ERICH FROMM

HUMANISTIC
PSYCHOANALYSIS

Lawrence D. Balana
 INTRODUCTION
• Modern day people have been torn away from their prehistoric union with
nature and with one another, yet they have the power of reasoning,
foresight, and imagination.
• Humans as a freak of universe: Lack of animal instincts and presence of
rational thought.
• Basic anxiety: The humanity’s separation from the natural world has
produced feelings of loneliness and isolation.
- It looks at people from a historical and cultural perspective rather than a
psychological one.
*It is less concerned with the individual and more concerned with those
characteristics common to a culture.
- The rise of capitalism which on one hand has contributed to
the growth of leisure time and personal freedom, but on the
other hand, it has resulted in feelings of anxiety, isolation, and
powerlessness.
*The cost of freedom has exceeded its benefits.
*The isolation has been unbearable leaving people with two
alternatives:
1. To escape from freedom into interpersonal
dependencies
2. To move to self-realization through productive love
and work
 Fromm’s Basic Assumptions
- Individual personality can be understood only in the light of human
history.
- Human dilemma: Humans have been “torn away” from their
prehistoric union with nature. They have no powerful instincts to adapt
to a changing world, instead, they acquired the facility to reason.
*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 is both a blessing and a curse. Because:
- It permits the people to survive
- It forces them to attempt to solve basic insoluble dichotomies.
 Existential dichotomies
- They are rooted in people’s very existence.
- They cannot go away with these existential dichotomies, they can only react to
these dichotomies relative to their culture and their individual personalities.
1st dichotomy: Life and death
- Self-awareness and reason tell us that we will die, but we try to negate this
dichotomy by postulating life after death, an attempt that does not alter the fact
that our lives end with death.
2nd dichotomy: 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.
3rd dichotomy: People are ultimately alone yet we cannot tolerate isolation.
- Although people cannot completely solve the problem of aloneness versus union,
they must make an attempt or run the risk of insanity.
 Human Needs
- Existential needs have emerged during the evolution of human
culture, growing out their attempt to find an answer to their existence
and to avoid being insane.
- Healthy individuals are better able to find ways of reuniting to the
world by productively solving the human needs of relatedness,
transcendence, rootedness, a sense of identity, and a frame of
orientation.
 Relatedness
The drive for union with another person or other persons.
• Three basic ways in which a person may relate to the world: submission,
power and love.
a. Submission
- A person can submit to another, to a group, or to an institution in order to
become one with the world.
- In this way he transcends the separateness of his individual existence by
becoming part of somebody or something bigger than himself and
experiences his identity in connection with the power to which he has
submitted.
- A submissive person searches for a relationship with domineering
people.
 b. Power
- Power-seekers welcome submissive partners.
Symbiotic relationship
- When a submissive person and a domineering person find each other.
- It blocks growth toward integrity and psychological health.
- Desperate need for relatedness.
- People in symbiotic relationships blame their partners for not being able
to completely satisfy their needs. They find themselves seeking additional
submission or power, and as a result, they become more and more
dependent and less and less of an individual.
 c. Love
- It is the only route by which a person can become united with the world,
and at the same time, achieve individuality and integrity.
- It enables a person to satisfy the need for relatedness without surrendering
integrity and independence.

Four basic elements common to all forms of genuine love:

✓ Care- Must care for that person and be willing to take care of him or her.
✓ Responsibility- Willingness and the ability to respond.
✓ Knowledge- People can respect others only if they have knowledge about them.
✓ Respect- Respect them for who they are and avoids the temptation of trying to
change them.
 2. Transcendence
- The urge to rise above a passive and accidental existence
into the “realm of purposefulness and freedom”.
- People can transcend their passive nature by either
creating or destroying life.
- Humans are the only species to use malignant aggression.
*Malignant aggression: To kill for reasons other than
survival.
 3. Rootedness
- The need to establish roots or to feel at home again with the world.
- Productive strategy: Actively and creatively relate to the world and become whole
or integrated.
- Negative strategy: Fixation; Reluctance to move beyond the protective security
provided by one’s mother.
- Fromm agree with Freud that incestuous desires are universal, but he disagreed
with Freud’s belief that they are essentially sexual.
- Incestuous feelings are based in “the deep-seated craving to remain in, or return
to, the all-enveloping womb, or to the all-nourishing breasts.”
- Fromm was influenced by Johann Jakob Bachofen: “Mother was the central figure in
these ancient social groups. It was she who provided roots for her children and
motivated them either to develop their individuality and reason or to become fixated
and incapable of psychological growth.”
 4. Sense of Identity

- The capacity to be aware of ourselves as a separate entity.

