takes so much time; on the contrary, all psychoanalysts wish to shorten
the length of therapy. What I am talking about here is Freud's courage in proposing that
so much time and attention should be given to one person. This is, indeed, a method
rooted in the spirit of humanism, in the spirit of respect for the individual.
Psychoanalysis as a theory of man has the humanistic features I have already men-
tioned in connection with Spinoza. For Freud, as for Spinoza, human nature is one, with
its own laws, regardless of the culture or race to which an individual may belong; Freud
developed a model of human nature which, whether one agrees with his specific theo-
ries or not, continues Spinoza's basic and humanistic concept of the universality of hu-
man nature.
So far, we have only talked about tangential aspects of the humanist character of
psychoanalysis. We must now proceed to the central issue: psychoanalysis is a method
which aims at the uncovering of the unconscious. It expects that by penetrating through
the defenses and resistances of conscious thought, the unconscious reality behind the
screen of consciousness can be reached. It expects, furthermore, that in the process of
making the unconscious conscious, neurotic symptoms and character traits can be cured.
Without entering into a discussion of the theory of neuroses and their cure, we can
ask ourselves: What is the process of becoming aware of the unconscious?
Let me say first that properly speaking there is no such thing as „the unconscious.”
The fact is that there are experiences inside ourselves of which we are aware and others
of which we are not. Freud believed, as did Spinoza or Nietzsche before him, that most
of what is real is not conscious, and most of what we are conscious of is not real, is fic-
tion and cliché.
Why is that so? Man always lives in a specific kind of society; it may be a society of
head-hunters and aggressive warriors, of peacefully cooperating peasants, of feudal serfs
and artisans, or of modern industrial workers and employees; he must live in a society if
he wants to live at all, and every society must form and mold the energies of man in
such a way that he wants to do what he has to do; the necessities of societies become
transformed into personal needs, into the „social character.” Concretely speaking, in a
society of warriors the individual must want to attack and rob; in a society of peaceful
peasants he must want to cooperate and to share; in modern industrial society he must

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want to work, to have discipline, he must be ambitious and aggressive, he must want to
spend and consume (in the nineteenth century, to save and to hoard). But society forms
the social character not only by stimulating certain strivings and drives, but also by re-
pressing those tendencies which are at odds with the social patterns. To give an exam-
ple: among a tribe of warriors there will be a few individuals who dislike robbing and
killing. But, almost certainly, they will not be aware of their feeling of dislike. They
might on the day of an attack against a neighboring tribe develop a psychosomatic
symptom like vomiting, or paralysis of an arm; their body will express their dislike, but
their conscious mind will not be aware of it.
This repression operates not only with regard to certain socially tabooed strivings, but
particularly with regard to one basic fact: in all societies in which there is conflict be-
tween the human interests of all individuals and the social interest of the existing society
(and its elite), the society will see to it that the majority of the people do not become
aware of this discrepancy. The greater the discrepancy between the specific interests of
the survival of a given social order and the human interest of all its members, the more
must a society be conducive to repression. Only when social interest and the human in-
terest of the individual are identical will the need for repression disappear.
But why, we must ask ourselves, is man so ready to repress what he feels and thinks
and experiences? Freud thinks that the reason lies in the fear of the father and of his cas-
tration threat. I believe the fear is deeper and of a social character: man is afraid of
nothing more than of being ostracized, isolated, alone. In fact, utter and complete isola-
tion is equivalent to insanity. If a society lays down the law that certain experiences and
thoughts must not be felt or thought consciously, the average individual will follow this
order because of the threat of ostracism which it implies if he does not. Formally speak-
ing, then, what is unconscious and what is conscious depends (aside from the individual,
family-conditioned elements and the influence of humanistic conscience) on the structure
of society and on the patterns of feelings and thoughts it produces.
As to the contents of the unconscious, no generalization is possible. But one state-
ment can be made: it always represents the whole man, with all his potentialities for
darkness and light; it always contains the basis for the different answers which man is
capable of giving to the question which existence poses. In the extreme case of the most
regressive cultures, bent on returning to animal existence, this very wish is predominant
and conscious, while all strivings to emerge from this level are repressed. In a culture
which has moved from the regressive to the spiritual-progressive goal, the archaic forces
representing the dark are unconscious. But man, in any culture, has all the potentialities:
he is the archaic man, the beast of prey, the cannibal, the idolater, and he is the being
with the capacity for reason, for love, for justice. The content of the unconscious, then,
is not just the good or the evil, the rational or the irrational; it is both; it is all that is
human. The unconscious is the whole man—minus the part of man which corresponds
to his society. Consciousness represents social man, the accidental limitations set by the
historical situation into which an individual is thrown. Unconsciousness represents uni-
versal man, the whole man, rooted in the Cosmos: it represents the plant in him, the
animal in him, the spirit in him; it represents the past back to the dawn of human exis-
tence, and it represents his future to the day when man will have become fully human,
and when nature will be humanized as man will be „naturalized.”
In Freud's concept, making the unconscious conscious had a limited function, first of

