Fromm Erich Fromm: Biographical History Term Paper

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Fromm allowed people to transcend the determinisms that Freud and Marx attributed to human family and human economic life as inevitable.

In contrast, Fromm stated that human beings have, in the title of his famous 1947 text, Escape from Freedom, attempted to use authoritarian forms of political and religious control, destructiveness, and social conformity to choose to limit their freedom. But humans can also attempt to free themselves from these controls, as these controls are self-imposed. Structures of the family, like excessively symbiotic families or withdrawing families may contribute to ways humans chose to limit their freedom, and by actively choosing such political, familial, and social systems, and remaining within these structures, humans may accept limitations -- or throw off such influences by recognizing them and reorganizing their familial and political lives, and thus change their societies and personalities. "Fromm emphasizes that we soak up our society with our mother's milk. It is so close to us that we usually forget that our society is just one of an infinite number of ways of dealing with the issues of life." (Boeree, 1997)

Fromm believes that the human social unconscious is best understood by examining the human personality in economic terms, rather than purely personal terms, like Freud. For example, the receptive orientation of personality is found in cultures that have particularly abundant natural resources, so that one need not work hard for one's sustenance, or in cultures that facilitate symbiotic families.

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The exploitative orientation, is the orientation of people expect to have to take what they need, and are also symbiotic family products, families where wants and demands are always satisfied. When the hoarding orientation predominates the personality, people expect to have to keep everything they own and thus see the world as possessions and potential possessions, along the lines of a withdrawing family -- these people expect to have things taken away, so they are always seeking to acquire more. The marketing orientation personality expects to sell and defines success as a matter of how well one can sell the self," package myself, advertise myself," to gain approval from a withdrawn parent. (Boeree, 1997) the productive orientation is a healthy personality, whom "Fromm occasionally refers to as the person without a mask." (Boeree, 1997)

Thus economics, such as scarcity of possessions, as well as familial style, such as scarcity of affection, produces a particular personality type. But once one is aware of one's orientation, through self-consciousness, one can understand the irrationality, for example, of the philosophy that the one who dies with the most toys wins. This is why Fromm's theory is such a positive and personally empowering theory of human development, and still finds resonance in sociological theory today.

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