Personality Theories in Psychology: Erich Fromm

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 the lifetime.

In this PsicologíaOnline article, we introduce a well-known psychoanalyst, sociologist, and humanist philosopher who left a strong mark on the Personality Theories in Psychology: Erich Fromm.

Index

1. Biography
2. Theory
3. Escape routes from reality
4. Families
5. The social unconscious
6. Evil
7. Discussion
8. Readings

Erich Fromm was born in Frankfurt, Germany in 1900. His father was a businessman and, according to Erich, rather angry and with quite a few mood swings. His mother was often depressed. In other words, as with quite a few of the authors we've reviewed in this book, his childhood was not a very happy one.

Like Jung, Erich came from a very religious family, in this case Orthodox Jews. He later called himself an "atheist mystic."

In her autobiography, Beyond the Chains of Illusion Fromm talks about two events in his early teens that led him down this path. The first has to do with a family friend:

She would be about 25 years old; she was beautiful, attractive and also a painter; she the first painter he knew. I remember hearing that she had been engaged but after a while she had broken her engagement; I remember that he was almost always in the company of his widowed father. I remember him as an insipid, old and unattractive man; something like that (maybe because my judgment was somehow based on jealousy). Then one day I heard the tremendous news: her father had died and immediately afterwards 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 the young Erich, at that time 12 years old, and he asked him 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 British and allies) are cheap mercenaries. " The hatred, the "war hysteria," frightened him, as it should have.

Therefore he found himself again wanting to understand something irrational (the irrationality of the masses) and found some answers, this time in the writings of Karl Marx.

To end 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 popular enough 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 on the relationships between economic class and the personality types there. He died in Switzerland in 1980.

As suggested in his biography, Fromm's theory it is rather a combination of Freud and Marx. Of course, Freud emphasized the unconscious, biological drives, 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 foreign to them: the idea of Liberty. He encouraged people to transcend the determinisms that Freud and Marx attributed to them. In fact, Fromm makes freedom the central feature 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, as Freud says, at least those simple species. Animals are not occupied with their freedom; your instincts take over everything. The groundhog, for example, does not need a course to decide what they will be when they are older; They will be marmots!

A good example of socio-economic determinism (as Marx considers it), is the traditional society of the Middle Ages. In the same way as marmots, few people at this stage needed professional consulting: they had the 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 women.

Today, we look at life from 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 to search for a soul; we just adapt and never have an identity crisis.

Historically speaking this simple but hard life began to take shape during the Renaissance, where people began 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 that we are going to follow. Then came the Reformation, which introduced the idea that each of us were individually responsible for the salvation of our souls. And then came the democratic revolutions such as the American and French Revolutions. Right now it seems that we are supposed to rule ourselves. Later came the Industrial Revolution and instead of threshing the cereals or doing things with our hands, we had to sell our work in exchange for money. Suddenly we become employees and consumers. Then came socialist revolutions such as the Russian and Chinese, which introduced the idea of ​​the participatory economy. Besides being responsible for your maintenance, you had to worry about your employees.

Thus, after almost 500 years, the idea of individual, with individual thoughts, feelings, moral conscience, freedom and responsibility, it was established. But along with individuality came isolation, alienation, and perplexity. Freedom is a difficult thing to achieve and when we have it we are inclined to run away from it.

Fromm describes three ways through which we escaped from freedom:

Authoritarianism. We seek 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 Y sadism and he points out to us that both feel compelled to assume the role individually, so that although the sadist with all his apparent power over the masochist, he is not free to choose his actions. But there are less extreme positions of authoritarianism anywhere. In many classes, for example, there is an implicit contract between students and teachers: students demand structure and the teacher holds on to his notes. It seems innocuous and even natural, but in this way the students avoid taking any responsibility in their learning and the teacher may avoid addressing the truly relevant issues in their countryside.

Destructiveness. Authoritarians live a painful existence, in a sense, eliminating themselves: if there is no self, how can anything harm 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 he can redirect it within himself. 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 pleasure passive entertainment. He gives Freud's death drive a twist: self-destructiveness is frustrated destructiveness, not the other way around.

Automaton compliance. Authoritarians escape their own persecution through an authoritarian hierarchy. But our society emphasizes equality. There is less hierarchy to hide in than it seems (although many people maintain them and others do not). 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 go away. Or I can notice on TV that, like a horoscope, he will tell me quickly and effectively what to do. If I see myself like…, if I speak like…, if I think like…, if I feel like… anyone else in my society, then I will go unnoticed; I will disappear in the midst 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 automaton conformity is like a social chameleon: he assumes the color of his environment. Since he looks like the rest of the others, he no longer has to feel lonely. Of course he will not be alone, but neither is he himself. The conformist automaton experiences a division between his genuine feelings and the disguises he presents to the world, much like Horney's theoretical line.

