Erich Fromm Quotes

Every civilized human being, whatever his conscious development, is still an archaic man at the deeper levels of his psyche.

The unconscious is not just evil by nature, it is also the source of the highest good: not only dark but also light, not only bestial, semihuman, and demonic but superhuman, spiritual, and, in the classical sense of the word, "divine."

A human being becomes human not through the casual convergence of certain biological conditions, but through an act of will and love on the part of other people.

Hemingway never grew out of adolescence. His scope and depth stayed shallow because he had no idea what women are for.

The knowledge that there is a part of the psychic functions that are out of conscious reach, we did not need to wait for Freud to know this!

Between the ages of 24 and 27, I read Freud's complete works, everything that had been translated into English. It was very stimulating intellectually. But I did not accept his view of neurosis or of human nature.

Behavior is mutable. It changes from place to place. It's like accents, dialect - it varies from one area to another. But there are universal truths about what it means to be a human being. All the other stuff is like applique. Learning that was interesting to me and probably useful for becoming an actor.

I read Freud's Introductory Lectures in Psychoanalysis in basically one sitting. I decided to enroll in medical school. It was almost like a conversion experience.

I was in Jungian analysis for 20 years, 1976-96.

Personality and socialization aren't the same thing.

Since Freud, the center of man is not where we thought it was; one has to go on from there.

I've never been to a shrink. But my parents were very psychologically literate - my father had undergone Freudian analysis - and we often talked about other people in psychological terms, so I picked up a lot of that.

Throughout the ages, stories with certain basic themes have recurred over and over, in widely disparate cultures; emerging like the goddess Venus from the sea of our unconscious.

We shall probably get nearest to the truth if we think of the conscious and personal psyche as resting upon the broad basis of an inherited and universal psychic disposition which is as such unconscious, and that our personal psyche bears the same relation to the collective psyche as the individual to society.

I trained in psychiatry in the 1970s, and much of our training was about what was then psychoanalytic theory, with a little bit of theory from Jungian psychology and a few other places.

Psychoanalysts believe that the only 'normal' people are those who cause no trouble either to themselves or anyone else.

The creative process taps into our deepest subconscious, and we are each of us sex-crazed - products of a shame-based Judeo-Christian culture that has irrevocably warped us all to varying degrees.

Society becomes how we behave.

I'm somebody who's super into psychology and analysis and the human psyche and the human experience.

The collective unconscious consists of the sum of the instincts and their correlates, the archetypes. Just as everybody possesses instincts, so he also possesses a stock of archetypal images.

My favorite books are psychology, self-help, and I'm fascinated by Jung, by dream work.

Our culture is so inundated with Freudian prototypes, and I think that 'Twin Peaks' came up with a whole new Pandora's Box of outlandishly mental, out of balance people that have never been described or have been noted by the psychiatric community.

If you're a white male growing up in this society, you're constantly receiving encouragement to go on in science in the form of all the images that you're receiving.

Freud made the discovery- quite genuinely, simply through working on his own material- that the more deeply one explores the phenomena of human individuation, the more unreservedly one grasps the individual as a self-contained and dynamic entity, the closer one draws to that in the individual which is really no longer individual.

As Freud has shown, blunders are not the merest chance. They are the result of suppressed desires and conflicts. They are ripples on the surface of life, produced by unsuspected springs. And these may be very deep - as deep as the soul itself. The blunder may amount to the opening of a destiny.