SUMMARY
ERICH FROMM: HUMANISTIC PSYCHOANALYSIS
I. OVERVIEW
a. Modern-day people have been torn away
from their prehistoric union with nature
and also with one another yet they have
the power of reasoning, foresight,
imagination.
b. “Freaks of Universe”
c. Self-awareness contributes to feelings of
loneliness, isolation, and homelessness.
d. Reuniting with nature and with fellow
human beings to escape those feelings
e. Emphasizes the influence of
sociobiological factors, history, economics
and class structure
f. Humanistic Psychoanalysis: humanity’s
separation from the natural world has
produced feelings of loneliness and
isolation—basic anxiety.
g. Looks at people from a historical and
cultural perspective rather than a strictly
psychological one
h. Less concerned with the individual and
more concerned with those
characteristics common to a culture.
i. When humans emerged, as a separate
species in animal evolution, they lost
most of their animal instincts but gained
“an increase in brain development that
permitted self-awareness, imagination,
planning and doubt”
j. This combination of weal instincts and a
highly developed brain makes humans
distinct from all other animals.
k. Personality: the totality of inherited and
acquired psychic qualities which are
characteristic of one individual and which
the individual unique
II. BIOGRAPHY
a. Trained in Freudian psychoanalysis,
influenced by Karl Marx, Karen Horney…
b. View of human nature was shaped by
childhood experiences
c. Very neurotic parents—probably a rather
unbearably neurotic child
d. Father: moody
Mother: prone to depression
e. Grew up in 2 distinct worlds—Traditional
Orthodox Jewish and modern capitalist
(seeing events from more than one
perspective
III. FROMM’S BASIC ASSUMPTIONS
a. “Individual personality can be understood
only in the light of human history.”
b. Humans have been torn away from their
prehistoric union with nature and left
with no powerful instincts to adapt to a
changing world. But because humans
have acquired the ability to reason, they
can think about their isolated condition —
the human dilemma.
c. EXISTENTIAL DICHOTOMIES
i. Between life and death (life after
death)
ii. Humans are capable of
conceptualizing goal of complete self-
realization but also aware that life is
too short to reach that goal
iii. People are ultimately alone. Yet we
cannot tolerate isolation
iv.
IV. HUMAN NEEDS
a. Relatedness
i. Drive for union with another person/s
ii. 3 basic ways in w/c a person may
relate to the world
1. Submission
2. Power
3. Love: only route by w/c a person
can become united with the world
and achieve individuality and
integrity
b. Transcendence
i. Urge to rise above a passive and
accidental existence and into the
“realm of purposefulness and
freedom”
ii. Malignant aggression: kill for reasons
other than survival
c. Rootedness
i. The needs to establish roots or to feel
at home again.
ii. Fixation: tenacious reluctance to
move beyond the productive security
provided by one’s mother
iii. People who strive for rootedness
through fixation, are afraid to the next
step of birth, craving to be nurtured,
nursed, protected by a motherly
figure
iv. AGREED TO FREUD that incestuous
desires are universal but disagreed
with Freud that they are essential
v. Attracted to older woman—
Bachofen’s mother-centered theory
d. Sense of Identity
i. Capacity to be aware of ourselves as a
separate entity.
ii. Because we are torn away from
nature, we need to form a concept of
our self, to be able to say, “I am I” or
“I am the subject of my actions”
iii. Without a sense of identity, people
could not retain their sanity, and this
threat provides a powerful motivation
to do almost anything to acquire a
sense of identity.
iv. NEUROTICS: attach to powerful
people or to social or political
institutions
HEALTHY: lesser need to conform and
to give up their sense of identity; do
not surrender their freedom and
 individuality in order to fit in to the
society
e. Frame of orientation
i. Road map to make way through the
world
ii. Without it, humans would be
confused and unable to act
purposefully and consistently
iii. Enables people to organize the
various stimuli that impinge them
iv. A road map without a goal or
destination is worthless.
v. Object of devotion: focuses people’s
energies in a single direction, enables
us to transcend our isolated existence
and confers meaning to their lives;
you can only have the f.o.o if you have
the o.o.d
V. THE BURDEN OF FREEDOM
Basic Anxiety: feeling of being alone in the
world
a. MECHANISMS OF ESCAPE
i. Authoritarianism
1. tendency to give up the
independence of one’s own
individual self and to fuse one’s
self with somebody or something
outside oneself, in order to
acquire the strength which the
individual is lacking
2. Masochism: results from basic
feeling of powerlessness,
weakness and inferiority, aimed at
joining the self to a more powerful
person or institution; disguised as
love or loyalty but can never
contribute positively to
independence and authenticity
3. Sadism: more neurotic and more
socially harmful, aimed at
reducing basic anxiety through
achieving unity with another
person. (1. Need to make others
dependent on oneself and to gain
power over those who are weak 2.
Compulsion to exploit others to
take advantage of them and use
them for one’s benefit or pleasure
3. Desire to see others suffer,
either physically or
psychologically.)
ii. Destructiveness: rooted in the
feelings of aloneness, isolation and
powerlessness; seeks to do away with
other people
iii. Conformity: giving up their
individuality and becoming whatever
people desire them to be; seldom
express opinion, robot-like, react
predictably, appear stiff and
automated
b. POSITIVE FREEDOM: can be free and not
alone, critical and yet not filled with
doubts, independent and yet an integral
part of mankind; represents a successful
solution to the human dilemma of being
part of the natural world and yet separate
from it.
VI. CHARACTER ORIENTATIONS: person’s
relatively permanent way of relating to people
and things
a. NON-PRODUCTIVE ORIENTATIONS
i. Receptive
1. Source of all good lies outside
themselves and that the only way
they can relate to the world is to
receive things (love, knowledge,
materials)
2. Receiving than giving passively
3. Negative qualities: Passive,
submissive, lack of self-confidence
Positive qualities: loyal,
acceptance, trust
ii. Exploitative
1. Aggressively take what they desire
rather than passively receive it
2. Negative qualities: egocentric,
conceited, arrogant, seducing
Positive qualities: impulsive,
proud, charming, self-confident
iii. Hoarding
1. Seek to save that which they have
already obtained
2. Hold everything inside and do not
let go of anything
3. Possess loved one and preserve
the relationship rather than
allowing it to change and grow
4. Tend to live in the past
5. Similar to freud’s ANAL
CHARACTER—excessively orderly,
stubborn and miserly.
6. Negative qualities: rigidity,
sterility, obstinacy, compulsivity
and lack of creativity
Positive qualities: Orderliness,
cleanliness and punctuality
iv. Marketing
1. An outgrowth of modern
commerce in which trade is no
longer personal but carried out by
large, fearless corporations
2. See themselves as commodities,
with their personal value
dependent on their exchange
value, that is their ability to sell
themselves
3. They must make other believe
that they are skillful and salable
4. Play many roles and guided by the
motto “I am as you desire me”
TWO KINDS OF UNPRODUCTIVE FAMILY:
 Symbiotic Family – members of the family are b. Fromm believed that patients come to
“swallowed up” by other so they do not develop therapy seeking satisfaction of their basic
their own personality human needs
c. Transference and Counter transference
Withdrawing Family – cool indifference if not cold
hatefulness

