In this classic work a noted psychoanalyst assesses the persistent tension between traditional religion and the underlying philosophy of psychoanalysis, which many believe regards the satisfaction of instinctive and material wishes as the sole aim of life.
Erich Fromm, Ph.D. (Sociology, University of Heidelberg, 1922) was a German-American social psychologist, psychoanalyst, sociologist, humanistic philosopher, and democratic socialist. He was a German Jew who fled the Nazi regime and settled in the United States. He was one of the founders of The William Alanson White Institute of Psychiatry, Psychoanalysis and Psychology in New York City and was associated with the Frankfurt School of critical theory.
Fromm explored the interaction between psychology and society, and held various professorships in psychology in the U.S. and Mexico in the mid-20th century.
Fromm's theory is a rather unique blend of Freud and Marx. Freud, of course, emphasized the unconscious, biological drives, repression, and so on. In other words, Freud postulated that our characters were determined by biology. Marx, on the other hand, saw people as determined by their society, and most especially by their economic systems.
This is Fromm's third book, which is not appreciably different in tone from his previous two. The argument herein is that psychoanalysts ought to assume the role of priest/rabbi/monk in our secular world. Just like religious doctors, psychologists ought to be concerned with the health of the patient's soul. In fact, the Greek root psyche meant "soul," "breath," or "spirit." By trying to imitate other sciences the discipline of psychology has lost its way. The soul cannot be quantified; it cannot be put under a microscope. Psychologists no longer encourage the achievement in their patients of the most distinctive and desirable of human characteristics: love, value, reason, and conscience. Further, as therapists, psychologists have taken social acceptance/efficiency as the main criterion of mental health, a dangerous trend. Therapeutic treatment is now commonly (and erroneously) defined as the attempt to remove the neurotic symptoms that are interfering with a patient's functionability. But symptomatic relief should not be the aim of psychologists. Rather, psychologists ought to cure sickness and help others achieve objective mental health; they ought to help patients understand their mental problems by digging beneath the surface and understanding root causes. Such a process might be quite intensive and require the disabusing of many illusions. Such a process may also help the patient learn how to become an end onto oneself, rather than a tool of de-humanizing economic systems and other authoritarian power structures.
Most interesting is Fromm's treatment of Freud. Fromm attempts to liberate Freud from his almost hopeless dependence on sex, and make his discoveries relevant in terms of inter-personal relationships. He succeeds. Take, for example, the Oedipus complex, i.e., incestuous fixation, which Freud believed to be at the core of every neurosis:
The essence of incest is not the sexual craving for members of the same family. This craving, in so far as it is to be found, is only one expression of the much more profound and fundamental desire to remain a child attached to those protecting figures of whom the mother is only the earliest and most influential. The foetus lives with and from the mother, and the act of birth is only one step in the direction of freedom and independence .... To cut through the navel string, not in the physical but in the psychological sense, is the great challenge to human development and also its most difficult task. As long as man is related by these primary ties to mother, father, family, he feels protected and safe. He is still a foetus, someone else is responsible for him. He avoids the disquieting experience of seeing himself as a separate entity charged with the responsibility of his own actions, with the task of making his own judgments .... By remaining a child man not only avoids the fundamental anxiety necessarily connected with the full awareness of one's self as a separate entity, he also enjoys the satisfactions of protection, warmth, and of unquestioned belonging which he once enjoyed as a child; but he pays a high price. He fails to become a full human being, to develop his powers of reason and love; he remains dependent and retains a feeling of insecurity which becomes manifest at any moment when these primary ties are threatened .... He can feel affection but it is animal affection, the warmth of the stable, not human love which has freedom and separateness as its condition. The incestuously oriented person is capable of feeling close to those whom he is familiar with. He is incapable of relating himself closely to the "stranger," that is, to another human being as such. In this orientation all feelings and ideas are judged in terms not of good and evil or true and false but of familiar and unfamiliar.
This is a powerful idea. In this scheme, Oedipal-incestuous ties are not limited to one's mother or father. One can develop infantile (what Freud deemend pre-genital) fixations to family/ancestors, lovers, the nation state, various economic, commercial, or social institutions or trends, to race, political parties, religion, etc. Each of these identifications has the potential of bonding and isolating the individual to the extent that he can no longer think of himself as a separate entity capable of controlling his own destiny. He feels intense anxiety any time his primary ties to these groups are threatened by unfamiliar outsiders. This anxiety often develops into destructive hatred for the outsider.
