You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
First and foremost, Erich Fromm's The Heart of Man is an aspirational text. Published in 1964, it remains in our own time sixty years later, an impassioned jeremiad both as societal critique and in ethical orientation for the practice of clinical psychoanalysis. Following Hannah Arendt's (1963) Eichmann in Jerusalem, Fromm argues for the human imperative to recognize the psychological causes of our behavior and through reasoned choice, to guide consciously the course of our actions.
Rather than passively accept the acts that imperil both humanity as well as the planet on which we live, Fromm's “alternativism” hearkens back to the Deuteronomic clarion-call to choose life from among our potential for blessings and curse (Deuteronomy 37.19). He writes,
The alternative to the regressive, archaic solution to the problem of human existence, to the burden of being man is the progressive solution, that of finding a new harmony not of regression but by the development of all human forces, of the humanity within oneself. (p. 115)
Fromm's persuasive style is rooted in his own Bildung orientation, stressing life-long learning toward the singular goal of rational human self-formation (Sorkin, 1983, 1987; Sterba, 1982). Orchestrating voices across literary history, he conjoins the Egyptian Ikanaton (as does Freud, 1939 in Moses and Monotheism) with Moses and the Hebrew Bible, with Lao-Tse, Buddha, and Zarathustra, together with “the philosophers of Greece and the prophets in Israel” (p. 115) in easy conversation with Nietzche, Marx, Aristotle (p. 112), the neo-Kantian Hermann Cohen (p. 85), and humanist renaissance thinkers including Nicholas of Cusa, Erasmus, Thomas More, and Pico della Mirandola (p. 78).
Fromm's is an enthusiastic, powerfully synoptic public argument. His singular fault is that in his enthusiasm and conviction, he is a big-picture man, more attentive to message than detail. For example, in deriving the human qualities that eventuate in the “biophilic” orientation,