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Erich Fromm

Erich Fromm Books

Psychologist

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“A person who has not been completely alienated, who has remained sensitive and able to feel, who has not lost the sense of dignity, who is not yet "for sale", who can still suffer over the suffering of others, who has not acquired fully the having mode of existence - briefly, a person who has remained a person and not become a thing - cannot help feeling lonely, powerless, isolated in present-day society. He cannot help doubting himself and his own convictions, if not his sanity. He cannot help suffering, even though he can experience moments of joy and clarity that are absent in the life of his "normal" contemporaries. Not rarely will he suffer from neurosis that results from the situation of a sane man living in an insane society, rather than that of the more conventional neurosis of a sick man trying to adapt himself to a sick society. In the process of going further in his analysis, i.e. of growing to greater independence and productivity,his neurotic symptoms will cure themselves.”

PhilosophyPsychologyHumanismPsychoanalysis
Book:The art of being
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“Our whole culture is based on the appetite for buying, on the idea of a mutually favorable exchange. Modern man's happiness consists in the thrill of looking at the shop windows, and in buying all that he can afford to buy, either for cash or on installments. He (or she) looks at people in a similar way. For the man an attractive girl—and for the woman an attractive man—are the prizes they are after. 'Attractive' usually means a nice package of qualities which are popular and sought after on the personality market. What specifically makes a person attractive depends on the fashion of the time, physically as well as mentally. During the twenties, a drinking and smoking girl, tough and sexy, was attractive; today the fashion demands more domesticity and coyness. At the end of the nineteenth and the beginning of this century, a man had to be aggressive and ambitious—today he has to be social and tolerant—in order to be an attractive 'package'. At any rate, the sense of falling in love develops usually only with regard to such human commodities as are within reach of one's own possibilities for exchange. I am out for a bargain; the object should be desirable from the standpoint of its social value, and at the same time should want me, considering my overt and hidden assets and potentialities. Two persons thus fall in love when they feel they have found the best object available on the market, considering the limitations of their own exchange values. Often, as in buying real estate, the hidden potentialities which can be developed play a considerable role in this bargain. In a culture in which the marketing orientation prevails, and in which material success is the outstanding value, there is little reason to be surprised that human love relations follow the same pattern of exchange which governs the commodity and the labor market.”

LovePhilosophyPsychologyExchangePersonality Market
Book:THE ART OF LOVING
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“In addition to conformity as a way to relieve the anxiety springing from separateness, another factor of contemporary life must be considered: the role of the work routine and the pleasure routine. Man becomes a 'nine to fiver', he is part of the labour force, or the bureaucratic force of clerks and managers. He has little initiative, his tasks are prescribed by the organisation of the work; there is even little difference between those high up on the ladder and those on the bottom. They all perform tasks prescribed by the whole structure of the organisation, at a prescribed speed, and in a prescribed manner. Even the feelings are prescribed: cheerfulness, tolerance, reliability, ambition, and an ability to get along with everybody without friction. Fun is routinised in similar, although not quite as drastic ways. Books are selected by the book clubs, movies by the film and theatre owners and the advertising slogans paid for by them; the rest is also uniform: the Sunday ride in the car, the television session, the card game, the social parties. From birth to death, from Monday to Monday, from morning to evening - all activities are routinised, and prefabricated. How should a man caught up in this net of routine not forget that he is a man, a unique individual, one who is given only this one chance of living, with hopes and disappointments, with sorrow and fear, with the longing for love and the dread of the nothing and separateness?”

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Book:THE ART OF LOVING
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“Indeed, with the experience of self disappears the experience of identity - and when this happens, man could become insane if he did not save himself by acquiring a secondary sense of self; he does that by experiencing himself as being approved of, worthwhile, successful, useful - briefly, as a salable commodity which is he because he is looked upon by others as an entity, not unique but fitting into one of the current patterns.”

