Frued V. 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 development continues into adulthood. He believes that if a child k

Both Freud and Fromm defined psychoanalysis as the art of making the unconscious conscious, both recognize that we resist knowing the truth and that resistances must be overcome. Their views of resistance vary. Fromm believed repression is a constantly recurring process. He believed a person resists perceiving and knowing out of fear of seeing more than society allows or because the truth would force one to experience one’s irrationality or powerlessness.

Fromm agreed with Freud that dreams could serve the purpose of wish fulfillment, that the day’s events set them off, and that a person may conceal truths in different ways. While both men believed in dream symbols, Freud believed most dreams involved childhood sexual impulses and Fromm regarded many symbols as asexual.

eeps up with the increasing feelings of isolation, that anxiety can be kept to a minimal and personality development proceeds normally.

Freud, on the other hand, regarded religious beliefs to be extremely harmful to the individual and society. “He viewed religion as a regression to infancy, when a helpless baby needed protection of an all-powerful parent.”(Ewen 60) He hated religious ideas such as life continues after death and that all good is rewarded and all evil punished, that the difficulties of life serve a higher purpose so there is no reason to despair. Freud believed religion to be a collective neurosis started at a very early stage of development. People are indoctrinated with religion during childhood, before reason sets in, so they become dependent on its effects. Freud recommended children be brought up without religion so they would learn to rely on themselves. He thought people should not look to an ideal happiness in the hereafter, but face the reality and burdens of life in the present.

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