Psychoanalysis and Religion by Erich Fromm

Author:Erich Fromm [Fromm, Erich]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-1-4804-0203-4
Publisher: Open Road Media
Published: 2013-02-19T21:43:00+00:00

IV The Psychoanalyst as “Physician of the Soul”

There are today various schools of psychoanalysis ranging from the more or less strict adherents to Freud’s theory to the “revisionists” who differ among themselves in the degree to which they have changed Freud’s concepts.26 For our purpose, however, these differences are much less important than the difference between that psychoanalysis which aims primarily at social adjustment and psychoanalysis which aims at the “cure of the soul.”27

In the beginning of its development psychoanalysis was a branch of medicine and its aim was to cure sickness. The patients coming to the psychoanalyst suffered from symptoms which interfered with their functioning in everyday life; such symptoms were expressed in ritualistic compulsions, obsessional thoughts, phobias, paranoid thought systems, and so on. The only difference between these patients and those who went to a regular physician was that the causes of their symptoms were to be found not in the body but in the psyche, and the therapy was therefore concerned not with somatic but with psychic phenomena. But the aim of the psychoanalytic therapy was not different from the therapeutic aim in medicine: the removal of the symptom. If the patient was freed from psychogenic vomiting or coughing, from his compulsive acts or obsessive thoughts, he was considered cured.

In the course of his work Freud and his collaborators became increasingly aware that the symptom was only the most conspicuous and, as it were, dramatic expression of the neurotic disturbance, and that in order to achieve lasting and not merely symptomatic relief one must analyze the person’s character and help the patient in the process of character reorientation. This development was furthered by a new trend among patients. Many people who came to psychoanalysts were not sick in the traditional sense of the word and had none of the overt symptoms mentioned above. They were not insane either. They often were not considered sick by their relatives and friend, and yet they suffered from “difficulties in living”—to use Harry Stack Sullivan’s formulation of the psychiatric problem—which led them to seek help from a psychoanalyst. Such difficulties in living were of course nothing new. There have always been people who feel insecure or inferior, who cannot find happiness in their marriages, who have difficulties in accomplishing or enjoying their work, who are inordinately afraid of other people, and so on. They might have sought help from a priest, a friend, a philosopher—or “just lived” with their troubles without asking for help of any specific kind. What was new was the fact that Freud and his school offered for the first time a comprehensive theory of character, an explanation for the difficulties in living in so far as these are rooted in the character structure, and a hope for change. Thus, psychoanalysis shifted its emphasis more and more from therapy of the neurotic symptoms to therapy of difficulties in living rooted in the neurotic character.

While it is relatively simple to decide what the therapeutic aim is in cases of

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