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Author:Erich Fromm
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“The development of man's intellectual capacities has far outstripped the development of his emotions. Man's brain lives in the twentieth century; the heart of most men lives still in the Stone Age. The majority of men have not yet acquired the maturity to be independent, to be rational, to be objective. They need myths and idols to endure the fact that man is all by himself, that there is no authority which gives meaning to life except man himself.”

PhilosophyPsychology
Book:Escape from Freedom
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“Love is not primarily a relationship to a specific person; it is an attitude, an orientation of character which determines the relatedness of a person to the world as a whole, not toward one “object” of love. If a person loves only one other person and is indifferent to the rest of his fellow men, his love is not love but a symbiotic attachment, or an enlarged egotism. Yet, most people believe that love is constituted by the object, not by the faculty.”

Love1956
Book:THE ART OF LOVING
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“Ao relacionar-se com o mundo objetivo, por intermédio de suas faculdades, o mundo exterior torna-se real para o homem, e de fato é só o “amor” que faz o homem verdadeiramente crer na realidade do mundo objetivo a ele extrínseco. Sujeito e objeto não podem ser separados . “O olho transformou-se em olho humano quando seu objeto se converteu em um objeto humano, social, criado pelo homem e a este destinado... Eles [os sentidos] se relacionam com a coisa devido a esta, mas a coisa em si mesma é uma relação humana objetiva para si própria e para o homem, e vice-versa. A necessidade e o gozo perderam, assim, seu caráter egoísta, e a natureza perdeu sua mera utilidade pelo fato de sua utilização ter-se transformado em utilização humana. (Com efeito, só posso relacionar-me de maneira humana com uma coisa quando esta se relaciona de maneira humana com o homem)” Esta última afirmação é quase exatamente a mesma feita no pensamento do budismo Zen, assim como por Goethe. De fato o pensamento de Goethe, Hegel e Marx se acha intimamente ligado ao do Zen. O que há de comum neles é a ideia do homem superar a cisão entre sujeito e objeto; o objeto é um objeto, mas no entanto cessa de ser objeto , e nesta nova abordagem o homeme se funde com o objeto, conquanto ele e o objeto continuem a ser dois. O homem ao relacionar-se humanamente com o mundo objetivo, supera a alienação de si mesmo.”

ZenBudismoMarxista
Book:Marx's Concept of Man
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“The courage of the authoritarian character is essentially a courage to suffer what fate or its personal representative or “leader” may have destined him for. To suffer without complaining is his highest virtue—not the courage of trying to end suffering or at least to diminish it. Not to change fate, but to submit to it, is the heroism of the authoritarian character.”

CourageVirtueFateSubmissionAuthoritarianism1941Suffering In SilenceMechanisms Of EscapeAuthoritarian Character
Book:Escape from Freedom
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“Man is born as a freak of nature, being within nature and yet transcending it. He has to find principles of action and decision-making which replace the principles of instincts. He has to have a frame of orientation which permits him to organize a consistent picture of the world as a condition for consistent actions. He has to fight not only against the dangers of dying, starving, and being hurt, but also against another danger which is specifically human: that of becoming insane. In other words, he has to protect himself not only against the danger of losing his life but also against the danger of losing his mind.”

HumanBeing Human
Book:The Revolution of Hope: Toward a Humanized Technology
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“Man is gifted with reason; he is life being aware of itself he has awareness of himself, of his fellow man, of his past, and of the possibilities of his future. This awareness of himself as a separate entity, the awareness of his own short life span, of the fact that without his will he is born and against his will he dies, that he will die before those whom he loves, or they before him, the awareness of his aloneness and separateness, of his helplessness before the forces of nature and of society, all this makes his separate, disunited existence an unbearable prison. He would become insane could he not liberate himself from this prison and reach out, unite himself in some form or other with men, with the world outside.”

