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In this chapter, we embark upon a historical journey, examining aspects of the lives and work of three individuals who attempted to incorporate the world outside the clinic into their theorizing about psychology and mental health: Frantz Fanon, Karen Horney, and Erich Fromm. These >worlded< clinicians waged important critiques of the psychological theories and practices of their time, particularly along the lines of race, gender, and political economy. We will pay attention to how elements of their own life travels informed their understanding of the importance of context vis-à-vis psychology. We will close with a concrete example of supportive intercultural travel by exploring the cross-cultural engagement of Zen Buddhism and D.T. Suzuki with Horney and Fromm.
Realist scholars are increasingly turning their attention to Pierre Bourdieu's concept of habitus or dispositions as a way of theorizing thought and behaviour. In this article, the author offers a contribution, based on Erich Fromm's social psychology, to the realist theory of habitus. The author argues that while Bourdieu and Fromm both see the quest for meaning as the source of subjectivity in social life, Fromm goes further than Bourdieu in analysing the psychodynamic consequences of the acquisition of habitus. Fromm provides additional tools to understand the properties of habitus that emerge from its interaction with primary psychological needs. Principally, Fromm's work reveals an undertheorized set of emergent properties of habitus.
Donald Trump and his followers who never waiver stand at 41.5% of the US population (Fivethirtyeight.com), the embodiment of a lust for power and fame and the minions who crave fulfillment through his arrogant and belligerent antics. Speaking from the mid-Twentieth century, Fromm offers a starting point for our discussion of the present day, centered on the social-psychological intersection where everyday people recreate the systems upon which they both depend, and which may very well destroy them.
Erich Fromm’s >Escape from Freedom< (1941) charts the growth and decline of freedom and selfawareness in the West from the Middle Ages to modern times, when people sought refuge from insecurity and responsibility in totalitarian movements, such as Nazism and Fascism. In contrast to the thesis that >Escape from Freedom< is evidence of >The Americanization of a European Intellectual,< Fromm wrote it because freedom, or the lack of it, was an acute problem in Nazi Germany, not America. His language and concepts were formed and fused during the crucial ideological and intellectual struggles of a specific, wretched moment in German history, the rise and triumph of Nazism; hence, he waged a Kulturkampf against Nazi barbarism to save Western humanist civilization.
Modern society is marked with utmost ambivalence. There is the utmost desire to be free, creative, and productive. Yet, our creative and productive desires trap us and now control our own freedom to become. Couple this inconsistency with the rapid sociostructural changes, fragmentation of traditions, and dissolution of communal well-being, what we have is a life of uncertainty. It is a life debased from its very ontological foundation with the transmission of technorationalities of the capitalist industry. In modernity, we could no longer speak of individuality and subjectivity since the very historical thread that serve as its foundation is now wavered towards accumulation and possession of the capital. Moreover, this overleaning towards the capital deadens us unconsciously that we mistake this for reality. The market ideology with all its rationalizations reifies human consciousness to the extent that we consider the technorationalities as the ontological normative structure. As a result, there is a growing dislocation of subjectivity which leads to neurotic social behaviors and inner social contradictions. As a result, we have our own social discontents. It is then the aim of this paper to ponder on the psychosocial effects of the market economy. I argue that there is a need to look at the effects of this economic system that perpetually delineate subjective experiences and plunge humanity into incontrovertible pseudo images. It is at this point that Fromm’s radical psychosocial interpretation of society becomes binding. I argue with Fromm that our social libidinal drives or what he termed as social characterology, which we are all unconscious of, must be thoroughly brought to fore. I claim that this particular characterology result to the obstructions of a normal and healthy society.