In fact, since the "true nature" of humanity is freedom, any of these escapes 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 to replace instinctual principles. He must have an orientative 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, starving and injuring himself, but also another specifically human danger: that of going insane. In other words, he must protect himself not only from the danger of losing his life, but losing his mind. (Fromm, 1968, p. 61, in its original in English. N.T.).

I would add here that freedom is indeed a complex idea, and that Fromm is speaking here of a "true" personal freedom, rather than merely political freedom (usually called liberalism): Most of us, whether we are free or not, tend to cherish the idea of ​​political freedom, since it assumes that we can do whatever we want. A good example would be sexual sadism (or masochism) that has a psychological root that conditions behavior.

This person is not free in the personal sense, but he will appreciate a politically free society that says that what adults do with each other is none of their business. Another example concerns many of us today: we may be fighting for our freedom (in the political sense), and even when we get it, we tend to be conformists and rather irresponsible. We have the vote, but we failed to apply it!. Fromm tends a lot to political freedom; but it is quite insistent that we make use of that freedom and exercise the responsibility inherent in it.

Choosing how we escape freedom has a lot to do with the type of family we grow up in. Fromm describes two types of non-productive families.

Symbiotic families. Symbiosis is the close relationship between two organisms that cannot live without each other. In a symbiotic family, some members of the family are "absorbed" by other members, so that they cannot fully develop their personalities on their own. The most obvious example is the case where the parents "absorb" the child, so that the child's personality is simply a reflection of the parents' wishes. In many traditional societies, this is the case with many boys, especially girls.

The other example is the case where the child "absorbs" her parents. In this case, the child dominates or manipulates the parent, who exists essentially to serve the child. If this sounds strange to you, let me assure you that it is quite common, especially in traditional societies and particularly in the relationship between his son and his mother. Within this particular cultural context, it is even necessary: ​​how else does the child learn the art of authority that he will need to survive as an adult?

In reality, virtually everyone in a traditional society learns how to be both dominant as a submissive, since almost everyone has someone above or below him in the hierarchy Social. Obviously, the authoritarian escape from freedom is structured in such a society. But note that as much as it may offend our modern standards of equality, this is the way we people have lived for hundreds of years. It is a fairly stable social system, which allows us a great amount of love and friendship and billions of people support it.

Estranged families. In fact, its main characteristic is its icy indifference and even its icy hatred. Although the familiar style of "retreat" has always been with us, it has only come to dominate a few societies in the last few hundred years; that is, since the bourgeoisie (the merchant class) arrived on the scene with force.

The "cold" version is the older of the two, typical of northern Europe and parts of Asia, and everywhere the merchants have been regarded as a formidable class. Parents are very demanding of their children, who are expected to pursue the highest standards of living. Punishments are not a matter of being hit on the head in the middle of an argument at dinner; it is more of a formal process; a complete ritual that possibly involves breaking up the discussion and meeting in the woods to discuss the issue. The punishment is radical and cold, "for your own good." Alternatively, a culture may use guilt and withdrawal of affection as punishment. Either way, children in these cultures turn to achievement regardless of their notion of success.

The puritan style of family defends the destructive flight of freedom, which is internalized unless some circumstances (such as war) do not allow it. I would add here that this type of family propels a faster form of perfectionism (living by the rules) which is also a way of avoiding freedom that Fromm does not mention. When rules are more important than people, destructiveness is inevitable.

The second type of estranged family is the modern family, and it can be found in most of the most advanced places in the world, especially in the United States. Changes in parenting attitudes have led many people to shudder at the fact of physical punishment and guilt in raising their children. The new idea is to raise your children as your equals. A father must be the best "friend" of his son; the mother must be her daughter's best companion. But, in the process of controlling their emotions, parents become quite indifferent. They are no longer, in fact, true parents, they only cohabit with their children. The children, now without a true adult guide, turn to their colleagues and the "average" in search of their values. This is, therefore, the superficial and television family!

The escape from freedom is particularly obvious here: it is an automaton conformity. Although this family is still in the minority in the world (except, of course, on TV), this is one of Fromm's main concerns. It seems to be the harbinger of the future.

What makes a good, healthy and productive family? Fromm suggests that this would be a family where parents take responsibility for teaching their children to reason in an atmosphere of love. Growing up in this type of family allows children to learn to identify and value their freedom and to take responsibility for themselves and ultimately for society as a whole.

But our families most of the time are just a reflection of our society and culture. Fromm emphasizes that we soak up our society with our mother's milk. It is so close to us that we often forget that our society is just one of the many avenues of dealing with the issues of life. Many times we believe that the way we do things is the only way; the natural way. We have come to terms with it so well that it has become unconscious (the social unconscious, to be more precise? also called collective unconscious, although this expression is attributed to another author. N.T.). For this reason, on many occasions we believe that we are acting based on our own judgment, but we are simply following orders that we are so used to that we do not notice them as such.

