Battung, Rhaine Antoinette M.

Francisco, Sam Gabrielle C.

Humanistic Psychoanalysis – Erich Fromm

Erich Fromm was a German social psychologist and psychoanalyst who was associated with
the Frankfurt School of critical theory. He was renowned for opposing Sigmund Freud's views
and for creating the idea that freedom was a fundamental aspect of human nature. Similar to
how all personality theorists see things, Fromm's perception of human nature was impacted by
his early life.

On March 23, 1900, in Frankfurt am Main, Erich Fromm, the lone child of Orthodox Jewish
parents Rosa Krause and Naphtali Fromm, was born. Erich recalled that his father was a
businessman and that he had a temper. His mother has a history of depression. In other words,
like many of the individuals we've studied, his upbringing wasn't particularly happy. He called his
family "highly neurotic."

In his autobiography, Beyond the Chains of Illusion, Fromm talks about events in his early
adolescence that started him along his path. The first involved a friend of the family's:

- Maybe she was 25 years of age; she was beautiful, attractive, and in addition a painter,
the first painter I ever knew. I remember having heard that she had been engaged but
after some time had broken off the engagement; I remember that she was almost
invariably in the company of her widowed father. As I remember him, he was an old,
uninteresting, and rather unattractive man, or so I thought (maybe my judgment was
somewhat biased by jealousy). Then one day I heard the shocking news: her father had
died, and immediately afterwards, she had killed herself and left a will which stipulated
that she wanted to be buried with her father. (p. 4)

Erich, who is 12 years old, was deeply affected by this news and found himself asking why.
Later, he started to learn about the Oedipus complex and comprehend how such a thing could
really happen. Fromm was content with the Freudian interpretation in those early years but
would later perceive the young woman's illogical dependence on her father as an unproductive
symbiotic relationship.

At the age of 14, he witnessed the extremes that nationalism could take, and the second event
was much more significant: World War I. .He was confident that the British and French were
equally irrational, and once more he was troubled by the thought of how generally sensible and
peaceful people could turn into those who are so motivated by national ideals, so set on killing,
and so willing to die.

During adolescence, Fromm was greatly influenced by the teachings of Freud and Karl Marx,
yet the disparities between the two also inspired him. As he learned more, he started to doubt
the efficacy of both systems. Fromm initially hesitated to become a socialist, but after the war he
did. the Socialist Party to join. Instead, he focused his studies at the University of Heidelberg in
psychology, philosophy, and sociology, where he got his PhD in sociology at the age of 22 or
25.
Still uncertain that his education might provide insight into such difficult problems as Fromm
came to psychoanalysis because he thought it would provide solutions to concerns about
human motivation that other fields were unable to address, such as the young woman's suicide
or the madness of war. He studied psychoanalysis from 1925 to 1930, first in Munich, then in
Frankfurt, and lastly at the Berlin Psychoanalytic Institute, where he received analysis from
Hanns Sachs, a Freud pupil. Although Fromm never met Freud, most of his teachers during
those years were strict adherents of Freudian theory (Knapp, 1989).

References:
ERICH FROMM - Dr. C. George Boeree, 2006
https://webspace.ship.edu/cgboer/fromm.html
THEORIES OF PERSONALITY 9th EDITION - Feist, Jess, Feist, Gregory F., Roberts, Tomi-
Ann. 2018
https://issuhub.com/view/index/23508