The essential Fromm
by Erich Fromm, Rainer Funk (Editor)
On This Page
Description
As Fromm points out, ours is "a life between having and being"--between mere having and healthy being, between destructiveness and creativity, between narcissism and productive self-understanding, between passivity and the joy of positive activity. The alternatives of having and being are basic orientations of our character and determine our behavior. The mostly unpublished and unknown texts featured in The Essential Fromm encapsulate Fromm's views on the fulfilling life. To show more put down roots yet remain free is what the late Erich Fromm called the art of being. It is the secret of happiness. show lessTags
Recommendations
Member Reviews
This book consists of excerpts from books by Fromm and interviews with him, organized topically by the editor. This approach emphasizes a few points in each chapter, often rather redundantly. Fromm criticizes modern civilization for how it tends to change human character. Every society shapes its members, beyond their individual dispositions, into what that society needs: warriors, farmers, factory workers, etc. Fromm sees industrial society as reducing individuals to workers and consumers, trapping them in the dynamics of "having", which interferes with their broader human potential for "being".
Ratings
Members
- Recently Added By
Author Information
182+ Works 18,487 Members
Psychologist and philosopher Erich Fromm was born in Frankfurt, Germany on March 23, 1900. He received a Ph.D in sociology from the University of Heidelberg in 1922 and finished his psychoanalytical training at the Psychoanalytical Institute in Berlin in 1930. He started his own clinical practice and joined the Frankfurt Institute for Social show more Research. In 1934, he moved to New York and became a professor at Columbia University. In 1950, he moved to Mexico City and became a professor at the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de Mexico, where he created a psychoanalytic section at the medical school. He retired from there in 1965 and moved to Muralto, Switzerland in 1974. Throughout his life, Fromm maintained a clinical practice and wrote books. His writings were notable for both their social and political commentary and their philosophical and psychological underpinnings. He became known for linking human personality types with socioeconomic and political structures. His most popular book, The Art of Loving, was first published in 1956 and became an international bestseller. He died on March 18, 1980. (Bowker Author Biography) show less
Rainer Funk is Director of the Erich Fromm Institute Tuebingen, Co-Director of the Erich Fromm Study Center at the International Psychoanalytic University (IPU) in Berlin, and a practicing psychoanalyst based in Tuebingen, Germany.
Common Knowledge
- Canonical title
- The essential Fromm
Classifications
Statistics
- Members
- 58
- Popularity
- 531,505
- Reviews
- 1
- Rating
- (3.50)
- Languages
- English, Polish
- Media
- Paper, Ebook
- ISBNs
- 9
- ASINs
- 2
