Erich Fromm, hologram of the century

A contemporary of the 1940th century, one of the many intellectuals who emigrated to the United States from Europe captured by Hitler, Erich Fromm sparkled with a bright star in the XNUMXs, after the publication of his first book, Escape from Freedom. The book stated the collapse of the illusions of the Enlightenment that with the progress of science and industry, man would also improve. Indeed, says Fromm, human capabilities increase, but the majority turns away from them and runs away from freedom, because it is inseparable from responsibility.

Since then, each new book by Fromm has become an event, and not just one science, but the entire intellectual life of the Western world. Yes, he did not fit into the framework of one or even several sciences. Psychologist? Recognized classic. Philosopher? Yes, and very uncommon. Ethic? Undoubtedly. Sociologist? Certainly. Religious scholar? At least two serious books on the subject: Psychoanalysis and Religion and Zen Buddhism and Psychoanalysis. Political ideologue? Fromm not only created a political program, but also participated in an attempt to implement it. The desire to “fit” it into the framework of a certain worldview is also unsuccessful. He is often referred to as a psychoanalyst, implying that he owned the trade of psychoanalysis and earned money from it, and also founded psychoanalytic societies and institutions in different countries. However, Fromm’s theoretical positions are far from the usual psychoanalysis. He called them “humanistic psychoanalysis”, but this designation does not fit many of his works on the socio-historical determination of people’s consciousness, their unconscious, as well as character and personality.

Fromm, like no one else, was able to build a multidimensional image of a person. Freedom and conformism, love and aggression, dreams and religion, life and death, Sigmund Freud and Karl Marx, instincts, the market and conscience – all these facets flicker in Erich Fromm’s slender and clear books. As in pieces of a hologram, the man of the XNUMXth century is reflected in them in all his contradictions.

Five keys to understanding:

Broken nature

A person is born when an animal goes beyond nature and ceases to be controlled by hereditary mechanisms alone. Self-consciousness, reason and imagination arise, which destroy the harmony with nature and encourage a person to seek his own way. But he cannot completely break with his natural roots, and all his life he experiences this duality, a split within his own nature.

Life as a process of birth

Birth in the conventional sense is only the beginning of birth as such. The child is by no means independent, his relationship with his mother is a “psychological symbiosis”. All further development is a gradual, step by step, overcoming of symbiotic relationships and the birth of an individual personality. However, this is not the case for everyone…

Society as a substitute for biological connections

Society is generated by the desire of a person to abandon his evolutionary achievements – consciousness, reason and freedom – and return to a problem-free pre-human state of unity with nature. This is impossible, but it is replaced by forms of social organization, merging into which we can do without freedom, responsibility and reason, obeying established rules. Social structures form not only uniform forms of consciousness for the members of a given society, but also forms of the unconscious and personality structures.

Active love

Perhaps the most popular of Fromm’s books is The Art of Loving. In the first Russian editions, the title was translated as “The Art of Love”, but this is a gross mistake. Love for Fromm is not a passive emotional state, but an active ability, an art in which one can and should improve, a verb, not a noun.

To have or to be?

This is the title of Fromm’s last completed and published book in his lifetime. Possession and being are the two main modes of human existence. The collapse of the expectations that the XNUMXth century was met with is associated with the victory of possession over being, with the dominance of the universal desire to make the whole world and oneself an object of possession, property, if not literally, then symbolically. The path to the recovery of society goes through the restoration of the value of being.