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Three major postwar schools of sociology in the Federal Republic of Germany are discussed: (1) Rene Konig, leader of the Cologne school, conceived of the family as a group or system, and demonstrated the theoretical relevance of sociology of the family for general sociology. (2) Helmut Schelsky considered the family as an institution and investigated changes in the German family since World War II, using 180 >family monographs<; he perceived the basis of official family policy to be the ideologization of family stability. (3) Max Horkheimer and Erich FROMM (the Frankfurt school) examined the aspect of authority in the relationship between soci-ety and the family; questions of authority in the family were studied to determine their effect on socialization processes and on women's opportunities for emancipation. Three phases in the development of West German research on the family since 1945 are identified by Heidi Rosenbaum: a surge of progress around 1950, followed by a decline, and then renewed interest in the 1960s.
(1) Erich Fromm's theory of >self-realization< has developed through the process of critical examination into S. Freud's biological-deterministic rationale and his own cultural-deterministic one in his early works, and it consequently includes both of these factors as the vital components. (2) In his theory, therefore, a human-being is regarded as an existence who can realize his own primary potentialities to be for himself only through his self-determining, spontaneous-productive activities as the responses or re-actions to his biological/socio-cultural determinants. In this sense, man's self-realization is the very process of such productive re-activities. (3) The essential point of the controversial issues between Fromm and the other members of the >Frankfurt School<-Horkheimer, Adorno, Marcuse-is concerned with the objective possibility of self-realization within the real context of the present society. However, Fromm's rebuttal against their negative arguments concerning his self-deterministic rationale seems to be insufficient so far as I know.
(4) In his theory, the possibility of self-realization is based on his >faith< -or >paradoxical hope< -n human nature inherently having potential powers and strivings for self-realization within itself. By this faith, his practical efforts in psychiatry and his own self-realization have been supported and, at the same time, the faith itself has also been verified through these experiences. (5) Thus, we can grasp the innate construction of Fromm's theory of self-realization as follows. a) His theory is based on the self-deterministic rationale on man's personality. b) But the biological/cultural determinisms are still alive, because in his theory man's self-realization is regarded as the process which is constructed only through his productive re-activities to his own biological/socio-cultural determinants. c) His self-deterministic rationale is founded on the above-mentioned >faith<. In other words, the theory of self-realization is the very product of this faith. (6) The essential process of what is called >self-formation< (Selbst-bildung) in educational philosophy can be identified with the self-realization through man's spontaneous-productive re-activities.