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    The Essential Fromm: Life Between Having and Being
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    The Essential Fromm: Life Between Having and Being
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    The Essential Fromm: Life Between Having and Being
    Ebook155 pages3 hours

    The Essential Fromm: Life Between Having and Being

    By Erich Fromm and Rainer Funk

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    About this ebook

    As Fromm points out, ours is “a life between having and being”—between mere having and healthy being, between destructiveness and creativity, between narcissism and productive self-understanding, between passivity and the joy of positive activity.
     
    The alternatives of having and being are basic orientations of our character and determine our behavior. The mostly unpublished and unknown texts featured in The Essential Fromm encapsulate Fromm’s views on the fulfilling life. To put down roots yet remain free is what the late Erich Fromm called the art of being. It is the secret of happiness.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherOpen Road Integrated Media
    Release dateDec 9, 2014
    ISBN9781497693623
    Author

    Erich Fromm

    Erich Fromm (1900–1980) was a bestselling psychoanalyst and social philosopher whose views about alienation, love, and sanity in society—discussed in his books such as Escape from Freedom, The Art of Loving, The Sane Society, and To Have or To Be?—helped shape the landscape of psychology in the mid-twentieth century. Fromm was born in Frankfurt, Germany, to Jewish parents, and studied at the universities of Frankfurt, Heidelberg (where in 1922 he earned his doctorate in sociology), and Munich. In the 1930s he was one of the most influential figures at the Frankfurt Institute of Social Research. In 1934, as the Nazis rose to power, he moved to the United States. He practiced psychoanalysis in both New York and Mexico City before moving to Switzerland in 1974, where he continued his work until his death.

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    Reviews for The Essential Fromm

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    • 4/5
      I saw this book in the secondhand shop in Sharrow and didn't buy it. Then yesterday I cycled down to say goodbye to the Greek man selling his gift shop and to buy a lunch in the Sharrow Marrow and after locking up the bike I went back into the book shop and bought this book after all. I read some in the cafe spilling tea on its early pages then I biked through Endcliffe Park and got off the bike, sat on the grass and read some more. When I got home I read some more. All the time thinking - he wrote this in the seventies and yet it is fresh and speaks to us from the author's grave. No higher praise than this.
    • 3/5
      This book consists of excerpts from books by Fromm and interviews with him, organized topically by the editor. This approach emphasizes a few points in each chapter, often rather redundantly. Fromm criticizes modern civilization for how it tends to change human character. Every society shapes its members, beyond their individual dispositions, into what that society needs: warriors, farmers, factory workers, etc. Fromm sees industrial society as reducing individuals to workers and consumers, trapping them in the dynamics of "having", which interferes with their broader human potential for "being".

      3 people found this helpful

    • 2/5
      Fromm states that people in our society have become obsessed with acquiring property, keeping it and increasing it. People become property to be owned and used. He rejects the ideas of the enlightenment and those thinkers who believe people can live freely and trade with one another maintaining a respect for each other through sharing mutual values. His views about people seem to stem from a static view of power rather than a dynamic view of the possibilities for individuals who choose to live a flourishing life. He claims that humans have a deeply rooted desire to express themselves, yet he does not explain the apparent contradiction between this view and the social structure that forces people to have rather than to be. Joy is experienced through productive behavior which, for Fromm often ends in sadness. It was disappointing to read a book that was contradictory on so many levels.

      2 people found this helpful