The Revision of Psychoanalysis

It was Erich Fromm's conviction that psychoanalysis needs to retain Freud's essential insight into the unconscious while replacing his mechanistic-materialistic philosophy with a humanistic one. In this book, never before published in English, Fromm presents such a revision of psychoanalysis, one that is both humanistic and dialectical.
The Revision of Psychoanalysis is Fromm's long-expected account of his own personal way of understanding and practicing psychoanalysis. Of special interest to today's readers are his continuing efforts to understand the meaning of sexuality, his critique of Herbert Marcuse's vision of psychoanalysis, and the implications of a Freudian analytical social psychology for the reform of social arrangements. The book is essential reading for psychologists and for social and political theorists in many disciplines. For psychoanalysts, it provides Fromm's most provocative and unique recommendations for the revision of psychoanalysis.

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