HUMANISTIC PSYCHOANALYSIS OF ERICH FROMM

VICTOR DANIELS

IN: THE SAGE ENCYCLOPEDIA OF THEORY IN COUNSELING AND PSYCHOTHERAPY.
EDITED BY EDWARD S. NEUKRUG. LOS ANGELES: SAGE PUBLICATIONS, 2015.

Note: ever since I was an undergraduate long ago, both gestalt psychology and the work of Erich Fromm have been among my central interests. In the gestalt world his perspectives dovetail neatly with those of Max Wertheimer and especially Kurt Lewin. Of all psychologists I view Fromm as the one who has offered the most powerful psychological analysis of society. Perhaps that’s not surprising since he was trained as both a psychoanalyst and sociologist. But I had never written about him except in my online lecture notes. In 2013 I was asked to write the entry about Fromm in the Sage Encyclopedia of Theory in Counseling and Psychotherapy. I accepted, and this is the result. I have use SAGE’s outline as the structure for this. (An aside: The Sage Encyclopedia is a remarkable resource!)

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Erich Fromm (1900-1980) viewed most people who live in a dehumanizing and alienating society as themselves dehumanized and alienated. We can be fully healed and whole, he believed, only within a culture that itself is moving toward becoming healed and whole. He offered not only innovations in psychotherapy, but also a program for restructuring society along more cooperative, less alienating lines.

The aim of analysis, said Fromm, is to know oneself. The method is designed to help a patient discover and fathom his or her hidden total experience. “Hidden” means bringing what we have not known was within us into awareness. “Total” means knowing all of the self, not just bits and pieces. Ultimately, the goal of therapy is to have the patient fully exercise his or her own latent powers, in a way that acknowledges the needs and concerns of others as well as his or her own. This perspective combined personal and social humanism. Fromm sought to help every person live in a joyful, fulfilling way within a psychologically and spiritually enriching social context. Such deeper, more individuated persons exercise positive freedom, which is a holistic, integrative activity of a person’s entire organism, much like Kurt Goldstein’s concept of organismic self-regulation.

HISTORICAL CONTEXT
Born March 23, 1900 in Frankfurt, Germany, Fromm was surrounded by subcultures and social upheavals that sensitized him to how the ways cultural forces affect us. He completed his PhD in sociology at the University of Heidelberg in 1922. During the 1920s, he studied psychoanalysis with Frieda Fromm Reichmann, whom he later married, when he was 26 and she was 36..and He began a clinical practice in 1927, with much help from Frieda in completing the requirements for becoming a psychoanalyst. He subsequently trained with Wilhelm Wittenberg in Munich and Karl Landauer in Frankfurt, and then graduated from the Berlin Institute under Hans Sachs and Theodor Reik. In 1929, he became a co-founder of the Frankfurt Psychoanalytic Institute, and also joined the Frankfurt Institute for Social Research, later known simply as the “Frankfurt School” of socialist-leaning European psychoanalysts. There he worked to clarify the links between social structures such as the family, workplaces, and distributions of wealth and the psyche and its impulses. That connection faded as some of those colleagues came to consider him insufficiently committed to the socialist cause. By contrast, many psychoanalysts in Europe and America viewed him as “too socialist.” Such critiques were ironic, because a central thrust of Fromm’s thinking was how people give up their capacity to think independently and instead identify with an ideology created by others. Fromm joined Carl Jung, Alfred Adler and others who rejected Freud’s insistence that sexual libido and its repression were the root cause of mental illness.

When Nazis gained power, Fromm moved to Geneva, Switzerland, then to New York City. After his relationship with Reichmann ended, he shared ideas and had a relationship with Karen Horney. He joined Karen Horney, Harry Stack Sullivan, and Margaret Mead in asserting that culture and intersubjectivity drive human behavior more strongly that economic and psychosexual factors. It was then that he became a cofounder of the William Alanson White Institute. In 1943 his relationship with Karen Horney ended, and in 1944 he married Henny Gurland Fromm, who died in 1952. He went on to become a professor at the National Autonomous University in Mexico City, and remarkably enough, also taught at Michigan State University and New York University. In Mexico City he founded the Mexican Institute of Psychoanalysis which he directed until 1976. Fromm remarried in 1953, to Annis Freeman. In his final years he returned to Switzerland, where he died just before his 80th birthday.

