The Art of Listening

Erich Fromm

• Publisher: Open Road Media
• Year: 2013
• eBook ISBN: 9781480401983
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Psychiatry & Mental Health
• Index: Psychology

The renowned social psychologist and New York Times–bestselling author shares his insights on the process of psychotherapy, drawing on his own experience.
 
Over the course of a distinguished career, Erich Fromm built a reputation as a talented speaker and gifted psychoanalyst—the first specialization of this polymath. The Art of Listening is a transcription of a seminar Fromm gave in 1974 to American students in Switzerland. It provides insight into Fromm's therapy techniques as well as his thoughts and mindset while working. In this intimate look at his profession, Fromm dismantles psychoanalysis and then reassembles it in a clear and engaging fashion.
 
This ebook features an illustrated biography of Erich Fromm including rare images and never-before-seen documents from the author's estate.

Part II.

Therapeutic Aspects of Psychoanalysis

4.

What Is Psychoanalysis

The Aim of Psychoanalysis

The question with which I want to start is at the same time a basic question for all that follows: What is the aim of psychoanalysis? Now that’s a very simple question and I think there’s a very simple answer. To know oneself. Now this “To know oneself” is a very old, human need, from the Greeks to the Middle Ages, to modern times you find the idea that knowing oneself is the basis of knowledge of the world or—as Meister Eckhart expressed it—in a very drastic form: “The only way of knowing God is to know oneself.” This is one of the oldest human aspirations. And it is indeed an aspiration or an aim which has its roots in very objective factors.

How is to know the world, how is one to live and react properly if the very instrument which is to act, which is to decide, is not known to ourselves? We are the guide, the leader of this “I” which manages in some way to live in the world, to make decisions, to have priorities, to have values. If this “I,” this main subject which decides and acts is not properly known to us it must follow that all our actions, all our decisions are done half blindly or in a half-awakened state.

One has to think of the fact that man is not endowed with instincts like the animals, which tell him how to act so that he really does not have to know anything except what his instinct tells him. This requires a qualification because in even the animal kingdom the animal and even the animal of a very low level of evolution needs to learn something. Instincts do not operate without a minimum of learning at least. But that is only a minor point—but by and large the animal does not have to know much. Although it has to have some experience which is indeed transmitted through memory.

But man has to know everything in order to decide. His instincts don’t tell him anything about how to decide except that they tell him that he must eat, drink, defend himself, sleep and possibly that he ought to produce children. The trick of nature is, you might say, to endow him with a certain pleasure or lust for sexual satisfaction. But that is not by far as strong an instinctive demand as the other drives or impulses are. So to know oneself is a condition not only from a spiritual or—if you like—religious, or moral or a human standpoint, it is a demand from the biological standpoint.

Because the optimum of efficiency in living depends on the degree to which we know ourselves as that instrument which has to orient itself in the world and make decisions. The better known we are to ourselves obviously the more proper are the decisions we make. The less we know ourselves the more confused must be the decisions we make.

Psychoanalysis is not only a therapy but an instrument for self-understanding. That is to say an instrument for self-liberation, an instrument in the art of living, which is in my opinion the most important function psychoanalysis can have.

The main value of psychoanalysis is really to provide a spiritual change of a personality, and not to cure symptoms. As far as this is there to cure symptoms that is fine if there are no better and shorter cures but that the real historical importance of psychoanalysis goes in the direction of such knowledge which you find in Buddhist thinking. The kind of self-awareness—mindfulness—plays a central role in Buddhist practice to achieve a better state of being than the average man does.

Psychoanalysis claims that to know oneself leads to cure. Well that’s a claim which is made already in the Gospels: “The truth shall make you free.” (John 8:32) Why does the knowledge of one’s unconscious, that is to say full self-knowledge, help to make a person free from symptoms or make him even happy?

