Erich Fromm: Biography Of The Father Of Humanistic Psychoanalysis
Psychoanalysis has normally been associated with a pessimistic view of the human being, according to which our behavior and thoughts are directed by unconscious forces that we cannot control and that anchor us to our past.
This idea has to do with the psychoanalytic conception of Sigmund Freud, but this is not the only one.
Once psychoanalysis had established itself in Europe, other proposals from this psychological current appeared, some of which emphasized our ability to become free and decide our life path. Erich Fromm’s humanistic psychoanalysis is an example of this Today, in this biography, we will explain who this important psychoanalyst was.
Erich Fromm was born in Frankfurt in 1900 He belonged to a family related to Orthodox Judaism, which meant that during his youth he was inclined to begin Talmudic studies, although later he preferred to train in both the psychoanalysis of Sigmund Freud and the theoretical legacy of Sigmund Freud. Karl Marx which made him approach the ideas of socialism and obtain a doctorate in sociology.
During the 1930s, when the Nazis took control of Germany, Erich Fromm moved to New York, where he opened a clinical practice based on psychoanalysis and began teaching at Columbia University. From that moment on he was popularizing a psychoanalysis with strong influences from humanist philosophy, which emphasized the capacity of human beings to become more free and autonomous through personal development.
When psychology was born in the second half of the 19th century, the first efforts of this first generation of researchers were aimed at understanding the basic functioning of mental processes. This involved asking questions about topics such as the origin of mental illness, the functioning of consciousness thresholds, or learning processes.
Until the consolidation of psychoanalysis in Europe, psychologists left aside the problems related to the way in which we consider our life path, our past and our possible future affect us emotionally and in our decision-making.
Discovering the importance of the unconscious
Psychoanalysis, in some way, had introduced a more metapsychological approach (or close to philosophy) in psychotherapeutic practice However, the initial current of thought from which this arose greatly emphasized the power of the unconscious over the individual, on the one hand, and was very focused on providing explanations for traumas and mental disorders, on the other.
Erich Fromm started from the approach of psychoanalysis to turn it towards a much more humanistic vision of the human being For Fromm, the human psyche could not be explained simply by proposing ideas about how we do it to combine our unconscious desires with the pressure of the environment and culture, but to understand it we must also know how we do it to find the meaning of life, just as the existentialists proposed.
Life is not made to suffer
Erich Fromm did not distance himself from the disease-centered perspective of other psychoanalysts because he thought that life could be lived apart from discomfort and suffering. The optimism of his humanistic vision of things was not expressed through the denial of pain, but through a very powerful idea: that we can make it bearable by giving it meaning. This idea, by the way, was shared with other humanist psychologists of the time, such as Viktor Frankl.
Life, Fromm said, is irremediably linked to moments of frustration, pain and discomfort, but we can decide how to make that affect us. The most important project of each person would consist, according to this psychoanalyst, in making these moments of discomfort fit into the construction of ourselves, that is, personal development.
Erich Fromm, on the capacity to love
Erich Fromm believed that the main source of human discomfort comes from friction between the individual and others This constant tension is based on an apparent contradiction: on the one hand we want to be free in a world in which we live with many other agents, and on the other we want to establish emotional ties with others, to be linked to them.
Expressed in its terms, it could be said that a part of our self is made to be in union with others. However, due to our own nature as beings with a body different from that of others, we see ourselves separated from the rest and, to a certain extent, isolated.
Erich Fromm believed that This conflict can be addressed by developing our capacity to love Loving others in the same way and all those things that make us a unique person, with all its imperfections. These ambitious missions were, in reality, a single project, consisting of developing love for life itself, and this was captured in the famous work The Art of Loving, published in 1956.
Psychoanalysis to explore human potential
In short, Fromm dedicated his work to examining the range of possibilities that the humanist conception of life could contribute not only to techniques to reduce suffering in specific situations that generate discomfort, but also to the strategies to interre these episodes of suffering into a vital project full of meaning
His psychoanalytic proposals thus move away from the first psychoanalysis aimed at making people suffer as little as possible, and prefer to focus on the development of people’s maximum potential in a process that, in itself, we could call “happiness.” That is why, even today, Reading the works of Erich Fromm are very popular because they are considered inspiring and have a rich philosophical background
