Chapter 7 Notes Flashcards
Capitalism led to increased anxiety leading to 2 choices
1) escape from freedom into interpersonal dependencies or
2) move to self-realization through productive love and work
things that affected Fromm were
1) talmudic scholars
2) the girls’s suicide
3) WW1
4) Neurotic parents
5) karl marx
6) freud
7) zen
8) johan jakob bachofen
9) hooking up with older women lek Horneye
Fromm’s Basic Assumptions
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.
Human Dilemma X3 =
+
existential dichotomies
1) life and death: we will die - how to find meaning in that
2) aware of the goal of self-realization, but life is too short to achieve it
3) we are alone but cannot tolerate isolation with the belief that our happiness depends on uniting with fellow humans : cannot solve aloneness versus union but must make an attempt or run the risk of insanity
People experience this basic dilemma because
they have become separate from nature and yet have the capacity to be aware of themselves as isolated beings. The human ability to reason, therefore, is both a
blessing and a curse. On one hand, 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. Humans
cannot do away with these existential dichotomies; they can only react to these dichotomies relative to their culture and their individual personalities.
5 needs
Relatedness Transcendence Rootedness A sense of identity Frame of orientation
Relatedness can happen in 3 ways
(1) submission, (2) power, or (3) love
Transcendence
Art, religion, laws, love
Humans can destroy through malignant aggression, or killing for reasons other than survival, but they can also create and care about their creations.
Rootedness
the need to establish roots and to feel at home again in the world
Sense of Identity
Capacity to be aware of ourselves as separate entities
A way to preserve your sanity
Frame of Orientation
Basically how things fit together in a social context
An example of a weak version is 9/11 was caused by evil bad people as opposed to orienting it in detail and nuance
The Burden of Freedom
experience basic anxiety, or a feeling of being alone in the world.
As the only animal possessing self-awareness, humans are the freaks of the universe.
Mechanisms of Escape
3 forms similar to Horney’s neurotic trends
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.
Positive Freedom
Expression of both rational and emotional potentialities
Associated with spontaneous activity
Love and work are the twin components of positive freedom
Character Orientations
Relatively permanent way of relating to people or things
Substitute for instincts
Relate to things via assimilation and socialization
Nonproductive Orientations
1) Receive things passively
2) exploiting or taking via force
3) hoarding
4) marketing
The Productive Orientation
Biophilia: passionate love of life and all that is alive
Desire to further all life
Concerned with growth
Want to effect change through reason and love
Self love must come first
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
3) incestuous symbiosis, or an extreme dependence on one’s mother or mother surrogate.
Psychotherapy
Developed humanistic psychoanalysis
Compared to Freud he was much more into the interpersonal dynamics of therapeutic encounter
The aim is for patients to come to know themselves
Come to satisfy the basic human needs so the patient therapist relationship plays an important role
Therapist must relate as one human to another
Transference and counter transference do exist
Dreams, fairy tales, myth but not into specific interpretation of symbols, more to the person
Fromm’s Methods of Investigation
data he gathered from a variety of sources, including psychotherapy, cultural anthropology, and psychohistory.
Related Research
Not generated much
More sociological than psych
The more estranged you feel from society, the more anxious and depressed you feel
Worse if you feel estranged from your friends and family
Modern society provides benefits but they come at a cost
Critique of Psychoanalytic Social Theory
Not able to generate research – too vague
Not verifiable at all
Organize and explain: breadth of info but no precision
Guide to action: not useful
Internally consistent: no taxonomy, operational definitions
Low on parsimony
Concept of Humanity
Both pessimistic and optimistic
Free choice vs determinism: middle
Causality vs teleology : tips to the side of tele
Conscious vs un: conscious : able to visualize the future and strive
Social vs biological: social / historical
Similarities vs uniqueness: stresses uniqueness
Fromm’s psychohistorical study of Hitler
Fromm regarded Hitler as the world’s most conspicuous example of a person with the syndrome of decay, possessing a combination of necrophilia, malignant narcissism, and incestuous symbiosis. Hitler displayed all three pathological disorders. He was attracted to death and destruction; narrowly focused on self-interests; and
driven by an incestuous devotion to the Germanic “race,” being fanatically dedicated to preventing its blood from being polluted by Jews and other “non-Aryans.”
Unlike some psychoanalysts who look only to early childhood for clues to adult personality, Fromm believed that each stage of development is important and
that nothing in Hitler’s early life bent him inevitably toward the syndrome of decay.
