The Sane Society

LibraryThing Review

Not my favorite of Fromm's -- That honor is still reserved for the three-way tie of Escape from Freedom, The Art of Loving, and Marx's Concept of Man -- but he still impresses with his daunting ... Read full review

I read this book as a young man, and was impressed with the depth and perception of the material. Later, in mid life, when I was suffering from a bout of home-sickness "an overwhelming sadness"(I had migrated from Perth, Australia, to the USA, in 1962), I recalled this section of the book, and it (along with appeals to other literature*) gave me the strength to carry on. Go to page 68-69 of this on-line bbok to see this section, where Fromm describes the healthy individual, who is independent from "nature, mother, clan"
* These were Maslow, "Motivation and Personality", and a poem by Gerard Manley Hopkins, "Spring and Fall. to a young child", the latter being more relevant to the discussion of how to escape the oppressive sadness of homesickness, as follows: the poet describes the root of Margaret's sadness over the transient nature of the leaves: with great insight he ends this poem with:
"It ís the blight man was born for,
It is Margaret you mourn for"
I hypothesized that if I accepted ny own mortality, then other, lesser losses wouldn't worry me so much. After imagining my own death...funeral, etc.,and shedding real tears over this, I found that this hypothesis was right..for me.