Breaking with the cliché that psychoanalysis has a deterministic component, we find a series of postulates that defend our ability to be free and choose the path we want to follow in life.
In this PsicologíaOnline article, we present a well-known psychoanalyst, sociologist and humanist philosopher who left a strong mark on the Personality Theories in Psychology: Erich Fromm.
Biography
Erich Fromm was born in Frankfurt, Germany in 1900. His father was a businessman and, according to Erich, rather choleric and with quite a few mood swings. His mother was frequently depressed. In other words, as with a few of the authors we have reviewed in this book, his childhood was not a very happy one, to say the least.
Like Jung, Erich came from a very religious family, in this case Orthodox Jews. He later called himself an “atheist mystic.”
In his autobiography, Beyond the Chains of Illusion, Fromm talks about two events in his early adolescence that led him down this path. The first has to do with a family friend:
She was more or less about 25 years old; She was beautiful, attractive and also a painter; she the first painter she knew. I remember hearing that she had been engaged but after a while she had broken off her engagement; I remember that she was almost always in the company of her widowed father. I remember him as a dull, old and unattractive man; something like that (perhaps because my judgment was based in some way on jealousy). Then one day I heard the tremendous news: her father had died and immediately afterward she had committed suicide, leaving a will that stipulated that her wish was to be buried next to her father (p. 4 in English).
As you can imagine, this news surprised young Erich, then 12 years old, and launched him into that question that many of us would ask ourselves: “why?” Later, he would find some answers (partially, as he admitted) in Freud.
The second event was even stronger: the first World War. At the tender age of 14, he was able to realize how far nationalism could go. Around him, the messages were repeated: “We (the Germans, or rather the Christian Germans) are great; They (the English and allies) are cheap mercenaries.” The hatred, the “war hysteria”, frightened him, as it should.
Therefore, it was found again wanting to understand something irrational (the irrationality of the masses) and found some answers, this time in the writings of Karl Marx.
To conclude Fromm’s story, he received his doctorate from Heidelberg in 1922 and began his career as a psychotherapist. He moved to the US in 1934 (a fairly popular time to leave Germany!), settling in New York City, where he would meet many of the other great refugee thinkers united there, including Karen Horney, with whom he had a romance.
Near the end of his career, he moved to Mexico City to teach. He had already done considerable research work on the relationships between economic class and personality types there. He died in Switzerland in 1980.
Theory
As suggested in his biography, Fromm’s theory It is rather a combination of Freud and Marx. Of course, Freud emphasized the unconscious, biological impulses, repression and so on. In other words, Freud postulated that our character was determined by biology. On the other hand, Marx considered people as determined by their society and more especially by their economic systems.
Fromm added to these two deterministic systems something quite strange to them: the idea of freedom. He encouraged people to transcend the determinisms that Freud and Marx attributed to them. In fact, Fromm makes freedom the central characteristic of human nature.
As the author says, there are examples where determinism operates exclusively. A good example would be the almost pure determinism of animal biology, just as Freud says, at least those simple species. The animals are not busy in their freedom; Your instincts take care of everything. The groundhog, for example, does not need a course to decide what they are going to be when they grow up; They will be groundhogs!
A good example of socio-economic determinism (just as Marx considers) is the traditional society of the Middle Ages. In the same way as groundhogs, few people at this stage needed professional consulting: they had destiny; that Great Chain of Being, to tell you what to do. Basically, if your father was a farmer, you would be a farmer. If your father was king, you would become one too. And if you were a woman, well, there was only one role for a woman.
Nowadays, we look at life in the Middle Ages or we see life as an animal and we just cower in fear. But the truth is that the lack of freedom represented by social or biological determinism is easy: your life has a structure, a meaning; There is no doubt, there is no reason for a soul’s search; we simply adapt and never suffer an identity crisis.
