Fromm: Humanistic Psychoanalysis

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Fromm's Basic Assumptions

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Fromm believed that 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—a situation Fromm called the human dilemma.

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Relatedness

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First is relatedness, which can take the form of (1) submission, (2) power, or (3) love. Love, or the ability to unite with another while retaining one's own individuality and integrity, is the only relatedness need that can solve our basic human dilemma.

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Transcendence

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Being thrown into the world without their consent, humans have to transcend their nature by destroying or creating people or things. Humans can destroy through malignant aggression, or killing for reasons other than survival, but they can also create and care about their creations.

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Rootedness

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Rootedness is the need to establish roots and to feel at home again in the world. Productively, rootedness enables us to grow beyond the security of our mother and establish ties with the outside world. With the nonproductive strategy, we become fixated and afraid to move beyond the security and safety of our mother or a mother substitute.

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Sense of Identity

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The fourth human need is for a sense of identity, or an awareness of ourselves as a separate person. The drive for a sense of identity is expressed nonproductively as conformity to a group and productively as individuality.

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Frame of Orientation

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By frame of orientation, Fromm meant a road map or consistent philosophy by which we find our way through the world. This need is expressed nonproductively as a striving for irrational goals and productively as movement toward rational goals.

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The Burden of Freedom

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As the only animal possessing self-awareness, humans are the freaks of the universe. Historically, as people gained more political freedom, they began to experience more isolation from others and from the world and to feel free from the security of a permanent place in the world. As a result, freedom becomes a burden, and people experience basic anxiety, or a feeling of being alone in the world.

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Mechanisms of Escape

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To reduce the frightening sense of isolation and aloneness, people may adopt one of three mechanisms of escape: (1) authoritarianism, or the tendency to give up one's independence and to unite with a powerful partner; (2) destructiveness, an escape mechanism aimed at doing away with other people or things; and (3) conformity, or surrendering of one's individuality in order to meet the wishes of others.

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Positive Freedom

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The human dilemma can only be solved through positive freedom, which is the spontaneous activity of the whole, integrated personality, and which is achieved when a person becomes reunited with others.

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Character Orientations

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People relate to the world by acquiring and using things (assimilation) and by relating to self and others (socialization), and they can do so either nonproductively or productively.

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receptive orientation

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believe that 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 objects.

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exploitative orientation

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also believe that the source of good lies outside themselves, but they aggressively take what they want rather than passively receiving it.

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Hoarding characters

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try to save what they have already obtained, including their opinions, feelings, and material possessions.

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marketing orientation

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see themselves as commodities and value themselves against the criterion of their ability to sell themselves. They have fewer positive qualities than the other orientations because they are essentially empty.

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The Productive Orientation

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Psychologically healthy people work toward positive freedom through productive work, love. and reasoning. Productive love necessitates a passionate love of all life and is called biophilia.

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Personality Disorders

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Unhealthy people have nonproductive ways of working, reasoning, and especially loving. Fromm recognized three major personality disorders: (1) necrophilia, or the love of death and the hatred of all humanity; (2) malignant narcissism, or a belief that everything belonging to one's self is of great value and anything belonging to others is worthless; and incestuous symbiosis, or an extreme dependence on one's mother or mother surrogate.

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Psychohistorical Study of Hitler

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the world's most conspicuous example of someone with the syndrome of decay, that is, necrophilia, malignant narcissism, and incestuous symbiosis.

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Related Research

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discrepancies between one’s values and those of society lead to feelings of estrangement, and that these feelings of estrangement lead to anxiety and depression. assessing the personality types of preschoolers, then following up almost 20 years later on the political beliefs of the participants, who were now young adults. They found that children described as easily offended, indecisive, fearful, and rigid were more likely to be politically conservative in their 20s, and those described as self-reliant, energetic, somewhat dominating, and relatively under-controlled were more likely to be politically liberal in their 20s. This research not only shows how people deal differently with their “burden of freedom,” but also how powerfully predictive personality types are, even when measured at very early ages.

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Critique of Psychoanalytic Social Theory

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The strength of Fromm's theory is his lucid writings on a broad range of human issues. As a scientific theory, however, Fromm's theory rates very low on its ability to generate research and to lend itself to falsification; it rates low on usefulness to the practitioner, internal consistency, and parsimony. Because it is quite broad in scope, Fromm's theory rates high on organizing existing knowledge.

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Concept of Humanity

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Fromm believed that humans are the "freaks of nature," because they lack strong animal instincts while possessing the ability to reason. In brief, his view is rated average on free choice, optimism, unconscious influences, and uniqueness; low on causality; and high on social influences.