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All philosophical systems have essential and nonessential features. The founder of the system, even when he wants to, cannot say what is basic and what is peripheral, because he is a prisoner of his epoch. Only the disciples, even when they are not geniuses like their teacher and live in a different historical period, can do so. Frequently a bureaucracy takes over the system and decides what is fundamental. This is how orthodoxy develops. They decide that everything said by the teacher has the same validity and is inalterable.
Psychoanalysis was Freud's system but, besides being a general theory, it also was a 'movement' and gave birth to a professional bureaucracy, which decides who is a heretic. Dissident schools create 'counterbureaucracies' and 'counterorthodoxies'. Fortunately, in the last three decades a new current has developed which tries to decide what is basic in Freud's thought. There are small groups in Europe and the United States developing this attitude. Fromm's Institute and Society is one such group, they believe.
Fromm believes there are five fundamental nuclei to Freud's theory: 1, the concept of the unconscious; 2, the concept of psychic conflict leading to mental illness; 3, the concept of making the unconscious conscious, leading to health; 4, the concept of transference and resistance, both in the illness and the process of making conscious that which is unconscious; phenomena that helped Freud to penetrate into the unconscious were dreams, free associations, and symptomatic acts; 5, the concept that character is largely determined in childhood. He thinks that the following three aspects of Freud's theories were the result of the culture in which he lived: the libido theory; the concept of man as a machine, and the concept that every irrational experience is a repetition of childhood experiences. Finally, he states that the alternative is not between 'freudianism' and 'non-Freudianism', but between psychoanalysis as a science and d