Erich Fromm the soul of man content. Overview analysis of work

Bai mi:
Annotation.
This is a book whose philosophical depth does not coexist with its usual abstraction and abstraction, but gives a clear idea of today. A book in which clearly visible parallels are drawn between the historical and the present, how it was and how it can be. Where is a person moving? And why does he choose this particular path? And does he have freedom of choice? Freedom. A completely special category, which is currently thrown at by many and with different goals - to attract, convince, promise. Freedom. Erich Fromm points out when freedom of choice has already been lost, at what point this happens, and when we are actually still free to choose.
The book examines many phenomena of social and state life - power itself and its consequences, growing injustice in society, social problems and discontent that have become a logical continuation of industrialization and the power of machines. The death of the living in the modern world is not only a problem of the destruction of some individual species, but as the extinction of “vitality” in general and an addiction to the dead - necrophilia as the central disease of the century, largely unconscious by people. The book tries to answer the questions: why are we moving towards destruction, oppression, destruction? And will it still be possible to avoid nuclear war in the 21st century?

Essay. The usefulness of the book for a journalist.

No! – “deadly exciting”, yes! - to LIFE

“Each person moves in a certain direction chosen by him: towards the living or the dead, towards good or evil. In evil, a person loses himself in a tragic attempt to free himself from the burden of his human existence. If a person is indifferent to life, then there is no longer any hope that he will choose good. His heart truly became so hard that his “life” was over.”
Erich Fromm "The Soul of Man"

When I picked up Erich Fromm’s book “The Soul of Man”, I doubted my choice for a long time: it is not very popular (compared to Bern’s “Games”), rather small and with some general and banal title, and the topic - “ The human soul", good and evil. However, the choice was made. My doubts were dispelled already in the introduction. This book is not an abstract philosophical discussion, but an incredibly relevant study of TODAY. But this is our journalists’ material. This is our task: “... to explore the phenomenon of indifference towards life in an increasingly mechanized industrial world. In this world, man has become a thing, and - as a consequence of this - he confronts life with fear and indifference, if not hatred. The current penchant for violence, manifested in youth crime and political assassinations, challenges us to take the first step towards change. The question arises whether we are moving towards a new barbarism, even if it does not come to atomic war, or whether a renaissance of our humanistic tradition is possible.” We do not have the right to describe in our materials an abstract, deeply psychological movement of the soul that encourages people to act in a certain way, but we also do not have the right not to know what motivates every person who comes into our field of vision in order to objectively assess reality and the situation.
What is a person? Is the creature originally good or evil? Fromm rejects these extremes and argues that “man is alone with his “two instincts” - the desire for good and the desire for evil.” I note that with OWN instincts, i.e. Man is initially characterized by duality of character. It is unreasonable to attribute to him only one characteristic, thereby justifying him to some extent. Thus, before us (journalists) is a person who can move in both directions, he chooses a trajectory, takes certain actions - now we have a situation in front of us that needs to be investigated. Starting with the situation, conditions, general information about an event, something similar in history, sooner or later we come to a person, and we need to study him with the same (if not more) care than the rest. Fromm's book is really useful, practically useful. I was convinced of this by already working with the first situation – an anti-fascist rally canceled by the mayor’s office.
Let's look:
“In order for millions of people to put their lives on the line and become murderers, they must be instilled with feelings of hatred, resentment, destructiveness and fear. Along with weapons, these feelings are an indispensable condition for waging war.”
“The distinction between just and unjust wars ... is highly questionable, since each of the opposing sides is usually able to present its position as a defense against attack.”
“The tendency to represent any war as a defensive one shows the following: firstly, the majority of people, at least in many civilized countries, do not allow themselves to be induced to kill and die unless they are first convinced that they are doing it to protect their lives and freedom; secondly, it shows how easy it is to convince millions of people that they are allegedly in danger of attack and therefore must defend themselves. This susceptibility to the influence of others rests primarily on the lack of independent thinking and feeling, as well as on the emotional dependence of the vast majority of people on their political leaders. If this dependence exists, then almost all arguments that are expressed in a sufficiently demanding and convincing form are taken at face value. The psychological consequences are, of course, the same, whether we are talking about imaginary or real danger. People feel threatened and are willing to kill and destroy to protect themselves.”
All of the above helps to understand the true cause of such phenomena, figure out who is to blame in such situations, why they happen and how to correct the situation. This is especially important for a journalist, since in many ways he creates public opinion, so he must study the processes thoroughly in order to be as objective as possible.
As you can see, most of the topics covered are in close proximity to the topic of power. This is another side of public life that is interesting to a journalist, a line with which many materials will intersect. What is Erich Fromm's opinion on this? “The main danger to humanity is not a monster or a sadist, but a normal person endowed with extraordinary power.” Power, one way or another, reveals in a person those instincts that push him to evil. Indeed, if, for lack of power, he could be limited by laws and other “powerful” people, then when he receives power, he has nothing to fear and can realize the desire for evil that is inherent in him. I want to. Like. I'll do it. And I always want to. Every person is predisposed to both good and evil, as stated earlier. And as was noted by the thinker himself, and can be deduced from historical experience, the possession of power does not lead to good. Very often, powerful people, if they were not necrophiles, then become one. Necrophilia flourishes in the modern industrial world. This term here is understood not in a sexual sense, but in a general love for the dead - the desire to oppress, destroy, kill, in particular oneself. Erich Fromm raises a very important problem of the 20th century - the problem of industrialization, the power of machines, which leads to the death of the living. Living feelings, relationships. A living person. One should not think that this is again connected with a purely historical, partly philosophical view. This is directly related to journalism, as it is a product of social problems. Quite specific. “We find ourselves in a situation in which excess and deficiency are sharply opposed to each other, both in the economic and psychological fields. As long as people spend their main energy on protecting their lives from attacks and on not dying of hunger, the love of life must wither and necrophilia flourish. An important social prerequisite for the development of biophilia is the elimination of injustice.” The author sees injustice in a situation where a person becomes not an end in itself, but a means to achieve better living conditions for another person. In this regard, Fromm considers the concept of freedom as the ability, the ability of a person to realize himself. The process of creating something new is the basis of life. And in our society, this ability is either suppressed from above, or is simply impossible, because people are faced with the problem of simply surviving, as well as moving towards false ideals. “The constant struggle for a higher step on the social ladder and the constant fear of being incompetent creates a permanent state of fear and stress in which the average person no longer thinks about the threat looming over himself and over the whole world.” The social conditions created in our time simply do not allow people to live their lives, or to live at all. The life of a specific person is suppressed by the life of the masses, mechanized, becomes monotonous repetition - this leads to regression. The constant, monotonous – the dead – fills our lives. The author finds the reason for this in the growing bureaucracy, the strengthening and establishment of capitalism.
Who, if not a journalist, needs to point out these reasons that give rise to a mass specific situations. Modern media sometimes admire the expanding industrialization and mechanization of our lives, when we need to talk about the loss of a living person in life. Finally, let's pay attention to language (including the media). The author talks about the emergence of expressions like: “deadly exciting”, “I’m mortally in love” or “this is just killing me.” This is also an indicator of “charm for the dead.”
Thus, is it necessary to conclude how useful the book is to a journalist? It explores everything that a journalist encounters every day, which becomes the subject and at least should be studied. Starting from the language he uses to the reasons for the situations he describes.

Essay on ethics. E. Fromm “The Soul of Man”
Introduction:

Erich Fromm German psychologist, philosopher, sociologist. He was one of the representatives of neo-Freudianism.

In this book, the author tries to destroy human narcissism and incestuous attraction. It also touches on love, but in a new, broader sense – about love and life.

Fromm tries to show that love for the living, combined with independence and overcoming narcissism, forms a “growth syndrome” opposite to the “decay syndrome”, which arises from love for the dead, from incestuous symbiosis and malignant narcissism.

A very exciting question was explored by Erich Fromm - the phenomenon of indifference towards life in an increasingly mechanized industrial world.

“In this world, man has become a thing and, as a consequence of this, he confronts life with fear and indifference, if not hatred.”

Fromm drew on his work in the clinical field to write this book.
Man: wolf or sheep?
For many years, people cannot come to one conclusion: Who is a person: a Wolf or a Sheep? Anyone who chooses their answer can bring compelling arguments.

For example, “Sheep” are people who in ancient times carried out the orders of their leaders, knowing that if they carried out these orders they could die. But even in our time they are not particularly different from those times.

“The Grand Inquisitors and dictators based their systems of power precisely on the assertion that people are sheep,” writes Fromm. It was believed that this gave the leaders a certain conviction that they were fulfilling a completely moral duty. The leaders gave the "sheep" what they wanted.

So, who are the “wolves”?!

Thomas Hobbes writes: “homo homini lupus est – Man is a wolf to man.” Fromm writes that many come to the conclusion that man is an evil and destructive creature, who can only be kept from his favorite pastime by fear of a stronger killer.

“Wolves want to kill, sheep want to do what they are told. Wolves force the sheep to kill and strangle, and they do this not because it gives them joy, but because they want to obey.”

I believe that in our time the same “wolves” and “sheep” have survived, but now these people are in different, let’s say, guises.

For example, “sheep” can be called people who also obey, but in a different sense. They are subordinate, for example, in professional activities, military service and many other areas. Can they be called slaves? I doubt! They are forced to “obey,” but if we take reality, they have their own benefit from this.

Fromm focused on three phenomena that, if combined, form the “decay syndrome” - love for the dead, inveterate narcissism and symbiotic-incestuous attraction. This syndrome encourages a person to destroy for the sake of destruction, and the “growth syndrome” consists of love for all living things.

“However, there is no doubt that every person moves in a certain direction chosen by him: towards the living or the dead, towards good or evil.”
Various forms of violence.
Violence- physical or mental impact of one person on another, violating the right of citizens to personal integrity (in the physical and spiritual sense).

Violence has always accompanied human nature. Revealing the “anatomy of destructiveness,” Fromm recognizes the presence of internal human aggressiveness. Its identification depends on the social conditions that realize the internal contradiction of a person, his living in two worlds at once. . The increase in violence in the historical process is associated with the predominance of social conditions conducive to aggressiveness.

Fromm distinguishes several forms of violence: playful, reactive, compensatory and archaic type.

Game violence is used to demonstrate one's dexterity, but is not motivated by hatred. Fromm considers reactive violence as violence manifested in the defense of life, freedom, dignity and property, compensatory violence that serves a person disadvantaged by life as a replacement for productive activity and a way to take revenge on life. The archaic type is seen here as bloodlust.

Violence is the use of force - overt or covert - to obtain from a person or group something that they are not willing to agree to voluntarily. In a narrow sense, violence is the infliction of physical and moral injury on a person. In a broad sense, violence is any damage (physical, moral, psychological, ideological, etc.) inflicted on a person, or any form of coercion against other individuals and social groups.

The problem of the place and role of violence in human society has always attracted the attention of researchers. Human history, and especially the history of European peoples, is replete with wars and military conflicts. Now violence has become a universal means of resolving various conflicts, both external and internal.
Love for the dead and Love for the living.
According to E. Fromm, love is an attitude, an orientation of character that sets a person’s attitude to the world in general, as well as a form of manifestation of a sense of care, responsibility, respect and understanding for other people, the desire and ability of a mature creative character to take an active interest in life and development object of love. Love is an art that requires a variety of knowledge and skills, including discipline, focus, patience, interest, activity and faith. IN modern society love relationships follow the laws of the market and are realized in numerous forms of pseudo-love.

Love for the dead is a literal translation - nikrophilia, and biophilia is love for the living.

Fromm writes that necrophiles are people who can easily talk about deaths and funerals. They are attracted to everything that is dead: corpses, rot, sewage and dirt. Fromm used Hitler as an example, and said that he was fascinated by destruction and found pleasure in the smell of the dead.

“Necrophiles live in the past and never live in the future. Their feelings are essentially sentimental, that is, they depend on the sensations they experienced yesterday or think they experienced. They are cold, distant, and committed to "law and order." Their values are exactly the opposite of those that we associate with normal life: it is not the living, but the dead that excites and satisfies them.”

The necrophile is accustomed to an organized world, where everything is sorted into shelves, where everyone (including him) knows their social role. And if this world collapses or even just changes a lot, then the necrophile begins to behave actively. But he himself is not capable of creating any other world: he is not capable of free creativity, he is irritated by those who lead a life in complete disorder, he is irritated by accidents, surprises get on his nerves - he is afraid of all this.

How can you characterize biophiles?! Biophiles - according to Fromm, these are people who love all living things and strive for creation.

Biophilic ethics has its own principle of good and evil. Good is everything that serves life, evil is everything that serves death. The author also considers joy as a virtue, and sadness as a sin. According to Fromm, biophilic selfhood is motivated by life and joy, the purpose of moral efforts is to strengthen the life-affirming side in a person. For this reason, the biophile is not tormented by remorse and guilt, which, after all, are only aspects of self-loathing and sadness.

Individual and public narcissism.
The concept of narcissism dates back to ancient Greek mythology. The very concept of narcissism is sometimes used as a designation and symbol of human self-knowledge. The concept of Narcissism was introduced by H. Ellis in 1989 to designate a pathological form of narcissism, but it became more widespread in psychoanalytic teachings. For Sigmund Freud this was one of his seminal discoveries. According to Freud, narcissism is the state and direction of libido towards the self.

