Word: fromm
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Because Sigmund Freud invented psychoanalysis, there was no old couchman around to analyze him and get him started on the right track-so he analyzed himself. Now Erich Fromm, one of the most eminent of today's analysts, who differs with Freud on many vital issues, has subjected the founder to a searching analysis from the outside. It is not the first such effort, but the best. In Sigmund Freud's Mission, (Harper; $3), German-born Author Fromm casts grave doubt on Biographer Ernest Jones's description of Freud's self-analysis as "an imperishable feat...
Although Freud developed the hotly debated Oedipus complex from his feelings toward his mother, Fromm believes that he concealed their intensity even from himself. And while discovery of the "wish to remain attached to Mother" was a notable event, Freud destroyed its value by restricting it to instinctual desires. In analytic terms: "His own attachment to Mother was the basis of his discovery, and his resistance to seeing his attachment was the basis for the limitation and distortion of this very discovery...
...general, says Fromm. "Freud's aim was to found a movement for the ethical liberation of man, a new secular and scientific religion for an elite which was to guide mankind." What happened? His "messianic impulses" struck a response in followers who had no strong religious, political and philosophic convictions, but a hidden need for them. In "the movement" they found everything: "A dogma, a ritual, a leader, a hierarchy, the feeling of possessing the truth, of being superior to the uninitiated...
Forbidding Fruit. Fromm sees the same basis for the great popularity of psychoanalysis since the early 19305, especially in the U.S.: "Here is a middle class for whom life has lost meaning . . . Yet they are in search of a meaning, of an idea to devote themselves to, of an explanation of life which does not require faith or sacrifice." Often, he adds, patients "are much less concerned with being cured than with the exhilarating sensation of having found a spiritual home...
...supplant earlier "depth psychology" methods, but permeated many of them. Though its greatest acceptance came among eclectics (no particular school), it has been taken up by many Freudians and some Jungians and Adlerians, and recently in the U.S. by followers of Karen Horney, Harry Stack Sullivan and Erich Fromm...