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IN THIS PRESENTATION, I WISH to delineate what I see as Erich Fromm's radical contribution to understanding man—the human animal who, by the nature of his existence, must make decisions and the choice whether to be genuinely alive or to stagnate. By combining a clinical wisdom secured through almost 50 years of intensive psychoanalytic experience with a life-long devotion to humanistic studies, Fromm (1947) has fashioned a conceptual formulation of man's nature which is unique and classical in its vigor and simplicity.
The major thrust of Fromm's theoretical view of man is that man must transform his life experience to bring himself into life—that adaptive modifications of personality are, in truth, not sufficient to accomplish this serious task. Although not clearly acknowledged, man's search for relatedness and identity comprises the bed-rock of human existence. The biological condition of man provides inadequate instinctive determination for this search. The evolutionary emergence of the specifically human phenomenon, self-awareness, forces on man an awesome sense of separateness. Man is inescapably compelled to find a solution to the central question posed by life—that is, how to transcend his separateness and relate himself to his world. Fromm delineates two contrasting modes of relatedness: regression to earlier and often archaic forms of relatedness, or to hope-oriented, affirmative responses in the direction of becoming fully human through developing one's creativity, productivity, and ability to love. Each of us has the potential for the most archaic as well as the most progressive solutions.
The different solutions man finds to this human condition are