But this does not mean to suggest that humans can be mentally healthy without achieving a sense of belonging. In fact, the opposite is the case. Every human needs a religious system, if we define religion as "any system of thought and action shared by a group which gives the individual a frame of orientation or object of devotion." It does not matter whether such a system is monotheistic, polytheistic, or atheistic. (In fact, centring the religious discussion on the acceptance or denial of god distracts us from developing an attitude which can be called religious in a humanistic sense.) What does matter is that such a system and its doctrines treat humans as ends unto themselves and help them become devoted to other humans in non-destructive ways. In this sense, Fromm differentiates between Oedipal/incestuous religions and humanistic religions. The former type inhibits, while the latter promotes the unfolding of such human qualities as reason, love, and creativity. The symbol system one uses to understand one's devotion is essentially immaterial. The real conflict is not between belief in God and atheism but between a humanistic, religious attitude and an attitude which is equivalent to idolatry.
Erich Fromm is becoming one of my favorite authors. The continued relevance of this writing from over 70 years ago demonstrates his insight and foresight. I was immediately drawn to this book's title, as religion and psychoanalysis are two of my favorite topics. What Fromm set out to do in this book is contrast psychoanalysis and religion, but also show their similarities. Furthermore, some psychoanalytical views (that of Sigmund Freud and Carl Gustav Jung) of religion are presented. Finally, Fromm points out different approaches to religion. He contrasts authoritarian religion with humanistic religion.
The book starts with an outline of the problem with which both, psychoanalysis and religion are concerned. I would call this the problem of spiritual development. During the last century, man has had incredible success in developing technologies and processes that essentially represent an increase of the power man exerts over nature. Fromm rightly points out that man's spiritual development is severely lagging behind his technical and scientific development which might even lead to an existential risks for humanity (think about nuclear weapons, or more recently artificial intelligence).
Spiritual development might already sound like a very religious term. But Fromm doesn't think so, and claims that one does not need to believe in God in order to believe in the soul and its demands. He is in good company with Martin Buber and Josef Pieper, who also worked out beautiful perspectives on what it means for man to be spirit which do not rely on a religious notion of God.
One of the main reasons for the underdevelopment of the human soul or spirit is the fact that there are few institutions which offer people guidance in this direction. In fact it seems that priests and psychoanalysts are the only professional groups concerned with the spiritual development of people nowadays. Although it might initially seem that these two groups and the approaches they represent are at odds, Fromm manages to show that more nuance is needed, and that they don't necessarily need to be seen as contradictory.
According to Fromm, the goal of psychoanalysis is the "optimal development of a person鈥檚 potentialities and the realization of his individuality". Love also plays a central role: "Analytic therapy is essentially an attempt to help the patient gain or regain his capacity for love. If this aim is not fulfilled nothing but surface changes can be accomplished." Understanding this we can begin to see where psychoanalysis and religion might converge. But first, another important distinction needs to be made.
Religion can be categorized into two fundamentally different perspectives. Fromm calls these authoritarian religion and humanistic religion. The basic idea in authoritarian religion is that man is to recognize an invisible higher power that decides over his fate and which demands his obedience. God is to be worshiped not because of his qualities (goodness, love, justice, etc.), but simply because he is God and has total control over everything (Ludwig Feuerbach has a great critique of this in 'The Essence of Christianity'). This of course also means that man is not in the position to question, for example, God's goodness, as goodness and all other values are basically defined by God. Questioning and lack of submission are seen as sinful things in this religious understanding. The basic problem in this religious approach is that in this unconditional submission of man to the higher power, he loses his freedom, and to some degree even his personhood.
In contrast to this, stands what can be called humanistic religion. "Inasmuch as humanistic religions are theistic, God is a symbol of man鈥檚 own powers which he tries to realize in his life, and is not a symbol of force and domination, having power over man." This means that at its core humanistic religion is about spiritual development: the development of man's capacity to love ('The Art of Loving' by Fromm is a must read for this topic), his strength of mind to seek and understand the truth, his freedom, and his moral strength. This understanding of religion elevates orthopraxy over orthodoxy. Fromm rightly notes that "the way a man looks at his neighbor or talks to a child, the way he eats, walks, or shakes hands, or the way in which a group behaves toward minorities is more expressive of faith and love then any stated belief."
As might be clear by now, exactly this is where religion and psychoanalysis overlap in their goals. A beautiful conclusion that Fromm draws is the following: "the question is not whether man returns to religion and believes in God but whether he lives love and thinks truth. If he does so the symbol systems he uses are of secondary importance. If he does not they are of no importance."
