by DK
Fromm suggests that our separation from nature originated with the growth of intellect, which has made us aware of our separateness. It is our ability to reason and relate that lets us transcend nature. It provides the capabilities for productive living and affords us intellectual superiority, but it also makes us realize that we exist alone in this world. Reason makes us aware of our own mortality and the mortality of our loved ones. This understanding creates a chronic source of tension and an unbearable loneliness that we are always seeking to overcome; man’s inherent state of being is one of anxiety and hopelessness. But there is hope, Fromm insists, because man can overcome his sense of isolation and alienation through finding his purpose.
However, as we strive to become free, unique individuals, we still feel the need for unity with others, and in trying to balance these needs we may seek out the comfort of conforming to a group or an authority. This is a misguided approach, says Fromm; it is imperative to discover one’s own independent sense of self, and one’s own personal views and value systems, rather than adhering to conventional or authoritarian norms. If we try to hand responsibility for our choices to other people or institutions we become alienated from ourselves, when the very purpose of our lives is to define ourselves through embracing our personal uniqueness, discovering our own ideas and abilities, and embracing that which differentiates each of us from other people. Man’s main task is to give birth to himself. In doing so, he frees himself from confusion, loneliness, and apathy.
"It seems that nothing is more difficult for the average man to bear than the feeling of not being identified with a larger group."
Erich Fromm
The creativity of artists encourages them to interpret the world around them in new ways. The world’s most highly acclaimed artists have always essentially been nonconformist.
Creativity and love
Paradoxically, Fromm believes that the only way we can find the sense of wholeness we seek is through the discovery of our individuality.
We can achieve this by following our own ideas and passions, and through creative purpose, because “creativity requires the courage to let go of certainties.”
One of the critical ways in which man delivers himself from isolation is through his capacity to love. Fromm’s concept of love is vastly different from popular understandings of the word. To Fromm, love is not an emotion, nor is it dependent on finding an object to love. It is an interpersonal creative capacity that one must actively develop as part of one’s personality. He says “it is an attitude, an ordination of character which determines the relatedness of the person to the whole world.”
In terms of personal love for another, Fromm says that the main tenets are care, responsibility, respect, and knowledge—an objective knowledge of what other people truly want and need. Love is only possible through respecting the separateness and uniqueness of ourselves and of another; paradoxically, this is how we develop the ability to create connectedness. Love demands a great amount of respect for the other person as an individual, and it is based on autonomy, not a blending of personalities. In our overwhelming desire to connect and unify, we try to love but our relationships often result in an unloving imbalance. We think we are loving, but in reality we may be seeking another form of conformity. We say “I love you” when really we mean “I see me in you,” “I will become you,” or “I will possess you.” In loving, we try to lose our uniqueness, or steal it from the other person. Our yearning to exist “as one” makes us want to see ourselves reflected in other people, which in turn leads us to artificially impose our own traits onto someone else.
The only way to love, says Fromm, is to love freely, granting the other person their full individuality; to respect the other person’s differing opinions, preferences, and belief systems. Love is not found by fitting one person into another’s mold, and it is not a question of finding the perfect “match.” It is, he says, “union with somebody, or something, outside oneself, under the condition of retaining the separateness and integrity of one’s own self.”
Many people spend vast amounts of time and money attempting to cultivate the self that they feel is most worthy of acceptance, and most likely to result in being loved or desired. This is futile, because only a person who has a strong sense of self, and can stand firmly within their own understanding of the world, is able to give freely to others and love in an authentic way. Those who tend to orient themselves toward receiving love instead of being loving will fail; they will also seek to establish a receiving relationship in other ways, always wanting to be given things—material or immaterial—rather than to give. These people believe the source of all good things lies outside themselves, and they constantly feel the need to acquire, though this brings no relief.
"‘Know thyself’ is one of the fundamental commands that aim at human strength and happiness."
Erich Fromm
Personality types
Fromm identified several personality types that he called “nonproductive”, because they enable people to avoid assuming true responsibility for their actions and prevent productive, personal growth. Each of the four main nonproductive types—receptive, exploitative, hoarding, and marketing—have both positive and negative sides. A fifth type, necrophilous, is unremittingly negative, and a sixth type—the productive personality—is Fromm’s ideal. In reality, our personalities are generally drawn from a mix of the four main types.
A person with a “receptive” orientation is said to live passively in the status quo, accepting the lot handed to them. These people follow rather than lead; they have things done to them. In extremes, this is the stance of the victim, but on the positive side, it is rich in devotion and acceptance. Fromm compares this type to the peasants and migrant workers of history.
