Escape from Freedom

She was born Gayatri Chakravorty, in Calcutta, West Bengal, 24 February 1942, to a middle class family. She did her undergraduate in English at the University of Calcutta (1959), graduating with first class honours. After this she completed her Master's in English from Cornell University and then pursued her Ph.D. while teaching at University of Iowa. Her dissertation was on Yeats, directed by Paul de Man, titled Myself Must I Remake: The Life and Poetry of W.B. Yeats.

It was her subsequent work on Derrida's "Of Grammatology" which was a turning point for the self-confessed "insecure intellectual". She managed to apply Derridan deconstructivism to everything from Feminism and Marxism, to Literary Criticism and Post-Colonialism. Criticised by all the camps of thought she ventured into with her tools, she describes herself as a "para-disciplinary, ethical philosopher".

Spivak coined the term "strategic essentialism" which is critical for understanding how post-modernists can achieve a sort of temporary solidarity for the purpose of social action. For example, most feminists refuse to recognize "woman," or terms or concepts that portray woman as a collection of "essences." In other words, all women are individuals, and all attempts to make generalizations about them is wrong. This attitude makes it difficult for feminists to work for causes that may help fight oppression. "Strategic essentialism" allows feminists to temporarily accept an "essentialist" position about women specifically for the purpose of social action.

Escape from Freedom

Written by Erich Fromm and published in 1941, Escape from Freedom (Also published as The Fear of Freedom) exposes the spiritual corruption of democracy, where insecurity begets authority and authority becomes totalitarianism. A classic description of how a civilized Western democracy will sacrifice freedom for security.

Erich Fromm

When Fromm moved to Mexico City in 1950, he became a professor at the National Autonomous University in Mexico and established a psychoanalytic section at the medical school there. He taught at the university until his retirement in 1965. Meanwhile, he taught as a professor of psychology at Michigan State University from 1957 to 1961 and as an adjunct professor of psychology at the graduate division of Arts and Sciences at New York University after 1962. All the while, Fromm maintained his own clinical practice and published a series of books.

Beginning with his first seminal work, Escape from Freedom, first published in 1941, Fromm's writings were notable as much for their social and political commentary as for their philosophical and psychological underpinnings. His second seminal work, Man for Himself: An Inquiry into the Psychology of Ethics, first published in 1947, was a continuation of Escape from Freedom. Taken together, these books outlined Fromm's theory of human character, which was a natural outgrowth of Fromm's theory of human nature. Fromm's most popular book was The Art of Loving, an international bestseller first published in 1956, which recapitulated and complemented the theoretical principles of human nature found in Escape from Freedom and Man for Himself, principles which were revisited in many of Fromm's other major works.

Central to Fromm's world view was his interpretation of the Talmud, which he began studying as a young man under Rabbi J. Horowitz and later studied under Rabbi Salman Baruch Rabinkow while working towards his doctorate in sociology at the University of Heidelberg and under Nehemia Nobel and Ludwig Krause while studying in Frankfurt. Fromm's grandfather and two great grandfathers on his father's side were rabbis, and a great uncle on his mother's side was a noted Talmudic scholar. However, Fromm turned away from orthodox Judaism in 1926 and turned towards secular interpretations of scriptural ideals.

The cornerstone of Fromm's humanistic philosophy is his interpretation of the biblical story of Adam and Eve's exile from the Garden of Eden. Drawing on his knowledge of the Talmud, Fromm pointed out that being able to distinguish between good and evil is generally considered to be a virtue, and that biblical scholars generally consider Adam and Eve to have sinned by disobeying God and eating from the Tree of Knowledge. However, departing from traditional religious orthodoxy, Fromm extolled the virtues of humans taking independent action and using reason to establish moral values rather than adhering to authoritarian moral values.