In his 1914 seminal work "On Narcissism," Freud described primary narcissism - "...the original libidinal cathexis of one's own person, part of which is subsequently given to the object, but which is mainly preserved" (p. 75) and secondary narcissism - the cathexis of the "residues" of lost objects built (through introjection) inside the ego. Transformed into narcissism, this object libido is desexualized (sublimated) and presumably provides energy for the development and functioning of the ego. In addition, Freud defined narcissism as the “libidinal cathexis of the ego,” but, as Hartmann notes ( 1950), Freud here uses the concept of I in the sense of Self. Freud also called narcissistic such an attitude towards the outside world, which is characterized by the absence of object relations. Finally, he outlined the narcissistic roots of the ego ideal and showed that self-esteem depends on the narcissistic libido.

Thus, in psychoanalytic literature, the term narcissistic is used to designate a wide range of phenomena: sexual perversion, stage of development, type of libido or its object, method of object selection, relationship with the environment, attitude, self-esteem and personality type, which can be relatively healthy, neurotic, psychotic or borderline. In addition, the idea of a separate developmental line of narcissistic libido has become a fundamental theoretical basis for the school of Self psychology, in which various personality traits are viewed as narcissistic structures that arise as a result of the transformation of narcissism. Such a broad use of this term leads to confusion, so the need for more strict use is becoming increasingly obvious.

Fromm continued Freud's idea. He paid some attention to the study of narcissism as professional capital and occupational disease politicians. Qualifying political leaders as narcissists, Fromm noted that they are characterized by a typical set of character traits that encourage them to realize narcissistic fantasies about their superhuman nature and lead to isolation from people and an increase in fear.

As a result of research into group and social groups, N. Fromm came to the conclusion that, along with some positive aspects and useful social functions, ensuring the existence of social groups and society, these forms of narcissism at the same time pose a great danger to people and the existence of humanity.
Incestuous relationships.
In this chapter, Erich Fromm also drew on Freud's ideas, namely the incestuous relationship with the mother. So what is the very concept of incest? Incest - according to Freud, this is an innate erotic attraction directed towards parents, and according to From, incest is understood broadly in terms of interpersonal relationships and takes on a sociological dimension. Attachment to parents is considered the most fundamental form of incest. We can say that the development of the organism proceeds from incest to freedom.

The simplest example of incestuous relationships is the attachment of a boy or girl to his mother. Not everyone can overcome this attachment later.

The sexual factor also plays a role here. According to Freud, he was the decisive element in the little boy's relationship to his mother. Freud connected two facts: the existence of attachment to one's mother and genital aspiration at an early age. It follows that a boy often experiences sexual attraction to his mother, and a girl to her father, while a girl’s incestuous attraction is directed towards her mother. All this is a consequence of psychological symbiosis with the mother. But even as an adult, men will need a woman who will create them comfort, coziness, provide maternal care, and if this is not the case, they may become depressed. Of course, this will not affect this person's life too much. People exposed to incestuous symbiosis lose their individuality.

Fromm denied Freud's point of view only in the position that the attraction to the mother is based on the need for security, and not on the need for sex. Incest negatively affects a person's mental abilities, makes him incapable of true love, and prevents him from achieving independence and personal integrity.

Fromm wrote about this:

“The tendency to remain attached to the mother or the person replacing her, as well as to the family, the tribe, is innate in all people. It contrasts with another no less natural tendency - to be born in order to develop and grow. If a person’s psychological development proceeds normally, then the second tendency prevails. Otherwise, its opposite wins - the tendency towards symbiotic relationships, which gives rise to inconsistency and limitation in a person.”

Freedom. Determinism. Alternative.

If we proceed from the fact that the essence of man can be defined as a contradiction inherent in human existence. Man belongs to the animal and human worlds. In the animal world, it means that a person is not sufficiently equipped with instincts by nature, so he can survive only by developing artificial life. But man, unlike animals, is aware of himself, the past and the future.

“Man sees himself involved in a terrible conflict - he is a captive of nature, but despite this, he is free in his thinking, he is part of nature and yet, so to speak, its quirk, he is neither here nor there. This self-awareness made man a stranger in the world, isolated from everyone, alone and filled with fear.”

Fromm boils it down to the fact that a person belongs to two opposing worlds.

The idea of an alternative is inherent in every person. “A person can choose between two possibilities: going backward or moving forward. He can either regress towards an archaic, pathological solution, or he can progress, developing his humanity.”

Determinism (from Latin - I determine) is the doctrine of the universal laws of the interconnections of everything that exists. According to determinism, real natural, general and psychological phenomena and processes arise, develop and are destroyed naturally, as a result of the action of certain causes, and are determined by them. To explain a phenomenon means to find its cause. A cause is a phenomenon that gives rise to another phenomenon.

Historically, the first version of determinism was the idea of fate, fate, and divine destiny. Accordingly, the problem of freedom in philosophy and theology arose in connection with the problems of will (“free will”) and choice (“freedom of choice”). On the one hand, the concept of divine destiny left no room for individual freedom, on the other hand, the thesis about man’s godlikeness, his divine nature (“in the image and likeness”) presupposed the possibility of man to influence his destiny.

Conclusion.

Erich Fromm explored the heart of man, his “soul”. It was in the soul that he found the origins of the social world order, moral quests and human potential.

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Review analysis of the work of E. FROMMA The Human Soul.

Philosophy

1. Overview of the work of E. FROMMA The human soul. Her capacity for good and evil. - M.: “Republic”, 1992)

Erich Fromm (1900-1980), German-American philosopher, psychologist and sociologist, representative of neo-Freudianism - a prominent thinker of the twentieth century. His philosophical anthropology includes psychoanalytic, existential, anthropological, Marxist ideas, as well as ancient mystical traditions and ideas of Eastern occultism.

Many philosophical movements, including existentialism, personalism, hermeneutics, sociobiology, absorbed his discoveries and spiritual acquisitions. He gave impetus to the development of humanistic thinking of our century.

Fromm believed that the main approach to the study of human personality should be to understand a person’s relationship to the world, to other people, to nature, and to himself. He substantiated the possibilities of versatile improvement of man as a living, thinking being. Fromm's legacy contains ideas about the historical conditioning of human passions and experiences, about social character as a reflection of the fusion of biological and cultural factors, about the inevitability of universal, planetary humanism.

P. S. Gurevich believed that “The Renaissance of anthropological thinking in our century was largely prepared by the works of Erich Fromm. “- and explained: “Whatever he writes about - about existence, power, state, despotism, culture, nation - he begins his own reasoning with man.”

Fromm strives to analyze complex social phenomena, revealing the initial mental needs of a person and the types of communication, types of orientation and pathological characters that grow on this basis.

In this work we will consider E. Fromm’s views on human nature as set out in his work The Soul of Man. Her capacity for good and evil.

Some believe that people are sheep, others consider them to be predatory wolves. - writes Fromm - Both sides can give arguments in favor of their point of view. Anyone who considers people to be sheep can at least point out that they easily follow the orders of other people, even to their own detriment. He may also add that people again and again follow their leaders into war, which gives them nothing but destruction, that they believe any nonsense, if it is stated with due persistence and supported by the authority of rulers - from direct threats of priests and kings to the insinuating voices of more or less secret seducers. It seems that most people, like dozing children, are easily suggestible and are ready to limply follow anyone who, by threatening or ingratiating themselves, persuades them persistently enough. A person with strong convictions who disregards the influence of the crowd is the exception rather than the rule. He is often admired by subsequent generations, but is usually a laughing stock in the eyes of his contemporaries.

However, Fromm immediately notes that if most people are sheep, then why do they lead a life that completely contradicts this? The history of mankind is written in blood. It is a story of never-ending violence, as humans have almost always subjugated their own kind through force. He rightly points out that Talaat Pasha did not kill millions of Armenians himself, and just as Hitler did not kill millions of Jews, and Stalin killed millions of his political opponents. These people were not alone, says Fromm - they had thousands of other people who killed and tortured, doing it not just with desire, but even with pleasure.

A thinker like Hobbes concluded from all this: homo homini lupus est - man is a wolf to man. And today many of us come to the conclusion that man is by nature an evil and destructive creature, that he resembles a murderer who can only be kept from his favorite pastime by fear of a stronger killer.

Fromm finds another explanation for this phenomenon, which is that a minority of wolves live side by side with the majority of sheep. Wolves want to kill, sheep want to do what they are told. Wolves force the sheep to kill and strangle, and they do this not because it gives them joy, but because they want to obey. Moreover, to induce the majority of the sheep to act like wolves, the murderers must come up with stories about the righteousness of their cause, about defending a freedom that is supposedly in danger, about avenging children bayoneted, about raped women and outraged honor.

This answer sounds convincing, but even after it, E. Fromm still has many doubts, and he poses the following question: Doesn’t it mean that there are, as it were, two human races - wolves and sheep? And further: if this is not part of their nature, then why are sheep so easily seduced by the behavior of wolves when violence is presented as their sacred duty? Maybe what was said about wolves and sheep is not true? Perhaps, in fact, a distinctive quality of a person is something wolfish and the majority simply do not show it openly? Or maybe we shouldn’t be talking about an alternative at all? Maybe a person is both a wolf and a sheep at the same time, or is he neither a wolf nor a sheep?

It is clear that the question of whether a person is a wolf or a sheep is only a formulation sharpened with the help of images of a question that is fundamental in social anthropology and ethics, namely: what is a person - is he essentially evil and vicious, or is he inherently good and capable of self-improvement?

Thus, following the chain of questions, Fromm reveals the depth of the problem raised. And the further he moves, the more and more global questions stand in his way. This forces him to analyze the problem from a historical perspective:

From the point of view of the Old Testament, a person is capable of both good and bad, he must choose between good and evil, between blessing and curse, between life and death. God never interferes with this decision. He helps by sending his messengers, the prophets, to instruct people how they can recognize evil and practice good, to warn them and oppose them. But after this has already happened, a person is left alone with his “two instincts” - the desire for good and the desire for evil; now he himself must solve this problem.

The development of Christianity proceeded differently. As the Christian faith matured, a view emerged that Adam's disobedience was a sin so grave that it destroyed the nature of Adam himself and all his descendants. Now man could no longer free himself from this depravity on his own. Only an act of God's mercy, the appearance of Christ who died for men, can destroy this depravity and save those who believe in him.

The thinkers of the Renaissance and later the Enlightenment ventured a significant step in the opposite direction. The latter argued that all evil in a person is only a consequence of external circumstances, and therefore in reality a person has no choice. They believed that it was only necessary to change the circumstances from which evil grew, then the original goodness in a person would manifest itself almost automatically. This point of view also influenced the thinking of Marx and his followers.

The moral bankruptcy of the West, which began with the First World War and led through Hitler and Stalin, through Coventry and Hiroshima to the current preparation for universal destruction, on the contrary, influenced the fact that man’s tendency to do evil began to be strongly emphasized again. Essentially, it was a healthy reaction to underestimating man's innate tendency to do evil. On the other hand, too often this served as a reason for ridicule of those who had not yet lost their faith in man, and their point of view was misunderstood, and sometimes deliberately distorted.

Fromm sees the danger that the sense of powerlessness that grips both the intellectual and the average person today may lead them to internalize a new version of depravity and original sin and use it to rationalize the view that war is inevitable as a consequence of the destructiveness of human nature . Such a point of view, he writes, often boasting of its extraordinary realism, is a delusion for two reasons. Firstly, the intensity of destructive aspirations in no way indicates their invincibility or even dominance. Second, the assumption that wars are primarily the result of psychological forces is erroneous.

However, one should not think that Fromm, who has long experience as a practicing psychoanalyst, can underestimate the destructive forces in a person. Having seen these forces in action in seriously ill patients, he, of course, knows how difficult it can be to stop or direct their energy in a constructive direction, but still he insists that wars arise by decision of political, military and economic leaders to seize lands, natural resources or to gain trade privileges, to protect against a real or perceived threat to the security of one's country, or to enhance one's personal prestige and fame. These people are no different from the average person: they are selfish and are hardly willing to give up their own advantages for the benefit of others, but at the same time they are not particularly vicious or particularly cruel. When such people, who in normal life would rather promote good than evil, come to power, command millions and have the most terrible weapons of destruction, they can cause great harm. In civilian life they would probably ruin a competitor. In our world of powerful and sovereign states (with "sovereign" meaning: not subject to any moral laws that could limit the freedom of action of a sovereign state), they can eradicate the entire human race. Based on all of the above, E. Fromm draws the following conclusion: The main danger to humanity is not a monster or a sadist, but a normal person endowed with extraordinary power.

So, having answered the first question: is a person a wolf or a sheep, Fromm understands the following topic: what underlies a person’s human value system and guides his actions:

I would like to dwell on three phenomena that, in my opinion, underlie the most harmful and dangerous form of human orientation: love for the dead, inveterate narcissism and symbiotic-incestuous attraction. Taken together, they form a “decay syndrome” that encourages a person to destroy for the sake of destruction and to hate for the sake of hating. I would also like to discuss the "growth syndrome", which consists of love for living things, love for people and love for independence. Only a few people develop fully one of these two syndromes. However, there is no doubt that each person moves in a certain direction chosen by him: towards the living or the dead, towards good or evil.