Sigmund Freud’s Therapeutic Aim and My Critique on It

I first want to say a word about the therapeutic aims of classic, Freudian psychoanalysis. As Freud once put it, the therapeutic aim was to make a person capable of working and being able to function sexually. To put it in better, objective terms: the aim of psychoanalysis is to make a person capable of working and reproducing. These are indeed the two great demands of society, which society makes of everybody. It means to suggest, to indoctrinate people why they should work and why they should produce children. Well, we do it anyway for many reasons. The State doesn’t have a great trouble to induce people to do that but if the State needs more children than are produced at the moment then it will do much to get the desired number of children by all sorts of things.

Freud’s definition of what is really mental health is essentially a social definition. It is to say to be normal in a social sense. Man shall function according to the socially patterned norms. Also the symptom is determined socially: A symptom is a symptom when it makes it difficult for you to function socially properly. Drug addiction, for instance, is considered a severe symptom. Compulsive smoking isn’t. Why? It’s the same thing, psychologically speaking. But the difference is very great socially speaking. If you take certain kinds of drugs this prevent you from proper social functioning in many situations. You can smoke yourself to death—who cares? If you die from lung cancer—that’s not a social problem. People will die anyway. But if you die from lung cancer when you are fifty,—well, when you are fifty you are not socially important anymore! Anyway you have produced the proper number of children, you have worked in the society, you have done your best; this is not interesting, this is not interfering with your social function.

We declare something a symptom when it is interfering with social function. That’s why a person who is not capable of having the slightest bit of subjective experience and sees things only entirely realistically is supposed to be healthy. Although he is just as sick as a psychotic who cannot recognize reality, as something manageable or as something to be manipulated but he can recognize something here, a feeling, a most subtle feeling, an inner experience which is inaccessible to the so-called normal person.

The Freudian definition is essentially a social definition and this is no critique in a narrower sense of the word because he was a man of his century and he never questioned his society. Freud never was critical of his society except that he felt the tabu on sex was too strong. It should be somewhat lowered. Freud himself was a very prudish man, exceedingly prudish and he would have been certainly exceedingly shocked to see the kind of sexual behavior now which is allegedly the result of his teaching. In reality it isn’t. Freud has little to do with that. The present sexual behavior is part of general consumerism.

How did Freud give reasons for the goals of psychoanalysis he set? To put it simply, according to Freud that what cures is related to an event in early childhood. This event is repressed. Because it is repressed it still operates. By the so-called repetition compulsion the person is bound to this early event in such a way that it does not only operate because of its inertia, because it is there, it has never ceased to work, but also because by the repetition compulsion the person is compelled to repeat the same pattern again and again. If this pattern is brought to consciousness then so to speak its energy is experienced fully, recalled but not only, as Freud soon saw, intellectually but affectively; if that what he called working through happens—then the force of this trauma is broken and the person is free from this repressed influence.

I have grave doubts about the validity of this theory. First I want to tell you of a personal experience that I had when I was a student at the Psychoanalytic Institute in Berlin [from 1928 to 1930]. One day our professors had a long discussion—the students were usually present—how often it happens that a patient really remembers his early traumatic experiences. The majority of them said that was very rare. I was very startled; I was a good, faithful student; I believed in it and suddenly I hear that the very thing which is supposed to be the basis of cure happens so rarely. (Of course the professors had their way out. It was said that the trauma reappears in the transference—but I won’t go into that now.)

The trauma in my opinion is indeed quite rare and it is indeed usually one single experience; it has to be really quite extraordinarily traumatic to have a strong effect. But many things which are said to be traumatic, namely that the father beat the boy once, at the age of three, when he was very furious—for Heaven’s sake that’s not a traumatic event. That’s a perfectly normal event because the influence is really constituted by the whole and continuous and constant atmosphere of the parents, of the family, and not by single events. Only rarely does a single event have such effects as it should have in the case of a real trauma. Today people talk of a real trauma because they missed the train or had some disagreeable experience somewhere. A trauma is by definition an event which goes beyond the charge which the human nervous circuit can tolerate. Since the person cannot tolerate the trauma the trauma has created a deep disturbance. But most traumata in this sense are very rare and what is often called a trauma then is really all those things which happen in life and which have little influence. What has influence is a continuous atmosphere.

