欧宝娱乐

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.