Beyond a simple condemnation of authoritarian value systems, Fromm used the story of Adam and Eve as an allegorical explanation for human biological evolution and existential angst, asserting that when Adam and Eve ate from the Tree of Knowledge, they became aware of themselves as being separate from nature while still being a part of it. This is why they felt "naked" and "ashamed": They had evolved into human beings, conscious of themselves, their own mortality, and their powerlessness before the forces of nature and society, and no longer united with the universe as they were in their instinctive, pre-human existence as animals. According to Fromm, the awareness of a disunited human existence is the source of all guilt and shame, and the solution to this existential dichotomy is found in the development of one's uniquely human powers of love and reason. However, Fromm so distinguished his concept of love from popular notions of love that his reference to this concept was virtually paradoxical.

Fromm considered love to be an interpersonal creative capacity rather than an emotion, and he distinguished this creative capacity from what he considered to be various forms of narcissistic neuroses and sado-masochistic tendencies that are commonly held out as proof of "true love." Indeed, Fromm viewed the experience of "falling in love" as evidence of one's failure to understand the true nature of love, which he believed always had the common elements of care, responsibility, respect, and knowledge. Drawing from his knowledge of the Talmud, Fromm pointed to the story of Jonah, who did not wish to save the residents of Nineveh from the consequences of their sin, as demonstrative of his belief that the qualities of care and responsibility are generally absent from most human relationships. Fromm also asserted that few people in modern society had respect for the autonomy of their fellow human beings, much less the objective knowledge of what other people truly wanted and needed.

The culmination of Fromm's social and political philosophy was his book The Sane Society, published in 1955, which argued in favor of communitarian socialism. Building primarily upon the works of Karl Marx, Fromm was the first political and social commentator in this school of thought to introduce the ideal of personal freedom, more frequently found in the writings of classic liberals, such as Frederic Bastiat, and objectivists, such as Ayn Rand. Fromm's unique brand of socialism rejected both Western capitalism and Soviet communism, which he saw as dehumanizing and bureaucratic social structures that resulted in a virtually universal modern phenomenon of alienation.

Fromm was very active in American politics. He joined the American Socialist Party in the 1950s, and did his best to help them provide an alternative viewpoint to the prevailing McCarthyism of the time, a viewpoint that was best expressed in his 1961 paper May Man Prevail? An Inquiry into the Facts and Fictions of Foreign Policy. However, as a co-founder of SANE, Fromm's strongest political interest was in the international peace movement, fighting against the nuclear arms race and America's involvement in the Vietnam war. After supporting then Senator Eugene McCarthy's losing bid for the 1968 Democratic presidential nomination, Fromm more or less retreated from the American political scene, although he did write a paper in 1974 entitled Remarks on the Policy of Détente for a hearing held by the U.S. Senate Committee for Foreign Relations.

Fromm was married three times. His first wife was Frieda Reichmann, a physician and psychoanalytist, best known for her groundbreaking work with schizophrenics. Fromm and Reichmann worked together in a private clinic in Heidelberg.

The evolution and expansion of consciousness is inevitable. With the expansion of consciousness comes new ways of seeing reality. Everything changes. You see things that you never could of conceived of before. Old philosophies and religions suddenly appear naive and give way to a far more profound understanding. Most religions and philosophies will not last long, simply because it is inevitable that a profound transformation in our consciousness, in our way of understanding and interacting with reality, is going to soon take place. It is inevitable because that is the direction that consciousness is headed.

The universe, as we directly experience and understand it, is but a construct of the brain that enables us to navigate about and get what we want. It's not a true picture of reality. There are many ways of constructing and experiencing reality, and there are ways of perceiving things other than the 'normal' construct that the vast majority of mankind employs.

Space itself is but a mental construct. There are many ways to construct space other than the familiar Euclidean space most people experience.

Our perceptual constructs will soon give way to something far more profound, something currently inconceivable for the vast majority of humanity because they are all trapped in their little worlds, and they think it is reality, but it is not. We are the universe conscious of itself. Very soon, consciousness is going to experience an abrupt change. Humanity has been confined for so long in an illusion. Individuality will give way to the experience of something common, that sort of underlies the individuality.

