A Comparison of Freud and Fromm

Erich Fromm was born four years after Freud in 1900 in Frankfurt, Germany. Unlike Freud, Fromm had no medical training in his background. He received his PHD from the University of Heidelberg and later studied at Berlin Psychoanalytic Institute. Erich Fromm died March 16, 1980 in Switzerland. (Ewen 187)

While Freud and Fromm were contemporaries and shared some basic beliefs, their approach to most issues varied greatly. Freud’s attitude was purely scientific. Fromm desired to humanize things.

Fromm accepted the importance of unconscious, biological drives, repression and defense mechanisms, but rejected Freud’s theory of id, ego and superego. Fromm did not believe in specific developmental stages. “He believed that the growing child slowly learns to distinguish between “I and not I”, through contact with the environment, notably those involving the parents.”(Ewen 194) Fromm contends that personality d

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Freud defined resistance more narrowly.

Freud regarded religious beliefs to be extremely harmful to the individual and society. Fromm believed repression is a constantly recurring process. “He viewed religion as a regression to infancy, when a helpless baby needed protection of an all-powerful parent. He described it as repressed, unconscious wishes to maintain infantile sexual fantasies, and the childhood fear of being punished because of one’s libidinal impulses, act as resistance to memory. Freud’s well-known theory is that the personality is determined during the first five years of life. He believed the analyst represents infantile authority, like the mother who solves all of her child’s problems or the father who is never satisfied with his son’s accomplishments. Sometimes his piercing eyes would freeze the patient and his intensity could provoke defensive reactions. Fromm’s approach tended to strengthen this type of transference and with it the patient’s resistance to remembering.

Freud’s approach to technique could be more democratic than Fromm’s, especially since Freud did not try to force fit the patient into a formula. He believed healthy personality is illustrated by biophilia, love, creativity and reason. The patient transfers desire and fear onto the analyst who becomes a substitute for figures of the past. Religion both sacred and secular can give meaning to life and give a sense of identity and rootness. His theory of character development was that humans are distinguished from other animals by a larger neocortex with fewer instincts. Freud saw the analyst as a professional with technical training who should have a love of truth, a broad education in the arts and sciences, and knowledge of his own unconscious.

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Approximate Word count = 1394
Approximate Pages = 6 (250 words per page double spaced)

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