TY - JOUR A1 - Cortina, Mauricio T1 - Rethinking Erich Fromm’s Humanism and His View of Human Nature JF - Psychoanalytic Inquiry, Routledge, Vol. 44 (No. 1, 2024), pp. 095-102. N2 - This article reviews Fromm’s view of human nature that is the basis for his existential humanism. Fromm’s core idea was that the combination of minimal instinctual endowment, enormous expansion of our neocortex, and being born in a helpless state created a set of existential contradictions or dichotomies. The main contradiction or dichotomy is being part of nature yet transcending it by being aware of our mortality. Not being able to go back to the previous “harmony” with nature, humans must develop their capacity for reason, symbolic capacities, imagination and human solidarity or regress to symbiotic and incestuous ties. I make two main arguments. I show that instead of losing our instincts, humans retain three social instincts that we share with other social species, namely attachment instincts (and forming attachment bonds), affiliation to groups (group instinct) and sexual instincts. I show how these three instincts have been significantly transformed in relation to our great ape relatives making us a more flexible, adaptive, cooperative and ultrasocial species. Second I describe a new evolutionary paradigm in which genes and culture coevolve and influence each other, also known as the dual inheritance model. The main effect of this dual inheritance is that cultures, like genes, transmit information and knowledge from one generation to the next. The cumulative effect of cultural knowledge transmitted through thousands of generations is that we develop new modes of production, new technologies, art forms, and new cultural rituals and practices. To which we must adapt. This new view of what made us human puts Fromm’s view of human nature and his radical humanism on a stronger sociobiological foundation. I close by making the argument that our group instinct is both our greatest strength and greatest weakness, making us a species with a >genius for good and evil<. Y1 - 2024 ER - TY - JOUR A1 - Cortina, Mauricio T1 - Prologue: Erich Fromm’s Relevance for Our Troubled World JF - Psychoanalytic Inquiry, Routledge, Vol. 44 (No. 1, 2024), pp. 001-008. Y1 - 2024 ER - TY - JOUR A1 - Cortina, Mauricio T1 - Epilogue: Erich Fromm’s Relevance for Our Troubled World JF - Psychoanalytic Inquiry, Routledge, Vol. 44 (No. 1, 2024), pp. 135-136. Y1 - 2024 ER - TY - JOUR A1 - Cortina, Mauricio T1 - Our Prehistory as Egalitarian Nomadic Foragers with Antiauthoritarian Leadership: What These Nomads Can Teach Us Today JF - Psychoanalytic Inquiry, Vol. 41, pp. 456–472. N2 - Our species has deep prehistoric roots in egalitarian and antiauthoritarian bands of nomadic hunter-gatherers. As large agricultural societies develop after the Neolithic revolution 10,000 years ago, despotic rulers, social hierarchies and brutal social inequalities begin to emerge. Through the immensely long arc of the history of our species the pendulum has swung between authoritarianism and antiauthoritarianism, egalitarianism and hierarchy, cooperation and competition, collective solidarity and individual selfishness. Recognizing these oscillations is a key to understanding the political and social nature of our species. As I show, our capacity to control bullies and tyrants and our longing for autonomy and freedom have deep roots in the egalitarian ways of life of nomadic foragers that prevailed during 100,000 years of the prehistory of our species or perhaps much longer. A better understanding about what is known about this prehistory gives us reasons to believe that >the better angels of our nature< are not just historical products, but are indeed rooted in human nature. Y1 - 2021 ER - TY - JOUR A1 - Cortina, Mauricio A1 - Maccoby, Michael T1 - Epilogue: Leadership, Psychoanalysis, and Society JF - Psychoanalytic Inquiry, Vol. 41, pp. 552-553. Y1 - 2021 ER - TY - JOUR A1 - Maccoby, Michael A1 - Cortina, Mauricio T1 - Prologue: Leadership, Psychoanalysis, and Society JF - Psychoanalytic Inquiry, Vol. 41, pp. 443–444. Y1 - 2021 ER - TY - JOUR A1 - Cortina, Mauricio T1 - Freedom and its Perversions, Lecture given in 2021. Y1 - 2021 ER - TY - JOUR A1 - Cortina, Mauricio T1 - A Tribute to Giovanni Liotti: gentle soul, first rate thinker, scholar and clinician, manuscript for publication, 2018. N2 - I describe my collaboration with Giovanni over the span of almost 15 years during which time we developed a multimotivational model that built on attachment theory and explored some of its clinical implications. I mention the many ways Giovanni influenced my thinking, and provide a few personal stories about Giovanni that give a sense of his generous, warm and creative nature. Throughout the article I describe how I developed some of the ideas we worked on together to provide a broad evolutionary and developmental outlook on human nature. We had planned to write a book together on this ambitious project, but personal circumstances got in the way. Y1 - 2018 ER - TY - JOUR A1 - Cortina, Mauricio T1 - Fromm’s View of the Human Condition in Light of Contemporary Evolutionary and Developmental Knowledge JF - R. Funk and N. McLaughlin (Eds.), Towards a Human Science. The Relevance of Erich Fromm for Today, Giessen (Psychosozial-Verlag) 2015, pp. 159-185. Y1 - 2015 UR - http://www.psychosozial-verlag.de/catalog/product_info.php/products_id/2535/CATALOGSSID/8c52oh5o77t4cs3r5m2r2722j4 ER - TY - JOUR A1 - Cortina, Mauricio T1 - The Greatness and Limitations of Erich Fromm’s Humanism JF - Contemporary Psychoanalysis, New York (William Alanson White Psychoanalytic Society), Vol. 51 (No. 3, 2015), pp. 388–422. Y1 - 2015 ER -