- Neurotics try to attach themselves to powerful people or to social
or political institutions.
- Healthy people have a less need to conform to the herd, less need to
give up their sense of self.
*They do not have to surrender their freedom and individuality in
order to fit into society because they possess an authentic sense of
identity.
 5. Frame of Orientation
- A road map to make their way through the world.
- It enables people to organize the various stimuli that impinge on them.
- People who possess a solid frame of orientation can make sense of events
and phenomena, but those who lack a reliable frame of orientation will strive
to put these events into some sort of framework in order to make sense of
them.
- Humans have the mental capacity to imagine many alternative paths to
follow.
- This goal or object of devotion focuses people’s energies on a single
direction, enables us to transcend our isolated existence, and confess
meaning to their lives.
 Summary of Human Needs

Human Needs Positive Components Negative Components

Relatedness Love Submission or domination
Transcendence Creativeness Destructiveness
Rootedness Wholeness Fixation
Sense of Identity Individuality Adjustment to a group
Frame of Orientation Rational goals Irrational goals
The Burden of Freedom
- As people gained more economic and political freedom, they feel
increasingly more isolated.
- A parallel experience exists on a personal level: 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.
*Basic anxiety: The feeling of being alone in the world.
MECHANISMS OF ESCAPE
1. Authoritarianism
- It is the tendency to give up the independence of one’s own individual self and to fuse oneself with
somebody or something outside oneself, in order to acquire the strength which, the individual is
lacking.
- This need to unite with a powerful partner can take one of two forms:
• Masochist
-It is often disguised as love or loyalty, but they can never contribute positively to independence and
authenticity.
• Sadist
- It is more neurotic and socially harmful.
Three kinds of sadistic tendencies:
1. The need to make others dependent on oneself and to gain power over those who are weak.
2. The compulsion to exploit others, to take advantage of others, and to use them for one’s benefit or
pleasure.
3. The desire to see others suffer, either physically or psychologically.
2. Destructiveness
- It seeks to do away with other people.
- By destroying people and objects, a person or a nation
attempts to restore lost feelings of power.
- By destroying other people or nations, destructive
people eliminate much of the outside world and thus
acquire a type of perverted isolation.
3. Conformity
- Giving up their individuality and becoming what other people desire
them to be.
- They seldom express their own opinion, cling to expected standards of
behavior, and often appear stiff and automated.
- The more they conform, the more powerless they feel. The more
powerless they feel, the more they must conform.
- People can break this cycle of conformity and powerlessness only by
achieving self-realization or positive freedom.
Positive Freedom
- Spontaneous and full expression of both their rational and their
emotional potentialities.
- They act according to their basic natures and not according to
conventional rules.
- Through positive freedom and spontaneous activity, people overcome
the terror of aloneness, achieve union with the world, and maintain
individuality.
- Through active love and work, humans unite with one another and
with the world without sacrificing their integrity.
- They affirm their uniqueness as individuals and achieve full realization
of their potentialities.
Character Orientations
- Personality is reflected in one’s character orientation.
*Character orientation: 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.
*Character: The relatively permanent system of all noninstinctual strivings
through which man relates himself to the human and natural world.
People relate to the world in two ways:
1. Assimilation: Acquiring and using things
2. Socialization: Relating to self and others
- In general terms, people can relate to things and to people either
nonproductively or productively.
Nonproductive Orientations

- Strategies that fail to move people closer to positive freedom

and self-realization.
- Not entirely negative. Each has both a negative and a positive
aspect.
- Personality is always a blend or combination of several
orientations, even though one orientation is dominant.
a. Receptive Character Type
- 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.
Positive traits
✓ Loyalty
✓ Acceptance
✓ Trust
Negative traits
✓ Passivity
✓ Submissiveness
✓ Lack of self-confidence
b. Exploitative Character Type
- The source of all good is outside themselves.
- They aggressively take what they desire.
- Exploitative people prefer to steal or plagiarize rather than create.
Positive traits
✓Impulsive
✓Proud
✓Charming
✓Self-confident
Negative traits
✓Egocentric
✓Conceited
✓Arrogant
✓Seducing
c. Hoarding Character Type
- 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.
- They are similar to Freud’s anal characters in that they are excessively orderly, stubborn, and
miserly.

