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

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

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