b. PRODUCTIVE IX. METHOD OF INVESTIGATION

i. has 3 dimensions a. Fromm's personality theory rests on data
1. working: value work not as an end he gathered from a variety of sources,
in itself, but as a means of creative including psychotherapy, cultural
self-expression and use work as a anthropology, and psychohistory.
means of producing life’s
necessities
2. loving: care, responsibility,
respect, and knowledge.
a. Biophilia: passionate love of
life and all that is alive
3. reasoning:

Three types of Relationship between Child and his

Parents:

 Symbiotic Relatedness – failure to attain

independence and signifies immaturity and
pseudo-forms of love
 Withdrawal Destructiveness – negative
relatedness or distance and indifference
 Genuine Productive Love

VII. PERSONALITY DISORDERS

a. NECROPHILIA
i. love of death
ii. sexual perversion in which a person
desires sexual contact with corpse
iii. any attraction to death
iv. alternative character of biophilia
v. racists, warmongers, bullies that loves
bloodshed, destruction, terror and
torture and delight destroying life
vi. love to talk about sickness, death, and
burials
vii. fascinated by dirt, decay, corpses and
feces
b. MALIGNANT NARCISSISM
i. Interest in their own body
ii. Devalued others belonging
c. INCESTUOUS SYMBIOSIS

SYNDROME OF DECAY – combination of the three

personality disorders.

NOTE: The goal of therapy Fromm's psychotherapy

was to work toward satisfaction of the basic human
needs of relatedness, transcendence, rootedness, a
sense of identity, and a frame of orientation. The
therapist tries to accomplish this through shared
communication in which the therapist is simply a
human being rather than a scientist

VIII. PSYCHOTHERAPY
a. More interpersonal aspects of a
therapeutic encounter