As a result of his theoretical research, Fromm comes to the following conclusions:

1. Evil is a specific human phenomenon. In evil, a person loses himself in a tragic attempt to free himself from the burden of his human existence.

2. The degree of evil corresponds to the degree of regression. The greatest evil is those impulses that are directed against life: love for the dead; incestuous-symbiotic aspirations to return to the mother's womb, to the earth, to the inorganic; narcissistic self-sacrifice, which makes a person an enemy of life precisely because he cannot leave the prison of his own “I” (see diagram).

3. Evil also exists to a lesser extent, which corresponds to lesser regression. In this case, we are talking about a lack of love, reason, lack of interest and lack of courage.

4. Man is inclined to go back and forth, in other words, he is inclined to good and evil. When both inclinations are still in balance, he is free to choose, assuming that he can understand his situation and is capable of serious effort. Then he can choose between alternatives determined, for his part, by the general situation in which he finds himself. However, if his heart has hardened to such an extent that his inclinations are no longer balanced, he is no longer free to choose. In a chain of events that leads to the loss of freedom, the last decision usually does not give the person the opportunity to freely choose; at the first decision, there is still the possibility that he will freely choose the path to good, assuming that he is aware of the significance of this first decision (see diagram).

Growth syndrome

progressions:

biophilia

(love of life)

love for neighbor, stranger, nature

independence, freedom

regressions:

necrophilia

(love of inanimate things, technocratic character)

narcissism

(self love)

infantilism, symbiotic maternal bond

Decay syndrome

5. Up to the point where he no longer has freedom of choice, a person is responsible for his actions. But responsibility is only an ethical postulate, and often we are talking only about the rationalization of the desire of authoritarian authorities to be able to punish a person. It is precisely because evil is something generally human, because it represents the potential for regression and the loss of our humanity, that it lives in each of us. The more we realize this, the less able we are to become judges over other people.

6. We are all determined by the fact that we were born as humans and therefore always face the task of making decisions. Along with our goals, we must choose our means. We cannot rely on anyone to free us, but we must constantly be aware of the fact that wrong decisions rob us of the opportunity to free ourselves.

We must actually achieve self-awareness in order to be able to choose good, but this self-awareness will not help us if we have lost the ability to be deeply moved by the plight of another human being, by a friendly glance, by the singing of birds and by the fresh green of the grass. If a person is indifferent to life, then there is no longer any hope that he will choose good. His heart truly became so hardened that his “life” was over. If this happened to the entire human race or its most powerful members, it could lead to the extinction of human life at its most promising moment.

Subject description: “Philosophy”

The subject of philosophy has changed historically: the subject of philosophical thinking among ancient philosophers was nature and space; in the Middle Ages in the spotlight philosophical reflections stands god - theo - theocentrism. The focus of Russian philosophers of the last century was on man - anthopocentrism. Currently, there are philosophical directions that differ in their subject matter and research method.

Basic problems of philosophy.

1) The problem of BEING (existence), this problem has two aspects: a) what exists; b) how to prove the existence of one or another element of existence. The first philosophers (ancient Greeks) identified existence with the material, indestructible, perfect cosmos, nature - the variety of objects and phenomena of the world. In the Middle Ages, the true divine being is contrasted with the untrue created being. In modern times (17th century), being is limited to nature, the world of natural bodies.

2) The problem of the first principle, the fundamental principle of substance. For centuries, thinkers have tried to find what things come from and what they become when they decay. Thus, the first philosophers understood the first principle as something concrete, sensory.

3) Fundamental properties of being. These include the movements of space and time.

4) The subject of philosophical reflection was the developmental connections between objects of the material world - dialectics.

5) Epistemology - theory of knowledge. The question of the sources of our knowledge, the question of knowledge of the world, the question of truth... 6) The subject of philosophical reflection is society and man.

The fundamental problem of philosophy is the problem of the relationship between the material and the spiritual, objective or subjective. In the early stages, philosophers became convinced that there was a phenomenon of a spiritual nature. The problem of the material and the spiritual was solved in two directly opposite ways: one believed that the material was primary, and the spiritual was secondary, while others believed that it was the other way around.

Materialism is a philosophical system (concept, doctrine) that recognizes the material principle as primary; secondary ideal. Major representatives of materialism ancient Greece There were Thales, Anaximenes, Heraclitus.

Idealism is a philosophical system that takes the ideal principle as primary; secondary (derivative) - material; a certain spirit creates the world around us. The largest idealists were: Pythagoras, Plato. In addition to these two as the main philosophical directions, there are dualistic schools (dua - two), which accept the material and the ideal as two principles. The largest representative was Dekar.

Materialism and idealism as philosophical trends are heterogeneous; there are various forms of both materialism and idealism.

Forms of materialist teachings: 1) Naive, spontaneous materialism of the ancient Greeks. The ancient Greeks expressed a number of ideas without relying on any single system (scientific, humanitarian knowledge); their views were naive.

2) Mechanistic, metaphysical materialism (17-18 centuries). In the 17th century, Newton's laws of mechanics were discovered. Thinkers began to use these laws of mechanics to explain all phenomena of the world, phenomena in life, etc. Thus, a certain worldview emerged - a mechanistic one, which had both strengths and weaknesses.

3) Metaphysical - metaphysics; by metaphysics Aristotle understood that sphere of human knowledge that lies behind physics. The concept of metaphysics is understood as a method of cognition, according to which all natural phenomena are considered separately from each other (outside of movement). This method developed in the 17th century in natural science.

4) Dialectical (dialectics), understand the philosophical concept that studies the interconnections of world phenomena, the inconsistency of existence, the development of the material world.

Forms of idealism: subjective and objective.

1) Subjective idealism recognizes my consciousness, the consciousness of a specific person, as the initial principle.

The largest representative was Bishop Berkeley. Things in the surrounding world represent a complex of my sensations.

Logic of reasoning: the world is given in sensations.

2) Objective idealism is a philosophical concept that recognizes “nobody’s consciousness,” the spirit in general, as primary, and all things in the surrounding world are produced from this spirit. The largest representative was Plato.

According to the teaching that the world of things is a product of the activity of an absolute idea, a certain spiritual substance, it is a symbol of all human knowledge. The absolute idea is constantly evolving.

Literature

Erich Fromm. For the love of life. – M.: AST, 2000. – 400 p.

Soul of man

Erich Fromm

Erich Fromm is the greatest thinker of the 20th century, one of the great cohort of “philosophers from psychology” and the spiritual leader of the Frankfurt School of Sociology.

The works of Erich Fromm are always relevant, because the main theme of his research was the disclosure of human essence as the realization of a productive, life-creative principle.

Erich Fromm

Soul of man

THE HEART OF MAN

Reprinted with permission from The Estate of Erich Fromm and of Annis Fromm and Liepman AG, Literary Agency.

This book develops ideas that I have already addressed in my more early works. In Flight from Freedom I explored the problem of freedom in relation to sadism, masochism and destructiveness; Meanwhile, clinical practice and theoretical reflections have led me, I believe, to a deeper understanding of freedom, as well as various types of aggressiveness and destructiveness. Now I can distinguish various forms of aggressiveness, which directly or indirectly serve life, from the malignant form of destructiveness - necrophilia, or genuine love for the dead, which is the opposite of biophilia - love for life and the living. In Man for Himself I discussed the problem of ethical standards resting on our knowledge of human nature rather than on revelation or man-made laws and traditions. Here I continue my research in this direction, paying special attention to the study of the essence of evil and the problem of choosing between good and evil. In a sense, this book, the main theme of which is man’s ability to destroy, his narcissism and incestuous desire, is the opposite of my work “The Art of Loving,” which was about man’s capacity for love. Although the discussion of non-love occupies a large part of this work, it nevertheless talks about love, but in a new, broader sense - about the love of life. I tried to show that love for the living, combined with independence and overcoming narcissism, forms a “growth syndrome”, the opposite of the “decay syndrome” that arises from love for the dead, from incestuous symbiosis and malignant narcissism.

Not only my experience as a clinician, but also social and political development recent years prompted me to research decay syndrome. The question becomes more and more pressing as to why, despite all the good will and awareness of the consequences of a nuclear war, attempts to prevent it are so insignificant compared to the magnitude of the danger and the likelihood of its occurrence. The atomic arms race is in full swing and the Cold War continues. It was anxiety that prompted me to explore the phenomenon of indifference towards life in an increasingly mechanized industrial world. In this world, man has become a thing, and - as a consequence of this - he confronts life with fear and indifference, if not hatred. The current penchant for violence, manifested in youth crime and political assassinations, challenges us to take the first step towards change. The question arises whether we are moving towards a new barbarism, even if it does not come to atomic war, or whether a renaissance of our humanistic tradition is possible.

Along with discussing this problem in this book, I would like to clarify how my psychoanalytic ideas relate to Freud's theory. I never accepted being classified as a member of the new “school” of psychoanalysis, whether it was called the “cultural school” or “neo-Freudianism.” I am convinced that these schools produced valuable results, but some of them overshadowed many of Freud's most important discoveries. I'm definitely not an "orthodox Freudian." The fact is that any theory that does not change for 60 years is, precisely for this reason, no longer the original theory of its creator; it is rather a petrified repetition of the former and as such actually turns into an installation. Freud carried out his fundamental discoveries in a very specific philosophical system, the system of mechanistic materialism, the followers of which were the majority of natural scientists at the beginning of our century. I believe that it is necessary to further develop Freud's ideas in another philosophical system, namely the system of dialectical humanism. In this book I tried to show that Freud’s greatest discoveries - the Oedipus complex, narcissism, the death instinct - were blocked by his ideological principles, and if these discoveries are freed from the old system and transferred to the new, they will become more convincing and significant. I think that the system of humanism, with its paradoxical mixture of merciless criticism, uncompromising realism and rational faith, will provide an opportunity for further fruitful development of the edifice whose foundation was laid by Freud.

And one more note. The thoughts expressed in this book are based on my clinical work as a psychoanalyst (and to a certain extent on my experience of participation in social processes). At the same time, it makes little use of documentary materials, which I would like to turn to in a larger work devoted to the theory and practice of humanistic psychoanalysis.

Finally, I would like to thank Paul Edwards for his critical comments on the chapter on freedom, determinism and alternativeness.

I want to emphasize that my point of view on psychoanalysis is in no way a desire to replace Freud’s theory with the so-called “existential analysis”. This ersatz of Freud's theory is often very superficial; concepts borrowed from Heidegger or Sartre (or Husserl) are used without their connection to carefully considered clinical facts. This applies both to the famous “existential psychoanalysts” and to the psychological ideas of Sartre, which, although brilliantly formulated, are still superficial and do not have a solid clinical foundation. Sartre's existentialism, like Heidegger's, is not a new beginning, but an end. Both speak of the despair that befell Western man after the catastrophe of two world wars and the regimes of Hitler and Stalin. But they are talking not only about the expression of despair, but also about the manifestation of extreme bourgeois egoism and solipsism. In Heidegger, who sympathized with Nazism, this is quite understandable. Much more puzzling is Sartre, who claims to be a Marxist and a philosopher of the future, while remaining a representative of the spirit of the lawless and selfish society that he criticizes and wants to change. As for the point of view according to which life has a meaning that is not given or guaranteed by any of the gods, it is represented in many systems, among religions - primarily in Buddhism.

Sartre and his supporters lose the most important achievement of theistic and non-theistic religions and the humanistic tradition when they argue that there are no objective values that matter to all people, and that there is a concept of freedom that arises from selfish arbitrariness.

I. Is man a wolf or a sheep?

Some believe that people are sheep, others consider them to be predatory wolves. Both sides can make a case for

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your point of view. Anyone who considers people to be sheep can at least point out that they easily follow the orders of other people, even to their own detriment. He may also add that people follow their leaders again and again into war, which gives them nothing but destruction, that they believe any nonsense, if it is stated with due persistence and supported by the authority of rulers - from direct threats of priests and kings to the insinuating voices of more or less secret seducers. It seems that most people, like dozing children, are easily suggestible and are ready to limply follow anyone who, by threatening or ingratiating themselves, persuades them persistently enough. A person with strong convictions who disregards the influence of the crowd is the exception rather than the rule. He is often admired by subsequent generations, but is usually a laughing stock in the eyes of his contemporaries.

The Grand Inquisitors and dictators based their systems of power precisely on the assertion that people are sheep. It was precisely the view that people are sheep and therefore need leaders to make decisions for them that often gave the leaders themselves the firm conviction that they were fulfilling a completely moral, although sometimes very tragic, duty: they took leadership and relieved others of the burden of responsibility and freedom by giving people what they wanted.

However, if most people are sheep, then why do they lead lives that completely contradict this? The history of mankind is written in blood. It is a story of never-ending violence, as humans have almost always subjugated their own kind through force. Did Talaat Pasha himself kill millions of Armenians? Did Hitler alone kill millions of Jews? Did Stalin alone kill millions of his political opponents? No. These people were not alone, they had thousands of other people who killed and tortured, doing it not just with desire, but even with pleasure. Are we not confronted everywhere with the inhumanity of man - in the case of ruthless warfare, in the case of murder and violence, in the case of the shameless exploitation of the weak by the stronger? And how often the groans of a tortured and suffering creature meet deaf ears and hardened hearts! A thinker like Hobbes concluded from all this: homo homini lupus est (man is a wolf to man). And today many of us come to the conclusion that man is by nature an evil and destructive creature, that he resembles a murderer who can only be kept from his favorite pastime by fear of a stronger killer.