Historically speaking, this simple but hard life begins to take shape during the Renaissance, where people begin to consider humanity as the center of the universe, instead of God. In other words, we don’t just go to church (or any other traditional institution) to find the path we are going to follow. Then came the Reformation, which introduced the idea that each of us was individually responsible for the salvation of our soul. And then came democratic revolutions such as the American and French Revolutions. Right now it seems like we are supposed to govern ourselves. Later came the Industrial Revolution and instead of threshing grain or making things with our hands, we had to sell our work in exchange for money. Suddenly, we become employees and consumers. Then came the socialist revolutions such as the Russian and Chinese, which introduced the idea of the participatory economy. In addition to being responsible for your maintenance, you had to worry about your employees.
Thus, after almost 500 years, the idea of individualwith thoughts, feelings, moral conscience, individual freedom and responsibility, it was established. But along with individuality came isolation, alienation and perplexity. Freedom is something difficult to achieve and when we have it we are inclined to run away from it.
Escape routes from reality
Fromm describes three ways through which we escape freedom:
Authoritarianism. We search avoid freedom by merging with others, becoming part of an authoritarian system like the society of the Middle Ages. There are two ways to approach this posture: one is to submit to the power of others, becoming passive and complacent. The other is to become an authoritarian yourself. Either way, we escape a separate identity.
Fromm refers to the most extreme version of authoritarianism as masochism and sadism and points out that both feel compelled to assume the role individually, so that although the sadist, with all his apparent power over the masochist, is not free to choose his actions. . But there are less extreme positions of authoritarianism everywhere. In many classes, for example, there is an implicit contract between students and teachers: the students demand structure and the teacher holds on to their notes. It seems innocuous and even natural, but in this way students avoid assuming any responsibility for their learning and the teacher can avoid addressing issues that are truly of interest in his field.
Destructiveness. Authoritarians live a painful existence, in a sense, eliminating themselves: if there is no self, how can anything hurt me? But others respond to pain by turning it against the world: if I destroy the world, how can it hurt me? It is this escape from freedom that accounts for the indiscriminate rottenness of life (brutality, vandalism, humiliation, crime, terrorism…).
Fromm adds that if a person’s desire for destruction is blocked, then they can redirect it within themselves. The most obvious form of self-destructiveness is, of course, suicide. But we can also include here many diseases such as substance addiction, alcoholism or even the tendency to indulge in passive entertainment. He puts a twist on Freud’s death drive: self-destructiveness is frustrated destructiveness, not the other way around.
Automated compliance. Authoritarians escape their own persecution through an authoritarian hierarchy. But our society emphasizes equality. There’s less hierarchy to hide behind than it seems (although many people maintain them and some don’t). When we need to retreat, we take refuge in our own mass culture. When I get dressed in the morning, there are so many decisions to make! But I just need to see what you’re wearing and my frustrations disappear. Or I can look at the TV which, like a horoscope, will tell me quickly and effectively what to do. If I look like…, if I talk like…, if I think like…, if I feel like…anyone else in my society, then I will go unnoticed; I will disappear in the middle of the people and I will not have the need to consider my freedom or assume any responsibility. It is the horizontal counterpart of authoritarianism.
The person who uses automatic conformity is like a social chameleon: he assumes the color of his environment. Since he looks like everyone else, he no longer has to feel alone. Of course he will not be alone, but he is not himself either. The automaton conformist experiences a split between his genuine feelings and the disguises he presents to the world, very similar to Horney’s theoretical line.
In fact, since the “true nature” of humanity is freedom, any such escape from it alienates us from ourselves. As Fromm puts it:
Man is born as a strangeness of nature; being part of it and at the same time transcending it. He must find principles of action and decision-making that replace instinctive principles. He must have an guiding framework that allows him to organize a consistent composition of the world as a condition of consistent actions. He must fight not only the dangers of dying, starvation, and injury, but also another specifically human danger: that of going mad. In other words, he must protect himself not only from the danger of losing his life, but also from losing his mind. (Fromm, 1968, p. 61, in its original English. NT).
I would add here that freedom is in fact a complex idea, and that Fromm is talking here about a “true” personal freedom, rather than merely political freedom (usually called liberalism): most of us, whether free or not, tend to cherish the idea of political freedom, since it implies that we can do whatever we want. A…