Search results
Results from the WOW.Com Content Network
On Disobedience and Other Essays is a 1981 book by the psychoanalyst Erich Fromm. Published by Harper & Row , it is a collection of four previously published essays . "Let Man Prevail" and "Humanist Socialism" originally appeared in Erich Fromm, Let Man Prevail: A Socialist Manifesto and Program , 1960
Fromm examined the life and work of Sigmund Freud at length. He identified a discrepancy between early and later Freudian theory: namely that, prior to World War I, Freud had described human drives as a tension between desire and repression, but after the end of the war, began framing human drives as a struggle between biologically universal ...
Fromm characterizes this as a dialectic historical process whereby the original situation is the thesis and the emancipation from it the antithesis. The synthesis is only reached when something has replaced the original order and provided humans with a new security. Fromm does not indicate that the new system will necessarily be an improvement.
One could feel that there would be unlimited production and hence unlimited consumption. Human beings aspired to be Gods of earth, but this wasn’t really the case. The great promise failed due to the unachievable aims of life, i.e. maximum pleasure and fulfillment of every desire (radical hedonism), and the egotism, selfishness and greed of ...
While Fromm provided for the possibility that religion could be a positive influence in an individual's life, perhaps facilitating happiness and comfort, his critique serves mainly to condemn, at a very basic level, most religious orders, especially those orders most commonly practiced in Western culture. Accordingly, Fromm's thesis is rejected ...
In Marx's Concept of Man, Erich Fromm provides a detailed analysis of Karl Marx's ideas about human nature and how those ideas informed his economic and political theories. Fromm shows how Marx's conception of man as a "species-being" who is fundamentally social and cooperative, rather than selfish and individualistic, shaped his vision of a ...
Get AOL Mail for FREE! Manage your email like never before with travel, photo & document views. Personalize your inbox with themes & tabs. You've Got Mail!
Erich Fromm sees the distinction between the two types of freedom emerging alongside humanity's evolution away from the instinctual activity that characterizes lower animal forms. This aspect of freedom, he argues, "is here used not in its positive sense of 'freedom to' but in its negative sense of 'freedom from', namely freedom from ...