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

Erich Fromm

2010

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Library of CongressCataloging-in-Publication Data

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

Copyright 1964 by Erich Fromm

Printed in the United States of America

ebook ISBN: 9781590562536

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As thepresent book is reissued, The American Mental Health Foundationcelebrates its 86th anniversary. Founded in 1924, AMHF is dedicatedto the welfare of people suffering from emotional problems, with aparticular concern for individuals with special needs and theelderly. For many years, AMHF generally devoted its efforts tobettering quality of treatment and developing more effectivemethods, available even to low-income wage earners.

The major therapeutic advances andimproved training methods are described in its existingpublications: the series The Search for the Future. Two of thesebooks are available on its Web site under the titles The Challenge for Group Psychotherapy (volume 1) and The Challenge forPsychoanalysis and Psychotherapy: Solutions for the Future (volume 2). Portions of these books are reprinted on the AMHFWeb site in French and German, as they were publishedinternationally (in addition to Italian editions), for a segment ofthe international community. These books were prepared by Dr.Stefan de Schill under the joint sponsorship of AMHF and TheInternational Institute for Mental Health Research, Zurich andGeneva. Volume 3, written by Dr. de Schill and published byPrometheus Books in 2000, is entitled Crucial ChoicesCrucial Changes: The Resurrection ofPsychotherapy.

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

Under the supervision and direction of Dr.William Van Ornum, AMHF Books is an exciting new venture. Withinthe mission and under the auspices of The American Mental HealthFoundation, AMHF Books publishes new research as well as works byclassic authors.

Erich Fromm (19001980) famouslyremains one of the authoritative voices of the 20th century, a timethat witnessed unprecedented changes in our understanding of theinner, as well as political, landscape of the human race. AMHFBooks is proud to be the publisher of this world-renownedindividual, one that has shaped our culture well into a newcentury. On the thirtieth anniversary of Fromms death and hundredand tenth anniversary of his birth, AMHF Books celebrates hisvisionary humanism by reissuing two of his books, The Revolution of Hope and The Heart of Man, and publishingtwo, Beyond Freud and The Pathology of Normalcy, for thefirst time.

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This booktakes 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 offreedom and with sadism, masochism, and destructiveness; in themeantime clinical experience and theoretical speculation have ledme to what I think is a deeper understanding of freedom as well asof various kinds of aggression and destructiveness. I have beenable to distinguish between various kinds of aggression, whichdirectly or indirectly are in the service of life, and thatmalignant form of destructiveness, necrophilia, which is a truelove of death as opposed to biophilia which is the love of life.In Man for Himself Idiscussed the problem of ethical norms based on our knowledge ofthe nature of man, and not on revelation and manmade laws andconventions. In this book I pursue the problem further and discussthe 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 maintopic there was mans capacity to love, the main topic here is hiscapacity to destroy, his narcissism and his incestuous fixation.Yet while the discussion of non-love fills most pages, the problemof love is also taken up in a new and broader sense, namely, loveof life. I try to show that love of life, independence, and theovercoming of narcissism form a syndrome of growth as against thesyndrome of decay formed by love of death, incestuous symbiosis,and malignant narcissism.

I have been led to the pursuit of the studyof this syndrome of decay not only on the basis of clinicalexperience but also by the social and political development of thepast years. Ever more pressing becomes the question why, in spiteof good will and knowledge of the facts about the consequences ofnuclear war, the attempts to avoid it are feeble in comparison withthe magnitude of the danger and the likelihood of war, given thecontinuation of the nuclear-arms race and the continuation of thecold war. This concern has led me to study the phenomenon ofindifference to life in an ever increasingly mechanizedindustrialism, in which man is transformed into a thing, and as aresult, is filled with anxiety and with indifference to, if notwith hate against, life. But aside from that, the present-day moodof violence, which is manifested in juvenile delinquency as well asin the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, demandsexplanation and understanding as a first possible step towardchange. The question arises whether we are headed for a newbarbarismeven without the occurrence of nuclear waror whether arenaissance of our humanist tradition is possible.

Aside from the problems mentioned thusfar it is the aim of this book to clarify the relation of mypsychoanalytic concepts to Freuds theories. I have never beensatisfied with being classified as belonging to a new school ofpsychoanalysis whether it is called the cultural school orNeo-Freudianism. I believe that many of these new schools, whiledeveloping valuable insights, have also lost much of the mostimportant discoveries of Freud. I am certainly not an orthodoxFreudian. In fact, any theory which does not change within sixtyyears is, by this very fact, no longer the same as the originaltheory of the master; it is a fossilized repetition, and by being arepetition it is actually a deformation. Freuds basic discoverieswere conceived in a certain philosophical frame of reference, thatof the mechanistic materialism current among most naturalscientists at the beginning of this century. I believe that thefurther development of Freuds thought requires a differentphilosophical frame of reference, that of dialectic humanism . I try to show in this bookthat Freuds greatest discoveries, that of the Oedipus complex,narcissism, and the death instinct, were hobbled by hisphilosophical premises and that, freed from them and translatedinto a new frame of reference, Freuds findings become ever morepotent and meaningful. [1] I believe that it is the frame ofreference of humanism, of its paradoxical blend of relentlesscriticism, uncompromising realism, and rational faith which willpermit the fruitful development of the work for which Freud laidthe foundations.