Publication of fromm-online.org. Property of the Literary Estate of Erich Fromm. For personal use only. Any kind of re-publication and commercial use requires written permission from the copyright holders. Veröffentlicht auf fromm-online.org. Eigentum des Literary Estate of Erich Fromm. Nutzung nur für persönliche Zwecke. Jede Wiederveröffentlichung und kommerzielle Nutzung bedarf der schriftlichen Erlaubnis der Rechteinhaber.
1972c-eng
The Erich Fromm Theory of Aggression Erich Fromm (1972c-eng) „The Erich Fromm Theory of Aggression” was written to introduce in Fromm’s book The Anatomy of Human Destructiveness and was first published in: The New York Times Magazine, New York (27. 2. 1972), pp. 14-15, 74, 76, 80-81, 84 and 86. – Numbers in {brackets} indicate the next page in the first English publication. Copyright © 1972 by Erich Fromm; Copyright © 2023 by The Literary Estate of Erich Fromm; E-Mail: fromm-estate[at-symbol]fromm-online.com.
What with international and civil wars, the increasing use of torture, rising violence in the cities and the threat of nuclear war, no explanation is needed for the lively current theoretical interest in the problem of human violence and aggression. In fact, if there is a question it is why it took such along tine for aggression to be recognized as a major psychological problem. Freud alone, in the early nineteen-twenties, became so impressed with the crucial role of human aggression (perhaps as a consequence of the first World War), that he undertook a radical revision of his whole theory. He substituted for the polarity of the two governing passions--sexuality and self-preservation--a new polarity: the life instinct (eros, including sexuality) and the death instinct, the drive for destruction of oneself or of others. The change failed to impress the public, and instead, Freud’s increasing popularity was largely based on his theory of sex; in the period of conspicuous consumption, sexual consumption, too, became respectable. But forty years later, another author, Konrad Lorenz, the eminent student of animal behavior („ethology“), succeeded where Freud had failed. In his book On Aggression, first published in German in 1963 and translated into English in 1966, he postulated a hypothesis similar to Freud’s in its results--that aggression is a force inherent in the human organism--but different in its theoretical premises. Man, Lorenz argued, like his animal ancestors, is motivated by a phylogenetically programmed, 1 spontaneously flowing spring of aggression, situated in certain areas of his brain; this aggression, if not expressed, accumulates and eventually explodes. In this „hydraulic“ mechanism of aggression the organism 1 That is, an innate programming, based on the evolution of the species. page/Seite 1 of/von 12