GENIUS FORUMS

Our conscious motivations, ideas, and beliefs are a blend of false information, biases, irrational passions, rationalizations, prejudices, in which morsels of truth swim around and give the reassurance albeit false, that the whole mixture is real and true. The thinking processes attempt to organize this whole cesspool of illusions according to the laws of plausibility. This level of consciousness is supposed to reflect reality; it is the map we use for organizing our life. - Erich Fromm (Man For Himself?)

Does anyone read Erich Fromm? I first read The Sane Society and wasn't very impressed, but as I evolved I found him very good.

Fromm is a psychoanalyst following in the tradition of Freud. However, Fromm disagrees with Freud on several points including the notion that the sex drive is the root of all behaviour and thought or mental illness. For Fromm Man's problems have to do with his relationship with reality. How man sees himself in the social environment as much as anything. How he feels about his job and his status. Fromm argues that anxiety, depression and aggression are not instinctual to man, but are products of man's place in modern civilization and his relation to reality. (The Sane Society, The Anatomy of Human Destructiveness)

I've ordered You Shall Be As Gods: A Radical Interpretation of the Old Testament and Its Tradition and The Forgotten Language: An Introduction to the Understanding of Dreams, Fairy Tales, and Myths

He seems to say that maternity is the grand thing and that reason took over by force. I don't think this is such a grand thing, but I'm half way through Anatomy. Its interesting stuff anyway.

i read his book THE ART OF LOVING about 20 years ago....was impressed then...
generally tho...i've stayed away from that science (psychology) as i thought it was nothing but theory...

i'm sorry now though...i should of studied it more....i got a lot of catching up to do !

Well, there is a difference between Fromm and Psychology.

Psychology is a science that uses experiments to test theories. Any school of thought like instinctivism, behaviorism, and so on is just a way of thinking about the facts. Fromm is a psychoanalyst which means he's focused on treating mental illness using a technique formulated by Freud. Freud used what data was available to him to build a model of human. Basically that humans were driven by libido and its development. The whole idea of Oedipus Complex; a man desiring sex with his own mother. Anal-retention; a person obsessed with anus, feces, anal arousal. These according to Freud were subconscious in the person as a result of sexual repression. These repressed states manifest as narcissism or anxiety. Fromm's view is a lot different but draws on Freud's basic assumption of their being a subconscious.

In any case, reading Fromm is different than reading an actual Psychology textbook. A book like Psychology by Peter O. Gray goes into epistemological detail and looks at many schools of thought equanimously presenting a great deal of reference to experiments. It is designed to be an introduction to the evidence and different theories and not presenting a theory on its own. Although Gray does make certain epistemic conclusions which rule out theories. He makes the assumption that experiments and reductionism are useful and this basically leaves out humanistic psychology. Humanistic psychology is based on some pretty weird assumptions that seem to contradict the whole practice. Anyway, that's just my opinion.

part of my reasoning as to not put much faith in psychoanalyst psychology...is that i always felt the human brain has not evolved enough to really understand
what they're trying to psychoanalize...and funny word... psycho(anal)yst....lol
thankyou Animus .

_/\_

I read "The Art of Loving" quite a few years agos...I still have a tattered, old copy of it. The pages are yellow and brittle and the cover is held on by scotch tape...I love the tactility of books.:)

Here's an excerpt:

"The Art of Loving"
Erich Fromm
p. 111
original copyright 1956

"Our society is run by a managerial bureaucracy, by professional politicians; people are motivated by mass suggestion, their aim is producing more, consuming more, as purposes in themselves. All activities are subordinated to economic goals, means having become ends; man is an automaton-well fed, well clad, but without any ultimate concern for that which is his peculiarly human quality and function. If man is to be able to love, he must be put in his supreme place. The economic machine must serve him, rather than he serve it. He must be enabled to share experience, to share work, rather than, at best, share in profits. Society must be organized in such a way that man's social, loving nature is not separated from his social existence, but becomes one with it. If it is true, as I have tried to show, that love is the only sane and satisfactory answer to the problems of human existence, then any society which excludes, relatively, the development of love, must in the long run perish of its own contradiction with the basic necessities of human nature. Indeed to speak of love is not "preaching", for the simple reason that it means to speak of the ultimate and real need in every human being. That this need has been obscured does not mean that it does not exist. To analyze the nature of love is to discover its general absence today and to criticize the conditions which are responsible for this absence. To have faith in the possibility of love as a social, and not only exceptional-individual phenomenon, is a rational faith based on the insight into the very nature of man."

edit: missed a phrase. I have word cutters living in my head..and word duplicators.

So true.

Was he a Genius ?

a little biography :

http://webspace.ship.edu/cgboer/fromm.html

The book THE ART OF LOVING that i had i borrowed from the dental office i was waiting in...
and then i gave the book to a Jewish friend that never read Fromm...

Kunga:
and then i gave the book to a Jewish friend that never read Fromm...[/quote]

Carmel:
..maybe that's as it should be, perhaps I should leave the book on a park bench for someone to find... :)

& Thanks for the link.

It's interesting that they labeled Fromm as an "atheistic mystic" on that site. I'm not quite sure what they mean by that. I thought he was a theist, albeit an open minded one.

Well, I finished Anatomy of Human Destructiveness on friday. Its a decent book, Fromm gives a psychoanalysis of Stalin, Himmler, Hitler and even Freud!. He ascribes the label Sadist to Stalin, Narcissist to Himmler and Necrophiliac to Hitler. After, of course, explaining what he means by those terms. He thinks Freud's later idea of the death instinct was a compensatory response to World War 1. Previously Freud based everything on libido and suggested human destructiveness was just a matter of sexual infancy or repression. Freud then formulated the view of the Eros and the death instinct. Basically a good vs bad dichotomy. Fromm thinks Freud tried desperately to avoid a dichotomy but failed because he was attached to the notion of the libido. Instead, Fromm suggests, man is primarily driven to life but in the process he stifles it. In the acquisition of more and more he creates his own prison and destroys his environment. He theorizes that some people feel so outside of reality that they compensate with narcissism or sadism, or even an obsession with death. All of this is part of them trying to feel alive. He points out that hunter-gatherer societies are far less destructive and materialistic and suggests that the modern society constructed by man in his bid for more is what applies the psychical illusion that man does not have enough and must work constantly just to sustain himself.

One could think of this as modern man's bloated desires enslaving him by the necessity of their fulfillment. Like an inherited mass addiction or something.