Theories of Personality: Erich Fromm: Humanistic Psychoanalysis
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
Negative Components | Positive Components | |
---|---|---|
Relatedness | submission/domination | love |
Transcendence | destructiveness | creativeness |
Rootedness | fixation | wholeness |
Sense of Identity | group conformity | individuality |
Frame of Orientation | irrational goals | rational goals |
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
Syndrome of Decay | Syndrome of Growth |
---|---|
Necrophilia | Biophilia |
Narcissism | Love |
Incestuous Symbiosis | Positive Freedom |
Critique
- Fromm’s theory is:
- High on organizing knowledge
- Low on guiding action, internal consistency, and parsimony
- Very low on generating research and falsifiability