Yet the arguments on both sides are not convincing. Even though we met some potential or obvious murderers and sadists who, in their shamelessness, could compete with Stalin or Hitler, these were still exceptions, not the rules. Are we really supposed to believe that we ourselves and most ordinary people are just wolves in sheep's clothing, that our “true nature” supposedly will appear only after we throw away the restraining factors that have hitherto prevented us from becoming like wild beasts? Although this is difficult to dispute, this line of thought cannot be considered completely convincing. There are opportunities for cruelty and sadism in everyday life, and they can often be carried out without fear of retribution. Nevertheless, many do not agree to this and, on the contrary, react with disgust when faced with such phenomena.

Perhaps there is another, better explanation for this surprising contradiction? Perhaps the simple answer is that a minority of wolves live side by side with a majority of sheep? Wolves want to kill, sheep want to do what they are told. Wolves force the sheep to kill and strangle, and they do this not because it gives them joy, but because they want to obey. Moreover, to induce the majority of the sheep to act like wolves, the murderers must come up with stories about the righteousness of their cause, about defending a freedom that is supposedly in danger, about avenging children bayoneted, about raped women and outraged honor. This answer sounds convincing, but even after it many doubts remain. Doesn't it mean that there are, as it were, two human races - wolves and sheep? Moreover, the question arises: if it is not in their nature, then why are sheep so easily seduced by the behavior of wolves when violence is presented as their sacred duty? Maybe what was said about wolves and sheep is not true? Perhaps, in fact, a distinctive quality of a person is something wolfish and the majority simply do not show it openly? Or maybe we shouldn’t be talking about an alternative at all? Maybe a person is both a wolf and a sheep at the same time, or is he neither a wolf nor a sheep?

Today, when nations determine the possibility of using the most dangerous destructive weapons against their “enemies” and, apparently, do not even fear their own death in the course of mass destruction, the answer to these questions is of decisive importance. If we are convinced that man is naturally destructive, that the need to use violence is deeply rooted in his being, then our resistance to ever-increasing cruelty may weaken. Why should we resist wolves if we are all wolves to one degree or another? The question whether man is a wolf or a sheep is only a pointed formulation of a question which, in the broadest and most general sense, belongs to the fundamental problems of theological and philosophical thinking of the Western world, namely: is man essentially evil and vicious or is he good? inherently and capable of self-improvement? The Old Testament does not believe that man is fundamentally evil. Disobedience to God on the part of Adam and Eve is not considered a sin. Nowhere do we find any indication that this disobedience ruined the man. On the contrary, this disobedience is a prerequisite for the fact that a person has become aware of himself, that he has become capable of solving his own affairs. Thus, this first act of disobedience is ultimately man's first step towards freedom. It even seems that this disobedience was part of God's plan. According to the prophets, it was precisely because man was expelled from paradise that he was able to shape his own history, strengthen his human powers and, as a fully developed individual, achieve harmony with other people and nature. This harmony took the place of the previous one, in which man was not yet an individual. The messianic thought of the prophets clearly proceeds from the fact that man is fundamentally blameless and can be saved apart from a special act of God's mercy.

Of course, this does not yet say that the capacity for good necessarily wins. If a person does evil, then he himself becomes worse. For example, Pharaoh's heart became “hardened” because he constantly did evil. It became so hardened that at a certain point it became completely impossible for him to start all over again and repent of what he had done. The Old Testament contains no less examples of atrocities than examples of righteous deeds, but it never makes an exception for such exalted images as King David. From the point of view of the Old

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The covenant man is capable of both good and bad, he must choose between good and evil, between blessing and curse, between life and death. God never interferes with this decision. He helps by sending his messengers, the prophets, to instruct people how they can recognize evil and practice good, to warn them and oppose them. But after this has already happened, a person is left alone with his “two instincts” - the desire for good and the desire for evil; now he himself must solve this problem.

Of course, the dogma of original sin did not remain undisputed within the church itself. Pelagius attacked her, but he failed to prevail. During the Renaissance, humanists tried to soften this dogma within the church, although they did not directly fight or challenge it, as many heretics did. True, Luther was more firmly convinced of the innate meanness and depravity of man, while the thinkers of the Renaissance and later the Enlightenment ventured a noticeable step in the opposite direction. The latter argued that all evil in a person is only a consequence of external circumstances, and therefore in reality a person has no choice. They believed that it was only necessary to change the circumstances from which evil grew, then the original goodness in a person would manifest itself almost automatically. This point of view also influenced the thinking of Marx and his followers. Belief in the fundamental goodness of man arose from a new self-awareness acquired through economic and political progress unheard of since the Renaissance. The moral bankruptcy of the West, which began with the First World War and led, through Hitler and Stalin, through Coventry and Hiroshima, to the current preparation for universal destruction, on the contrary, influenced the fact that man's propensity for evil began to be strongly emphasized again. Essentially, it was a healthy reaction to underestimating man's innate tendency to do evil. On the other hand, too often this served as a reason for ridicule of those who had not yet lost their faith in man, and their point of view was misunderstood, and sometimes deliberately distorted.

I have often been unfairly reproached for underestimating the evil potentially inherent in man. I would like to emphasize that I am far from such sentimental optimism. Anyone who has long experience as a practicing psychoanalyst can hardly be inclined to underestimate the destructive forces in man. He sees these forces at work in seriously ill patients and knows how difficult it can be to stop or direct their energy in a constructive direction. Likewise, those who have experienced the sudden explosion of evil and destructive rage since the outbreak of the First World War will hardly fail to notice the strength and intensity of human destructiveness. There is, however, a danger that the sense of powerlessness that engulfs both the intellectual and the average person today may lead them to internalize a new version of depravity and original sin and use it to rationalize the view that war is inevitable as a consequence of the destructiveness of human nature .

This point of view, often boasting of its extraordinary realism, is a misconception for two reasons. Firstly, the intensity of destructive aspirations in no way indicates their invincibility or even dominance. Second, the assumption that wars are primarily the result of psychological forces is erroneous. When explaining social and political problems, there is no need to dwell in detail on the false premise of “psychologism.” Wars arise at the decision of political, military and economic leaders to seize land, natural resources or to gain trade privileges, to protect against a real or perceived threat to the security of their country, or to increase their personal prestige and gain glory. These people are no different from the average person: they are selfish and are hardly willing to give up their own advantages for the benefit of others, but at the same time they are not particularly vicious or particularly cruel. When such people, who in normal life would rather promote good than evil, come to power, command millions and have the most terrible weapons of destruction, they can cause great harm. In civilian life they would probably ruin a competitor. In our world of powerful and sovereign states (with "sovereign" meaning: not subject to any moral laws that could limit the freedom of action of a sovereign state), they can eradicate the entire human race. The main danger to humanity is not a monster or a sadist, but a normal person endowed with extraordinary power. However, in order for millions of people to put their lives on the line and become killers, they must be instilled with feelings such as hatred, resentment, destructiveness and fear. Along with weapons, these feelings are an indispensable condition for waging war, but they are not its cause, just as guns and bombs in themselves are not the cause of wars. Many believe that nuclear war in this sense differs from traditional war. Someone who, at the touch of a button, launches atomic bombs, each capable of killing hundreds of thousands of people, hardly experiences the same feelings as a soldier who kills with a bayonet or machine gun. But even if the launch of an atomic missile in the consciousness of the person in question is experienced only as an obedient execution of an order, the question still remains: whether destructive impulses or, at least, deep indifference towards life, must not be contained in the deeper layers of his personality in order to Is such an action even possible?

II. Various forms of violence

Although this book deals primarily with malignant forms of destructiveness, I would like to first look at some other forms of violence. I am not going to discuss this issue in detail, but I believe that

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Consideration of less severe manifestations of violence may contribute to a better understanding of severe pathological and malignant forms of destructiveness. The distinction between types of violence is based on the difference between the corresponding unconscious motivations, for only when the unconscious dynamics of behavior are clear to us can we also understand the behavior itself, its roots, direction and the energy with which it is charged.

The most normal and least pathological form of violence is gaming violence. We find it where it is used for the purpose of demonstrating one's dexterity and not for the purpose of destruction, where it is not motivated by hatred or destructiveness. Numerous examples of playful violence can be cited, from the war games of primitive tribes to the art of sword fighting in Zen Buddhism. All of these war games are not about killing the enemy; even if he dies in the process, it is as if it were his mistake, since he “stood in the wrong place.” Of course, when we assert that the will to destruction cannot take place during play violence, we mean only the ideal type of such games. In practice, unconscious aggression and destructiveness can often be found behind the clearly established rules of the game. But even in this case, the main motivation is that the person demonstrates his dexterity, and not that he wants to destroy something.

Reactive violence is of much greater practical importance. By it I mean violence that occurs in defense of life, freedom, dignity, as well as one’s own or someone else’s property. It is rooted in fear and is probably why it is the most common form of violence; this fear can be real or imagined, conscious or unconscious. This type of violence is in the service of life, not death; its goal is preservation, not destruction. It arises not only from irrational passion, but to a certain extent also from rational calculation, so that the goal and the means are more or less related to each other. Based on higher spiritual considerations, it can be argued that killing, even in self-defense, cannot be justified from a moral point of view. But most who share this belief will agree that the use of force in defense of life is still inherently something different from the use of violence that serves destruction for its own sake.

Very often the feeling of danger and the reactive violence that follows from it are based not on real data, but on the manipulations of thinking; political and religious leaders convince their followers that they are under threat from some enemy, thus arousing a subjective feeling of reactive hostility. This is the basis of the distinction made by capitalist and communist governments, as well as the Roman Catholic Church, between just and unjust wars, which is highly dubious since usually each of the warring parties is able to present its position as a defense against attack. There was hardly any aggressive war that could not be represented as a defensive war. The question of who could rightfully say about himself that he defended himself is usually decided by the victors - and only occasionally, and much later, by more objective historians. The tendency to represent any war as a defensive one shows the following: First, the majority of people, at least in many civilized countries, will not allow themselves to be induced to kill and die unless they are first convinced that they are doing it in defense of their life and freedom. ; secondly, it shows how easy it is to convince millions of people that they are allegedly in danger of attack and therefore must defend themselves. This susceptibility to the influence of others rests primarily on the lack of independent thinking and feeling, as well as on the emotional dependence of the vast majority of people on their political leaders. If this dependence exists, then almost all arguments that are expressed in a sufficiently demanding and convincing form are taken at face value. The psychological consequences are, of course, the same, whether we are talking about imaginary or real danger. People feel threatened and are willing to kill and destroy to protect themselves. We find a similar mechanism in paranoid persecution mania, only here we are not talking about a group, but about an individual. However, in both cases, the individual subjectively feels a threat to himself and reacts to it aggressively. Another type of reactive violence occurs through frustration. Aggressive behavior is observed in animals, children and adults when their desire or need remains unsatisfied.

Such aggressive behavior represents an attempt, often in vain, to acquire by force what one has been deprived of. At the same time, undoubtedly, we are talking about aggression in the service of life, but not for the sake of destruction. Since the frustration of needs and desires has been and continues to be commonplace in most societies, it should not be surprising that violence and aggression constantly arise and manifest themselves.

Aggression arising from frustration is akin to hostility arising from envy and jealousy. Both jealousy and envy are specific types of frustration. They go back to the fact that B has something that A would like to have, or B is loved by a certain person whose love A seeks. A awakens hatred and hostility towards B, who gets what he would like, but cannot have A. Envy and jealousy are frustrations that are further aggravated by the fact that A not only does not get what he wants, but someone else takes advantage of it instead of him. The story of Cain killing his brother and the story of Joseph and his brothers are classic examples of jealousy and envy. The psychoanalytic literature contains abundant clinical information about these phenomena.

The next type, which, although related to reactive violence, is still one step closer to pathological violence, is revenge violence. Reactive violence is about protecting ourselves from the threat of harm, and therefore this type of biological function serves survival. In retaliatory violence, on the other hand, the damage has already been done, so the use of force is no longer a defensive function. It has the irrational function of magically making something that actually happened happen again as if it had not happened. We find vindictive violence in individuals as well as in primitive and civilized groups. If we analyze

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the irrational nature of this type of violence, then we can move one step further. The motive for revenge is inversely proportional to the strength and productivity of the group or individual. The weakling and the crippled have no other way to restore their destroyed self-respect than to take revenge in accordance with the lex talionis (an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth). On the contrary, a productive person has no or almost no need for this. Even if he is discriminated against, insulted or wounded, it is precisely due to the productivity of his life that he forgets what was done to him in the past. His ability to create is stronger than his need for revenge. The correctness of this analysis is easily confirmed by empirical data both in relation to the individual and in the public sphere. Psychoanalytic material shows that a mature, productive person is less motivated by a desire for revenge than a neurotic person who finds it difficult to lead a full, independent life and who is often inclined to risk his entire existence for the sake of revenge. In severe mental illness, revenge becomes the dominant goal of life, since without revenge, not only self-respect, self-esteem, but also the experience of identity is in danger of destruction. It should also be noted that in backward groups (economically, culturally or emotionally) the feeling of revenge (for example, for national defeat) seems to be strongest. Thus, the petty bourgeoisie, which has the worst of all in industrial societies, is in many countries the main breeding ground for revenge, racist and nationalist feelings. With "projective questioning" a correlation can be easily established between the intensity of feelings of revenge and economic and cultural impoverishment. It is somewhat more difficult to correctly understand revenge in primitive societies. In many of them we find intense and even institutionalized feelings and patterns of revenge, and the whole group feels obliged to take revenge if one of the members is harmed.