The “exploitative” orientation thrives on taking from others; exploitative people take what they need instead of earning or creating. However, they show extreme self-confidence and strong initiative. This type is typified by historical aristocracies who took power and wealth from indigenous populations to line their own pockets.
“Hoarders” are always seeking friends in high places and rank even loved ones in terms of their value, seeing them as something owned. Power-hungry and ungenerous, at best they are pragmatic and economical. Historically, these are the middle classes, or bourgeoisie, that rise in great numbers during economic depressions.
The last of the main types is the “marketing” orientation. These people are obsessed with image and with how to successfully advertise and sell themselves. Every choice is evaluated in terms of reflected status, from the clothes, cars, and vacations they buy to marriage into the “right” family. At worst, they are opportunistic, tactless, and shallow; at best, they are highly motivated, purposeful, and energetic. This type is most representative of modern society, in its ever-growing acquisitiveness and self-consciousness.
The most negative personality type—necrophilous—seeks only to destroy. Deeply afraid of the disorderly and uncontrollable nature of life, necrophilous types love to talk about sickness and death, and are obsessed with the need to impose “law and order.” They prefer mechanical objects to other people. In moderation, these people are pessimistic nay-sayers whose glasses are perpetually half empty, never half full.
Fromm’s last personality type, the productive orientation, genuinely seeks and finds a legitimate solution to life through flexibility, learning, and sociability. Aiming to “become one” with the world and so escape the loneliness of separation, productive people respond to the world with rationality and an open mind, willing to chan
ge their beliefs in the light of new evidence. A productive person can truly love another for who they are, not as a trophy or safeguard against the world. Fromm calls this brave person “the man without a mask.”
Fromm’s work has a unique perspective, drawing on psychology, sociology, and political thinking, especially the writings of Karl Marx. His writing, aimed at a mainstream audience, influenced the general public more than academia—mainly because of his insistence on the freedom of ideas. He is nonetheless recognized as a leading contributor to humanistic psychology.
"Life has an inner dynamism of its own; it tends to grow, to be expressed, to be lived."
Erich Fromm
Hitler’s fascination with death and destruction marks him out as an example of Fromm’s necrophilous personality type, which is obsessed with control and the imposition of order.
ERICH FROMM
Erich Fromm was the only child of his orthodox Jewish parents, and grew up in Frankfurt am Main, Germany. A thoughtful young man, he was initially influenced by his Talmudic studies, but later turned toward Karl Marx and socialist theory, together with Freud’s psychoanalysis. Driven by the need to understand the hostility he witnessed during World War I, he studied jurisprudence, then sociology (to PhD level), before training in psychoanalysis. After the Nazis took power in Germany in 1933, Fromm moved to Switzerland and then New York, where he established a psychoanalytic practice and taught at Columbia University.
Fromm married three times and had a well-documented affair with Karen Horney during the 1930s. In 1951, he left the US to teach in Mexico, returning 11 years later to become professor of psychiatry at New York University. He died in Switzerland at the age of 79.
Key works
1941 The Fear of Freedom
1947 Man for Himself
1956 The Art of Loving
See also: Alfred Adler • Karen Horney • Fritz Perls • Carl Rogers • Abraham Maslow • Rollo May
IN CONTEXT
APPROACH
Person-centerd therapy
BEFORE
1920s Austrian psychoanalyst Otto Rank proposes that separation from outdated thoughts, emotions, and behaviors is essential for psychological growth and development.
1950s Abraham Maslow says that people must not be viewed as a collection of symptoms but first and foremost as people.
AFTER
1960s Fritz Perls popularizes the concept of externalizing other people’s expectations to find one’s truest self.
2004 American humanistic psychologist Clark Moustakas explores the uniquely human components of life: hope, love, self, creativity, individuality, and becoming.
During the 19th and into the early 20th century, much of the approach to psychological treatment was based on the idea that mental illness was a fixed pathological malady that needed to be cured. Popular psychoanalytic theory, for example, defined people struggling with their mental health as “neurotic.” Mental illness was seen in a negative light and most psychological practices and theories of the time offered strict definitions with structured explanations of the underlying causes of the mental illness, and fixed methods to cure it.
American psychologist Carl Rogers took a much more esoteric route to mental health, and in so doing expanded the approach of psychotherapy forever. He felt that the philosophies of the time were too structured and rigid to account for something as dynamic as the human experience, and that humanity is much too diverse to be fitted into delineated categories.
