Art of Being by Erich Fromm

Author:Erich Fromm [Fromm, Erich]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-1-4804-0196-9
Publisher: Open Road Media
Published: 2013-01-16T21:31:00+00:00

13. Methods of Self-Analysis

It would require a book in itself to write in full about how to learn to analyze oneself. Hence I must restrain myself here to a few simple suggestions.

Before one can even begin, one must have learned to be still, to sit relaxed, and to concentrate. When these first conditions are achieved—at least to some degree—one can proceed in different ways that by no means exclude each other.

(1) One may try to remember the thoughts that were intruding while one tried to be still, and then “feel one’s way into them” with the aim of seeing whether they have any connection, and what it might be. Or one may proceed by observing certain symptoms such as feeling tired (in spite of sufficient sleep), or depressed, or angry, and then “feel around” what it was a reaction to and what was the unconscious experience behind the manifest feeling.

I intentionally do not say “to think,” because one does not arrive at an answer by theoretical thought; at best, one arrives at a theoretical speculation. What I mean by “feeling around” is an imaginative “tasting” of various possible feelings until, if one has succeeded, a certain realization appears with clarity as being the root of the conscious experience of, say, tiredness. An example: One tries to imagine previous instances of such tiredness and whether, later on, one became aware of the cause. One imagines several possibilities that could be at the bottom of the tiredness, such as a difficult task one tried to postpone instead of facing the difficulty, an ambivalent feeling toward a friend or a loved person, a criticism that might have hurt one’s narcissism to the extent of causing a slight depression, a meeting with a person in which one pretended a friendliness that was not genuine.

A more complex example is the following: A man has fallen in love with a girl. Suddenly, after some months, he feels tired, depressed, listless. He might try to find all sorts of rationalizing explanations, such as that his work is not going well (which may indeed be caused by the same factor that causes the tiredness) or that he is disappointed and saddened by political developments. Or he may acquire a severe cold and thus find a satisfactory answer. But if he is sensitive toward his own feelings, he may observe that recently he has tended to find fault in little things with the girlfriend, that he had a dream in which she had an ugly face and cheated on him. Or he may notice that while he was always very eager to see her, he has now found reasons that make it necessary to postpone planned visits. These and many other little signs may indicate to him that something is wrong in his relationship with her. If he concentrates on this feeling, it suddenly may dawn on him that his picture of her has changed, that in the first blossoming of his erotic and sexual attraction to her he

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