Overview

• Emphasizes the influence of sociobiological factors, history, economics, and class structure

• Humanity’s separation from the natural world has produced feelings of loneliness and isolation called basic anxiety

Theories

• “We feel lonely and isolated because we have become separated from nature and from other human beings.”

• “If I am what I have and if I lose what I have who then am I?”

• Born in Germany in 1900

• Strict upbringing, similar to Karen Horney

• Eclectic philosophy

• Combination of Sigmund Freud and Karl Marx

• First infatuation/World War 1

• Married 3 times

• Went to the US in 1934, affair with Karen Horney

• Went to Mexico towards the end of career

• Private psychoanalytic practice

• Publication of researches and books

• Dies in Switzerland in 1980, 5 days before his 80th birthday

Basic Assumptions

• Individual personality can be understood in the light of human history

• Concept of Human Dilemma

  • Reasoning facility

  • Awareness as isolated beings

  • Permits to survive

  • Tendency to solve insoluble dichotomies

Human Needs/Existential Needs

• Relatedness

  • Drive for union with another person or other persons

    • Submission

    • Power

    • Love

• Transcendence

  • An urge to rise above a passive and accidental existence and into the realm of purposefulness and freedom

  • Malignant aggression

• Rootedness

  • The need to establish roots

  • To feel at home with the world

  • Influence of mother’s role

• Sense of Identity

  • The capacity to be aware of ourselves as separate entity

• Frame of Orientation

  • Philosophy, a consistent way of thinking

  • Refers to goals or destinations

Fromm’s Theory

• As people have achieved more freedom, they have become more lonely, insignificant, and alienated from nature (less freedom = greater connectedness)

• 3 psychic mechanisms for escaping the negative aspects of freedom

Mechanisms of Escape

• Authoritarianism

  • Tendency to fuse with another person

  • masochism/sadism

• Destructiveness

  • By destruction, people restore feelings of power

• Conformity

  • Reactive, acts like robots

Positive Freedom

• Solution to the human dilemma

• Represents overcoming of loneliness, achieving union with the world and maintain individuality

Character Orientations

• A person’s relatively permanent way of relating to persons and things

• Character replaces instincts

• Assimilation

  • Acquisition and use of things

• Socialization

  • Relating to self and others

Non-Productive Orientations

• Strategies that fail to more people closer to positive freedom and self-realization

• Not entirely negative

• Receptive

  • The only way they can relate to the world is by receiving things; more concerned with receiving than giving

  • (-) passivity, submissiveness, lack of self-confidence

  • (+) loyalty, acceptance, trust

• Exploitative

  • Aggressively take what they desire

  • (-) egocentric, conceited, arrogant, seducing

  • (+) impulse, proud, charming, self-confident

• Hoarding

  • Holding everything inside and do not let go of anything

  • (-) rigidity, sterility, obstinacy, compulsivity, lack of creativity

  • (+) orderliness, cleanliness, punctuality

• Marketing

  • Dependent on the ability to sell themselves

  • Personal security rests on shaky grounds

  • Not permanent principles/values

  • (-) opportunistic and wasteful

  • (+) open-mindedness and adaptability

Productive Orientation

• Working

• Loving

• Reasoning

Personality Disorders (Disturbed Types)

• People who are incapable of love and uniting with others

• Necrophilia

  • Any attraction to death

  • Hates humanity

  • Destructive behavior is a manifestation of their basic character

• Malignant Narcissism

  • Impedes the perception of reality that everything belonging to a narcissistic person is valued and everything belonging to another is devalued

• Incestuous Symbiosis

  • Extreme dependence on the mother/mother surrogate

  • It may be another person/object

Comparison

Critique

• Fromm’s theory is:

  • High on organizing knowledge

  • Low on guiding action, internal consistency, and parsimony

  • Very low on generating research and falsifiability