The Revision of Psychoanalysis

In famous psychoanalyst Fromm's view, the normal person in our society suffers chronic low-grade schizophrenia marked by a fear of feeling deeply, loneliness, anxiety, alienation and lack of creative activity. In these scholarly essays, many written between 1968 and 1970, Fromm identifies false consciousness, obsessional business and sexual promiscuity as ways people try to block out full self-awareness. He scathingly attacks radical neo-Freudian Herbert Marcuse, guru of the '60s counterculture, arguing that Marcuse's proposal to revive Freud's polymorphous sexuality represents a return to a childish, sybaritic existence. Fromm finds much to admire, however, in the thought of Wilhelm Reich and R. D. Laing. In one interesting paper, he interprets sadism as a form of intense personal relatedness involving one person's need to dominate and control another. In another essay, he holds that mystical experience need not be narcissistic and presents psychoanalysis as an avenue to enlightenment. (Oct.)