Erich Fromm: biography of a humanist psychoanalyst

Usually the psychoanalysis with a pessimistic vision 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 settled in Europe, other proposals of this current appeared psychological, some of which emphasized our ability to become free and decide our path vital. Erich Fromm's humanist psychoanalysis is an example of this. Today, in this biography, we will explain who this important psychoanalyst was.

Who was Erich Fromm? This is his biography

Erich Fromm was born in Frankfurt in 1900. He belonged to a family related to Orthodox Judaism, which made him inclined to begin Talmudic studies, although later he preferred to train both in the psychoanalysis of Sigmund Freud and in the theoretical legacy from Karl Marx, which made him approach the ideas of socialism and doctorate in sociology.

During the 30s, when the Nazis took control of GermanyErich 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, that emphasized the ability of the human being to become more free and autonomous through Personal development.

Humanistic psychoanalysis

When psychology was born in the second half of the nineteenth century, the first efforts of this first generation of researchers were oriented to understand the basic functioning of the processes mental. This implied wondering about issues such as the origin of the Mental illness, the functioning of the thresholds of consciousness, or the learning processes.

Until the consolidation of psychoanalysis in Europe, psychologists put aside the problems related to the in which we consider our life trajectory, our past and our possible future affects us emotionally and in our decision making.

Discovering the importance of the unconscious

Psychoanalysis, somehow, had introduced a more metapsychological approach (or closer to philosophy) in psychotherapeutic practice. However, the initial stream of thought from which he started this one underlined much the power of the unconscious over the individual, on the one hand, and he was very focused on giving explanations about the trauma and mental disorders, on the other.

Erich Fromm started from the psychoanalytic approach to make him turn 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 pressure environment and culture, but to understand it, you also have to know how we do it to find the meaning of life, as proposed by the existentialists.

Life is not made to suffer

Erich Fromm did not distance himself from the disease-centered perspective of other psychoanalysts because he believed that life can be lived without 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 humanistic psychologists of the time, such as Viktor frankl.

Life, Fromm said, is inextricably 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, the development personal.

Erich Fromm, on the ability to love

Erich Fromm believed that the main source of human discomfort comes from friction between the individual and others. This constant tension starts from an apparent contradiction: on the one hand we want to be free in a world in which we coexist with many other agents, and on the other hand we want to draw affective ties with others, to be linked to they.

Expressed in his terms, it could be said that a part of our self is made to be in union with others. However, by our very nature as beings with a different body from others, we find ourselves separated from the rest and, to some 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 reflected in the famous work The art of Loving, published in 1956.

Psychoanalysis to explore human potential

Ultimately, 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 strategies to interr these episodes of suffering in a life 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 the maximum potential of people in a process that, in itself, we could call "happiness". That is why, even today, The reading of Erich Fromm's works are very popular for being considered inspiring and with a rich philosophical background.