Necrophilia or Biophilia: Fromm, Erich: The Heart of Man. Its Genius for Good and Evil. Religious Perspectives, edited by Ruth Nanda Anshen. New York, Evanston and London:  Harper and Row, Publishers, 1964,  156 pp.

In this book, Erich Fromm disclaims his alleged allegiance to the “cultural school” or to “Neo-Freudianism” who, he believes, have discarded the most important discoveries of Freud. Yet, Fromm holds that Freud's thought now calls for a different philosophical reference which he terms “dialectic humanism.” This is to be distinguished from existential analysis which Fromm thinks is often shallow and without sound clinical basis.

However, this book itself tends to make sharp un-dialectic diremptions between love and hate, life and death. It does not make a clear distinction between conflict and contradiction, between regression under control of the ego and pathological regression. Thus, the book sets up necrophilia as the contradictory of biophilia. Fromm's stress is induced by social and political developments in our day which are accompanied by an indifference to and hatred of life.

The Heart of Man is written with a fine and genuine passion calling attention to the social death urge of our time. It contains many felicitous formulations. Thus, freedom is defined as “acting on the basis of the awareness of alternatives and their consequences.” This is psychoanalytically sharper than the conceptions of freedom as acting in the awareness of necessity.