Fromm believes that our social unconscious is best understood when we examine our economic systems. In fact, he defines, and even names, five personality types, which he calls orientations in economic terms. If you wish, you can apply a personality test made from the adjectives that Fromm uses to describe his orientations.

The receptive orientation. These are people who hope to get what they need; if they don't get it right away, they wait. They believe that all good things and provisions come from outside of themselves. This type is more common in peasant populations, and also in cultures that have abundant natural resources, so it is not necessary to work too hard to achieve self-sustenance (even though nature may suddenly limit your sources!). It is also easy to find it on the lowest scale of any society: slaves, serfs, employee families, immigrant workers… all of them are at the mercy of others.

This orientation is associated with symbiotic families, especially where children are "absorbed" by their parents and with the masochistic (passive) form of authoritarianism. It is similar to Freud's passive oral posture; Adler's "leaning-getting" and Horney's conformist personality. In its extreme presentation it can be characterized by adjectives such as submissive and eager. In a more restrained way, she introduces herself with adjectives like resigned and optimistic.

The exploitative orientation. These people hope to get what they want through the exploitation of others. In fact, things have a greater value when they are taken from others: happiness is preferably stolen, ideas plagiarized, and love is achieved based on coercion. This type is more common in the history of aristocracies and in the upper classes of colonial empires. Take, for example, the English in India: their position was based entirely on their power to seize the indigenous population. Some of its most notable characteristics is the ability to stay very comfortable giving orders! We can also find it in the barbarian shepherds and peoples that support the invasion (such as the Vikings.

The exploitative orientation is associated with the "sucker" side in the symbiotic family and with the masochistic style of authoritarianism. It is Freud's aggressive oral, Adler's dominant, and Horney's aggressive types. At the extremes, they are aggressive, seductive and conceited subjects. When mixed with healthier qualities, they are assertive, proud, and engaging.

The Hoarder Orientation. People who hoard tend to keep those things with them; they repress. They regard the world as possessions and as potential possessions. Even loved ones are people to own, keep, or buy. Fromm, outlining Marx, relates this type of orientation to the bourgeoisie, the merchant middle class, as well as wealthy landowners and artists. He particularly associates it with the Protestant work ethic and with Puritan groups such as ours.

Retention is associated with the colder forms of estranged and destructive families. I would add here that there is also a clear relationship with perfectionism. Freud would call this type of orientation the retentive anal type; Adler (to some extent), I would call him the avoidant type and Horney (more clearly) the resigned type. In its pure form, it means that you are stubborn, stingy, and unimaginative. If you belong to a less extreme form, you would be decisive, economical and practical.

The sales orientation. This orientation hopes to sell. Success is a matter of how well I can sell myself; to make myself known. My family, my work, my school, my clothes; everything is an advertisement, and must be "perfect". Even love is thought of as a transaction. Only in this orientation is the marriage contract considered (we agree that you will give me this and that and I will give you that and so on). If one of us fails to agree, the marriage will be annulled or avoided (no bad feelings; We could even be very good friends! According to Fromm, it is the orientation of modern industrial society. This is our orientation!

This modern guy comes out of the cold, out-of-the-way family, and tends to use automaton conformity to escape freedom. Adler and Horney do not have an equivalent in their theories, but perhaps Freud does: it would be at least something close to the vague phallic personality, the type who lives on the basis of flirtation. At one extreme, the person "for sale" is opportunistic, childish, tactless. In more moderate cases, they are perceived as determined, youthful and social. Note that our current values ​​are expressed to us through propaganda: fashion, health, eternal youth, adventure, recklessness, sexuality, innovation... these are the concerns of the "yuppie". Superficial is everything!

Productive orientation. There is, however, a healthier personality, which Fromm occasionally refers to as the unmasked person. This is the person who, without avoiding his social and biological nature, never departs from freedom and responsibility. It comes from a family that loves without oversaturating the subject; who prefers reasons to rules and freedom over conformity.

The society that allows such people to grow does not yet exist, according to Fromm. Of course, he has an idea of ​​how it should be. She calls him humanistic community socialismWhat a mouthful! And of course it is not made up of words that are precisely very welcome in the United States; But let me explain: Humanist means that it is oriented towards human beings and not about another higher state entity (at all) or some divine entity. Communitarian means composed of small communities (Gesellschaften, in German), as opposed to a large corporate central government. Socialism means that everyone is responsible for the welfare of the neighbor. Besides being understandable, all this is very difficult to argue under Fromm's idealism!

Fromm says that the first four orientations (which others call neurotic) live the mode (or model) of tenure. They focus on consumption, obtaining, owning... They are defined by what they have. Fromm says that the "I have" tends to become the "it has me", making us subjects driven by our possessions.

