Word: fromm
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...Konrad Lorenz (On Aggression), co-winner of the 1973 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine. Lorenz found instinctive aggression in animals and suggested that man is similarly programmed by evolution. Behaviorist B.F. Skinner, conversely, has long argued that man can be conditioned to forsake his violent ways. Now Erich Fromm, 73, social philosopher, psychoanalyst and bestselling author (The Sane Society, The Art of Loving), has written a new book, The Anatomy of Human Destruction (Holt, Rinehart & Winston; $10.95), that challenges both schools of thought...
Lorenz is a fine observer of animals, Fromm concedes, who unfortunately "decided to venture out into a field in which he had little experience or competence, that of human behavior." Men and animals do fight instinctively to protect their vital interests -Fromm calls this "benign" aggression-but "only man seems to take pleasure in destroying life without any reason or purpose other than that of destroying." It is this "malignant" aggression that Lorenz has failed to identify and that now threatens man's very survival...
Manipulated Man. Fromm cites evidence to show that man's "malignant" lust for blood is not instinctive. He argues that "cooperation and sharing was a practical necessity for most hunting societies," and that historically, "warlikeness grows in proportion to civilization...
...Fromm does not agree with B.F. Skinner's plans for altering man through altering society. "Skinner," he writes, "recommends the hell of the isolated, manipulated man of the cybernetic age as the heaven of progress." According to Fromm, reinforcing peaceful behavior is not enough unless the reinforcers take into account Freud's discovery that the forces driving man are often unconscious. In spite of the emphasis he puts on man's passions and unconscious drives, Fromm believes that the most important determinant of a man's character is society. Echoing arguments he has sprinkled throughout...
...Fromm is often eloquent as a chronicler of society's sicknesses, but he gives only cursory attention to their cures. Sadism will disappear, he says, "when exploitative control of any class, sex, or minority group has been done away with." This can be done "only if the whole [social and political] system as it has existed during the last 6,000 years of history can be replaced by a fundamentally different...