A trauma can occur at any age, but the same traumatic event will have a greater effect the earlier it happens. But in that case at the same time the recuperative powers of a child are also greater. It’s really a complicated problem and I’m only warning against the loose use of the word trauma, which is today I find very frequent.

I have seen quite a few people change through the analytic process. I have seen quite a few people not change. But there is also the fact that individuals have changed fundamentally without analysis. Take one simple thing which we have seen in the last two years. There are a number of people who were in their minds hawks about the war in Vietnam, conservative Air Force officers and so on. These people stay in Vietnam, they experience this, they see the senselessness, the injustice, the cruelty, and suddenly there comes something which one in older times would have called a conversion, namely suddenly these people see the world entirely differently and change from people who are in favor of the war to people who risk their lives or their freedom to stop the war. People you would not recognize, you could say that by themselves they are not different people, just by a striking experience, that by their own capacity to respond to it. This capacity is not given to most people because most people have become already too insensitive. But that deep changes do occur analytically and outside of analysis, I think for that we have pretty much evidence, it can be seen again and again.

Freud’s Concept of the Child and My Critique on It

Freud was exceedingly critical as everybody knows who has read a little of Freud, with regard to his specific theme namely of conscious thought in relationship to unconscious motivation. Freud could certainly not be accused of not having been a radical critic of conscious thought. Yet when it comes to the society and its rules and its values, in which he lived, Freud was basically reformist. That is to say he took the same attitude which the liberal middle class took in general: “Basically this is the best of all worlds but it could be improved. It could be improved, maybe we could have longer periods of peace, prisoners could be treated better. The middle class never asked radical questions, for instance the question of criminology. Our whole system of criminology, of punishing, is entirely based on the class structure. They never asked: Is not the criminal primarily a man who is a criminal because this is his way of finding an optimum of satisfaction which he cannot get any other way? I don’t want defend here thieves and robbers. I think there is another dimension which makes thieving and robbing quite unpleasant. But nevertheless our whole system of criminal law is based on the whole structure of society which takes it for granted that the vast majority is—as one says politely—underprivileged, or more honestly, that the minority is overprivileged. This was also the case in the not radical pacifism with the reduction of armies; treaties should ensure peace.

And so psychoanalysis was a movement to make a better life by some reforms in consciousness. But it did not question radically the value and the structure of existing society. With his sympathies Freud was on the side of those who dominated—of the establishment. Well, you can see that in Freud’s attitude to the First World War. He believed until 1917 that the Germans would win. That was the year when most people who had some knowledge had already gotten over their beliefs that the Germans would win. I think of one letter Freud wrote in that time from Hamburg, where he wrote: “I am so happy to be in Hamburg to be able to say: ‘Our soldiers, our victories’ ,” because it was in Germany. Today that really sounds frightful. One has to understand the fantastic effect, the signal effect on the conscience of even the most intelligent and otherwise decent people in the First World War.

You can only understand this if you compare that with Vietnam at its worst. There was almost no opposition to the war in the First World War, and that was one of the tragedies about it. Einstein was one of the few exceptions who refused to endorse the war but the vast majority of German intellectuals or French intellectuals approved of the war. And so Freud’s statement is not that unusual, not that strong as it may sound outside of context but nevertheless it is pretty strong if you consider that it was that late. And it was written by men like Freud who in 1925 in his letter exchanged with Einstein called himself a “pacifist.”

How did Freud see the child? Originally when Freud heard the reports of patients that they had been seduced by their parents, girls by their fathers and boys by their mothers, he believed that these were reports of real events. And for all I know that was probably so. Ferenczi at the end of his life believed the same. But Freud very soon changed his viewpoint and said: No, these were all fantasies. The parents couldn’t, the parents didn’t do that, that wasn’t true. The children of these people then told these stories because they talked about their own fantasies. They wanted, they had this incestuous fantasy of sleeping with father, or with mother, or what the case ever may be. And all these stories are a proof for the incestuous semi-criminal fantasy of the young child.