Positive traits
✓ Orderliness
✓ Cleanliness
✓ Punctuality
✓
Negative traits
✓ Rigidity
✓ Sterility
✓ Obstinacy
✓ Compulsivity
✓ Lack of Creativity
d. Marketing Character Type
-They see themselves as commodities, with their personal value dependent on their exchange
value, that is, their ability to sell themselves.
- Must see themselves as being in constant demand, they must make others believe that they
are skillful and salable.
- Their personal security rests on shaky ground because they must adjust their personality to
that which is currently in fashion.
- Motto: “I am as you desire me”
- They have no permanent principles or values.
• Positive traits
✓ Changeability
✓ Open-mindedness
✓ Adaptability
✓ Generosity
•
• Negative traits
✓ Aimlessness
✓ Opportunism
✓ Inconsistency
✓ Wastefulness
e. Productive Character Type
- It has three dimensions: Working, loving and reasoning.
- Because productive people work toward positive freedom and a
continuing realization of their potential, they are the healthiest of all
character types.
- Only through productive activity can people solve the basic human
dilemma: to unite with the world and with others while retaining
uniqueness and individuality.
- Healthy people value work as a means of creative self-expression.
*Use work as a means of producing life’s necessities.
Productive love: Care, responsibility, respect and knowledge
*In addition to these four characteristics, healthy people possess biophilia– a
passionate love of life and all that is alive.
*They are concerned with the growth and development of themselves as well as
others.
*Fromm believed that love of others and self-love are inseparable but that self-
love must come first.

Productive thinking: It 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 not and not as they would wish them to be.
*They know themselves for who they are and have no need for self-delusion.
-Fromm believed that healthy people rely on some combination of all
five-character orientations.

*Their survival depends on their ability to receive things from other

people, to take things when appropriate, to preserve things, to
exchange things, and to work, love and think productively.
 Personality Disorders

Psychologically disturbed people are incapable of love

and have failed to establish union with others.
 Necrophilia
- Love of death or any attraction to death.
- Alternative character orientation of biophilia.
- Necrophilic personalities hates humanity.
*They are racists, warmongers, and bullies, they love bloodshed,
destruction, terror, and torture, and they delight in destroying life.
*They are strong advocates of law and order, love to talk about sickness,
death, and burials, and they are fascinated by dirt, decay, corpses, and feces.

- Their destructive behavior is a reflection of their basic character.

- Their entire lifestyle revolves around death, destruction, disease, and
decay.
 Malignant Narcissism
- Everything belonging to a narcissistic person is highly valued and everything belonging
to another is devalued.
- Moral hypochondriasis: A preoccupation with guilt about previous transgressions.
- People who are fixated on themselves are likely to internalize experiences and to dwell
on both physical health and moral virtues.
- Narcissistic people possess what Horney called Neurotic claims – they achieve security
by holding on to the distorted belief that their extraordinary personal qualities give them
superiority over everyone else.
- Their sense of worth depends on their narcissistic self-image and not on their
achievements.
- If the criticism of others is overwhelming, they may be unable to destroy it, so they turn
their rage inward which leads to Depression.
 Incestuous Symbiosis
- Extreme dependence on the mother or mother surrogate.
- Exaggerated form of Mother fixation
- People are inseparable from the host person, their personalities are blended
with the other person and their individual identities are lost.
- Originates in infancy.
- Fromm disagreed with Freud in suggesting that attachment to the mother rests
on the need for security and not for sex.
- They feel extremely anxious and frightened if their relationship is threatened.
- They believe that they cannot live without their mother substitute.
*The host need not to be another human. It can be a family, a business, a church,
or a nation.
 Syndrome of Decay:
Pathologic individuals who possess all three personality
disorders.

Syndrome of Growth:
Biophilia, love, and positive freedom