Two factors may play a decisive role here. The first corresponds quite closely to what was mentioned above - the atmosphere of mental poverty that prevails in the primitive group, which makes revenge a necessary means of compensating for the loss. The second factor is narcissism; a phenomenon that I will discuss in detail in chapter four. Here I would like to limit myself to the following statement: in a primitive group such intense narcissism prevails that any discrediting of the self-esteem of the group members has an extremely harmful effect on them and inevitably causes strong hostility.

Closely related to vengeful violence is the following type of destructiveness, which can be explained by a shock to faith, which often occurs in a child’s life. What is meant by a “shock of faith”?

A child begins his life believing in love, goodness and justice. Infant trusts the mother's breast; he relies on his mother to cover him when he is cold and to care for him when he is sick. This trust of the child may relate to the father, mother, grandfather, grandmother or some other close person; it can also be expressed as faith in God. For many children, this faith is shaken in early childhood. A child hears his father lying about an important matter; he experiences his cowardly fear of his mother, and it costs the father nothing to let the child down in order to calm her down; he observes his parents during sexual intercourse, while the father perhaps appears to him as a brute animal; he is unhappy and frightened, but neither his mother nor his father, who are supposedly so concerned about his well-being, notice this, they do not listen to him at all when he talks about it. So again and again there is a shock to this initial faith in love, in the truthfulness and justice of the parents. In children raised in a religious environment, this loss of faith sometimes relates directly to God. A child experiences the death of a loved bird, friend, or sister, and his faith in the goodness and justice of God may be shaken. However, this hardly matters to the one whose authority is affected, whether it is a question of faith in man or in God. At the same time, faith in life, in the ability to trust life, is constantly destroyed. Of course, every child goes through a series of disappointments; however, it is the severity and bitterness of one particular disappointment that is decisive. This first, main experience that destroys faith often takes place in early childhood: at the age of four, five or six years, or even much earlier - at an age at which later one can hardly remember oneself.

Often the final destruction of faith occurs much later in life, when a person has been deceived by a friend, lover, teacher, religious or political leader in whom he believed. In this case, only rarely is it a single case; it is rather a series of smaller experiences which, taken together, destroy a person's faith.

Reactions to such experiences vary. One may react in such a way that he loses his dependence on the person who disappointed him, he thereby becomes more independent and is therefore able to look for new friends, teachers and lovers in whom he trusts and in whom he believes. This is the most desirable response to past disappointments. In many other cases, they lead to the person becoming a skeptic, hoping for a miracle that will restore his faith, he tests people and, having become disillusioned with them, tests other people again, or, in order to regain his faith, he rushes into arms powerful authority (church, political party or leader). Often he overcomes his despair and loss of faith in life through a frantic pursuit of worldly values - money, power or prestige.

In the context of violence, there is another important reaction worth mentioning. A deeply disappointed person who feels deceived may begin to hate life. If you can’t rely on anything or anyone, if a person’s faith in goodness and justice turns out to be only a stupid illusion, if the devil rules and not God, then life is truly worthy of hatred, and the pain of subsequent disappointments becomes further unbearable. It is in this case that you want to prove that life is evil, people are evil and you yourself are evil. Disappointment in faith and love of life makes a person cynical and destructive. We are thus talking about the destructiveness of despair; disappointment in life leads to hatred of life.

In my clinical work I have often encountered such profound experiences of loss of faith; they often form a characteristic leitmotif in a person's life. The same applies in the public sphere when a leader who is trusted turns out to be bad or incapable. Those who do not respond to this with increased independence often fall into cynicism and

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destructiveness.

All of these forms of violence, in one way or another, are still in the service of life (either magically, or at least as a consequence of damage suffered or disappointment with life), while compensatory violence, which will now be discussed, is pathological to a greater extent, although and not like necrophilia, which we will discuss in the third chapter.

By compensatory violence I mean violence that serves an impotent person as a substitute for productive activity. To clarify what I mean by “impotence,” I must make a few remarks. Although a person is an object of natural and social forces ruling over him, nevertheless, he cannot be considered only as an object of corresponding circumstances. He has the will, ability and freedom to transform and change the world, albeit within certain limits. What is decisive in this case is not the strength of his will and the extent of freedom (on the problem of freedom, see below), but the fact that a person cannot stand absolute passivity. This causes him to transform and change the world, and not only to become transformed and changed. This human need finds its expression already in the cave paintings of the earliest period, in all art, in all work, and also in sexuality. All these activities arise from man's ability to direct his will towards a specific goal and work until the goal is achieved. His ability to use his powers in this way is potency. (Sexual potency is only a special form of this potency.) If a person, due to weakness, fear, incompetence or something like that, is unable to act, if he is impotent, then he suffers. This suffering from impotence leads to the destruction of the inner balance, and the person cannot accept a state of complete helplessness without trying to restore his ability to act. Can he do this and how? One possibility is to subordinate oneself to some individual or group that holds power and identify with it. Through such symbolic participation in the life of another, a person acquires the illusion of independent action, while in fact he only subordinates himself to those who act and becomes part of them. Another possibility - and the one that interests us most in connection with our research - is when a person uses his ability to destroy.

Creating life means transcending one's status as a created being, which, like lots from a chalice, is cast into life. The destruction of life also means transcending it and getting rid of the unbearable suffering of complete passivity. The creation of life requires certain properties that are absent in an impotent person. The destruction of life requires only one thing: the use of violence. The impotent need only possess a revolver, a knife or physical strength, and he can transcend life, destroying it in others or in himself. In this way he takes revenge on life for depriving him.

Compensatory violence is nothing more than violence rooted in impotence and compensating for it. A person who cannot create wants to destroy. Because he creates something or destroys something, he transcends his role only as a creation. Camus expressed this idea very accurately when he made his Caligula say: “I live, I kill, I use the intoxicating power of the destroyer, in comparison with which the power of the creator is just child’s play.” This is the violence of a cripple, the violence of a person from whom life has taken away the ability to positively express his specific human powers. They must destroy precisely because they are human, for to be human means to transcend one’s creatureliness.

Closely related to compensatory violence is the urge to bring a living being, be it animal or human, completely and absolutely under one's control. This impulse is the essence of sadism. As I showed in my book Flight from Freedom, the desire to cause pain to another is not essential to sadism. All of its various forms that we can observe reveal an essential impulse to completely subject the other person to one's power, to make him a helpless object of one's own will, to become his god and to be able to do with him as one pleases. To humiliate him, to enslave him are only means to achieve this goal, and the most radical goal is to make him suffer, for there is no greater power over a person than to force him to endure suffering and so that he cannot defend himself against it. The joy of complete domination over another person (or another living creature), in fact, is the essence of the sadistic impulse. This idea can be expressed differently: the goal of sadism is to make a person a thing, turning the living into something inanimate, since the living, through complete and absolute submission, loses the essential property of life - freedom.

Only by experiencing the intensity and frequency of destructive sadistic violence of an individual or the masses can one understand that compensatory violence is not something superficial, a consequence of negative influences, bad habits or the like. It is a force in man that is as intense and powerful as his will to live. It is so omnipotent precisely because it is life’s protest against mutilation; man has the potential for destructive and sadistic violence because he is a person and not a thing and because he must try to destroy life if he cannot create it. The Roman Colosseum, in which thousands of impotent people took great pleasure in watching wild animals fight and people killing each other, is a great monument to sadism.

The following follows from this consideration. Compensatory violence is the result of an unlived, crippled life, and its inevitable result. It is suppressed through fear and punishment or directed in a different direction through various kinds of performances and entertainment. However, as a potential it continues to exist and becomes evident when the forces suppressing it weaken. The only cure for this is an increase in creative potential, the development of a person’s ability to use his powers productively. Only this can help a person cease to be a cripple, a sadist and a destroyer, and only relationships that contribute to a person's acquisition of interest in life can lead to the disappearance of impulses because of which the history of mankind has been so shameful up to the present day. Compensatory violence, unlike reactive violence, is not in the service of life; to a much greater extent, it is a pathological substitute for life; it indicates the mutilation and emptiness of life. However, it is precisely through its denial of life that it demonstrates the human need to be alive and not to be crippled.

We must now move on to discuss the last type of violence - archaic bloodlust. Moreover, we are not talking about the violence of a psychopath, but about the thirst for blood of a person who is completely in the power of his

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connections with nature. He kills out of passion in order to transcend life in this way, because he is afraid to go forward and become fully human (a choice that we will talk about later). For man attempting to find the answer to life by degrading to a pre-individual state of his existence in which he becomes an animal and thus frees himself from the burden of reason, blood becomes the essence of life. Shedding blood means feeling alive, strong, unique, superior to everyone else. Murder turns into a great rapture, a great self-affirmation on an extremely archaic basis. On the contrary, being killed is the only logical alternative to murder. In the archaic sense, the balance of life is achieved by the fact that a person kills as much as possible and is ready to be killed himself, after he has satisfied his thirst for blood throughout his life. Murder in this sense is inherently something other than love for the dead. This is the affirmation and transcendence of life on the basis of the deepest regression. In an individual we can sometimes observe this thirst for blood in fantasies and dreams, during severe mental illness or during the act of murder. We can also observe it in a certain minority of people during the Patriotic or Civil War, when normal social restrictions disappear. We see it in archaic societies where killing (or being killed) is the dominant polarity of life. We observe it in the example of such phenomena as human sacrifice among the Aztecs, blood feud in the regions of Montenegro and Corsica. This also includes the role that blood plays in the Old Testament when God was sacrificed. One of the most interesting descriptions The joy of murder is contained in Gustave Flaubert’s work “The Legend of Saint Julian the Stranger.” Flaubert describes in it the life of a man who was prophesied at birth that he would become a great conqueror and a great saint; he grew up like an ordinary child until one day he was introduced to the exciting experience of murder. During Mass, he repeatedly observed a small mouse running out of a hole in the wall. Julian was very annoyed about this and decided to get rid of her. “He closed the door, scattered some bread crumbs on the steps of the altar and stood in front of the mouse hole with a stick in his hand. He had to wait quite a long time before first the pink muzzle appeared, and then the whole mouse. He gave her a light blow and stood, stunned, in front of the small body, which no longer moved. A drop of blood stained the stone floor. He hastily wiped it off with his sleeve, threw the mouse out into the street and told no one about it.” When he later strangled the bird, “its dying convulsions caused his heart to beat violently and filled his soul with wild, stormy joy.” After he experienced the ecstasy of shedding blood, he was simply obsessed with the passion of killing animals. He would come home in the middle of the night, “covered in blood and dirt and smelling like wild animals. He became like them." He almost succeeded in turning into an animal, but since he was a man, he did not succeed completely. The voice told Julian that one day he would kill his father and mother. Frightened, he fled from his parents' castle, stopped killing animals and instead became a famous and feared leader of the army. As a reward for one particularly major victory, he received the hand of an unusually beautiful and worthy girl - the emperor's daughter. He left the military profession, settled with her in a magnificent palace, and they could have led a life full of bliss, but he felt boredom and complete disgust. He began to hunt again, but an unknown force deflected his arrows from the target. “Then all the animals he had ever pursued appeared before him and formed a tight ring around him. Some sat on their hind legs, others stood. Being in their center, Julian was dumbfounded with horror and could not move.” He decided to return to the palace to his wife. Meanwhile, his old parents arrived there, and his wife gave them her bed. However, Julian thought that his wife and lover were in front of him, and he killed both of his parents. When he thus reached the deepest point of regression, a great change took place in him. Now he truly became a saint, devoting his entire life to the sick and poor. Finally, he warmed the poor man with his own body. After this, he soared “face to face with our Lord Jesus, who carried him into the heavenly heights, into the blue infinity.”

Flaubert describes the essence of bloodlust in this story. In this case, we are talking about the intoxication of life in its extremely archaic form, therefore, a person, after he has achieved a relationship with life on this archaic soil, can return to the highest level of development, namely, to the affirmation of life through his own humanity. It should be borne in mind that this tendency to kill, as mentioned above, is not the same as love for the dead, as we will describe it in the third chapter. Blood is identical here with the essence of life. Shedding the blood of another means fertilizing Mother Earth with what she needs for fruition. (One can recall the beliefs of the Aztecs, who considered the shedding of blood as a prerequisite for the continued existence of the cosmos, as well as the story of Cain and Abel.) Even in the case when one’s own blood is shed, a person thereby fertilizes the earth and becomes one with it.

At this regressive level, blood obviously means the same thing as a man's seed, and earth is equivalent to woman and mother. The seed and ovum are the expression of male and female polarity, which only becomes central when man, having begun to emerge completely from the earth, reaches the point where woman becomes the object of his desire and love. Shedding blood leads to death; ejaculation of semen leads to birth. But the goal of both is the affirmation of life, even if this occurs on a level hardly higher than animal existence. The killer can turn into a lover when he is fully born, when he completely breaks his connection with the earth and overcomes his narcissism. In any case, it cannot be denied that if he is not capable of this, his narcissism and archaic drive will keep him in a form of life so close to death that one who thirsts for blood can hardly be distinguished from one who loves the dead.