ExistenceHumanSelf Awareness1956
Book:THE ART OF LOVING
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“A manera de resumen, cuando digo «carácter revolucionario» no me refiero a un concepto conductal sino a un concepto dinámico. Uno no es un «revolucionario» en este sentido caracterológico porque profiera frases revolucionarias o porque participe en una revolución. En este sentido es revolucionario el hombre que se haya emancipado de los lazos de sangre y suelo, de su madre y su padre, de fidelidades especiales al Estado, clase, raza, partido o religión. El carácter revolucionario es un humanista en el sentido en que siente en sí mismo a toda la humanidad, y en que nada humano le es ajeno. Ama y respeta la vida. Es un escéptico y un hombre de fe. Es escéptico, pues sospecha que las ideologías encubren realidades indeseables. Es un hombre de fe, pues cree en aquello que existe potencialmente, aunque todavía no haya nacido. Puede decir «no» y ser desobediente precisamente porque puede decir «sí» y obedecer a aquellos principios que le son genuinamente propios. No está semidormido sino plenamente despierto ante las realidades personales y sociales que lo rodean. Es independiente; lo que es lo debe a su propio esfuerzo; es libre y no es sirviente de nadie. Este resumen puede sugerir que lo que acabo de describir es bienestar y salud mental antes que el concepto de un carácter revolucionario. No hay duda de que la descripción hecha corresponde a la de una persona sana, viva, cuerda. Mi afirmación es que la persona sana en un mundo insano, el ser humano plenamente desarrollado en un mundo tullido, la persona completamente despierta en un mundo semidormido, es precisamente el carácter revolucionario. Una vez que todo estén despiertos ya no habrá necesidad de profetas o caracteres revolucionarios: sólo habrá seres humanos plenamente desarrollados.”

HumanFrommRevolucionarioErich
Book:La Condicion Humana Actual y Otros Temas de la Vida Contemporanea
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“Although there are certain needs, such as hunger, thirst, sex, which are common to man, those drives which make for the differences in men's characters, like love and hatred, the lust for power and the yearning for submission, the enjoyment of sensuous pleasure and the fear of it, are all products of the social process. The most beautiful as well as the most ugly inclinations of man are not part of a fixed and biologically given human nature, but result from the social process which creates man. In other words, society has not only a suppressing function - although it has that too - but it has also a creative function.”

SocietyHuman NatureSocial PsychologyErich Fromm
Book:Escape from Freedom
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“It is the task of the "science of man" to arrive eventually at a correct description of what deserves to be called human nature. What has often been called "human nature" is but one of its many manifestations - and often a pathological one - and the function of such mistaken definition usually has been to defend a particular type of society as being the necessary one.”

SocietyHuman NatureHuman SciencesCultural Pathology
Book:The Sane Society
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“The Renaissance was the culture of a wealthy and powerful upper class, on the crest of the wave which was whipped up by the storm of new economic forces. The masses who did not share the wealth and power of the ruling group had lost the security of their former status and had become a shapeless mass, to be flattered or to be threatened—but always to be manipulated and exploited by those in power. A new despotism arose side by side with the new individualism. Freedom and tyranny, individually and disorder, were inextricably interwoven. The Renaissance was not a culture of small shopkeepers and petty bourgeois but of wealthy nobles and burghers. Their economic activity and their wealth gave them a feeling of freedom and a sense of individually. But at the same time, these same people had lost something: the security and feeling of belonging which the medieval social structure had offered. They were more free, but they were also more alone. They used their power and wealth to squeeze the last ounce of pleasure out of life; but in doing so, they had to use ruthlessly every means, from physical torture to psychological manipulation, to rule over the masses and to check their competitors within their own class. All human relationships were poisoned by this fierce life-and-death struggle for the maintenance of power and wealth. Solidarity with one's fellow man—or at least with the members of one's own class—was replaced by a cynical detached attitude; other individuals were looked upon as "objects" to be used and manipulated, or they were ruthlessly destroyed if it suited one's own ends. The individual was absorbed by a passionate egocentricity, an insatiable greed for power and wealth. As a result of all this, the successful individual's relation to his own self, his sense of security and confidence were poisoned too. His own self became as much an object of manipulation to him as other persons had become. We have reasons to doubt whether the powerful masters of Renaissance capitalism were as happy and as secure as they are often portrayed. It seems that the new freedom brought two things to them: an increased feeling of strength and at the same time an increased isolation, doubt, scepticism, and—resulting from all these—anxiety. It is the same contradiction that we find in the philosophical writings of the humanists. Side by side with their emphasis on human dignity, individuality, and strength, they exhibited insecurity and despair in their philosophy.”