THEORETICAL UNDERPINNINGS
Fromm’s early influences included Sigmund Freud’s theories and discoveries. Later, along with Alfred Adler, Karen Horney, and Harry Stack Sullivan, Fromm came to be labeled a “Neo-Freudian.” The four were interested in real lived relationships and looked askance at the ideological rigidity of Freud’s libido theory. The others had all been influenced by Adler’s outlook, and cross-fertilized each other’s ideas. Horney’s stress on awareness, borrowed from Zen Buddhism, became a thread in Fromm’s thinking.

For Fromm’s view the individual psyche is inherently social in nature. Every person embodies the entire range of possible human responses. There is no inclination toward any kind of behavior that a self-knowing analyst cannot find somewhere within himself or herself. At birth we each have a potential to develop and express qualities that range from the viciously destructive, through bland conformity, to deep spiritual realization. Yet we differ in our potentialities. An apple sapling may become huge and bountiful, or end up puny and weak, but it will never bear oranges. The social influences of family, workplace, and community, which themselves reflect the larger society’s norms and values, bend our potentialities in one direction or another. This bending begins in infancy and childhood, but can be somewhat undone by analysis after reaching adulthood.

With his training as a sociologist as well as a psychoanalyst, Fromm, along Michel Maccoby, carried out a psycho-social study of a Mexican peasant village that could easily be termed anthropology. With this background and interest, it is not surprising that throughout his career, Fromm addressed the interplay among personality, social structure, and culture. He wanted to restructure society along more humanistic, life-enhancing avenues.

MAJOR CONCEPTS
A number of the major concepts highlighted by Fromm include universal human needs, central relatedness, alienation, repression, dissociation, benign neurosis, malignant neurosis, narcissism, the pathology of normalcy, socially patterned defects, the burden of freedom, modes of getting, human versus being, authority, and forms of destruction.

Universal Human Needs
Fromm hypothesized that there were eight human needs, and when they are unmet, they can cause mental health problems. They include the following:
1. Effectiveness—the need to be accomplished.
2. Excitation and stimulation—active striving toward a goal.
3. Identity—a sense of one’s individuality and unique way of being in the world (This is often sacrificed for the price of belonging to some group.)
4. Frame of orientation—a need for understanding the world and our place in it.
5. Relatedness—a need for a shared connections with others.
6. Rootedness—a need to establish roots and feel at home again in the world from which we find ourselves alienated.
7. Transcendence—a need to create and care for something beyond oneself, such as artistic expression or children.
8. Unity—a sense of oneness with the social and natural worlds.

Central Relatedness
Central relatedness occurs when people connect in a real manner with each other rather than with images they want each other to see.

Alienation
We can be alienated from ourselves, each other, society, or nature. This results from (a) the structure of societies, (b) deficiencies in our relationships within ourselves and with others, and (c) family relationships based on power and domination rather than truly loving connections.

Repression
For Fromm, repression includes that which was conscious and then pushed out of awareness, and that which one has never been aware of. Fromm believed that a parent’s attitudes and anxieties, based on social mores, form the basis of what can be admitted to consciousness, and are transmitted through them to their children. This, says Fromm, is the basis for social repression

Dissociation
Dissociation is a type of detachment from self, and Fromm believed that information that tended to be out of consciousness was more likely reflective of dissociation than repression.

Benign Neurosis
Benign neurosis is when character flaws exist due to past traumatic events lead to pathological coping strategies. However, in this case the character structure is fairly intact and the prognosis for improvement or cure is usually favorable.

Malignant Neurosis
Malignant neurosis is when character flaws from past traumatic events damage the nucleus of the character structure resulting in a poor prognosis. A psychopath (a narcissist, manipulative person who has little empathy) is an example.

