Erich Fromm

Erich Fromm

Founder of Humanistic Psychoanalysis

Humanistic Psychoanalysis

believes that people are good and focuses on helping people reach their potential by exploring their uniqueness. It is based on the assumption that people have free will and are motivated to reach their full potential through self-actualization.

Reason and Self-Awareness

contributes to feelings of loneliness isolation and homelessness

Existential Dichotomies

• Humans are aware that life is too short.

  • People are ultimately alone, yet we can’t tolerate isolation.

Existential Needs

Distinctive human needs can move people towards a reunion with the natural world

Human Needs

• Relatedness

• Transcendence

• Rootedness

• Sense of identity

• Frame of Orientation

Relatedness

the drive for union with another person or other persons.

Fromm postulated three basic ways in which a person may relate to the world:

(1) submission- submissive people search for a relationship with domineering people

(2) power- power seekers welcome submissive partners

(3) love- “union with somebody, or something outside oneself under the condition of retaining the separateness and integrity of one’s own self ”

Transcendence

defined as the urge to rise above a passive and accidental existence and into “the realm of purposefulness and freedom”.

Rootedness

The need to establish roots or to feel at home again in the world.

Fixation

a tenacious, reluctant to move beyond the productive security provided by one’s mother or mother substitute

Sense of Identity

The capacity to be aware of ourselves as a separate entity.

Frame of Orientation (consistent way of looking at the world)

• Road map

• Final goal

• Irrational goal

• Rational goal

Basic Anxiety

sense of being alone in the world

Negative Components of Human Needs

• Submission or domination

• Destructiveness

• Fixation

• Adjustment to a group

• Irrational goals

Mechanism of Escape

• Authoritarianism (to acquire strength)

• Destructiveness (do away with other people)

• Conformity (compliance with the standards)

Character Orientation

• Hoarding

• Exploitative

• Receptive

Personality Disorder

• Necrophilia

• Malignant Narcissism

• Incestuous Symbiosis

Necrophilia

sexual intercourse with or attraction towards corpses.

Malignant Narcissism

a "severe mental sickness" representing "the quintessence of evil". He characterized the condition as "the most severe pathology and the root of the most vicious destructiveness and inhumanity".

Incestuous Symbiosis

an exaggerated form of the more common and more benign mother fixation

Syndrome of Growth

• Biophilia

• Love

• Positive Freedom