Erich Fromm: Frasi in inglese

Jewish Newsletter [New York] (19 May 1959); quoted in Prophets in Babylon (1980) by Marion Woolfson, p. 13

Kontext:
Most people pretend that they are happy, even to themselves because if you are unhappy, you are considered a failure. So you must wear the mask of being satisfied or happy because otherwise you lose credit on the market, you’re no longer a normal person or a capable person. But you just have to look at people. You only have to see how behind the mask there is unrest, irritability, anger, depression, insomnia, unhappiness, what the french called “malaise”: already at the outset of the century one spoke of “malaise of the century”. This is what Freud called “the unease in culture”. But it’s not the unease in culture, it’s the unease in bourgeois society that turns people into workhorses and [ignores] all that is important: the ability to love, to be there for oneself and others, to think, not to be a tool for the economy, but the end of all economic activity. That is what makes people the way they are.

I think it’s a common fiction that people share, that the modern person is happy. But this isn’t only my observation, it can be found in a range of people, and you only need to open your eyes yourself and not be deceived by appearances.
Origine: Rozhovor viz https://www.instagram.com/p/DHUAWP6uga7/

Human Nature and Social Theory (1969)
Contesto: What about the utopian thinkers of all ages, from the Prophets who had a vision of eternal peace, on through the Utopians of the Renaissance, etc.? Were they just dreamers? Or were they so deeply aware of new possibilities, of the changeability of social conditions, that they could visualize an entirely new form of social existence even though these new forms, as such, were not even potentially given in their own society? It is true that Marx wrote a great deal against utopian socialism, and so the term has a bad odor for many Marxists. But he is polemical against certain socialist schools which were, indeed, inferior to his system because of their lack of realism. In fact, I would say the less realistic basis for a vision of the uncrippled man and of a free society there is, the more is Utopia the only legitimate form of expressing hope. But they are not trans-historical as, for instance, is the Christian idea of the Last Judgment, etc. They are historical, but the product of rational imagination, rooted in an experience of what man is capable of and in a clear insight into the transitory character of previous and existing society.

Credo (1965)
Contesto: I believe that one can and must hope for a sane society that furthers man’s capacity to love his fellow men, to work and create, to develop his reason and his objectivity of a sense of himself that is based on the experience of his productive energy.
I believe that one can and must hope for the collective regaining of a mental health that is characterized by the capacity to love and to create...

Human Nature and Social Theory (1969)
Contesto: What about the utopian thinkers of all ages, from the Prophets who had a vision of eternal peace, on through the Utopians of the Renaissance, etc.? Were they just dreamers? Or were they so deeply aware of new possibilities, of the changeability of social conditions, that they could visualize an entirely new form of social existence even though these new forms, as such, were not even potentially given in their own society? It is true that Marx wrote a great deal against utopian socialism, and so the term has a bad odor for many Marxists. But he is polemical against certain socialist schools which were, indeed, inferior to his system because of their lack of realism. In fact, I would say the less realistic basis for a vision of the uncrippled man and of a free society there is, the more is Utopia the only legitimate form of expressing hope. But they are not trans-historical as, for instance, is the Christian idea of the Last Judgment, etc. They are historical, but the product of rational imagination, rooted in an experience of what man is capable of and in a clear insight into the transitory character of previous and existing society.

The Art of Loving (1956)

The Art of Loving (1956)

Origine: The Heart of Man: Its Genius for Good and Evil.

Kontext:
Normal people are the sickest, and sick people are the healthiest. That may sound witty or perhaps exaggerated, but I’m quite serious, it’s not just an amusing formula. The sick person reveals that certain human things aren’t yet so suppressed, that they come into conflict with the cultural patterns, and create symptoms through this friction. The symptom, like pain, is only an indication that something is wrong. One is lucky to have a symptom. The symptom, like pain, is only an indication that something is wrong. One is lucky to have a symptom. One is lucky to be in pain when something is wrong. We know if you did not feel pain, you’d be in a very dangerous situation. But a great many normal people have adapted so much that they have abandoned everything that is their own. They’ve become so alienated, so much instruments and robotic, that they no longer sense conflict at all. That is, their actual feeling, love, and hate are so much repressed or so much atrophied that they give the image of a chronic mild schizophrenia.
Origine: Rozhovor viz https://www.instagram.com/p/DHB6yIZM_HN/

