0390435333.pdf

Feist−Feist: Theories of

Personality, Seventh

Edition

II. Psychodynamic

Theories

7. Fromm: Humanistic
   Psychoanalysis

© The McGraw−Hill^209

Companies, 2009

mood before going to sleep; others are regional or national and depend on climate,
geography, and dialect. Many symbols have several meanings because of the variety
of experiences that are connected with them. For example, fire may symbolize
warmth and home to some people but death and destruction to others. Similarly, the
sun may represent a threat to desert people, but growth and life to people in cold cli-
mates.
Fromm (1963) believed that therapists should not try to be too scientific in un-
derstanding a patient. Only with the attitude of relatedness can another person be
truly understood. The therapist should not view the patient as an illness or a thing but
as a person with the same human needs that all people possess.

Fromm’s Methods of Investigation

Fromm gathered data on human personality from many sources, including psy-
chotherapy, cultural anthropology, and psychohistory. In this section, we look briefly
at his anthropological study of life in a Mexican village and his psychobiographical
analysis of Adolf Hitler.

Social Character in a Mexican Village

Beginning in the late 1950s and extending into the mid-1960s, Fromm and a group
of psychologists, psychoanalysts, anthropologists, physicians, and statisticians stud-
ied social character in Chiconcuac, a Mexican village about 50 miles south of Mex-
ico City. The team interviewed every adult and half the children in this isolated farm-
ing village of 162 households and about 800 inhabitants. The people of the village

Chapter 7 Fromm: Humanistic Psychoanalysis 203

FIGURE 7.1 Three pathological orientations—necrophilia, narcissism, and
incestuous symbiosis—converge to form the syndrome of decay, whereas three healthy
orientations—biophilia, love of others, and positive freedom—converge in the syndrome
of growth. Most people have average development and are motivated by neither the
syndrome of decay nor the syndrome of growth.

Necr

oph

ilia Biophi

lia

Incestu

ous

sym

bio

sis Pos

itive

free

dom

Syndrome

of

decay

Syndrome

of

growth

Average

development

Average

development

Narcissism Love of others