HumanismParadoxRenaissanceReformationClass Warfare1941
Book:Escape from Freedom
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“While we are living technically in the Atomic Age, the majority of men—including most of those who are in power—still live emotionally in the Stone Age; that while our mathematics, astronomy, and the natural sciences are of the twentieth century, most of our ideas about politics, the state, and society lag far behind the age of science. If mankind commits suicide it will be because people will obey those who command them to push the deadly buttons; because they will obey the archaic passions of fear, hate, and greed; because they will obey obsolete clichés of State sovereignty and national honor.”

Humanity
Book:On Disobedience and Other Essays
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“If the individual realizes his self by spontaneous activity and thus relates himself to the world, he ceases to be an isolated atom; he and the world become part of one structuralized whole; he has his rightful place, and thereby his doubt concerning himself and the meaning of life disappears. This doubt sprang from his separateness and from the thwarting of life; when he can live, neither compulsively nor automatically but spontaneously, the doubt disappears. He is aware of himself as an active and creative individual and recognizes that there is only one meaning of life: the act of living itself.”

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Book:Escape from Freedom
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“Most of us hoped to be able to trust. When we were little we did not yet know the human invention of the lie - not only that of lying with words but that of lying with one's voice, one's gesture, one's eyes, one's facial expression. How should the child be prepared for this specifically human ingenuity: the lie? Most of us are awakened, some more and some less brutally, to the fact that people often do not mean what they say or say the opposite of what they mean. And not only "people," but the very people we trusted most - our parents, teachers, leaders.”

TruthHopeSocietyDisappointmentInnocenceLieDisillusionment
Book:The Revolution of Hope: Toward a Humanized Technology
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“The faculty to think objectively is reason; the emotional attitude behind reason is that of humility. To be objective, to use one's reason, is possible only if one has achieved an attitude of humility, if one has emerged from the dreams of omniscience and omnipotence which one has as a child. Love, being dependent on the relative absence of narcissism, requires the developement of humility, objectivity and reason. I must try to see the difference between my picture of a person and his behavior, as it is narcissistically distorted, and the person's reality as it exists regardless of my interests, needs and fears.”

LoveReasonUnderstandingCompassionHumilityConflictEmpathySelfishnessReasoningNarcissismSubjectiveObjectivityObjectiveErich FrommThe Art Of Loving
Book:THE ART OF LOVING
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“One is not loved accidentally; one’s own power to love produces love - just as being interested makes one interesting. People are concerned with the question of whether they are attractive while they forget that the essence of attractiveness is their own capacity to love. To love a person productively implies to care and to feel responsible for his life, not only for his physical existence but for the growth and development of all his human powers. To love productively is incompatible with being passive, with being an onlooker at the loved person’s life; it implies labor and care and the responsibility for his growth.”

LoveCareAttractiveness
Book:Man for Himself: An Inquiry Into the Psychology of Ethics
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“Related to the no-effort doctrine is the no-pain doctrine. This, too, has a phobic quality: to avoid under all circumstances pain and suffering, physically and, particularly, mentally. The era of modern progress claims to lead man into the promised land of painless existence. In fact, people develop a kind of chronic phobia of pain. Pain is referred to here in the broadest sense of the word, not merely physical and mental pain. It is also painful to practice musical scales for hours every day, to study a subject that is not interesting yet is necessary for acquiring the knowledge one is interested in; it is painful to sit and study when one would like to meet his girlfriend, or just walk, or have fun with friends. These are indeed small pains. Regretfully, one must be willing to accept them cheerfully and without fretting if one wants to learn what is essential, wants to correct whatever is wrong in one's hierarchy.”

