The Soul of Man Can
Never be Described in Words
Erich Fromm
Erich Fromm
Erich Fromm (March 23, 1900 - March
18, 1980)
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The following article is reproduced
from “Theosophy” magazine, Los Angeles,
November, 1957, pp. 35-40. It first appeared
in the U.S.A. in the Saturday Review
for March 16, 1957.
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Life in its
biological aspects is a
miracle and a
secret, and man in his
human aspects is
an unfathomable secret.
The growing popularity of psychology is interpreted by many as a sign of
our approach to the Delphic ideal:
“Know Thyself”.
The idea of self-knowledge
has its roots in the Greek and Judaeo-Christian tradition. It was part of the
Enlightenment attitude. Men like James [1]
and Freud, deeply rooted in this tradition, helped to transmit it to us. But we
must not ignore other aspects of contemporary psychology which are dangerous
and destructive to human spiritual development.
Psychological knowledge has
assumed a particular function in capitalistic society, a function and a meaning
quite different from those which were implied in “Know Thyself”. Capitalistic
society is centered around the market, the commodity market and the labor
market, where goods and services are exchanged freely, regardless of clan and
blood relationships and other traditional standards and without force or fraud.
Knowledge of the customer is of paramount importance to the seller. With the
growing complexity of enterprises and capital, it becomes all the more
important to know in advance the wishes of the customer, and not only to know
them but to influence and manipulate them. The capital investments of modern
giant enterprises are not made by hunch, but after thorough investigation and
manipulation of the customer and the whole market.
Beyond “market psychology”
another new field of psychology has arisen, based on the wish to understand and
manipulate the employee. This is called “human relations”. It is a logical
outcome of the changed relationship between capital and labor. Instead of crude
warfare there is cooperation between the giant colossi of enterprise and the
giant colossi of labor unions, both of which have come to the conclusion that it
is in the long run more useful to compromise than to fight. In addition, we
have also found that satisfied, “happy” men work more productively and provide
for that smooth operation which is a necessity for big enterprises. Thus, what
Taylor did for the rationalization of physical work the psychologists do for
the mental and emotional aspect of the worker. He is made into a thing, treated and manipulated like a
thing, and so-called “human relations” are the most inhuman ones, because they
are “reified” and alienated relations.
From the manipulation of the
customer and the worker, the uses of psychology have spread to the manipulation
of everybody, to politics. While the idea of democracy originally centered
around the concept of clear-thinking and responsible citizens, the practice of
democracy becomes more and more distorted by the same methods of manipulation
which were first developed in market research and “human relations”.
While all this is well
known, I want now to discuss a more subtle and difficult problem which is
related to individual psychology and especially to psychoanalysis. The question
is:
To which extent is psychology (the knowledge of others and of myself) possible? What limitations exist to such knowledge? And what are
the dangers if these limitations are not respected?
Undoubtedly the desire to
know our fellow men and ourselves corresponds to a deep need in human beings.
Man lives within a social context. He needs to be related to his fellow man
lest he become insane. Man is endowed with reason and imagination; his fellow
man and he himself are problems which he cannot help trying to solve. The
endeavor to understand man by thought is called psychology, “the knowledge of
the soul”.
However, complete rational
knowledge is possible only of things.
Things can be dissected without being destroyed; they can be manipulated
without damage to their nature; they can be reproduced. Man is not a thing. He cannot be dissected without being destroyed.
He cannot be manipulated without being harmed. And he cannot be reproduced
artificially. Life in its biological aspects is a miracle and a secret, and man
in his human aspects is an unfathomable secret. We know our fellow man and
ourselves in many ways, yet we do not know him or ourselves fully because we
are not things. The further we reach into the depth of our being, or someone
else’s being, the more the goal of full knowledge eludes us. Yet we cannot help
desiring to penetrate into the secret of man’s soul, into the nucleus of “he”.