III. Love for the dead and love for the living

In the previous chapter we discussed forms of violence and aggression that can be more or less clearly defined as (or appearing to serve) life directly or indirectly. In this chapter, as in the following, we will talk about the anti-life tendencies that form the core of severe mental illness and constitute the essence of true evil. In this case, we will talk about three different types of orientation: necrophilia (as opposed to biophilia),

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narcissism and psychological symbiosis with the mother.

I will show that in these three tendencies there are benign forms that may be so mild that they should not be considered pathological. However, our main attention will be paid to the malignant forms of these three orientations, which converge in their most severe manifestations and ultimately form a “decay syndrome”, which is the quintessence of all evil; at the same time it is the most severe pathological condition and the basis of the most malignant destructiveness and inhumanity.

I could not have found a better introduction to the essence of necrophilia than the words spoken by the Spanish philosopher Unamuno in 1936 at the conclusion of a speech by General Millan Astray at the University of Salamanca, of which Unamuno was rector at the beginning of the Spanish Civil War. During the general's speech, one of his supporters shouted Millan Astrea's favorite slogan: “Viva la muerte!” (“Long live death!”). When the general finished his speech, Unamuno stood up and said: “... I just heard a necrophilic and meaningless call: “Long live death!” And I, a person who has spent his life formulating paradoxes, I, as a specialist, must tell you that this foreign paradox disgusts me. General Millan Astrey is a cripple. I would like to say this out loud. He is a war invalid. So was Cervantes. Unfortunately, right now there are many cripples in Spain. And soon there will be even more of them if God does not come to our aid. It pains me when I think that General Milan Astraeus could shape our mass psychology. The cripple, who lacks the spiritual greatness of Cervantes, usually seeks dubious relief in the fact that he is crippling everything around him. General Millan Astray could no longer hold back and shouted: “Abajo la inteligencia!” (“Down with the intelligentsia!”), “Long live death!” The Phalangists applauded enthusiastically. But Unamuno continued: “This is the temple of the intellect. And I am its high priest. You are desecrating this sacred place. You will win because you have more than enough brutal power at your disposal! But you won't convert anyone to your faith. Because in order to convert someone to your faith, he needs to be convinced and convinced, and for this you need what you don’t have - reason and righteousness in the fight. I think it is pointless to urge you to think about Spain. I have nothing more to say."

By indicating the necrophilic nature of the slogan “Long live death!” Unamuno touched on the core of the problem of evil. From a psychological and moral point of view, there is no sharper contrast than between people who love death and those who love life: between necrophiles and biophiles. This does not mean that someone has to be completely necrophilic or completely biophilic. There are people who are completely turned towards the dead; they are spoken of as mentally ill. There are others who give themselves completely to the living; it seems that they have achieved the highest goal available to man. Many have both biophilic and necrophilic tendencies in various combinations. Here, however, as in most life phenomena, it is very important to determine which tendency prevails and determines behavior, and this does not mean that only one of both attitudes is absent or present.

“Necrophilia” is literally translated as “love for the dead” (“biophilia” – “love for the living”, or “love for life”). Usually this concept is used to denote sexual perversion, namely the desire to possess a dead body (of a woman) for sexual intercourse or a painful desire to be near a corpse. But, as often happens, this sexual perversion only mediates a different, more clearly expressed picture of orientation, which for many people does not have an admixture of sexuality. Unamuno clearly recognized him when he described the general's performance as "necrophilic." He did not mean at all to say that the general was suffering from sexual perversion; he wanted to say that he hated life and loved the dead.

Surprisingly, necrophilia has never yet been described in psychoanalytic literature as a general orientation, although it is akin to Freud's anal-sadistic character and death instinct. Later I will dwell on these relationships, but I would like to first give a description of the personality of the necrophiliac.

A person with a necrophilic orientation feels an attraction to everything inanimate, to everything dead: to a corpse, rotting, sewage and dirt. Those people who willingly talk about illness, funerals and death are necrophilic. If they can talk about death and the dead, they become animated. A clear example of a purely necrophilic personality type is Hitler. He was fascinated by destruction and found pleasure in the smell of the dead. If during the years of his success it might have seemed that he was trying to destroy only those whom he considered his enemies, then the last days of the “death of the gods” showed that he experienced the deepest satisfaction at the sight of total and absolute destruction: at the destruction of the German people, the people of his environment and himself. The report of a certain World War II soldier may not be reliable, but it fits well into the overall picture: he allegedly saw Hitler, who, in a trance-like state, stared intently at a decomposing corpse and could not take his eyes off this spectacle.

Necrophiles live in the past and never live in the future. Their feelings are essentially sentimental, that is, they depend on the sensations they experienced yesterday or think they experienced. They are cold, distant, and committed to “law and order.” Their values are exactly the opposite of those that we associate with normal life: it is not the living, but the dead that excites and satisfies them.

A necrophiliac is characterized by a focus on strength. Strength is the ability to turn a person into a corpse, to use Simone Weil's definition. Just as sexuality can produce life, power can destroy it. Ultimately, all power rests on the power to kill. Maybe I wouldn’t want to kill a person, I would only like to take away his freedom; maybe I would only like to humiliate him or take away his property - but no matter what I do in this direction, behind all these actions is my ability and willingness to kill. He who loves the dead inevitably loves power. For such a person, the greatest human achievement is not the production, but the destruction of life. The use of force is not a passing action imposed on him by circumstances - it is his way of life.

On this basis, the necrophiliac is downright in love with power. Just as for someone who loves life, the main polarity in a person is the polarity of man and woman, so for necrophiles there is a completely different polarity - between those who have the power to kill and those who are not given this power. For them, there are only two “genders”: the powerful and the powerless, the murderers and the murdered. They are in love with those who kill and despise those they kill. Often such “falling in love with murderers” can be taken literally: they are the subject of sexual aspirations and

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fantasies, although in a less visual form than with the above-mentioned perversion or with so-called necrophagia (the need to devour a corpse). Such a desire is often found in the dreams of necrophilic individuals. I know of a number of dreams of necrophiliacs in which they had sexual intercourse with an old woman or an old man to whom they felt no physical attraction, but who aroused in them fear or admiration due to their power or destructiveness.

The influence of people like Hitler and Stalin also rests on their unlimited ability and willingness to kill. For this reason they were loved by necrophiles. Some were afraid of them and, not wanting to admit this fear to themselves, preferred to admire them. Others did not feel necrophilic in these leaders and saw in them creators, saviors and good fathers. If these necrophilic leaders had not given the false impression of constructive defenders, the number of those who sympathized with them would hardly have reached the level that allowed them to seize power, and the number of those disgusted with them would have predetermined their speedy downfall.

While life is characterized by structured, functional growth, the necrophiliac loves everything that does not grow, everything that is mechanical. The necrophiliac is driven by the need to transform the organic into the inorganic; he perceives life mechanically, as if all living people were things. He transforms all life processes, all feelings and thoughts into things. For him, only memory is essential, and not living experience; possession is essential, not being. The necrophiliac enters into a relationship with an object, flower or person only when he possesses it; therefore, a threat to his possession means for him a threat to himself: if he loses possession, then he loses contact with the world. Hence his paradoxical reaction, which is that he would rather lose his life than his possession, although with the loss of life he ceases to exist as an owner. He would like to dominate others and kill life in the process. He is filled with a deep fear of life, since life is disordered and uncontrollable according to its essence. A typical case of this attitude is the woman in the story of Solomon's Solution, who unfairly claimed to be the mother of the child. This woman preferred to have a piece of a dead child cut in two rather than lose a living one. For necrophiliacs, justice means fair division, and they are willing to kill or die for what they call "justice." “Law and order” are their idols, and anything that threatens law and order is perceived by them as a diabolical invasion of higher values.

The necrophile is attracted to the night and darkness. In mythology and poetry, he is represented as reaching into caves, into the depths of the ocean, or as blind. (The trolls in Ibsen's Peer Gynt are a good example of this; they are blind, they live in caves and recognize only the narcissistic value of "home brew" or anything homemade.) Anything that is averse to life or directed against it attracts the necrophiliac. He would like to return to the darkness of his mother's womb and to the past of inorganic or animal existence. He is fundamentally focused on the past, and not on the future, which he hates and fears. Similar to this is his strong need for security. But life is never certain, it can never be predicted and controlled; to make it controllable, it must be made dead; death is the only thing certain in life.

Usually necrophilic tendencies are most clearly manifested in the dreams of such a person. They contain murders, blood, corpses, skulls and excrement; sometimes they feature people turned into machines, or people who behave like machines. Many people dream of something like this from time to time, but this does not indicate necrophilia. In a necrophilic person, such dreams appear frequently and, as a rule, the same dream is repeated.

A high degree of necrophilia in a person can often be recognized by his external manifestations and gestures. He is cold, his skin seems lifeless, and often, looking at his facial expression, you might think that he smells something bad. (This expression is clearly present in Hitler's face.) The necrophiliac is obsessed with a love of forced, pedantic order. Eichmann represented such a necrophilic personality. He was fascinated by bureaucratic order and everything dead. His highest values were obedience and the orderly functioning of the organization. He transported Jews the same way he transported coal. He hardly perceived that in this case we were talking about living beings. So the question of whether he hated his victims is irrelevant. Examples of a necrophilic nature occur not only among the inquisitors, among the Hitlers and Eichmanns. There are countless people who, although they do not have the ability or power to kill, express their necrophilia in other, seemingly more harmless ways. An example of this kind is the mother who is interested only in the illnesses and misfortunes of her child and attaches importance only to gloomy forecasts regarding his future; on the contrary, the turn for the better does not impress her; she is cold to the joy of her child and does not pay attention to the new things that grow in him. It is likely that illness, death, corpses and blood appear in her dreams. She does not cause obvious harm to her child, but gradually she can stifle his joy in life, his faith in growth and ultimately infect him with his own necrophilic orientation.

Often the necrophilic orientation is in conflict with opposing tendencies, so that a kind of balance arises. An outstanding example of this type of necrophilic character was C. G. Jung. The autobiography published after his death contains numerous confirmations of this. Corpses, blood and murder often appeared in his dreams. As a typical expression of his necrophilic orientation in real life I would like to give the following example. When Jung's house in Bollingen was being built, the remains of a French soldier who had drowned 150 years earlier during Napoleon's entry into Switzerland were found there. Jung took a photograph of the corpse and hung it on the wall. He buried the dead man and fired three shots over the grave as a military salute. To a superficial observer this may seem somewhat unusual, but, however, it does not matter. However, this is precisely one of those many “minor” actions in which the underlying orientation appears more clearly than in pre-planned important actions. Many years earlier, Freud had been struck by Jung's orientation toward the dead. When he headed to the United States with Jung, Jung talked a lot about the well-preserved corpses found in the swamps near Hamburg. Freud could not bear these conversations and told Jung that he talked so much about corpses because he unconsciously wished him (Freud) to die. Jung indignantly rejected this, but several

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years later, when he had already broken up with Freud, he had such a dream. He had a feeling that he (together with a certain black native) must kill Siegfried. He left the house with a gun and, when Siegfried appeared on the top of the mountain, he shot him. Then he was paralyzed by horror, he was very afraid that his crime would be revealed. Fortunately, it rained heavily and washed away all traces of the crime. When Jung woke up, he had the feeling that he should commit suicide if he could not interpret this dream. After some thought, he came to the following “interpretation”: killing Siegfried meant no more and no less than killing the hero in himself and thus showing his humility. A slight change from Siegmund to Siegfried was enough for a man whose most significant achievement was the interpretation of dreams to hide the real meaning of the dream from himself. If we ask the question how such an intense repression became possible, the answer is as follows: the dream was an expression of his necrophilic orientation, but Jung was not able to explain the meaning of this dream, since it intensively repressed this general orientation. The fact that Jung was most fascinated by the past and only occasionally by the present and future fits into this picture; stones were his favorite material, and as a child he dreamed of God destroying the church by casting a large pile of sewage on it. His sympathies for Hitler and his racial theories also express a penchant for people who love the dead.

However, on the other hand, Jung was an extraordinarily creative person, and creativity is the direct opposite of necrophilia. He resolved his internal conflict thanks to the fact that he balanced the destructive forces in himself with his desire and ability to heal and made his interest in the past, the dead and destruction the subject of brilliant conclusions.

With this description of necrophilic orientation, I can create the impression that all the signs given here must certainly be present in a necrophilic person. And yet it is true that such diverse characteristics as the need to kill, the worship of power, the attraction to the dead and the dirty, sadism, the desire to transform the organic into the inorganic through “order” are equally relevant to the basic attitudes. Nevertheless, there are significant differences among individuals in the strength of their respective aspirations.

Each of the signs mentioned here can be expressed more in one person and less in another. The same significant differences exist among different people depending on the balance of their necrophilic and biophilic traits and the extent to which they recognize or rationalize necrophilic tendencies. However, the concept of a necrophilic personality type is in no way an abstraction or a generalization of various incompatible behavioral tendencies. Necrophilia is a fundamental orientation, it is precisely that response to life that is in complete contradiction with life; it is the most painful and dangerous of all life orientations of which a person is capable. It is a real perversion: although someone is alive, he loves not the living, but the dead, not growth, but destructiveness. If a necrophile dares to give himself an account of his own feelings, then he will express the slogan of his life in the words: “Long live death!”