On the other side, the productive orientation lives in the experiential way. What you are is defined by your actions in the world. You live without a mask, living life, relating to others, being yourself.

He says that most people, already used to the holding mode, use the verb have to describe their problems: "Doctor, I have a problem: I have insomnia. Although I have a nice house, wonderful children and a happy marriage, I have many worries. "This subject seeks the therapist to take away the bad things and leave the good things to him; almost the same as asking a surgeon to remove stones from your gallbladder. What you should say is more like "I'm confused. I am happily married, but I cannot sleep… ". By saying you have a problem, you are avoiding the fact that you are the problem; once again you are avoiding responsibility for your life.

Fromm was always interested in trying understand truly evil people from this world; not just those who were simply stupid, misguided, or ill, but those who were totally conscience of evil in their actions, whatever they were carried out: Hitler, Stalin, Charles Manson, Jim Jones and so on. successively; from the least to the most brutal.
All the orientations that we have mentioned, productive and non-productive; be it in the mode of possession or of being, they have one thing in common: they all constitute an effort to live. Like Horney, Fromm believed that even the most miserable neurotic is at least trying to adjust to life. They are, using their word, biophiles, lovers of life.

But there are other types of people that he calls necrophiles (lovers of death). They have a passionate attraction to everything that is death, destruction, rottenness, and sick; it is the passion to transform all that is alive into the non-living; to destroy by the mere fact of destroying; the exclusive interest in all this is purely mechanical. It is the passion to "destroy all living structures."

If we go back in time when we were in high school, we can visualize some examples: those who were true fans of horror movies. These people could have designed models and torture devices and guillotines and they loved to play war. They loved blowing things up with their chemistry games and occasionally tortured a small animal. They loved guns and were handy with all mechanical gadgets. The more technological sophistication, the greater his happiness. Beavis and Butthead (the famous musical television characters) are modeled under this scheme.

I remember seeing an interview on television once, during the little war that took place in Nicaragua. There were a lot of American mercenaries within the "Contras" and one in particular caught the reporter's eye. He was an ammunition expert (the one who blows up bridges, buildings, and of course, occasionally, enemy soldiers). When asked how he got involved in this kind of work, he smiled and told the reporter that he might not want to hear the story from him. You know, when he was a kid, he liked to put firecrackers on the back of little birds that he had caught; I lit the fuse, let them go, and watched them explode in midair. This man was a necrophilic. (An additional example and closer graphic can be seen in the character of Sid in the movie Toy Story. N.T.).

Fromm makes some suggestions on how this type of subject arises. He says there must be some kind of genetic influence that prevents them from feeling or responding to affections. He also adds that they must have had such a frustrating life that the person spends the rest of their life in rage. And finally, he suggests that they must have grown up with a necrophilous mother, so that the child has had no one to receive love from. It is very possible that the combination of these three factors causes this behavior. Even so, the idea remains that these subjects are fully aware of their evil and maintain it. Of course, they are subjects that need to be studied more deeply.

In some way, Fromm is a transitional figure, or if he prefers, a theorist who brings together other theories; for us, in an eminent way, he links the Freudian theories with the neo-Freudian ones that we have seen (especially Adler and Horney) and the humanistic theories that we will discuss later. In fact, he's so close to being an existentialist, it almost doesn't matter! I think the interest in his ideas will be greater in the same way that existential psychology does.

Another aspect of his theory is unique to him: his interest in the economic and cultural roots of the personality. No one before or after him has said it so directly: our personality is to a considerable extent, a reflection of such issues as social class, minority status, education, vocation, religious and philosophical background and so on successively. This has not been a very fortunate representation, although it may be due to his association with Marxism. But it is, I think, inevitable that we begin to consider it more and more, especially as a counterpart to the increasing influence of theories.

Fromm is an excellent and exciting writer. We can find the bases of his theories in Escape from Freedom (1941) and in Man for Himself (1947). If an interesting treatise on love in the modern world is called The Art of Loving (1956). My favorite book of all is The Sane Society (1955), which should in fact have been called "the insane society" since practically in its entirety it is aimed at showing how crazy our world is today, and how this leads us to difficulties psychological. He has also written "the book" on aggression, The Anatomy of Human Destructiveness (1973), which includes his ideas on necrophilia. He has written many other great books, including some on Christianity, Marxism, and Zen Buddhism.

All these books are translated into Spanish as follows: "El Escape de la Libertad"; "Man for Himself"; "The art of Loving"; "The Healthy Society"; "The Anatomy of Human Destructivity". For more information, there are about 2950 references to Fromm and his theory in Spanish on the Internet; just type in any search engine the word "Fromm" .N.T

This article is merely informative, in Psychology-Online we do not have the power to make a diagnosis or recommend a treatment. We invite you to go to a psychologist to treat your particular case.

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