Narcissism
Fromm suggested that narcissism, or the egotistic admiring of self and seeing the world in terms of one’s own interests, ideas, or feelings, was a central problem for many people.

The Pathology of Normalcy
The concept of pathology of normalcy reflects the belief that one’s self, based partly on societal values, is healthy, when indeed it is often not. This is difficult to treat because much of society supports the neurosis.

Socially Patterned Defects
When an entire society sanctions dysfunctional behaviors, such as the failure to satisfy some or all of the basic human needs, it is said to be sanctioning social patterned defects in individuals. Mental health occurs when people develop full maturity and can transcend these societal values.

The Burden of Freedom
Fromm believed that we may disown responsibility for our choices and instead look to authority figures to tell us how to live. In this context, a person may resort to conformity to accepted norms, authoritarianism, or destructiveness toward others and their possessions, ideas, or self-concepts.

Modes of Getting
In Man for Himself, Fromm conceptualized modes of getting what we need or want. These include passively receiving (which requires a willing giver); exploiting others or the world (i.e., taking by force or guile); hoarding (preserving) what we have; exchanging or trading (which for our time he labeled the marketing orientation), or by producing items ourselves. Each of these modes is on a continuum along which one can express oneself in harmful ways, at one extreme, and helpful ways at the other. For example, in the receptive orientation, “submissive” can be transformed into “devoted.” In the exploitive orientation, “rash” can become “self-confident.” In the hoarding orientation, “stingy” can become “economical.” And in the marketing orientation, “wasteful” can become “generous.”
Although the negative tendencies come from an impoverished view of self and world, a person can learn to express them positively. Everyone must be able to accept, to take, to save, and to exchange. Everyone must be able to follow authority, guide others, and assert himself or herself. We don’t have to become someone completely different, but can change constructively within the context of our starting points.

Having Versus Being
Fromm believed that individuals idolize having. Rather than embracing personal qualities and actions, we measure our worth based on how much “stuff” we have. In this process, he suggests, we lose our humanity. Ultimately, Fromm suggests, we have a choice between “having” or “being.”

Authority
Fromm suggested that in today’s world there is much irrational authority—that is, authority that is motivated by power, greed, and deception. Such power is often used to manipulate and humiliate others. Rationale authority, in contrast, is when a person who has expertise and competence, and who respects another who does not have such expertise and competence, can share his or her knowledge with the other in positive ways.

Forms of Destructiveness
While destruction and aggression are not synonyms, they are closely related as destruction can be a product of aggression. Fromm classified three types of aggression and three types of pseudo-aggression.

Aggression
Benign: This type of aggression is beneficial and promotes well-being of people and groups. Examples are self-defense, self-assertion to attain useful goals, and aggression that promotes the larger social good.
Defensive: Defensive aggression is when we foresee and plan for future threats based on past experience and can be advantageous or disadvantageous, such as in military buildups.
Malignant: The act of malignant aggression involves an intent to harm another.

Pseudo-aggression
Accidental: Accidental pseudo-aggression is when one might hurt another without intending to. In this case, unconscious motives may exist, but we cannot assume so.
Playful: Playful pseudo-aggression is aggression through playful activities and exercising skill such as in archery, sword fighting, etc. Aggression may emerge in competitiveness.
Self-assertive: Self-assertive pseudo-aggression is when a person moves toward a goal without undue hesitation, doubt, or fear. A person low in this quality is likely to be shy and have trouble avoiding and confronting threats.

TECHNIQUES
A number of techniques drive the humanistic analytical method of Fromm’s and include the following: on and off the couch, a phenomenological approach, sharing one’s own perceptions of what patients are saying and doing, a nonjudgmental attitude, cutting off resistances, discovery of personal narcissism, changing one’s actions, becoming aware of one’s body, dream analysis, learning to think critically, and concentrating and meditating.