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Book:The art of being
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“Love is not the result of adequate sexual satisfaction, but sexual happiness—even the knowledge of the so-called sexual technique—is the result of love. If aside from everyday observation this thesis needed to be proved, such proof can be found in ample material of psychoanalytic data. The study of the most frequent sexual problems—frigidity in women, and the more or less severe forms of psychic impotence in men—show that the cause does not lie in a lack of knowledge of the right technique, but in the inhibitions which make it impossible to love. Fear of or hatred for the other sex are at the bottom of those difficulties, which prevent a person from giving himself completely, from acting spontaneously, from trusting the sexual partner in the immediacy and directness of physical closeness. If a sexually inhibited person can emerge from fear or hate, and hence become capable of loving, his or her sexual problems are solved. If not, no amount of knowledge about sexual techniques will help.”

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Book:THE ART OF LOVING
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“The most important sphere of giving, however, is not that of material things, but lies in the specifically human realm. What does one person give to another? He gives of himself, of the most precious he has, he gives of his life. This does not necessarily mean that he sacrifices his life for the other—but that he gives him of that which is alive in him; he gives him of his joy, of his interest, of his understanding, of his knowledge, of his humor, of his sadness—of all expressions and manifestations of that which is alive in him. In thus giving of his life, he enriches the other person, he enhances the others sense of aliveness by enhancing his own sense of aliveness. He does not give in order to receive; giving is in itself exquisite joy. But in giving he cannot help bringing some thing to life in the other person, and this which is brought to life reflects back to him; in truly giving, he cannot help receiving that which is given back to him. Giving implies to make the other person a giver also and they both share in the joy of what they have brought to life. In the act of giving something is born, and both persons involved are grateful for the life that is born for both of them.”

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Book:THE ART OF LOVING
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“Luther's personality as well as his teachings shows ambivalence toward authority. On the one hand he is overawed by authority—that of a worldly authority and that of a tyrannical God—and on the other hand he rebels against authority—that of the Church. He shows the same ambivalence in his attitude toward the masses. As far as they rebel within the limits he has set he is with them. But when they attack the authorities he approves of, an intense hatred and contempt for the masses comes to the fore. […] we shall show that this simultaneous love for authority and the hatred against those who are powerless are typical traits of the "authoritarian character.”

CharacterTyrannyContemptAuthoritarianismMartin LutherMassesAmbivalenceProtestantismLutheranism1941
Book:Escape from Freedom
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“Or, to choose another example, we feel that freedom of speech is the last step in the march of victory of freedom. We forget that, although freedom of speech constitutes an important victory in the battle against old restraints, modern man is in a position where much of what "he" thinks and says are the things that everybody else thinks and says; that he has not acquired the ability to think originally—that is, for himself—which alone gives meaning to his claim that nobody can interfere with the expression of his thoughts. Again, we are proud that in his conduct of life man has become free from external authorities, which tell him what to do and what not to do. We neglect the role of the anonymous authorities like public opinion and "common sense," which are so powerful because of our profound readiness to conform to the expectations everybody has about ourselves and our equally profound fear of being different. In other words, we are fascinated by the growth of freedom from powers outside of ourselves and are blinded to the fact of inner restraints, compulsions, and fears, which tend to undermine the meaning of the victories freedom has won against its traditional enemies. We therefore are prone to think that the problem of freedom is exclusively that of gaining still more freedom of the kind we have gained in the course of modern history, and to believe that the defense of freedom against such powers that deny such freedom is all that is necessary. We forget that, although each of the liberties which have been won must be defended with utmost vigor, the problem of freedom is not only a quantitative one, but a qualitative one; that we not only have to preserve and increase the traditional freedom, but that we have to gain a new kind of freedom, one which enables us to realize our own individual self, to have faith in this self and in life.”

