In Medias Res (Sep 2024)
Refraction of Religion in the Medium of Psychoanalysis (Hyphens with the Credo of Erich Fromm)
Abstract
When in philosophy, psychoanalytic theory or the Eastern wisdom tradition, one speaks of ‘self-realization’ (or ‘self-actualization’, Maslow 1982), the entity ‘ego’ (from where we usually derive ‘egoism’ and all its negative connotations) is considered as something that, if we want to progress in the „freedom from-freedom to“ dialectics (Fromm 1941), it is necessary to either, philosophicaly speaking, ‘overcome’ or, through the means of available ‘spiritual practices’, annihilate (in the sense of ‘nirvana’; sanskr.: ‘extinction’). In this way, due to the ambiguity of the term ‘ego’ and linguistic poverty caused synonymization with ‘self’, we inevitably end up in a mental contradiction and, as a result, we give up on praxis. In this paper (which is part of a wider research on philosophical anthropology of Erich Fromm), some of the possible exit directions from one of the ‘aporias of the psyche’, are sketched only.
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