The opposite of necrophilic orientation is biophilic orientation, which in its essence is love for living things. Like necrophilia, biophilia does not consist of one single essential trait, but is a total orientation that completely determines a person’s lifestyle. It asserts itself in his bodily processes, in his feelings, thoughts, and gestures; the biophilic orientation is expressed in the whole person. In its most elementary form it manifests itself in the tendency to live, which can be found in any living organism. In contrast to Freud's theory of the “death instinct,” I share the view of many biologists and philosophers that the inherent property of any living substance is to live and persist in life. Spinoza expresses this as follows: “Every thing, as far as it depends on it, strives to remain in its existence (being)” (Spinoza B. Ethics. Part 3. Theorem 6). This desire is designated by him as “the real essence of the thing itself” (Ibid. Theorem 7).

We observe this tendency to live in any living substance around us: in grass that seeks its way to light and life through stones, in an animal that fights to the last to avoid death, in a person who does almost everything to save his life .

The tendency to preserve life and fight against death is the most elementary form of biophilic orientation and is inherent in any living matter. As long as we are talking about the tendency to preserve life and fight against death, it represents only one aspect of the desire for life. Another aspect, more positive, is that living substance tends to integrate and unify; it tends to unite and grow according to the structure. Unification and joint growth are characteristic of all processes of life, and this applies not only to cells, but also to thinking and feelings.

The most elementary expression of this tendency is the union of cells and organisms, from non-sexual cell fusion to sexual union in animals and humans. In the latter case, sexual union occurs through the attraction that exists between the male and female sexes. The polarity of man and woman forms the core of the need for union, on which the continuation of the human race depends. This is probably why nature has equipped man with the most intense sense of pleasure when both sexes unite. As a result of this connection, a new creature usually appears biologically. Union, birth and growth constitute the cycle of life, just as the cycle of death consists of cessation of growth, disintegration and decay.

But even if the sexual instinct biologically serves life, from a psychological point of view it is not necessarily an expression of biophilia. There seems to be scarcely any intense emotion which is not connected with the sexual instinct. Vanity, the desire to be rich, the thirst for adventure and even the death instinct can equally use the sexual instinct at their service. One can make various guesses why this happens, and try to assume that this is a trick of nature that has created the sexual instinct so adaptable; that he can be mobilized through intense aspirations of any kind, even if they are in conflict with life. But whatever the reason, there can hardly be any doubt that the sexual instinct and destructiveness are closely interrelated. (When considering the fact of confusion of the death instinct with the life instinct, Freud especially pointed out this relationship, which occurs in cases of manifestations of sadism and masochism.) Sadism, masochism, necrophagia and coprophagia

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are perversions not only because they deviate from the usual norms of sexual behavior, but also because they represent precisely fundamental perversions, that is, a confusion of the living and the dead.

Productive orientation is the complete development of biophilia. He who loves life feels attracted to the process of life and growth in all areas. For him, it is better to create anew than to save. He is able to be surprised and is more willing to experience something new than to seek refuge in the affirmation of what has long been familiar. Life's adventures are of greater value to him than safety. His attitude towards life is functional, not mechanical. He sees the whole, not just its parts; he sees structures, not sums. He wants to shape and influence through love, reason and example, not through force, not by tearing things apart and bureaucratically managing people as if it were a matter of things. He enjoys life and all its manifestations more than stimulants.

Biophilic ethics has its own principle of good and evil. Good is everything that serves life; Everything that serves death is evil. Goodness is “deep respect for life”, everything that serves life, growth, development. Evil is everything that strangles life, constrains it and dismembers it into pieces. Joy is a virtue and sadness is a sin. And it is quite consistent with the concept of biophilic ethics when the Bible mentions that Jews must bear punishment for the main sin: “Because you did not serve the Lord your God with gladness and joy of heart, when all things abounded” (Deut. 28:47). The biophile is not compelled by his conscience to avoid evil and do good. We are not talking about the super-ego described by Freud, which is a strict educator and uses sadism against itself for the sake of virtue. The biophilic conscience is motivated by life and joy; the purpose of moral effort is to strengthen the life-affirming side in a person. For this reason, the biophile is not tormented by remorse and guilt, which, after all, are only aspects of self-loathing and sadness. He quickly turns his face to life and tries to do good. Spinoza's ethics is an impressive example of biophilic morality. He says: “Pleasure, considered directly, is not bad, but good; displeasure, on the contrary, is downright bad” (Ethics. Part 4. Theorem 41). And he continues in the same spirit: “A free man thinks of nothing so little as death, and his wisdom consists in thinking not about death, but about life” (Ibid. Theorem 67).

Love of life underlies various versions of humanistic philosophy. They, although they have different systems of concepts, are imbued with the same spirit as the philosophy of Spinoza. They represent the principle that a healthy person loves life, sadness is a sin, and joy a virtue; The goal of human life is to feel attracted to everything living and to abandon everything that is dead and mechanical.

I have tried to give a picture of necrophilic and biophilic orientation in their pure form. Of course, they appear in this form only occasionally. Refined necrophiliac – mentally ill; the refined biophile is a saint. In most people, necrophilic and biophilic tendencies are mixed, and it is a question of which one is dominant. Those who have a dominant necrophilic orientation will gradually destroy the biophilic side in themselves. Usually they are not aware of their inclination towards the dead; they harden their hearts; they behave in such a way that their love for the dead is a logical and reasonable response to what they experience. On the contrary, those in whom the love of life has prevailed are afraid when they notice how close they are to the “valley of the shadows of death,” and this fear can motivate them to a new life. Therefore, it is very important not only to recognize how strong necrophilic tendencies are in a person, but also to what extent they are realized by him. As long as he thinks that he is in the land of life, while in reality he is in the land of death, he is lost to life, since for him there is no return.

When describing necrophilic and biophilic orientations, the question arises: how do these concepts relate to Freud’s concepts of the life instinct (eros) and the death instinct (thanatos)? The similarities are clearly recognizable. When Freud tried to hypothesize the existence of a dualism of both instincts in man, he was under the influence of the First World War and deeply impressed by the power of destructive impulses. He revised his earlier theory, which contrasted the sexual instinct with the ego instincts (assuming that both sides served survival and thus life), and replaced it with the hypothesis that both the life instinct and the death instinct are inherent in living matter itself . In Beyond the Pleasure Principle, he opined that there was probably a phylogenetically older principle, which he designated as the "inevitability of renewal," according to which it was possible to restore the previous state and ultimately return organic life to the original state of inorganic existence. “If it is true,” says Freud, “that life once arose from time immemorial and in an inconceivable way from inanimate matter, then, according to our assumption, then an instinct must have arisen aimed at destroying it and again restoring the inorganic state. If we see in this instinct the self-destruction of our hypothesis, then we will be able to recognize it as an expression of the death instinct, which cannot be absent from any life process.”

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Notes

Turning to the question of various forms of aggression, compare the extensive material in psychoanalytic research, especially the numerous articles in the journal “The Psychoanalytic Study of the Child” (N.Y.); especially on the problem of human and animal aggression, see: Skott J.R. 1958; Buss A.H. 1961; Berkowitz L. 1962.

In 1939, Hitler was to stage an attack by Polish partisans (who were actually stormtroopers) on a radio transmitter in Silesia to create the impression among the population that they were under attack, and thus present his deliberate invasion of Poland as a “just war.”

In a “projective survey,” responses are open-ended and interpreted according to their unconscious and unintended meaning. Thus, the data obtained is not about “opinions”, but about the forces unconsciously operating in

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the person being interviewed.

Wed. a description of the Montenegrin lifestyle by Djilas, who speaks of murder as the proudest and most intoxicating experience in a man’s life.

When the biblical story says that God created Eve as a “helper” for Adam, it thus points to a new function of love.

This symbolic meaning of blindness is something completely different from blindness in those cases where it symbolizes “true insight.”

Many rituals that rely on the separation of pure (living) and impure (dead) emphasize the importance of avoiding perversion.

This is the main thesis of Albert Schweitzer, who in his works and in his life was one of the greatest representatives of the love of life.

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Here is an introductory fragment of the book.

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Erich Fromm’s book “The Soul of Man” is, as it were, a continuation of his main book “Flight from Freedom.” Unlike the previous one, in this work E. Fromm considers the question: “Is man a wolf or a sheep?” To answer this question, Fromm considers three human aspects. These are “love for the dead and love for the living,” “individual and social narcissism,” and “incestuous relationships.” These three characteristics together form the “decay syndrome” to which many people are susceptible and which is the exact opposite of the “growth syndrome”, but which “encourages a person to destroy for the sake of destroying and to hate for the sake of not hating.” The analysis of these three themes, as well as their opposites and outcome, is the main content of Fromm’s work. Also, despite the fact that these themes were not touched upon in his fundamental work “Flight from Freedom,” they are still present in a man who abandoned freedom and chose authoritarianism. That is why the book “The Soul of Man” can be called a continuation of “Flight from Freedom,” although not a direct continuation. It also seems important to me in this work that the author writes that what is dangerous to society is not a psychopath or a sadist, but a “normal person endowed with extraordinary power” and who, due to the possession of this power, can make other people experience such feelings as hatred , outrage, destructiveness and fear. It is the introduction of these feelings that will become, according to Fromm, the weapon through which wars, robberies, violence and everything that happened in the 20th century will occur.

At the very beginning of the book, the author addresses the topic of “aggression”. To do this, he identifies the different types of aggression that we all commonly encounter. The list begins with aggression, which is the least destructive, namely in sports competition. In this case, the goal is to defeat the opponent, but not to destroy him. The book examines each type of aggression in detail and gives characteristics. I don’t think it’s important to list them all, but I’ll highlight the most interesting ones from this list in my opinion. This is “revenge violence.” This is type 3 or 4 violence. It usually appears in childhood and adolescence or in the early stages of civilization, but due to the fact that not all countries have achieved the development that European countries and the United States have achieved, this type of violence can still be found in backward countries (and it needs to be addressed). be prepared) and in countries where the general level of education is very low. As Fromm himself writes: “a productive person has absolutely or almost no need for this. Even if he is discriminated against, insulted or wounded, it is precisely due to the productivity of his life that he forgets what was done to him in the past. His ability to create is stronger than his need for revenge." Of course, the classic work “The Count of Monte Cristo” immediately comes to mind and, as many people know, the author himself said about his work that he was very surprised when he heard positive reviews regarding the main character, because Dumas, when creating his hero, wanted to show people how meaningless revenge is, how stupid it is to live for the sake of revenge. In principle, this idea can be found in many sources, including the Bible.

Another type of aggression that I find interesting is aggression associated with a “shock of faith.” Very often, events occur in people’s lives that completely change their worldview, castles in the air collapse, etc. So Fromm writes that for children raised in religious families, the loss of faith can relate directly to God, due to the death of one of their relatives or a pet. We often see this type of aggression when yesterday's heroes become today's main enemies. Very often the saying “from love to hate is one step” applies to this type of aggression. And in literature, this is well depicted in two classic novels, “The Winter of Our Anxiety,” where main character after the collapse of his faith in his son, he decides to commit suicide, but at the very last moment, he abandons it, because... recalls the daughter who resurrects this faith and the novel “Look at your home, Angel” in which the collapse of faith in man probably becomes the main leitmotif of the work.

Another type of aggression - “compensatory violence” - manifests itself as a result of impotence in a certain important area for a person. Then weakness results in a thirst for destruction. As Fromm writes, “he takes revenge on life for depriving him.” This is also a popular topic among writers. If I'm not mistaken, this type of aggression is described by the words - "the rage of Caliban who saw himself in the mirror."

The last type of aggression, but not the last from Fromm, is the archaic “thirst for blood.” This is the type of people who, having committed an act of violence (most often murder), can no longer stop. They constantly need to commit the act of murder, to see the blood of the victim. In literature and mythology, this type of aggression resulted in the myth of vampires who are constantly in need of fresh blood.