Origine: The Art of Loving

Variante: Immature love says: 'I love you because I need you.' Mature love say: 'i need you because I love you.
Origine: The Art of Loving (1956), Ch. 2

The portion of this statement, "Love is the only sane and satisfactory answer to the problem of human existence" has been widely quoted alone, resulting in a less reserved expression, and sometimes the portion following it has been as well: "Any society which excludes, relatively, the development of love, must in the long run perish of its own contradiction with the basic necessities of human nature."
The Art of Loving (1956)
Contesto: Our society is run by a managerial bureaucracy, by professional politicians; people are motivated by mass suggestion, their aim is producing more and consuming more, as purposes in themselves. All activities are subordinated to economic goals, means have become ends; man is an automaton — well fed, well clad, but without any ultimate concern for that which is his peculiarly human quality and function. If man is to be able to love, he must be put in his supreme place. The economic machine must serve him, rather than he serve it. He must be enabled to share experience, to share work, rather than, at best, share in profits. Society must be organized in such a way that man's social, loving nature is not separated from his social existence, but becomes one with it. If it is true, as I have tried to show, that love is the only sane and satisfactory answer to the problem of human existence, then any society which excludes, relatively, the development of love, must in the long run perish of its own contradiction with the basic necessities of human nature. <!-- p. 111 - 112

As quoted in The New York Times (5 January 1964)
Contesto: Both dreams and myths are important communications from ourselves to ourselves. If we do not understand the language in which they are written, we miss a great deal of what we know and tell ourselves in those hours when we are not busy manipulating the outside world.

Human Nature and Social Theory (1969)
Contesto: The revolutionary and critical thinker is in a certain way always outside of his society while of course he is at the same time also in it. That he is in it is obvious, but why is he outside it? First, because he is not brainwashed by the ruling ideology, that is to say, he has an extraordinary kind of independence of thought and feeling; hence he can have a greater objectivity than the average person has. There are many emotional factors too. And certainly I do not mean to enter here into the complex problem of the revolutionary thinker. But it seems to me essential that in a certain sense he transcends his society. You may say he transcends it because of the new historical developments and possibilities he is aware of, while the majority still think in traditional terms.

Human Nature and Social Theory (1969)
Contesto: One will be conducive to cooperation and solidarity another social structure to competition, suspiciousness, avarice; another to child-like receptiveness, another to destructive aggressiveness. All empirical forms or human needs and drives have to be understood as results of the social practice (in the last analysis based on the productive forces, class structure, etc., etc.) but they all have to fulfill the functions which are inherent in man’s nature in general, and that is to permit him to relate himself to others and share a common frame of reference, etc. The existential contradiction within man (to which I would now add also the contradiction between limitations which reality imposes on his life, and the virtually limitless imagination which his brain permits him to follow) is what I believe to be one of the motives of psychological and social dynamics. Man can never stand still. He must find solutions to this contradiction, and ever better solutions to the extent to which reality enables him.
The question then arises whether there is an optimal solution which can be inferred from man’s nature, and which constitutes a potential tendency in man. I believe that such optimal solutions can be inferred from the nature of man, and I have recently found it quite useful to think in terms of what in sociology and economy is now often called »system analysis«. One might start with the idea, in the first place, that human personality — just like society — is a system, that is to say, that each part depends on every other, and no part can be changed unless all or most other parts are also changed. A system is better than chaos. If a society system disintegrates or is destroyed by blows from the outside the society ends in chaos, and a completely new society is built upon its ruins, often using the elements of the destroyed system to build the new. That has happened many times in history. But, what also happens is that the society is not simply destroyed but that the system is changed, and a new system emerges which can be considered to be a transformation of the old one.

Credo (1965)
Contesto: I believe that love is the main key to open the doors to the "growth" of man. Love and union with someone or something outside of oneself, union that allows one to put oneself into relationship with others, to feel one with others, without limiting the sense of integrity and independence. Love is a productive orientation for which it is essential that there be present at the same time: concern, responsibility, and respect for and knowledge of the object of the union.
I believe that the experience of love is the most human and humanizing act that it is given to man to enjoy and that it, like reason, makes no sense if conceived in a partial way.