Radical Humanism in Psychoanalysis or Psychoanalysis as Art

EACH PSYCHOTHERAPY EXPRESSES A CONCEPT of man and puts it into practice using methods that draw upon a background of knowledge and convictions, which in turn, is increased by the experience of clinical work. Fromm's psychotherapeutic approach matured during his lengthy career as a psychoanalyst, constantly growing, providing the indispensable support to his theoretical convictions. He declares (1962, G.A. IX, p. 43) that in his written work he never lost sight of the critical observation of human behavior which he made during his psychoanalytic work. Fromm, however, also draws upon his experience in another laboratory, the historical scene. He was born in 1900 in Frankfurt and died in 1980 in Muralto, Switzerland. He witnessed dramatic events in his Jewish childhood. A scholar of social phenomena, he is recognized as being particularly expert in two historical periods (Heller, 1978): the growth of Nazism, and the American consumer democracy. These periods provide his multidisciplinary inquiry with signal traits of the human condition leading to more general considerations which transcend the subject matter from which they derive.

Fromm's complex background—psychoanalysis, anthropology, sociology, economics, religion—does not fully explain his originality as an intellectual, which is characterized by his expression in modern day language, of teachings, which have been voiced by the Masters—biblical prophets, Socrates, Buddah, Christ, Mystic Christians, Spinoza, Marx, Albert Schweitzer, Gandhi—in the spirit of acceptance, faith, and hope which characterizes every humanistic vision (Biancoli, 1983).

The problem of the scientific nature of this psychoanalytic approach is explained in the internal coherence of Fromm's theory,