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all because the unconscious was supposed to consist mainly of the repressed, instinctual
desires, as far as they are incompatible with civilized life. He dealt with single instinctual
desires, such as incestuous impulses and castration fear, the awareness of which was as-
sumed to have been repressed in the history of a particular individual. The awareness of
the repressed impulse was supposed to be conducive to its domination by the victorious
ego. If we go beyond Freud's concept of unconsciousness and follow the concept pre-
sented above, then Freud's aim, the transformation of unconsciousness into conscious-
ness („Id into Ego”), gains a wider and more profound meaning. Making the uncon-
scious conscious transforms the mere idea of the universality of man into the living ex-
perience of this universality; it is the experiential realization of humanity.
To experience my unconscious means that I know myself as a human being, that I
know that I carry within myself all that is human, that nothing human is alien to me,
that I know and love the stranger, because I have ceased to be a stranger to myself. The
experience of my unconscious is the experience of my humanity, which makes it possible
for me to say to every human being „I am thou.” I can understand you in all your basic
qualities, in your goodness and in your evilness, and even in your craziness, precisely be-
cause all this is in me, too. Not only clarity and tolerance in general to my fellow man
follows from this experience, but specifically the capacity of the analyst to understand
his patient. He may know a great deal about a patient, but he will know him, under-
stand him, only when he has found in himself, even though in a lesser degree, all the
tendencies and desires he tries to discover in his patient's unconscious.
I have tried to indicate that, in its deepest roots, psychoanalysis is part of the hu-
manist movement which began in Europe five hundred years ago. The humanism of the
Renaissance was indeed more than a return to classical learning. It was a renewal of He-
brew, Greek, and Roman humanism. It was the form in which modern man emanci-
pated himself from the shackles of medieval authority. It was a protest against secular
and ecclesiastic restriction of man's thought and activities. It was a protest against the fa-
naticism of religion and nationalism, and it was a protest against the subjection of man
to the idolatry of economic interests. Quite rightly, the historian Friedrich Heer called
Renaissance humanism „Die Dritte Kraft” (The Third Force). It was that force which had
faith in man and faith in reason, and which tried to avert the catastrophe which fanati-
cism and inhumanity eventually brought to Europe. This third force transcended the fa-
natical religious partisanship of the sixteenth century, just as the humanist third force to-
day tries to transcend the fanaticism of political partisanship. The future of man depends
on the strength of humanism in our time, and we hope that psychoanalysis will serve
the idea of humanism and contribute to its strength.

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Auer, A. (1956), G. Manetti und Pico della Mirandola. De hominis dignitate, In: Vitae et veritati, Festgabe
für Karl Adam. Düsseldorf.
Bouwsma, W. J. (1957), Concordia Mundi: The Career and Thought of Guillaume Postel. Cambridge: Har-
vard.
Cassirer, E. (1951), The Philosophy of the Enlightenment, F. C. A. Koelln and James P. Pettegrove, trans.,
Princeton: Princeton.
Cusanus, N. (1954), Of Learned Ignorance, Germain Heron, trans., London: Routledge.
Erasmus, D. (1946), The Complaint of Peace. New York: Scholars' Facsimiles.
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 Propriety of the Erich Fromm Document Center. For personal use only. Citation or publication of
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Leibniz, G. W. ( 1961), Neue Abhandlungen über den menschlichen Verstand, Eds. Wolf von Engelhardt and
Hans Heinz Holz. Frankfurt a. M: Insel Verlag.
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