Fromm

• Self-awareness contributes to feelings of loneliness, isolation, and homelessness.
• Humanistic Psychoanalysis assumes that humanity’s separation from the natural world has produced feelings of loneliness and isolation, a condition called basic anxiety.
• Humanistic Psychoanalysis emphasizes the influence of sociobiological factors, history, economics, and class structure
• Humanistic Psychoanalysis looks at people from a historical and cultural perspective rather than a strictly psychological one
• Humanistic Psychoanalysis is less concerned with the individual and more concerned with those characteristics common to a culture
• Fromm grew up in two very distinct worlds, one the traditional Orthodox Jewish world, the other the modern capitalist world.
• How many women does Fromm have?

  4
• Humans who have been “torn away” from their prehistoric union with nature 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.
• The human ability to reason is both a blessing and a curse.
• 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.
• How many existential dichotomies does Fromm have?

  3
• What are the human needs?

  relatedness, transcendence, rootedness, sense of identity, and frame of orientation
• Relatedness is the drive for union with another person or other persons.
• Three basic ways in which a person may relate to the world according to Fromm: submission, power, and love
• A person can submit to another, to a group, or to an institution in order to become one with the world.

  submission
• “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”

  submission
• Whereas submissive people search for a relationship with domineering people, power seekers welcome submissive partners.

  power
• When a submissive person and a domineering person find each other, they frequently establish a symbiotic relationship, one that is satisfying to both partners.
• Symbiosis may be gratifying but it blocks growth toward integrity and psychological health.
• Fromm believed that it is the only route by which a person can become united with the world and, at the same time, achieve individuality and integrity.

  love
• It is a “union with somebody, or something outside oneself under the condition of retaining the separateness and integrity of one’s own self ”.

  love
• Involves sharing and communion with another, yet it allows a person the freedom to be unique and separate.

  love
• Enables a person to satisfy the need for relatedness without surrendering integrity and independence.

  love
• Four basic elements common to all forms of genuine love: care, responsibility, respect, and knowledge
• It is the urge to rise above a passive and accidental existence and into “the realm of purposefulness and freedom”

  transcendence
• malignant aggression: to kill for reasons other than survival
• It is the need to establish roots or to feel at home again in the world

  rootedness
• It can be sought in either productive or nonproductive strategies

  rootedness
• Productive strategy: people are weaned from the orbit of their mother and become fully born. They actively and creatively relate to the world and become whole or integrated. This new tie to the natural world confers security and reestablishes a sense of belongingness and rootedness.
• Fixation is a tenacious reluctance to move beyond the protective security provided by one’s mother.
• It is the capacity to be aware of ourselves as a separate entity

  Sense of Identity
• Because we have been 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.”

  sense of identity
• Being split off from nature, humans need a road map, a frame of orientation, to make their way through the world. Without such a map, humans would be “confused and unable to act purposefully and consistently”
• Frame of Orientation enables people to organize the various stimuli that impinge on them.
• goal or object of devotion focuses people’s energies in a single direction, enables us to transcend our isolated existence, and confers meaning to our lives.
• Reason is responsible for feelings of isolation and loneliness; the process that enables humans to become reunited with the world
• Under the burden of freedom: Mechanism of Escape and Positive Freedom
• Three primary mechanisms of escape: authoritarianism, destructiveness, and conformity.
• It is the “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”

  authoritarianism
• Authoritarianism have two forms—masochism or sadism