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The present article is an attempt to elucidate the epistemological- ethical significance of the x experience in humanistic psychology and ethics. The aim is to show the epistemological-ethical relevance of the x experience phenomenon for developing a new integral self-understanding of the scientific task as a integral anthropology. The aim is to pick up where Fromm left off in his previously unpublished, cautiously formulated programmatic essay entitled >Institute for the Science of Man.< The article begins with a section looking at Fromm’s conception of >the conscious mind< and >the unconscious<. Particularly stressed here is the radical reform of the Freudian concept of >the unconscious< undertaken by Fromm in his analytical social psychology and humanist psychoanalysis. The second section outlines what the x experience phenomenon is and explains its importance for humanistic psychoanalysis. Fromm’s concept of >derepression< is presented and its important anthropological and epistemological implications discussed. The fact that there had been as good as no scientific study of the logic of the x experience, nor of its epistemological, ethical and anthropological implications, led Fromm to call for what he called an >empirically based psychological anthropology<, which would serve as the basis for all individual disciplines within the human sciences. The third section, given the heading >The Importance of the X- Experience in Humanistic Psychoanalysis for Achieving an Integrally Expanded Self-Understanding in the Sciences and in Mankind,< takes Armin Bader’s epistemological ideal of a integrally expanded self-understanding (the so-called comprehensive method of research) as a key starting point from which a theoretical scientific basis can then be developed for purposes of realizing the Frommian ideal of science as integral anthropology. The article closes by discussing the significance of the x experience for the development of an evolutionary theory of man.
Compares FROMM's position on psychoanalytic technique with that of other analysts. Of the 2 essential therapeutic factors, insight and experience of new relationships, FROMM only stresses the first. Yet, his insistence on direct relatedness implies that the patient's experience of a new relationship with the analyst would inevitably become the 2nd major factor in a FROMMian analysis. However, FROMM never discussed this in theoretical terms. FROMM's reference to nonerotic love would lead one to define his attitude as that of parental love, although FROMM would suspect this definition to encourage in the analyst a narcissistic self-image as a good parent.