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.

Keywords

• erich fromm
• credo
• psychic topography
• ego
• individual self