I definitely agree with this conclusion, although I would like to stress the importance of the symbol system maybe a bit more than Fromm does. Today we find ourselves in what some call the meaning crisis. Traditional religion and other grand narratives have been deconstructed and don't seem to work anymore for many people. Alternative perspectives which are able to offer meaning, like humanistic religion or humanistic psychology have existed for a long time, but are, even today, not that accessible. It might be exactly because of their deficient or even missing symbol system (e.g. rituals, communities, language, etc.) that they are not as widely known. As a consequence their contribution to human flourishing is not as big as it could be. In the realm of Christianity there are some thinkers that followed a humanistic approach. Fromm recognizes some of them in the updated foreword: Teilhard de Chardin, Hans K眉ng, and Karl Rahner in Catholicism and Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Karl Bultmann and Paul Tillich in Protestantism. Their advantage is that they have been able to use existing symbol systems, which increased their appeal for people who are already part of the Christian religion. For the increasing number of non-religious people, an alternative with a similarly developed symbol system seems to not exist as of now. Maybe this is something that needs further attention by those of us who consider ourselves advocates of the spiritual development of humanity.
Maybe the most important book I've ever read. This put me in the terrifying and exhilarating position of realizing the beauty of agnosticism and why people are terrified of the unknown.
As a young man who had been interested in the psychology of religion, I read this book which had a deep influence on my religious ideas. In it he makes a distinction between authoritarian religion, which fosters dependency and blocks self-realization, and humanistic religion which generates human ideals and an ethical vision based in love of humanity.
In this short text, Fromm distinguishes between authoritarian and humanistic religious feelings. He states that authoritarian religious impulses are bad while humanistic feelings are good. The former places God beyond humanity as its master and guide while the latter centres around the idea that man can either correct God or can become a kind of God. The psychoanalyst, Fromm argues, ought to help her/his patients by directing them towards more humanistic impulses. Only then, Fromm claims, will humanity become free and just.
The main failing of Fromm's text is obvious: where does he get the idea that humanistic feelings are superior to authoritarian ones? Far from accepting religions as competing worldviews, he subordinates all religious feelings to his own (Marxist?) moral standard. His attempt to remain neutral fails completely (as do all other attempts to remain neutral). In the end, Fromm devalues the differences between religions and their distinct claims to legitimacy by failing to recognize them as fundamentally competing positions (please realize that my own view is also far from neutral). At the very least, Fromm could have acknowledged the impossibility of neutrality.
Finally, I find Fromm's optimism nauseous. To suppose, only five years after WWII, that humanity can eventually become just and free . . . for anyone who thinks this is possible, just read uncensored YouTube comments or the comments on articles at cbc.ca (or nearly every other website for that matter). Left to itself and with a veil of anonymity, humanity tends towards the vile and arrogant.
Very interesting read about religion and its affect psychology of humans.. The book compares the main two form of religions.. The dominant and the humanistic religion ..
鈥淏ug眉n insan谋n en de臒erli ruhsal varl谋klar谋n谋 tehdit eden Fenike Tanr谋s谋 ya da Kibele de臒il, yetkeci toplumlarda devletin ve yetkenin, bizim toplumumuzda da makinenin ve ba艧ar谋n谋n tanr谋la艧mas谋d谋r鈥�
this book has taken a major role on how i see religions in agnostic viewpoint. started off by elaborating the main problems on why people have the tendency to constantly return to religions/ their beliefs, and to make god(s) as the one n only solution. it was kind of disenchanting when Fromm claimed that it wasn't a form of restoring faith, but to obliterate the feeling of being anxious/doubtful. that they chose this option (to believe in God) simply to feel safe, and not as a form of adherence. Freud's criticism towards religions about how it puts morality on unstable basis really speaks volume to me.
Fromm's lectures are presented as a series of essays on religion and Freudian psychology. He uses the term religion to represent one's . Fromm eloquently advocates for a psychology of human spirituality, a philosophy of human existence located in a spiritual context. In doing so, he augurs the birth of the positive psychology movement, with its focus on quality of life, happiness, and practical life actualization.
Pitanje "Da li postoji Bog?" jeste besmisleno? Dovoljno je da postoji jedan covek koji veruje u Boga pa da to pitanje ako nista po pravilima lepog ponasanja promenimo u pitanje "Sta je to Bog?"