"The subjective human being has an important value… that no matter how he may be labeled and evaluated he is a human person first of all."
Carl Rogers
Achieving mental health
Rogers takes the view that it is absurd to view mental well-being as a specific fixed state; good mental health is not something that is suddenly achieved at the end of a series of steps. Nor is it attained because an individual’s previously neurotic state of tension has been reduced by the satisfaction of biological drives and impulses, as the psychoanalysts insisted. Neither is it cultivated by following a specific program designed to develop and preserve a state of inner impermeable homeostasis, or balance, reducing the effect of the world’s external chaos on the self, as the behaviorists recommended.
Rogers does not believe that anyone exists in a defective state that needs to be fixed in order to provide them with a better state, preferring to view human experience, and our minds and environment, as alive and growing. He talks about the “ongoing process of organismic experience”—seeing life as instantaneous and ongoing; life exists in the experience of every moment.
For Rogers, a healthy self-concept is not a fixed identity but a fluid and changing entity, open to possibilities. Rogers embraces an authentic, unprescribed, free-flowing definition of healthy human experience, with limitless possibilities. Humans are not traveling a road where the destination is to become “adjusted” or “actualized,” as fellow humanistic psychologist Abraham Maslow had suggested. Indeed, the purpose of existence is not about reaching any kind of destination, Rogers claims, because existence is less a journey toward an endpoint and more an ongoing process of growth and discovery that does not stop until we die.
"What I will be in the next moment, and what I will do, grows out of the moment, and cannot be predicted."
Carl Rogers
Living “the good life”
Rogers uses the phrase living “the good life,” to refer to the range of characteristics, attitudes, and behaviors displayed by people who have embraced the foundations of his approach—people who are “fully in the stream of life.” One essential ingredient is the ability to stay wholly present in the moment. Since self and personality emerge out of experience, it is of the utmost importance to stay fully open to the possibilities offered by each moment, and to let experience shape the self. The individual lives in an environment of constant change, yet frequently and all too easily, people deny this fluidity and instead create constructs of how they think things should be. They then try to mold themselves and their idea of reality to fit the constructs they have made. This way of being is the very opposite of the fluid, flowing, and changing organization of self that Rogers believes the nature of our existence requires.
Our preconceptions about how the world is, or should be, and our own role within it, define the limits of our world and reduce our ability to stay present and open to experience. In living the good life and remaining open to experience, Rogers believes we adopt a way of being that prevents us feeling trapped and stuck. The aim, as Rogers sees it, is for experience to be the starting point for the construction of our personalities, rather than trying to fit our experiences into a preconceived notion of our sense of self. If we hold on to our ideas of how things should be, rather than accepting how they really are, we are likely to perceive our needs as “incongruent” or mismatched to what is available.
When the world does not “do what we want,” and we feel unable to change our ideas, conflict arises in the form of defensiveness. Rogers explains defensiveness as the tendency to unconsciously apply strategies to prevent a troubling stimulus from entering consciousness. We either deny (block out) or distort (reinterpret) what is really happening, essentially refusing to accept reality in order to stick with our preconceived ideas. In so doing, we deny ourselves the full range of potential reactions, feelings, and ideas, and we dismiss a wide range of options as wrong or inappropriate. The defensive feelings and thoughts that rise up in us when reality conflicts with our preconceptions create a limited, artificial interpretation of experience. In order to r
eally participate in what Rogers calls the “ongoing process of organismic experience,” we need to be fully open to new experience, and be completely without defensiveness.
"Self and personality emerge from experience, rather than experience being translated… to fit preconceived self-structure."
Carl Rogers
Unlike a maze with only one route across, Rogers asserts that life is full of possibilities and offers multiple routes —but individuals are often unable or unwilling to see them. To experience “the good life” we need to stay flexible and open to what life brings, by experiencing it fully moment by moment.
Spending time working in a developing country can be a rewarding way to open up to new experiences, challenge fixed ideas about the world, and find out more about ourselves.
A full range of emotions
By tuning in to our full range of emotions, Rogers argues, we allow ourselves a deeper, richer experience in every part of our lives. We may think we can selectively block emotion, and dampen down disturbing or uncomfortable feelings, but when we repress some of our emotions, we inevitably turn down the volume of all our emotions, denying ourselves access to the whole of our nature. If on the other hand, we allow ourselves to be more comfortable with our emotions, including those we have deemed to be negative, the flow of positive feelings emerges more strongly; it is as if by permitting ourselves to feel pain, we allow for a more intense experience of joy.