As you know, this forms the rock bottom of psychoanalytic theory, namely the theory that the child, the infant already is filled with—as Freud called it—polymorphous-perverse fantasies. Freud really meant something pretty bad, that this child is a greedy child who can think of nothing else but how to seduce her father or his mother—and with a wish to sleep with them. That of course slanted the whole psychoanalytic viewpoint in a wrong direction. First of all it led to the theoretical assumption that these incestuous fantasies were an essential part of a child’s equipment. Secondly, that in analyzing a person you must always assume that everything of this kind which a patient reports is due to his own fantasy and needs to be analyzed and does not represent reality.

Basically, Freud’s principle was: the child is “guilty” and not the parents. And this comes through very clearly in Freud’s own case histories. Together with some colleagues, I have shown it in the “Comments on ‘The Case of Little Hans’ ” (E. Fromm, et al., 1966k): The parents, even those who are most obvious, selfish, antagonistic, hostile, are always defended by Freud. The onus, the charge is always on the child. This child, with these incestuous fantasies, and not only incestuous, then of course the child wanted to murder the father, to rape the mother, what, the child was as Freud himself said a “mini-criminal.”

This picture of the child as a “mini-criminal” one must understand dynamically as a consequence of the need to defend parental authority: to defend authority and thus defend the parents. If you go through the life of most children, then indeed you will find that parental love is one of the greatest fictions that have ever been invented. Usually parental love masks—as Laing has said quite correctly—the power the parent wants to have over the child. I don’t mean that there are not exceptions. There are real exceptions, there are some loving parents, I have seen some. But on the whole, if you read the history of the treatment of children by their parents through the ages, and if you see the history of people today, then you will find that indeed the main interest of most parents is control of the children and that what their love is I would call a kind of sadistic level: “I mean your best, and I love you inasmuch as you don’t try to rebel against my control.”

It is a love which you had in the patriarchal society, of the father, of the husband to the wife; children have been property since the days of Rome and are still property. Still a parent has the absolute right to dispose of his child. There are a few attempts in various countries now to change this and to appoint a Court, who could take away the right of a parent to bring up the child if there is some serious reason to believe he is incompetent to bring up the child. This is all so much eyewash because until a court decides that parents are incompetent the judges are parents themselves and are just as incompetent—so how could they decide that? Aside from the rather semi-instinctive and somewhat narcissistic love of mothers for their infants, up to the age when they show the first signs of their own will, from then on the tendency to control and to possess is dominating. For most people, their own sense of power, of control, of having importance, of moving something, of the feeling that they have something to say is by having children. Therefore—what I am saying is no malicious picture of parents, it’s very natural. You see the British upper class by and large didn’t give a damn about their children. The upper class in Europe they had their gouvernantes, their governesses and so on; the mothers didn’t care a hoot about their children, because there were plenty of other satisfactions in life. They were having their love affairs, they were having their parties, they were interested—in England—in their horses and so on.

Children are looked at as possession as long as in people the wish to have is the dominant quality of their character structure. There are people in whom this wish to have is not dominant, but they are very rare today. So it is quite natural; for children are so accustomed to take that for granted because the whole society says that’s natural. The consensus is from the Bible on: The Bible says a rebellious son must be stoned and killed. Well, we don’t do that anymore but what happened to a rebellious son in the 19th century was quite strong.

If you analyze parental love I would say by and large it’s a human faculty, it’s something very understandable, something with which one can feel great empathy and even sorrow and compassion if you like. But nevertheless it is essentially in most people at best benign possessive and a tremendous number of malignant possessive, that is to say beating, hurting—and hurting in the many ways in which people are not even aware that they are hurting, hurting in the sense of dignity: hurting the sense of pride, making the child which is so sensitive and at the same time so intelligent, feel he is a nincompoop, he is stupid, he doesn’t understand. Even some of the most well-meaning people do that, exhibit their children as if they were little clowns in front of other people. Everything under the sun is done to make a child feel inferior, to depress the state of self-confidenc...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Contents
• Editor's Foreword
• I. Factors Leading to Patient's Change in Analytic Treatment
• II. Therapeutic Aspects of Psychoanalysis
• Bibliography
• Index
• A Biography of Erich Fromm
• Copyright