Erich Fromm Flashcards
According to Fromm, are personalities shaped by biological forces or environmental and cultural factors?
Personality is influenced by the social and cultural forces that affect the individual within a culture and by the universal forces that have influenced humanity throughout history.
What is the title of Fromm’s first book which describes his vision of the human condition and discusses how the freer the people are, the more lonely and alienated they feel?
Escape from Freedom
What period did Fromm reform to as ‘the last era of stability’?
The Middle Ages (about A.D. 400-1400)
What caused people during the Renaissance and the Protestant Reformation to feel alienated, insecure, insignificant and have a lost sense of belonging?
Freedom and choice over their lives which they got at the expense of societal ties.
What are the three psychic escape mechanisms (for escaping from negative aspects of freedom) that Fromm proposed?
Authoritarianism, destructiveness, and automaton conformity?
In what strivings is authoritarianism manifested?
Masochistic (believe they are inferior and inadequate, very dependent on another person or group. Willingly submit to the control). Sadistic (need power over others, want to achieve control and make others dependent on them, exploitative)
What is the aim of the destructive psychic mechanism?
To eliminate an object or a person. ‘I can escape the feeling of my own powerlessness in comparison with the world outside of myself by destroying it.’
What are the characteristics of the automaton conformity psychic escape mechanism?
We ease our loneliness by becoming exactly like everyone else and by conforming to the societal rules. People who conform completely have sacrificed their personality.
According to Fromm, some children never achieve independence but escape their loneliness and insecurity by becoming part of someone else. What is this dynamic called?
Symbiotic relatedness
What are the characteristics of the withdrawal-destructiveness interaction?
A distance and separation from others - passive and active forms of the same type of parent-child relationships
What are the six basic human needs according to Fromm? (needs that help cope with the conflict between freedom and the creation of the self)
Relatedness, Transcendence, Rootedness, Identity, Frame of Orientation, Excitation and stimulation
IRREFT (idk that’s how i’ll try to remember it lol)
What is The need to feel an attachment or sense of belonging to family, community, and society?
Rootedness
What is The need for a consistent, coherent picture of our world within which to understand life
events.
Frame of Orientation
What is The need to maintain contact with other people, ideally through productive love?
Relatedness
What is The need to achieve an awareness of our unique abilities and characteristics?
Identity
What is the need for a stimulating external environment so that the brain can function at a peak level of
activity and alertness?
Excitation and simulation
What is The need to rise above our animal nature by becoming either creative or destructive?
Transcendence
What are nonproductive orientations according to Fromm?
receptive, exploitative, hoarding, marketing character types
What are the four additional character types that Fromm proposed?
Necrophilous, Biophilous, Having, Being
Which character type of Fromm is similar to Freud’s oral incorporative personality type and Horney’s compliant personality type
Receptive
What character type of Fromm is similar to Freud’s oral aggressive?
Exploitative
What character type of Fromm is similar to Freud’s anal retentive personality and Horney’s detached type?
Hoarding type
Which character type was most common in Fromm’s society?
Marketing character type
What is the ideal character type which represents the goal of human development?
Productive character type
What is the necrophilous character type attached to?
Death, corpses, decay, feces, dirt. Happiest when talking about illness and death, they are stuck in the past and then to be cold. Ex: Mother constantly obsessed with child’s failures making gloomy predictions about its future.
What is the opposite type of necrophilous and what are its characteristics?
Biophilous - in love with life, attached to growth, creation/ Try to influence by love, reason, example
What is the having character type characterized by?
Meaning found in possessions of things, people and ideas. Define value based on how well their possession compare with those of others.
What is the being character type characterized by?
Define self in terms of what they are. Self-worth comes from within, not comparison with others. Cooperation, love, productive lives. Can be achieved through analysis and self-analysis