The analysis of three themes begins: the theme of love for the dead, necrophilia. This type of people is quite common in life, of course, I don’t want to say that everyone we will talk about later feels sexual desires towards the dead. No, as I showed above, here, as in aggression, there is a gradation from a small (weak) desire for the dead, inanimate, mechanical to the strongest desire, which precisely takes the form of sexual desire. Like Fromm, I think it will be the most best choice To explain the essence of the “craving for the dead,” quote an excerpt from the speech of the Spanish philosopher Unamuno in 1936 at the end of the speech of General Millan Astray at the University of Salamanca, of which Unamuno was rector at the beginning of the Spanish Civil War. During the general’s speech, one of his supporters shouted his favorite slogan, General Astraeus, “Viva la muerte! (“Long live death!”). After the general’s speech was completed, Unamuno stood up and this is what he said: “... I just heard a necrophilic and meaningless call: “Long live death!” And I, a person who has spent his life formulating paradoxes, I, as a specialist, must tell you that this foreign paradox disgusts me. General Millan Astrey is a cripple. I would like to say this out loud. He is a war invalid. So was Cervantes. Unfortunately, right now there are many cripples in Spain. And soon there will be even more of them if God does not come to our aid. It pains me when I think that General Millan Astray could shape our mass psychology. The cripple, who lacks the spiritual greatness of Cervantes, usually seeks dubious relief in the fact that he cripples everything around him. General Millan Astraeus could no longer hold back and shouted: “Abajo la intelligence! (“Down with the intelligentsia!”), “Long live death!” The Phalangists applauded enthusiastically. But Unamuno continued: “This is the temple of the intellect. And I am its high priest. You are desecrating this sacred place. You will win because you have more than enough brutal power at your disposal! But you won't convert anyone to your faith. Because in order to convert someone to your faith, he needs to be convinced and convinced, and for this you need what you don’t have - reason and righteousness in the fight. I think it is pointless to urge you to think about Spain. There's nothing more to say." This example clearly demonstrates the meaning of the concept that Fromm is talking about and the type of people who are susceptible to cravings for everything dead. The craving for the dead, according to Fromm, also manifests itself in the desire to discuss diseases, deaths, unhealthy interest in feces, etc.
Fromm gives a rather funny example when he recalls an episode related to Freud. Once, when Freud went to the USA, he was accompanied by his friend and one of the most famous psychoanalysts, C. G. Jung, who spoke quite a lot about the well-preserved corpses found in the swamps near Hamburg. At some point, S. Freud could not stand this conversation any longer and told Jung that he talks so much about corpses because... wishes him (Freud) death. Naturally, Jung rejected these accusations, but from this episode (and from some others that are given in the book) we see another example of a craving for the dead. Despite this characteristic, Jung was a very prolific writer, so he balanced necrophilia and biophilia. Here it is necessary to note one very important thing; according to Fromm, every person contains both necrophilia and biophilia. Those who have greater necrophilia are pathologically ill people. And those who have only biophilia are saints. Since such people are quite rare, we are dealing with people who have both necrophilic and biophilic aspirations and it is only in their power to determine which will prevail.

The second topic can be started with an anecdote, which, like the story with the Spanish professor, clearly shows the essence of the issue. The writer meets a friend and tells him about himself at length and tediously. Finally he says: “I've been talking about myself for so long. Now let's talk about you. How do you like my latest book? So, analyzing the second question - “individual and social narcissism” - Fromm begins with a description of the individual, and as he analyzes it, he translates this into a group model, which is not much different from the individual. As with the craving for the dead and the living, both cravings that are present in every person, narcissism is also present in a person and the person himself determines how much it influences him. Fromm writes that most likely, narcissism is present in a person as a sexual instinct and an instinct of self-preservation, since if there were no narcissism, then a person would not be able to take care of himself. This is what Fromm writes: “How could an individual person survive if his physical needs, interests, and desires were not charged with strong energy? Biologically, from a survival point of view, a person must perceive himself as something much more important than his entire environment. If he does not do this, where will he get the energy and desire to protect himself from others, work to maintain his existence, fight for his life and achieve success in the fight against the environment? Without narcissism, he would probably be a saint - but what chance do saints have of survival?

So, if we accept narcissism as a certain necessity, then it is naturally necessary to draw boundaries. By the way, it is necessary to recall two extreme types of narcissism. One kind of narcissism can be observed in mentally ill people, for whom the reality of the outside world has “no longer existed” and in infants, for whom the reality of the outside world “has not yet arisen.” As you can see, if the second type is inherent in every person, then the first type is characteristic of people who, for various reasons, have already become detached from reality, no longer see the world around them, “they have turned themselves into God and the whole world.” Fromm very accurately gives examples of people for whom reality “has already ceased to exist.” These are Caligula, Stalin, Hitler, Trujillo, representatives of the house of Borgia, about whom Fromm very accurately notes: “The more a person tries to become a god, the more he isolates himself from all other people; this isolation makes him increasingly afraid.” Right to the point! How often do we hear stories about people who put themselves almost on the same level as God, but who at the same time were afraid of everything and everyone and built such security systems that sometimes they died because of them. The second important point that Fromm writes about is that narcissistic people are completely insensitive to constructive criticism. Such criticism acts as a red rag to a bull. And as Fromm correctly notes, people who have power and are narcissistic physically eliminate the objects of criticism, i.e. They try to destroy everyone who criticizes. The third point is that narcissistic people try to adjust the world to suit themselves. For them, they do not revolve around the world, but it revolves around them. Everything that exists exists for his sake alone. People like this create serious problems in love, since they completely reject the fact that someone might not like them. Then they most often say: “she loves me, she just doesn’t know it yet.” The consequences, as we know, can be the most tragic in such cases.

After analyzing individual narcissism, Fromm transfers this model to the whole society. In principle, everything is the same there, only not one person does not see reality and is busy with narcissism like the Greek Narcissus, but all or part of society. This is shown, for example, in the following: “Even if I am poor and uneducated, I am still something important, because I belong to the most wonderful group in the world: “I am white.” Or: “I am an Aryan.” I think examples of this can still be seen today. In this regard, the following phrase from Fromm on this matter seems quite interesting (I think everyone will immediately remember certain images from the news): “There are numerous examples in history when the vilification of symbols of group narcissism caused attacks of rage bordering on madness.”

The following moment of manifestation of group narcissism is also interesting: “The leader delights the group, which projects its narcissism onto him. The more significant the leader, the more significant his follower.” In this case, we recall what Fromm wrote in the book “Flight from Freedom” when he described the reason why the Germans chose Hitler. This was a response to the weakening of the state. Those. the authoritarian character of a person elevates a person or structure (state) as long as it is strong. It can rob, torture, kill, but it does not have the right, from its point of view, to give in. Because for such people, weak, this is the reason to destroy you.

In contrast to narcissism, Fromm cites religious teachings, the basis of which is the reduction of narcissism, and the destruction of barriers that did not allow one to see and understand the entire world around him (“... love your neighbor as yourself”).

The last topic that Fromm analyzes is “incestuous relationships.” As you know, this theme became the cornerstone of Freud’s entire teaching. Here is a small educational program that Fromm gives:

“Freud drew attention to the exceptional energy with which the child’s attachment to his mother is charged; An ordinary person only rarely manages to overcome this attachment completely. Freud observed that it reduces a man's ability to connect with a woman, that it reduces his independence, and that the conflict between his conscious goals and his repressed incestuous relationship can lead to various neurotic conflicts and symptoms. Freud believed that the force underlying the little boy's attachment to his mother is the genital libido, which drives him to desire his mother sexually and to hate his father as a sexual rival. However, in view of the superior power of this rival, the little boy pushes aside his incestuous desires and identifies himself with the demands and prohibitions of his father. However, repressed incestuous desires continue to live in his subconscious, but their significant intensity manifests itself only in pathological cases.” This is Freud's view of this problem. IN further development psychoanalysis, this position has undergone the adjustment that Fromm talks about. So one of the psychoanalysts writes that in fact we are not talking about the child’s sexual desires for the parent, but about the desire to return back to the mother’s womb. Fromm expresses a similar idea. Here is what he writes about this: “These pregenital “incestuous” aspirations are one of the most fundamental passions, both in men and women, which contain a person’s longing for security, for satisfying his narcissism, his longing for getting rid of the risk of responsibility , from freedom and self-awareness, his need for unconditional love, which will be offered to him without expecting reciprocal love on his part.” I think that Fromm's version is more correct, but this is in the context of the average person, i.e. the average person who has incestuous desires is characterized by the desire to return back, to the mother’s belly, so that nothing would bother him and to be loved without demanding anything in return, or in Fromm’s words, there is an “Escape from freedom”, a refusal freedom because of its unbearable weight. This also confirms that “a girl’s sexual attraction is directed towards the father, but her incestuous desire is directed towards the mother.” This eliminates the problem of sex, and also “shows even more clearly that even the deepest incestuous relationship with the mother does not contain the slightest trace of sexual stimulation.” As for the sexual desire of a child for one of the two parents, here, just like with necrophilia, when there is a sexual desire for a corpse, we are dealing with pathology, with an extreme case. However, this can also be expressed in the fact that “a man who is looking for a strict mother figure as a wife feels like a prisoner who has no right to do something displeasing to this wife-mother and is constantly afraid of causing her indignation.” In this context, it is important to note that the mother may not necessarily be the biological mother. She can be replaced by an aunt or grandmother. This is one of the main theories put forward by another famous psychoanalyst, H. S. Sullivan, who speaks of “a person endowed with the quality of a mother.”

An important fact is that narcissism (as well as necrophilia) is very often intertwined with incestuous desires. Fromm writes about it this way: “The various cultures of the Great Mother, the cult of the Mother of God, the cult of nationalism and patriotism - they all testify to the intensity of this veneration.” And he further explains: “He cannot open himself to the world and cannot fully accept it into himself; he is constantly imprisoned by his racist-national-religious maternal bond” (“a stranger” is a barbarian). Remember what religions say, “become a brother to everyone.” This is the opposite of what all these narcissistic sects say, who recognize and see only themselves as loved ones. And in his last speech at the Pushkin celebrations, F. Dostoevsky addressed those present with the famous speech, which became “his coronation” and after which he became Dostoevsky. With this unifying speech, he addressed the people, in which he spoke “about the ability of the Russian soul to try on Western contradictions, about its universality,” he said that “to become Russian, you need to become a brother to all people.” Those. Dostoevsky understood that one of the most important goals of humanity is to reveal and accept the world in all its otherness.

In concluding this review of this last topic, I cannot help but mention the role of the father. And the fact that we are all about the mother, yes, about the mother. I think the role of the father is extremely important in the psychological development of the child. In principle, this role at the very beginning of his life (the life of a baby) is played by a doctor who cuts the umbilical cord, thereby dividing two living organisms into two independent and different ones. Further, the father will play this role or the role, if you will, of an icebreaker who will cut the ice that connects the child and mother in childhood and adolescence. Therefore, it seems to me that the absence of a father, or, to use Sullivan’s words, “a person endowed with the quality of a father,” has a negative impact on the mental maturation of the child (this is related to the question of the possibility of adopting children by homosexual couples, although not everything is so simple, because one of the partners changes his role). Since the mother, without knowing and unwillingly, can exert constant psychological pressure on the child, suppressing his personality, his individuality (what Fromm calls “incestuous symbiosis” occurs, i.e. instead of two individuals, there becomes one, due to absorption one another). And if in a normal situation a teenage rebellion occurs, as a result of which the child finally breaks away from his mother and becomes a full-fledged member of society and begins to look for a “girlfriend/friend in life,” then in this case, he becomes completely dependent on the mother, both physically and psychologically . Here is what Fromm writes about the love of the father: “He represents law and order, social rules and duties established by man, and he is the one who punishes or rewards. His love is conditional and can be earned by doing what he demands.”

In the final chapter, Fromm returns to the question he asked at the very beginning: is a person good or evil, is he free or are his actions determined by external circumstances? Fromm comes to the conclusion that a person is neither good nor bad, but that it is necessary to look at what specific person we are talking about, that it is necessary to consider a specific person: “It follows that one person has freedom of choice, while another has lost it . If we refer to all people, then we are dealing with an abstraction, or just with a moral postulate in the sense of Kant or William James."

Next, Fromm reflects on the problem of choice and the connection of this choice with good or evil “Human activity, according to Spinoza, is causally determined by passions or reason. If a person is possessed by passions, he is a slave; if he is subject to reason, he is free.” Actually, this is the main answer to the question of how not to succumb to the “decay syndrome.” I think this is the main idea of the book. People who are guided not by reason, but by prejudices, very often suffer from one of the three inclinations that Fromm analyzes in this work. A person acting according to reason is able to reduce the dark tendencies of his Self.

At the very last point, Fromm asks about the process of choice: “Determinists argue that in every situation there is only one single real possibility of choice. According to Hegel, a free person acts on the basis of an understanding of this one possibility, that is, on the basis of a conscious necessity. He sees an example of a wrong choice or the cessation of the possibility of free choice in the fact that a person makes a series of moves, each of which is not necessarily wrong, but if he started moving in the wrong direction, then his chance increases, eventually, of passing the point of no return , when the game continues, but freedom of choice has already been lost, because the end is already predetermined long before the finale. For example, he introduces a description of a game of chess, when both partners have the same chances of winning, but the repeated mistake of one leads to the fact that an intelligent person will stop and admit defeat, and will not finish the previously lost game. For example, at a certain moment, Hitler could stop and abandon the wrong steps, but starting from a certain moment (cruelty towards the conquered peoples) he lost his freedom of choice, the game was over long before official recognition. True, as Fromm notes, in some cases a person who continues to play does not lose anything except time, in others, as in the example of Hitler, a nation loses millions of its citizens in a deliberately losing game. “Human freedom consists in his ability to choose between two available real alternatives. Freedom in this sense should be defined not as “actions in consciousness,” but as actions based on awareness of alternatives and their consequences.”

Bottom line: refusal to rationally analyze all possible real alternatives and their consequences leads a person to renounce freedom and positive growth and the dominance of his destructive side in a person, expressed by Fromm in necrophilia, narcissism and incestuous relationships, which in turn are breeding ground for aggression , hatred, malice and so on.

E. Fromm’s book “The Soul of Man” is the same interesting work as his work “Flight from Freedom” and which supplements it with new material. The book is well written and easy to read, making it suitable for almost any reader. One of the values of the book is to help the reader identify people with a predominance of “decay syndrome” or “growth syndrome” in order to develop certain tactics of behavior towards them, and will also provide an opportunity for their own education of themselves or loved ones.