first part

• A third experience that helped shape the young man’s early life was his training by Talmudic teachers
• Self-awareness contributes to feelings of loneliness, isolation, and homelessness. To escape from these feelings, people strive to become reunited with nature and with their fellow human beings.
• theory of personality that emphasizes the influence of sociobiological factors, history, economics, and class structure. humanistic psychoanalysis
• 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 looks at people from a historical and cultural perspec tive rather than a strictly psychological one. It is less concerned with the individual and more concerned with those characteristics common to a culture.
• 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”
• The isolation wrought by capitalism has been unbearable, leaving people with two alternatives:

  (1) to escape from freedom into interpersonal dependencies or

  (2) to move to self-realization through productive love and work.
• 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.
• As a boy, Erich studied the Old Testament with several prominent scholars, men who were regarded as “humanists of extraordinary tolerance”
• he had “very neurotic parents” and that he was “probably a rather unbearably neurotic child”
• . How was it possible that this young woman could prefer death to being “alive to the pleasures of life and painting”? (Fromm, 1962, p. 4). This question haunted Fromm for the next 10 years and eventually led to an interest in Sigmund Freud and psychoanalysis.
• Fromm was such a private person that his biographers do not agree on many facts of his life
• After the war, Fromm became a socialist, although at that time, he refused to join the Socialist Party. Instead, he concentrated on his studies in psychology, philosophy, and sociology at the University of Heidelberg
• From 1925 until 1930 he studied psychoanalysis, first in Munich, then in Frankfurt, and finally at the Berlin Psychoanalytic Institute, where he was analyzed by Hanns Sachs, a student of Freud
• Fromm renewed his acquaintance with Karen Horney, whom he had known casually at the Berlin Psychoanalytic Institute.
• Fromm joined Horney’s newly formed Association for the Advancement of Psychoanalysis
• Among 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), and

  For the Love of Life (1986).
• Landis and Tauber (1971) listed five important influences on Fromm’s thinking:

  (1) the teachings of the humanistic rabbis;

  (2) the revolutionary spirit of Karl Marx;

  (3) the equally revolutionary ideas of Sigmund Freud;

  (4) the rationality of Zen Buddhism as espoused by D. T. Suzuki; and

  (5) the writings of Johann Jakob Bachofen (1815–1887) on matriarchal societies.