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Psychoanalysis is essentially a theory of unconscious strivings, of resistance, of falsification of reality according to one's subjective needs and expectations.

Erich Fromm

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Erich Fromm
Age: 79 †
Born: 1900
Born: March 23
Died: 1980
Died: March 18
Philosopher
Psychoanalyst
Psychologist
Sociologist
University Teacher
Writer
Frankfurt/Main
Expectations
Falsification
Theory
Psychoanalysis
Reality
Subjective
Needs
Essentially
Unconscious
Resistance
According
Strive
Strivings

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The experience of separateness arouses anxiety it is, indeed, the source of all anxiety.
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Man's biological weakness is the condition of human culture.
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[Sigmund ] Freud assumes that every dream represents the satisfaction of adesire and in the last analysis, of a sexual desire that has its roots in infancy.
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If it is true, as I have tried to show, that love is the only sane and satisfactory answer to the problem of human existence, then any society which excludes, relatively, the development of love, must in the long run perish of its own contradiction with the basic necessities of human nature.
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Man is the only animal for whom his own existence is a problem which he has to solve.
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Jewish legend says that the world rests on 36 just men: only thirty six, but their moral strength is immense.
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Actually, if you take the average American, and studies have shown that, he is really concerned only with private affairs that is to say, with his health, his money and family affairs.
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There is only one reality: the act of feeling ourselves in the process of making choices.
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The state of sleep is a state of freedom in which man is not occupied with the manipulation of the outside world.
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We are terribly imaginative, as far as technique in science is concerned. As far as changes in social arrangements are concerned, we lack utterly in imagination.
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A society whose principles are acquisition, profit, and property produces a social character oriented around having, and once the dominant pattern is established, nobody wants to be an outsider, or indeed an outcast in order to avoid this risk everybody adapts to the majority, who have in common only their mutual antagonism.
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I would say our social relationships are relatively shallow. We are actually afraid to be intimate, with people - many people even with their wives and husbands.
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Politics and religious leaders [are hindered] by their egotism.
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Man can be conditioned to behave in almost every desired way but only almost.
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The lust for power is not rooted in strength but in weakness.
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While we teach knowledge, we are losing that teaching which is the most important one for human development: the teaching which can only be given by the simple presence of a mature, loving person.
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Not he who has much is rich, but he who gives much.
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It is essential... that discipline should not be practised like a rule imposed on oneself from the outside, but that it becomes an expression of one's own will that it is felt as pleasant, and that one slowly accustoms oneself to a kind of behaviour which one would eventually miss, if one stopped practising it.
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Thus, the ultimate choice for a man, inasmuch as he is driven to transcend himself, is to create or to destroy, to love or to hate.
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