Erich Fromm - The Heart of Man: Its Genius for Good and Evil

Works by Erich Fromm published by American Mental Health Foundation Books
Beyond Freud: From Individual to Social Psychoanalysis
The Heart of Man: Its Genius for Good and Evil
The Pathology of Normalcy
The Revolution of Hope: Toward a Humanized Technology

American Mental Health Foundation Inc Post Office Box 3
Riverdale NY 10471-0003

First published in 1964 by Harper & Row, Publishers, New York, as volume XII of the Religious Perspectives planned and edited by Ruth Nanda Anshen. Copyright 1964 by Erich Fromm

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the written permission of The American Mental Health Foundation Inc and American Mental Health Foundation Books.

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Printed in the United States of America
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Fromm, Erich, 19001980.

The heart of man : its genius for good and evil / Erich Fromm. p. cm.
Originally published: New York : Harper & Row, 1964. (Religious perspectives ; v. 12). With new foreword.

Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN-13: 978-1-59056-186-7 (alk. paper) ISBN-10: 1-59056-186-4 (alk. paper)
1. Ethics. 2. Good and evil. 3. Psychoanalysis and philosophy. I. Title. BJ45.F68 2010
170dc22

Contents
1 ManWolf or Sheep? 13
2 Different Forms of Violence 21
3 Love of Death and Love of Life 33
4 Individual and Social Narcissism 59
5 Incestuous Ties 91
6 Freedom, Determinism, Alternativism 111
Index 147
Publishers Foreword

As the present book is reissued, The American Mental Health Foundation celebrates its 86th anniversary. Organized in 1924, AMHF is dedicated to the welfare of people suffering from emotional problems, with a particular concern for individuals with special needs and the elderly. For many years, AMHF generally devoted its efforts to bettering quality of treatment and developing more effective methods, available even to low-income wage earners.

The major therapeutic advances and improved training methods are described in its existing publications: the series The Search for the Future. Two of these books are available on its Web site under the titles The Challenge for Group Psychotherapy (volume 1) and The Challenge for Psychoanalysis and Psychotherapy: Solutions for the Future (volume 2). Portions of these books are reprinted on the AMHF Web site in French and German, as they were published internationally (in addition to Italian editions), for a segment of the world community. These books were prepared by Dr. Stefan de Schill under the joint sponsorship of AMHF and The International Institute for Mental Health Research, Zurich and Geneva. Volume 3, written by Dr. de Schill and published by Prometheus Books in 2000, is entitled Crucial ChoicesCrucial Changes: The Resurrection of Psychotherapy.

In 2009, AMHF Books published The Violent Person by Dr. Raymond B. Flannery Jr. This is a book for professionals as well as anyone with a concern for, and an interest in, the mechanisms for human violence, stress at the breaking point (PTSD), and the workings of the brain.

8 | Publishers Foreward

Under the supervision and direction of Dr. William Van Ornum, AMHF Books is an exciting new venture. Within the mission and under the auspices of The American Mental Health Foundation, AMHF Books publishes new research as well as works by classic authors.

Erich Fromm (19001980) famously remains one of the authoritative voices of the 20th century, a time that witnessed unprecedented changes in our understanding of the inner, as well as political, landscape of the human race. AMHF Books is proud to be the publisher of this world-renowned individual, one that has shaped our culture well into a new century. On the thirtieth anniversary of Fromms death and hundred and tenth anniversary of his birth, AMHF Books celebrates his visionary humanism by reissuing two of his books, The Revolution of Hope and The Heart of Man, and publishing two, Beyond Freud and The Pathology of Normalcy, for the first time.

None of the board members of The American Mental Health Foundation receives remuneration. Nevertheless, the costs of promoting research, preparing translations, and disseminating its findings and knowledge are high. For this reason, all sales of its books, donations, and legacy bequests constitute a meaningful contribution to the public good. We thank you for helping us improve the lives of our citizens.

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Introduction

This book takes up thoughts that were presented in some of my earlier books, and attempts to develop them further. In Escape from Freedom I deal with the problem of freedom and with sadism, masochism, and destructiveness; in the meantime clinical experience and theoretical speculation have led me to what I think is a deeper understanding of freedom as well as of various kinds of aggression and destructiveness. I have been able to distinguish between various kinds of aggression, which directly or indirectly are in the service of life, and that malignant form of destructiveness, necrophilia, which is a true love of death as opposed to biophilia which is the love of life. In Man for Himself I discussed the problem of ethical norms based on our knowledge of the nature of man, and not on revelation and manmade laws and conventions. In this book I pursue the problem further and discuss the nature of evil and of the choice between good and evil. Finally, this book is in some respects a counterpart to The Art of Loving. While the main topic there was mans capacity to love, the main topic here is his capacity to destroy, his narcissism and his incestuous fixation. Yet, while the discussion of non-love fills most pages, the problem of love is also taken up in a new and broader sense, namely, love of life. I try to show that love of life, independence, and the overcoming of narcissism form a syndrome of growth as against the syndrome of decay formed by love of death, incestuous symbiosis, and malignant narcissism.

I have been led to the pursuit of the study of this syndrome of decay not only on the basis of clinical experience but also by the
10 | Introduction

social and political development of the past years. Ever more pressing becomes the question why, in spite of good will and knowledge of the facts about the consequences of nuclear war, the attempts to avoid it are feeble in comparison with the magnitude of the danger and the likelihood of war, given the continuation of the nuclear-arms race and the continuation of the cold war. This concern has led me to study the phenomenon of indifference to life in an ever increasingly mechanized industrialism, in which man is transformed into a thing, and as a result, is filled with anxiety and with indifference to, if not with hate against, life. But aside from that, the present-day mood of violence, which is manifested in juvenile delinquency as well as in the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, demands explanation and understanding as a first possible step toward change. The question arises whether we are headed for a new barbarismeven without the occurrence of nuclear waror whether a renaissance of our humanist tradition is possible.

Aside from the problems mentioned thus far, it is the aim of this book to clarify the relation of my psychoanalytic concepts to Freuds theories. I have never been satisfied with being classified as belonging to a new school of psychoanalysis whether it is called the cultural school or Neo-Freudianism. I believe that many of these new schools, while developing valuable insights, have also lost much of the most important discoveries of Freud. I am certainly not an orthodox Freudian. In fact, any theory which does not change within sixty years is, by this very fact, no longer the same as the original theory of the master; it is a fossilized repetition, and by being a repetition it is actually a deformation. Freuds basic discoveries were conceived in a certain philosophical frame of reference, that of the mechanistic materialism current among most natural scientists at the beginning of this century. I believe that the further development of Freuds thought requires a different philosophical frame of reference, that of dialectic humanism . I try to show in this book that Freuds greatest discoveries, that of the Oedipus complex, narcissism, and the death instinct, were hobbled by his philosophical premises and that, freed from them and translated into a new frame of reference, Freuds findings

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