To Have Or To Be
Erich Fromm
Jonathan Cape, Great Britain, 1978
We've Had 100 Years Of Psychotherapy - And The World's Getting Worse
James Hillman & Michael Ventura
HarperCollins, USA, 1992
_______________________________________________________________
As the global situation deteriorates in the face of resource depletion, climate change and
ecological destruction it is becoming increasingly apparent that the
roots of our problems may not be primarily scientific, political or
economic but rather psychological and spiritual. Change toward a
sustainable and equitable society will require a paradigm shift in our
conception of the world and
an expansion in our sense of self if our actions on other levels are to
be truly effective. These two books by eminent therapists provide
psychological approaches that offer a diagnosis of the global situation,
reading back from the symptoms and the “presenting issues” to find the
underlying causes and a process that offers a means of healing. To
differing degrees they advise how we might think differently so that
psychological and spiritual inquiry might be fed back as engaged action into the scientific, political and economic spheres.
Erich Fromm's book is an academically rigorous, referenced work aimed at a wide popular audience, and is written in such a way as to communicate easily. His theme in To Have Or To Be is set out concisely by his title, that humanity faces a choice between two modes of existence: that of having (ownership, possession, domination, an experience of the world as a collection of objects) and that of being
(belonging, reciprocity, becoming, a relation to the world as a
communion of subjects). Human society has been pursuing the first mode
up to the point of our current crises; Fromm considers the second mode
to be the necessary base for our salvation from them.
Crucially, however, Fromm also believes that switching modes alone is not enough to produce
effective action. Social change results from a transformation in what
he calls the ‘social character’, a blending of the individual psychical
sphere and the socio-economic structure of which the individual is part.
To alter that socio-economic structure we require new social forms
‘that begin to bridge the gap between what is necessary and what is
possible’. Sadly the more detail Fromm provides as regards action, the
more apparent the historical distance between the period of authorship
and the present becomes. The existing socio-economic structures he
discusses have already gone thorough a series of changes. While the
‘fake socialism’ of the USSR he decries has fallen with that state, the
capitalism he bemoans has proceeded, as he feared, to even greater
triumph in dictating the direction of the world. Also, when he espouses
the ‘energizing attraction of a new vision’ he states it with the caveat
that the chances of a change in the mode of existence of the global
population ‘remain slim’. Three decades on from its initial publication I
found it difficult not to
assume the disempowering stance that those slim chances will have
attenuated to extreme emaciation, if not impossibility across the
intervening years.
James Hillman and Michael Ventura's book We've Had 100 Years Of Psychotherapy - And The World's Getting Worse
plays off the interaction of two voices - the learned sagacity of
Hillman and the New Journalism of Ventura. The resulting tone is
populist, informal, conversational and determinedly in your face, an
instant contrast to the structured prose of Fromm. The statement late in
Fromm's book that ‘[p]urely psychological change... has been completely
ineffective’ is however at the core of the Hillman/Ventura dialogues.
In fact, as their title reveals, their book exhibits anxiety about the
solipsism of the current therapeutic mode, of a psychological inquiry
that only looks inward not outward at a worsening world. The authors
counsel that we have become a little too obsessed, possessed
even, by “our” problems. Hillman pointedly notes that ‘[p]ersonal
growth doesn't automatically lead to political results’. He also poses a
question to Ventura: ‘could analysis have new fantasies of itself, so
that the consulting room is a cell in which revolution is prepared?’
Ventura
relates an exchange with his son about agency in the world in the face
of ‘ecological disaster’ and the authors offer him and us a look at the
worst and a challenge in how to act. The purpose of concerned souls,
they propose, is found in ‘trying to be a wide-awake human during a Dark
Age and keeping alive what you think is beautiful and important’. They
suggest these might be ‘ideas, art, knowledge, skills, or just plain old
fragile love, how we treat people, how we help people’. This is a call
to build resilience in what we cherish, to maintain what is valuable in
being human, and to support hope. Hillman and Ventura’s choice to share
authorship and to present their ideas in this discursive form provides a
literal example of dialogic relating and a conversation I certainly
felt we were invited to join.
What
both books propose is an expansion of our sense of self, of soul -
beyond the skin of the individual to include the flesh of the world, the
world soul, anima mundi. This transpersonal sense of self would end
divisions, dualisms such as man/nature or world/self and extend our
essential concerns across the entire ecosphere. Hillman writes ‘I would
rather define self as the interiorization of community’
that is: include within the sense of self that which has previously been
considered outside self. This is where the psychological gains a
spiritual dimension, as this expanded non-dual conception is akin to the
‘you are that’ of Vedanta or Martin Buber’s call for the boundless
relationship of an I-Thou rather than an I-It attitude towards the
world. But the authors of both books stress the necessity of turning
insights outwards; the psychical and the spiritual must drive action in
and with the world. Effecting global change cannot be programmatic,
domineering - the problems we face cannot be solved at the same level we
were at when we created them. Our solutions must be creative,
participatory and dialogic. In facing the challenges ahead it is clear
that our heads and hearts must share the task of our hands, we need a
praxis bold as love.
[Originally published on the Yourmindfire blog: http://yourmindfire.blogspot.com/2008/01/imagine-no-possessions.html]
precede my declaration that I felt pretty down with most of the rest of
its vision. Ignoring the conceit of the Pacific North West seceding
from the USA, much of the novel seemed to present a realistic vision of a future society.