Our perceptual realities are only the dimly lit surface of a vast sea of consciousness. This is not the Jungian collective unconscious per se, but rather something which is indeed very conscious. However, the great majority of our species has not experienced this directly because they are confined within their little, illusory perceptual shells which they think is somehow reflective of reality, but it is not.

We (our conscious worlds) are but waves or ripples on the surface of something vast, the Self, a consciousness which underlies and encompasses all the little spheres of self-consciousness. This is why being self-centered is naive. We, as a species, are moving inexorably towards Self-centeredness.

If you directly experience the bigger picture, you willl see just how much of an illusion our 'normal' perceptual reality is. For good reason, no-one can claim to experience the full, true picture. However, a few of us have experienced a much bigger picture, and know that this is the direction that consciousness is heading, that this is in our future.

People are stuck in their little waves of individuality, they never look deep beneath the surface, and there is something vast there that likely is common to all. It is something that you have to directly experience because explanations and descriptions will be empty without the actual experience, though it is not recommended that everybody attempt to experience it just yet. Nonetheless, it is where the future is headed.

Personality theories are mainly concerned with the structure of the human mind or psyche, which subsumes explaining how individual psychological processes are organized and made coherent. As such, personality theories serve as the basis and synthesizing element for many other fields in psychology

Intellectual Mistakes and Misinterpretations

Before proceeding much further, it's best to keep in mind that personality theorists often make intellectual mistakes in their theories, even the geniuses like Freud. Just a few of these mistakes are outlined below:

Ethnocentrism - biases due to one's culture. For example, Freud grew up in Vienna, not Tokyo or Africa. Hence, we expect his theories to be influenced by Viennese culture.

Egocentrism - biases due to one's individuality. These include temperament, genetics, family structure and dynamics, special personal experiences, education, etc. It could be said, not without too much exaggeration, that every personality theory may be explained in terms of the personality theorist's life experiences, and in fact, is limited by them.

Dogmatism - biases due to dogmatism; i.e. not allowing for questions, doubts, or new information. Often, dogmatic people will employ circular reasoning to validate their theories.

In addition, when trying to make sense of a personality theory, people will often run into the pitfall of misinterpretation. This is because words have many different associations and shades of meaning, and often we encounter a word used by a personality theorist that we unintentionally assign all sorts of associations and meanings to that the theorist did not have in mind.

For example, Freud's id, ego, and superego are all words used by his translators, though the original German terms were es, ich, and überich, which would be more properly translated as 'it', 'I', and 'over-I'.

In general, misinterpretations are prone to occur 1) when words are translated from other languages, 2) with neologisms (altogether new words), and 3) metaphors.

Evidence for personality theories comes in the following five varieties:

Anecdotal
Clinical
Phenomenological
Correlational
Experimental

Philosophical Assumptions

Philosophical assumptions underlying personality theories:

Free will vs. Determinism
Uniqueness vs. Universality
Physiological vs. Purposive Motivation
Conscious vs. Unconscious Motivation
Nature vs. Nurture
Stage vs. Non-Stage Theories of Development
Cultural Determinism vs. Cultural Transcendence
Early vs. Late Personality Formation
Continuous vs. Discontinuous Models of Mental Illness
Optimism vs. Pessimism

Classifying Personality Theories

Psychoanalytic - the Freudians and neo-Freudians, who for the most part, attribute signifacance to unconscious processes.
Behavioristic - focus on careful observation of behavior and environment and their relations. Behaviorists include Hans Eysenck, B. F. Skinner, and Albert Bandura.
Humanistic/Existential - focus on phenomenological methods and believe that the answers are to be found in consciousness or experience.

"strategic essentialism"- Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak

Escape from Freedom

Erich Fromm