Anonymous wrote:
Erich Fromm's "Escape from Freedom" (aka "Fear of Freedom") is a classic psychological work describing the anxiety that "free" people who face a multitude of choices with uncertain outcomes can feel.
**************************************************************** I’m not much interested in how individuals get off in the BSDM scene. However, I do think that more needs to be said about Fromm’s views on freedom, especially as it relates to the question of accepting d/s roles in general. According to my reading of Fromm’s research, many people are brought up, socialized, even spanked if you will, to think of their freedom as coming from submission, giving over their freedom to authority, as opposed to appropriating it, owning it as their own power. As this process begins at birth with parental control within class divided, patriarchal and bureaucratically accepted authoritarian structures, character itself is forged and the instinct to be free is turned upside down, subsumed so to speak under layers of domination. In an Orwellian twist, on the grand scale of contemporary society, freedom becomes wage-slavery i.e. acceptance of the conservative motto: “a fair day’s work for a fair day’s wage.”
But enough of my thoughts.
Best, Mike B)
>From “Illuminations” by Douglas Kellner:
For Fromm, natural instincts are part of the base (Unterbau) of society, and he believes that our understanding of human behavior and social processes will be enriched by reciprocal knowledge of how society molds and adapts instincts to its structures, and how human beings shape and change their environments to meet their needs. "In certain fundamental respects, the instinctual apparatus itself is a biological given; but it is highly modifiable. The role of primary formative factors goes to the economic conditions. The family is the essential medium through which the economic situation exerts its formative influence on the individual's psyche. The task of social psychology is to explain the shared, socially relevant, psychic attitudes and ideologies -- and their unconscious roots in particular -- in terms of the influence of economic conditions on libido strivings" (Fromm {1932a} 1970, p. 149).
Fromm also suggests that psychoanalysis can help explain how the socio-economic interests and structures are transformed into ideologies, as well as how ideologies shape and influence human thought and behavior. Such a merger of Marx and Freud will immeasurably enrich materialist social theory, in Fromm's view, by providing analysis of the mediations through which psyche and society interact and reciprocally shape each other. Every society, he claims, has its own libidinal structure and its processes whereby authority is reproduced in human thought and behavior. An analytical social psychology must thus be deeply empirical to explain how domination and submission take place in specific societies in order to provide understanding of how social and psychological change is possible.
In an essay from the same period, "Psychoanalytic Characterology and Its Relevance for Social Psychology," Fromm applies his analytic social psychology to an investigation of how bourgeois society forms dominant character types which reproduce social structure and submit to social authority. A theory of social character would be central to Fromm's work, though in this essay he assumes in rather orthodox Freudian fashion that the "general basis of psychoanalytic characterology is to view certain character traits as sublimations or reaction formations of certain instinctual drives that are sexual in nature" (Fromm {1932b} 1970, pp. 164-165). Fromm then discusses Freud's theory of oral, anal, and genital characters, and how specific social structures produce and reward certain types of character traits while eliminating others. In particular, drawing on Werner Sombart's study of the "bourgeois" and on Benjamin Franklin's diaries, Fromm discusses how bourgeois society produced a character structure in which duty, parsimoniousness, discipline, thrift, and so on became dominant traits of the bourgeois character structure while love, sensual pleasure, charity, and kindness were devalued. full: http://www.uta.edu/english/dab/illuminations/kell8.html
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Isaac Newton
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