Man for Himself

ONE of the chief complaints against psychoanalysis has been that it creates a moral vacuum. Now, a practicing analyst seeks to fill that vacuum with an ethical system built on psychoanalytic foundations. Dr. Fromm rejects alike Freud’s amoralism and codes stemming from an authority other than man himself (for example, institutional religion). Good is the fulfillment of man’s potentialities. Virtue and vice are defined in terms of “responsibility” and “irresponsibility” toward one’s own existence. Conscience is the judge of “our success or failure in the art of living.” All this adds up to the familiar doctrine of “self-realization,” but substantially fortified by a scientific definition — that furnished by the psychoanalytic picture of human nature — of what it is that demands to be realized.