ON AND OFF THE COUCH
Early in his career, Fromm used the classical psychoanalytic technique of having patients lie on a couch and free-associate, while he himself listened, observed, and took notes. Later he moved to sitting face-to-face in direct dialogue with the client. Free-associating on the couch, he concluded, can keep a person in an infantile state of mind and feeling. It is necessary for the patient’s adult side to react to and confront the archaic material in order to escape its childlike grip. The analytic cure includes the conflict that occurs when rational and irrational sides of the personality meet, and a growth-promoting resolution of that conflict occurs.

A PHENOMENOLOGICAL APPROACH
Phenomenology has to do with the ability of the analyst to understand the subjective experience of the client. Fromm, thus, believed that one can only formulate a plan of analysis after having immersed oneself in the experience of the patient. What urges and what deep goals drive this person? What fears and recollections of past traumas limit him or her? Analysis begins with understanding the patient’s inner world.

SHARING ONE’S OWN PERCEPTIONS OF WHAT PATIENTS ARE SAYING AND DOING
Here, the analyst tells the patient the full truth of his or her perception of the situation. Half-truths and beating around the bush leave the patient untouched. Such dialogue requires a focus on awareness in the present and avoidance of intellectualization by either analyst or patient.

A NONJUDGMENTAL ATTITUDE
Fromm shared Carl Rogers’s emphasis on an intentionally cultivated non-judgmental attitude that allows the other to feel fully heard. This means full acceptance of a patient, not feigned approval. He listened with an ear that is “neither tolerant nor judging.” (In regard to dehumanizing qualities of society and culture, he was sometimes more judgmental.)

CUTTING OFF RESISTANCES
The analyst blocks off one retreat after another by gently challenging the patient to become aware of a crucial avoidance or self-deception while being sensitive to the main resistances and repressions. This also tells whether the patient is someone who can be analyzed, and how deep the therapy might go.

DISCOVERY OF PERSONAL NARCISSISM
A narcissistic person has not learned to truly love himself or herself, and is therefore greedy for all the admiration he or she can get from self and others. Such greed results from frustration of deep needs and longings. It interferes with realistic contact with others and the world. Helping the patient identify, face, and release is one of therapy’s great challenges. We can find happiness only when we release egocentric narcissism that is constantly worried about “What’s going on with me?” Instead, we need to become interested in what is happening in the people and world around us.

CHANGING ONE’S ACTIONS
Despite years of analysis, unless you behave differently, you will still have your same old problems. Fromm encouraged patients to try out new solutions and actions and to consciously experience the anxiety that often accompanies doing so.

BECOMING AWARE OF ONE’S BODY
Sensitivity to situational or chronic tensions anywhere in the body offers reliable information about preferences, hopes, and fears even when mind and emotions are confused.

DREAM ANALYSIS
In dream analysis, Fromm would often look for “universal symbols,” which replaces Carl Jung’s concepts of “archetypes,” Both labels refer to the universal quests and questions that appear in all cultures in all times. The main point, he believed, is to lead the patient toward individuation and aliveness.

LEARNING TO THINK CRITICALLY
Only by thinking critically can we be free, said Fromm. Because this ability has not yet been mastered by most, we unthinkingly accept stories spun by those in positions of power to control the restless rest. Brazilian educator Paolo Freire labeled these the “dominant narrative.”

CONCENTRATING AND MEDITATING
We can think critically only if we can witness our own thinking process. Concentration, or the ability to maintain one’s mental focus, has been shown to make people more effective in diverse realms of life. Fromm points out that practicing a concentrative meditation for a minimum of 15 minutes each day can help greatly in developing this faculty.

THERAPEUTIC PROCESS
Fromm downplayed the value of interpretation and believed that direct experience was crucially important in therapy. He was more interested in present passions than in childhood traumas, reports anthropologist, sociologist, and psychoanalyst Michael Maccoby, In his view, what blocked development was less our memories than our choices.

Fromm believed that a central element in helping a patient become fully himself or herself was making the unconscious, conscious. This process is a journey of personal discovery that requires emphasis on direct experience of one’s sensations, thoughts, feelings, and inclinations toward action during the therapeutic hour. He liked to use his first hour with a new patient to ask why he or she had come and get a life history, taking note of what was said, what was not said, and the feelings the person expressed while speaking.

