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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<.
The paper reviews central concepts and research findings of attachment theory emphasizing its clinical relevance to psychoanalytically informed clinicians. We then turn to a historical analysis in order to understand why Bowlby's work was dismissed within psychoanalytic circles and the reasons why Bowlby's contributions and attachment theory have begun to have a significant impact among clinicians within the last ten years.
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.
On the contingency of life
(1991)
Erich Fromm's Contribution to Relational Perspectives in Psychoanalysis Typescript 1992, 24 p.
(1992)
Mauricio Cortina evaluates the strengths and weaknesses of Fromm's model of human nature and motivation by contrasting Freud's and Fromm's approach to the problem. Fromm provided a nonreductionistic model of motivation by exploring emergent (new) evolutionary properties that characterize the human species. This emphasis on what is evolutionarily new is the greatest strength of the model. However, the strength is associated with a significant weakness. While recognizing specifically new motivational structures, Fromm underestimates the importance of evolutionary and developmental continuity and transformation. The >eviction from paradise< biblical metaphor captures the essence of Fromm's view of the human condition. Fromm thought that a key factor in development was the struggle to overcome a regressive pull to return to the lost security provided by the mother figure or its symbolic equivalents such as blood ties, tribalism, and nationalism. Cortina presents an alternative evolutionary and developmental model that is in keeping with Fromm's emphasis on the importance of evolutionary transformations in humans, but does not accept Fromm's premise that as a species we are uprooted from nature. The evolutionary perspective accounts for the plasticity of human adaptation – that Fromm attributed to a combination of a relatively weak instinctive endowment and the development of the neocortex – as the result of a neotenic process (the retention of juvenile characteristics into adult life). This neotenic interpretation, together with a developmental perspective derived from attachment theory, questions the paradigm of symbiotic unity that informed Fromm's view of development and still remains an influential model of development in many other psychoanalytic schools of thought. Research based on attachment theory shows that under normal conditions security is never >lost< but rather it is found, or more precisely it is constructed (Sroufe 1986). This construction between the infant and its primary caregivers continues over a very protracted period of human development when it gradually becomes internalized, providing a sense of continuity in human development. Under favorable conditions ties with parents are never relinquished but become transformed as new intimate relationships to peers and lovers develop, supplying a new source of emotional security. The chapter concludes with some clinical implications of this >secure base< model of development.
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.