He was one of the most influential thinkers of the 20th century: Erich Fromm.
Photo: EFSC-ITU-BERLIN.DE
Mr. Funk, they were research assistant and assistant by Erich Fromm in the 1970s and they were involved in the emergence of the book “Having or being” from 1976. How was the collaboration?
I got literature on the subject, researched on certain questions, and together we talked about his texts. I was with him two to three times a week for several hours.
They describe the title as “cult book for a generation”. But this book seems more current than ever?
In the 1970s, many people were fed up with prosperity and eternal striving. They searched for alternative models of social coexistence. It happened that after reading “Having or” having “sold their car and ran bike again. It was something like a spirit of optimism. In view of the current crises, the book is certainly even more up -to -date. However, one no longer believes in the transformative power of your own forces, but that of the use of AI and technology.
Why does humans no longer believe in their own powers in these times of crisis?
Slanded casually because the machine can do it better. Why should we still make an effort and develop our own thoughts when there are programs and tools?
Interview
The work of the psychoanalyst and sociologist Erich Fromm games today “hardly a role in the media public,” writes the publisher Rainer Funk In the foreword to anthology “Humanism in times of crisis”. If you deepen yourself in the writings of psychologists and philosophers born on March 23, 1900 in Frankfurt am Main and died in Switzerland on March 18, 1980, his findings and analyzes have a burning and helpful effect for our time. Funke, born in 1943, studied theology and philosophy and did her doctorate in psychology. He was a lecturer in Bremen, Fulda and and has been a member of the board of the Erich Fromm-Foundation and director of the Erich Fromm Institute in Tübingen since 2014.
According to his own statement, Erich Fromm developed into a pacifist as a teenager. The propaganda no longer believed that he doubts the asseries of the warring parties. “The war was placed as a struggle for freedom,” he writes in “beyond the illusions” about his memories of the First World War. Sounds familiar, right?
Anyone who reads Fromms analyzes of the war propaganda and political enemy image constructions will be dismayed by how divisions and projections in politics and the media are now facing today, for example in the Ukraine War. It was barely eight weeks, then it was said that violence did not just have to be defended, but “defeated” by stronger counter -violence. This creates a piral violent.
Do you see a way out?
The question of guilt would have to be put down. The primary goal should be to end killing and destroying.
We are in western civilization in an charged mood, the friend-fermentation thinking increases, polarization is growing. What are the causes of this warehouse thinking?
Polarizations are always psychologically an indication that people feel threatened and want to secure their own. Climate change, wars, turbo capitalism, increased inequalities, digital revolution – all of this means that people are massively threatened, unsettled and increasingly faint.
Are there any ways out of this fainting?
Either you upgrade so huge that you no longer feel threatened and passed out. Or you deny the powerless feelings and instead fantasize in your own greatness. This path leads us straight to Trump’s “America First” policy, but also characterizes all right-wing populist policies. And at the same time, everything that is not useful is demonized and fought. We then speak of narcissistic logic.
Is all human suffering in narcissism? Not to consider your own actions not to question the other’s actions?
In contrast to other psychologists, people are born as a social being after Erich Fromm, narcissism is not his fate. Nevertheless, the narcissistic split in detail and in social interaction is a possibility that only exists in humans. This endangers a human and social interaction.
The group narcissus ensures the followers, in parties, behind rulers, behind slogans and propaganda. Why is people so susceptible to seduction and followers?
The desire to belong here, the power of social media and other factors play an important role here. From a psychological point of view, however, it is crucial how people try to overcome their fears, their anger, uncertainty, fainting.
“Have or be” – “cult book for a generation”. How is the greed of billionaires explained? Is that pure addiction?
The limitless possibilities of digital technology and the unleashed neoliberal economy mean that many people strive for limitlessness and never have enough. This is a new understanding of freedom that can take up like a addiction. If Fromm “have or his” would write today, it would be a matter of telling about the desire for limitlessness.
Erich Fromm was a Jew, he left Germany in good time before the persecution of the Nazis, lived in the USA, Mexico, at the end of his life in Switzerland. Why did the exploration of exile play a major role in his publications?
Fromm had lived in Switzerland since 1931 due to a lung disease and moved to New York in 1934. Characteristic of Fromm is certain that he had a very weak national bond. He was interested in the culture, society and politics of those countries in which he lived.
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Erich Fromm saw himself as a world citizen and he was a universal scholar.
Yes, and his great scientific work is primarily aimed at seeing your own social character critically, but being open to all other possibilities of individual and social human beings.
Is there any hopes that the current development will not end in complete devastation of the earth or in world wars?
Fromm tortured this question as early as 1962 when humanity was about to the Cuban crisis shortly before the outbreak of an atomic third world war. At the time, his bad idea was that the indifference to the acute threat of expression of a more unconscious than conscious hostility could be against life. At that time, pious appealed to the love of living, he advocated universal humanism. Giving a voice to love for life would be his message for today.
Erich Fromm: Humanism in times of crisis. Texts on the future of humanity. Ed. V. Rainer Funk. Deutscher Taschenbuchverlag, 256 pages, Br. 14 €.
Erich Fromm: The power of love. About and be, love and violence. Life and death. Ed. V. Rainer Funk and an afterword by Gerhard Wehr. Diogenes, 160 p., Br., 14 €.
Erich Fromm: have or be. The mental foundations of a new society. Deutscher Taschenbuchverlag, 272 pages, Br., 11 €.
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