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.
Fromm's book is offered as a definitive statement on the origins of the human appetite for cruelty and destruction. The author notes that six years ago, when he envisioned the book as the first volume of a comprehensive work on psychoanalytic theory, he focused on this topic because “aside from being one of the fundamental theoretical problems in psychoanalysis, the wave of destructiveness engulfing the world makes it also one of the most practically relevant ones. [p. xi].” The result is an impressively long and wide-ranging analysis of the problem in which Fromm regrettably fails to make good on his promise to provide us with a substantial new understanding of the morbid human passion for death and destruction.
In the first third of the book, Fromm reargues the old debate on nature versus nurture (or instinct versus behaviorism) and decides (as he has often done in previous works) in favor of a third position—his own brand of existentialism, in which he views humans as motivated by character-rooted passions that evolve from individual life experiences and are influenced to a large degree by the particular social system in which the individual is enmeshed.
From this vantage point, Fromm rejects appetitive instinct theories of aggression, such as the Freudian death instinct or Lorentz's phylogenetically programmed aggressive behavior, in which agressive energy inevitably accumulates to the point of explosive discharge unless drained off beforehand by appropriate stimuli. Fromm insists (as most contemporary psychoanalysts probably would) that normal aggressive behavior in humans occurs only as a response to frustration. He points out the Darwinian survival value of this inherited instinctual response that man shares with other species in the animal kingdom. And it is at this point that he arrives at his main thesis: beyond this defensive or “benign” aggression, there is a second kind of aggression, found only among humans, that he labels “malignant aggression.” This ki