Erich Fromm: biography of the father of humanistic psychoanalysis.

Life and work of an essential author to understand psychoanalysis.

Psychoanalysis has usually been associated with a pessimistic view of the human being, according to which our behavior and thoughts are driven by unconscious forces that we cannot control and that anchor us to our past.

This idea has to do with Sigmund Freud's psychoanalytic conception, but it is not the only one.

Once psychoanalysis had become established in Europe, other proposals of this psychological current appeared, some of which emphasized our capacity to become free and decide our life trajectory. Erich Fromm's humanistic 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 during his youth to begin Talmudic studies, although he later preferred to be trained in the psychoanalysis of Sigmund Freud and in the theoretical legacy of Karl Marx. Karl MarxMarx's theoretical legacy, which brought him closer to the ideas of socialism and a doctorate in sociology.

During the 1930s, when the Nazis took control of Germany, Erich Fromm moved to New York, where he opened a clinical practice based on psychoanalysis and began teaching at Columbia University. From that time on he popularized a psychoanalysis with strong influences from humanistic philosophy, which emphasized the capacity of the human being to become freer and more autonomous through personal development.

Humanistic psychoanalysis

When psychology was born in the second half of the 19th century, the first efforts of this first generation of researchers were aimed at understanding the basic functioning of mental processes. This implied asking questions such as the origin of mental illness, the functioning of the thresholds of consciousness, or the processes of learning.

Until the consolidation of psychoanalysis in Europe, psychologists neglected problems related to the way in which we approach our life trajectory, our past and our possible future affect us emotionally and in our decision making.

Discovering the importance of the unconscious

Psychoanalysis, in a way, had introduced a more metapsychic approach, had introduced a more metapsychological (or close to philosophical) approach to psychotherapeutic practice.. However, the initial current of thought from which it started emphasized the power of the unconscious over the individual, on the one hand, and was very focused on the explanations of traumas and mental disorders, on the other.

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

Life is not meant to be suffered

Erich Fromm did not distance himself from the illness-centered perspective of other psychoanalysts because he thought that life can be lived apart from 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, he shared with other humanistic psychologists of the time, such as Viktor Frankl.

Life, Fromm said, is irremediably 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, personal development.

Erich Fromm, on the capacity to love

Erich Fromm believed that the main source of human discomfort comes from the friction between the individual and the others.. This constant tension stems 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 establish affective ties with others, to be linked to them.

Expressed in their 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 body distinct from that of others, we see ourselves as separate from the rest and, to a certain extent, isolated.

Erich Fromm believed that this conflict can be addressed by developing our capacity to love.. To love others in the same way and all those things that make us a unique person, with all our imperfections. These ambitious missions were, in reality, a single project, consisting of developing love for life itself, and so it was embodied in the famous work The Art of Loving, published in 1956.

Psychoanalysis to explore human potential

In short, Fromm devoted his work to examining the range of possibilities that the humanistic conception of life could bring not only to techniques for reducing suffering in specific situations that generate discomfort, but also to the strategies to turn these episodes of suffering into a meaningful life project..

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 people's maximum potential in a process that, in itself, we could call "happiness". That is why, even today, Erich Fromm's works are still very popular today as inspirational and have a rich philosophical background..