Erich Fromm's 3 best books

We go there with the most advanced student of Freud. And who surely surpassed him in his communication skills evidenced in so many good books. I mean of course Erich Fromm. An author who, through his essays and with a deep dissemination will, facilitated, and still facilitates today, the opportunity to get closer to what is essentially human in philosophy and psychology. Because everything resides in this duo.

Psychology is based on our life philosophy more or less adjusted to the patterns. And this shared place of our consciousness is a very fertile space for ideologies, trends, fashions and any other form of external occupation.

So read many of the great works of Fromm, with that validity of humanism extended at all times as a safeguard against alienation, supposes an exercise of the will to know reality and trompe l'oeil, of consciousness and distortion arrived as external noise. Best of all is the language applied in his books, a perfect balance between terminology and meaning or translation into everyday life.

Firm believer in the postulates of Marx as an ideal system of social organization against the recalcitrant individualism sought by authoritarianism disguised as capitalism.

Making these initial socialist premises compatible (nothing to do with authoritarian communism) with psychoanalysis as a discipline capable of tackling the other fundamental part of every society: the individual, his work finally abounds in an idealism labeled as good-natured on many occasions.

But, coldly considered, the only set capable of balancing a world that, as the author always pointed out, does not stop growing in imbalance, injustice, indifference and the only perspective of the inflated ego from the notion of material stockpiling.

Thus, To read Fromm today is to insist on that countercurrent, in that real search for the foundations of happiness that although it may be a mere diffuse horizon, it never has to do with the material satisfaction of the ego, which is conceptually an empty ideal.

Top 3 recommended books by Erich Fromm

The art of Loving

In its most humanistic aspect, Fromm devoted himself to the writing of this book on the foundations of love. At the end of a book like this there is no other choice but to approach critical thinking of what we understand today by love.

If those who label conventional, regular or extended love as something else, they must agree that this love, understood as a counterpart in the most intense infatuation, is not so real when after a short time it vanishes.

If the emotions about the other person disappear, it is as if that love had never existed. And then all the time spent on it will be wasted time.

Furthermore, love extends to the fraternal, to the paternal, to the ideological. A love given only to the contingent, to the casual, to the ephemeral does not match the time lived with the weight of the fundamental ... It is not that the author intends to explain what love is or is not or how to love accurately.

But it is clear that what endures despite everything is a greater demonstration of love, the transfer of that part of life that in the most selfish love is only a matter of self-enjoyment falsely projected behind the lattice of passion. A matter of reading, weighing and rethinking many things without prejudice that another notion must be wrong for its own reasons.

The art of Loving

the fear to the freedom

The most sociological book, his first great work of thought when the author was already around 40 years old. Because that is an age that, as can be interpreted from Dante Alighieri's note: «Halfway through life, in a dark forest I found myself because my path had lost », gives a lot of himself to analyze whats overdue terms and the future, without the heavy burdens of impulsive youth or the heavy debts of old age.

The best time to address consolidated principles in modern society developed in the twentieth century amid still latent conflicts and high hopes of those who best knew how to sell the idea of ​​freedom. With a touch between the fatalistic and the vague hope of amendment, the author opens our minds to the crisis of our civilization today.

Governments seem doomed to be occupied by authoritarianisms as serious as fascism or outrageous capitalism, one as ultimately dangerous as the other.

The worst consequence of all is the surrender of the human being, the acceptance of destiny as a path through which to advance alone, after, above all, contemplating with disenchantment the betrayal of those who promised equality and justice, in short, a little to no freedom. little oriented towards the individualism that annuls and alienates.

the fear to the freedom

Pathology of normality

How many times doubts assail us about the social definition of normality. The fit between that global difference marked one by one by any human being and the sociological, psychological, emotional references is clearly impossible at different times or in its complete generality.

The stridency between what should be and what is within ourselves ends up leading to misalignment, in the firm belief of being out of all order established by the requirements and tendencies of an economic system that demands the maximum dedication of our existence.

For Fromm, the mismatch, analyzed from the practice of psychoanalysis, ends up describing this pathology of normality as a true mental condition.

And the truth is that its extensive examples and its detailed exemplification quite clarifies the emotional deficiencies that are inserted in many cases because of that duty to be as an entity and part of the whole and that need to be that can point to a very different space .

Pathology of normality
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