What, then, does it mean,
that we know ourselves or that we know another person? To know ourselves means
to overcome the illusions we have about ourselves. To know our neighbor means
to overcome the “parataxic distortions” (transference) we have about him. We
all suffer, in varying degrees, from illusions about ourselves. We are enmeshed
in fantasies of omniscience and omnipotence which were experienced as quite
real when we were children. We rationalize our bad motives in terms of
benevolence, duty, or necessity. We rationalize weakness and fear in terms of “good
causes”, our unrelatedness in terms of others’ unresponsiveness. With our
fellow man we distort and rationalize just as much, except that usually we do
so in the opposite direction. Our lack of love makes him appear as hostile when
he is only shy. Our submissiveness transforms him into a dominating ogre when
he only asserts himself. Our fear of spontaneity makes him out to be childish,
when he is really childlike and spontaneous. To know more about ourselves means
to do away with the many veils which hide us and our neighbor from our view.
One veil after another is lifted, one distortion after another dispelled.
Psychology can show us what
man is not. It cannot tell us what
man, each one of us, is. The soul of
man, the unique core of each individual, can never be grasped and described
adequately. It can be “known” only inasmuch as it is not misconceived. The
legitimate aim of psychology, as far as ultimate knowledge is concerned, is the
negative, the removal of distortions
and illusions, not the positive,
full, and complete knowledge of a human being.
There is, however, another
path to knowing man’s secret. This path is not that of thought, but of love. Love is active penetration of the
other person in which my desire to know is stilled by union. In the act of
fusion I know you, I know myself, I know everybody - and I “know” nothing. I
know in the only way in which knowledge of that which is alive is possible for
man - by the experience of union, not
by any knowledge our thought can give. The only way to full knowledge lies in
the act of love; this act transcends thought, it transcends words.
Psychological knowledge may
be one condition for full knowledge in the act of love. I have to know the
other person and myself objectively in order to be able to see his reality or,
rather, in order to overcome the illusions, the irrationally distorted pictures
I have of him. If I know a human being as he is, or rather if I know what he is
not, then I may know him in his ultimate essence in the act of love.
Love is an achievement not
easy to attain. How does the man who cannot love try to penetrate the secret of
his neighbor? There is, as I have tried to show in [the book] “The Art of
Loving”, one other way, a desperate one, to know the secret: it is that of
complete power over another person, the power which makes him do what I want,
feel what I want, think what I want, which transforms him into a thing, my thing. The ultimate degree of this
attempt to know lies in the extremes of
sadism, in the desire to make a human being suffer, to torture him, to force
him to betray his “secret” in his suffering or eventually to destroy him. In
the craving to penetrate man’s secret lies an essential motive for the depth
and intensity of cruelty and destructiveness. In a very succinct way this idea
has been expressed by the Russian writer Isaac Babel. He quotes a fellow
officer in the Russian Civil War who has just stamped a former master to death
as saying:
“With shooting - I’ll put it
this way - with shooting you only get rid of a chap..... With shooting you’ll
never get at the soul, to where it is in a fellow and how it shows itself. But
I don’t spare myself, and I’ve more than once trampled an enemy for over an
hour. You see, I want to get to know what life really is, what life’s like down
our way.”
While sadism and
destructiveness are motivated by the desire to force man’s secret, it can never
lead to the expected goal. By making my neighbor suffer, the distance between
him and myself grows to a point where no knowledge is possible. Sadism and
destructiveness are perverted, hopeless, and tragic attempts to learn.
The problem of knowing man
runs parallel to the theological problem of knowing God. Negative theology
postulates that I cannot make any positive statement about God. The only
knowledge of God is what He is not. As Maimonides put it, the more I know about
what God is not the more I know about God. Or as Meister Eckhart put it:
“Meanwhile man cannot know what God is even though he be ever so well aware of
what God is not.” One consequence of such negative theology lies in mysticism.
If I can have no full knowledge of God in thought, if theology is at best
negative, the positive knowledge of God can be achieved only in the act of
union with God.
Translating this principle
to man, we might speak of a “negative psychology”, and furthermore say that
full knowledge of man by thought is impossible, and that full “knowledge” can
occur only in the act of love. Just as mysticism is a logical consequence of
negative theology, love is the logical consequence of negative psychology.
Stating the limitations of
psychology is to point to the danger resulting from ignoring these limitations.
Modern man is lonely, frightened, and little capable of love. He wants to be
close to his neighbor, yet he is too unrelated and distant to be able to be
close. His marginal bonds to his neighbor are manifold and easily kept up, but
a deep “central relatedness” hardly exists. To find closeness he seeks
knowledge; and in search of knowledge he finds psychology. Psychology becomes a
substitute for love, for intimacy, for union with others and oneself; it
becomes the refuge of the lonely, alienated man instead of being a step toward
the act of union.