LibertyCommon SenseConformityFreedom Of SpeechRestrictionAuthoritarianismMemes1969
Book:Escape from Freedom
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“Modern man lives under the illusion that he knows 'what he wants,' while he actually wants what he is supposed to want. In order to accept this it is necessary to realize that to know what one really wants is not comparatively easy, as most people think, but one of the most difficult problems any human being has to solve. It is a task we frantically try to avoid by accepting ready-made goals as though they were our own.”

FreedomExpectationsWillWants
Book:Escape from Freedom
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“Another form of projection is the projection of one’s own problems on the children. First of all such projection takes place not infrequently in the wish for children. In such cases the wish for children is primarily determined by projecting one’s own problem of existence on that of the children. When a person feels that he has not been able to make sense of his own life, he tries to make sense of it in terms of the life of his children. But one is bound to fail within oneself and for the children. The former because the problem of existence can be solved by each one only for himself, and not by proxy; the latter because one lacks in the very qualities which one needs to guide the children in their own search for an answer. Children serve for projective purposes also when the question arises of dissolving an unhappy marriage. The stock argument of parents in such a situation is that they cannot separate in order not to deprive the children of the blessings of a unified home. Any detailed study would show, however, that the atmosphere of tension and unhappiness within the “unified family” is more harmful to the children than an open break would be-which teaches them at least that man is able to end an intolerable situation by a courageous decision.”

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Book:THE ART OF LOVING
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“The familiar picture of man in the last centuries was one of a rational being whose actions were determined by his self-interest and the ability to act according to it. Even writers like Hobbes, who recognized lust for power and hostility as driving forces in man, explained the existence of these forces as a logical result of self-interest: since men are equal and thus have the same wish for happiness, and since there is not enough wealth to satisfy them all to the same extent, they necessarily fight against each other and want power to secure the future enjoyment of what they have at present. But Hobbe's picture became outmoded.”

ReasonHobbesLust For Power1941
Book:Escape from Freedom
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“The main condition preventing love is narcissism. The polar opposite of narcissism is objectivity. The way to have objectivity is reason. The attitude grounding reason is humility. To be objective, to use reason, is only possible if one has achieved an attitude of humility. To engage objectively not only when it meets one's needs, but with the whole of mankind for their own sake, means one is halfway to love. But to love is to commit and give completely oneself to another without guarantee, in the hope that the other will come to conceive love in the other. Love is an act of faith. One attitude then is basic to love: inner activity as the careful productive use of one's powers.”

Humility
Book:THE ART OF LOVING
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“The difference between the having and being modes can be easily observed in two examples of conversations. Let us take a typical conversational debate between two men in which A has opinion X and B has opinion Y.Each identifies with his own opinion. What matters to each is to find better, i.e., more reasonable, arguments to defend his opinion. Neither expects to change his own opinion, or that his opponent's opinion will change. Each is afraid of changing his own opinion, precisely because it is one of his possessions, and hence its loss would mean an impoverishment.”

IdeasOpennessDebates
Book:To Have or to Be? The Nature of the Psyche
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“The "pathology of normalcy" rarely deteriorates to graver forms of mental illness because society produces the antidote against such deterioration. When pathological processes become socially patterned, they lose their individual character. On the contrary, the sick individual finds himself at home with all other similarly sick individuals. The whole culture is geared to this kind of pathology and arranged the means to give satisfactions which fit the pathology. The result is that the average individual does not experience the separateness and isolation the fully schizophrenic person feels. He feels at ease among those who suffer from the same deformation, in fact, it is the fully sane person who feels isolated in the insane society - and he may suffer so much from the incapacity to communicate that it is he who may become psychotic.”

IndividualSocietyInsanitySanityIndividualismOriginalityAlienationPathology
Book:The Anatomy of Human Destructiveness
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