Erich Fromm was one of the first psychoanalytic thinkers who was genuinely interested in Asian philosophies. In the first part of this article, I will show Fromm’s imago of Buddhism as a radical, nontheistic, and ethical philosophy >without God.< I will argue that Fromm made an important difference between the phenomenal ego and being that proves crucial for his understanding of psychoanalysis and his critique of modern society. I will also explore Fromm’s synthesis of Buddhist philosophy and psychoanalysis, and show the similarities and differences between them.
In this article we will explore three important themes: (1) Fromm's anti-objectivistic perspective which stands for the idea that the other Being should not become an object in analysis; (2) the central idea of the relatedness and the relational dimension in the psychotherapeutic practice; (3) in the last part we will analyze the existential-ontological level which is manifested in analysis. We will focus our attention on the different ways in which Fromm as a psychoanalytic thinker, social critic and humanist can help the therapists to include the existential and social dimension in the psychotherapeutic work.
In this article we will explore the postmodern conception of the >death< of the subject and the fol-lowing postmodern philosophical premises: the critique of the master narratives, the critique of metaphysics, the deconstruction of foundationalism, and the critique of the Enlightenment notion of the autonomous and free subject. In the central part of the article we will explore the limitations of the postmodern philosophy and introduce Fromm’s notion of the birth of the self in the time-history continuum. Contrary to the postmodern philosophy, we will insist on Fromm’s non-essentialist notion of being as a paradox and on the notion of the human agency which is crucial for the psychoanalytic (therapeutic) work and a personal transformation.