Psychology as a surrogate
becomes apparent in the phenomenon of the popularity of psychoanalysis.
Psychoanalysis can be most helpful in undoing the parataxic distortions within
ourselves and about our fellow man. It can undo one illusion after another, and
free the way to the decisive act, which we alone can perform: the “courage to
be”, the jump, the act of ultimate commitment. Man after his physical birth has
to go through a continuous process of birth. Emerging from the mother’s womb is
the first act of birth; from her breast is the second; from her arm the third.
From here on the process of birth can stop; a person can develop into a
socially adjusted and useful person and yet remain stillborn in a spiritual
sense. If he is to develop into what he potentially is as a human being, he
must continue to be born. That is, he must continue to dissolve the primary
ties of soil and blood. He must proceed from one act of separation to the next.
He must give up certainty and defenses and take the jump into the act of
commitment, concern, and love.
What happens so often in
psychoanalytic treatment is that there is a silent agreement between therapist
and patient which consists in the assumption that psychoanalysis is a method by
which one can attain happiness and maturity and yet avoid the jump, the act,
the pain of separation. To use the analogy of the jump a little further, the
psychoanalytic situation looks sometimes like that of a man wanting to learn
how to swim and yet intensely afraid of the moment when he has to jump into the
water, to have faith in the water’s buoyancy. The man stands at the edge of the
pool and listens to his teacher explain to him the movements he has to make; that
is good and necessary. But if we see him going on talking, talking, talking we
become suspicious that the talking and understanding have become a substitute
for the real swim. No amount or depth of psychological insight can take the
place of the act, the commitment, the jump. It can lead to it, prepare for it,
make it possible - and this is the legitimate function of psychoanalytic work.
But it must not try to be a substitute for the responsible act of commitment,
an act without which no real change occurs in a human being.
If psychoanalysis is
understood in this sense, another condition must be met. The analyst must
overcome the alienation from himself and from his fellow man which is prevalent
in modern times. As I have said, modern man experiences himself as a thing, an embodiment of energies to be
invested profitably on the market. He experiences his fellow man as a thing to
be used for profitable exchange. Contemporary psychology, psychiatry, and
psychoanalysis are involved in this universal process of alienation. The
patient is considered as a thing, the sum of many parts. Some of these parts
are defective and need to be “fixed”, like the parts of an automobile. There is
a defect here and a defect there, called symptoms. The psychiatrist considers it
his function to fix them. He does not look at the patient as a unique totality.
For psychoanalysis to
fulfill its real possibilities, the analyst must overcome his own alienation,
be capable of relating himself to the patient from core to core, and in this
relatedness to open the path for the patient’s spontaneous experience, and thus
for the “understanding” of himself. He must not look on the patient as an
object, or even be only a “participant observer”. He must become one with the
patient, and at the same time retain his own separateness and objectivity so
that he can formulate his experiences in the act of oneness and of separateness
at the same time.
The final understanding
cannot be expressed fully in words. It is not an “interpretation” which describes
the patient as an object with its various defects, and their genesis, but it is
an overall intuitive grasp; it takes place first in the analyst and then, if
the analysis is successful, in the patient. This grasp is sudden. It is an
intuitive act which can be prepared by many cerebral insights but can never be
replaced by them. If psychoanalysis is to develop in this direction it has
still unexhausted possibilities for human transformation and spiritual change.
If it remains enmeshed in the socially patterned defect of alienation it may
remedy this or that defect, but it will become another tool for making man more
automatized and adjusted to an alienated and basically “inhuman” society.
NOTE:
[1] James: William James, North-American Psychologist and
Philosopher (1842-1910) leader of the movement known as pragmatism.
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Read also the
article “The Power of Suggestion”,
by Robert Crosbie, which is easy to find in our associated websites.
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On the role of the esoteric movement in
the ethical awakening of mankind during the 21st century, see the book “The Fire and Light of Theosophical
Literature”, by Carlos Cardoso Aveline.
Published in
2013 by The Aquarian Theosophist,
the volume has 255 pages and can be obtained through Amazon Books.
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