Patients who experienced analysis with him speak of feeling truly “seen.” Fromm believed that it was important to offer one’s own perceptions and a response in a straightforward manner, believing anything less was valueless. He suggested gently challenging some patients and being more confrontational with others who could handle such interactions.

Fromm believed that the analyst’s task is to show the patient real alternatives in a manner in which the patient has a sense of self-discovery. A common form of resistance to such awareness is the wish for an easy compromise that integrates parts of fundamentally opposed paths. This impossible solution inhibits real change.
Fromm believed that resistance is an issue not just in analysis, but in many daily life problems. He felt it was important for the patient to fully open up to himself or herself and not take small steps that he or she believes denote therapeutic progress. We should not fool ourselves into thinking we are making progress, such as when some patients use free association and believe that all that comes into one’s mind is useful. Moreover, he said, dwelling on one’s misfortunes, could lock a person into a lifelong posture of being a self-pitying victim.

For Fromm, transference is a widespread phenomenon. In his view, everyone transfers some perceptions and feelings about one person onto others. Everyone longs for a close relationship with someone who offers love, guidance, and caring. The analyst must beware of falling into a submission-dependency relationship in which the patient becomes even more powerless and depends on the analyst as a support for everyday living. In countertransference, the analyst has irrational and sometimes unknown attitudes toward the patient. He or she may want the patient’s approval, praise, or even love—although a capable analyst should be beyond all that. But in Fromm’s view, much of the concern about transference and countertransference is secondary to the relational dialogue between two human beings talking to and affecting each other. From such dialogue, authentic contact can occur.

Hope was fundamental to Fromm’s view and his approach to psychotherapy. Just as patients had dissociated from troubles in life and relationships, and from the past events that caused them harm, so too had many of them dissociated from their positive potentialities and talents.

Finally, Fromm speaks of the importance of creating a wise, fulfilling culture that can enhance people’s lives. Doing this combines self-development with cooperative and collaborative social arrangements. He liked to quote Ortega y Gasset’s line, ‘I am myself and my circumstances. And if I do not save my circumstances, I cannot save myself.” Fromm’s student Maccoby speaks of “The Two Voices of Erich Fromm.” His exploratory, skeptical, analytic side tries to help suffering people free themselves from fear and develop their creative potential. His prophetic side was both spiritual and cultural. He saw neurotic symptoms as responses to oppression and alienation, whether in the family, the company, or the statehouse. He sought to help realize an age of worldwide peace and solidarity. At his or her best, the analyst helps the patient discover the revolutionary self within the neurotic.

IN THE ENCYCLOPEDIA, See also Existential-Humanistic Therapies, Existential Therapy, Gestalt Therapy, Adlerian Therapy, Classical Psychoanalysis: Overview; Freudian Psychoanalysis; Neo-Freudian Psychoanalysis; Meditation; Mindfulness Techniques; Person-Centered Counseling. Wilhem Reich, R.D. Laing.

FURTHER READINGS
Fromm, Erich. (1941). Escape from Freedom. New York: Avon.
Fromm, Erich (1947). Man for himself: An inquiry into the psychology of ethics. New York: Holt, Rhinehart, & Winston.
Fromm, E. (1955). The Sane Society. New York: Henry Holt.
Fromm, E. (1956). The Art of Loving. New York: Harper.
Fromm, E. (1973). The Anatomy of Human Destructiveness. New York: Henry Holt.
Fromm, E. (1976). To have or to be. New York: Harper & Row.
Fromm, E. (1994). The Art of Listening. New York: Open Road.
Funk, Rainier (Ed.). (2009). The Clinical Erich Fromm. Personal Accounts and Papers on Therapeutic Technique. Amsterdam & New York: Rudopi.
Maccoby, Michael. (2006) “The Two Voices of Erich Fromm: The Prophetic and the Analytic.” In Society, July/August. xs