Erich Fromm on: Identity
I want to stress only the
concept that identity is the experience which permits a person to say
legitimately “I” – “I” as an organizing active center of the structure of all my
actual and potential activities, but it does not exist in the state of
passiveness and half-awakeness, a state in which
people are sufficiently awake to go about their business but not awake enough
to sense the “I” as the active center within themselves.
This concept of “I” is different from the concept of ego.
The experience of my “ego” is the experience of myself
as a thing, of the body I have, the memory I have – the money, the house, the
social position, the power, the children, the problems I have. I look at myself
as a thing and my social role is another attribute of thingness.
Many people easily confuse the identity of ego with the identity of “I” or Self. The difference is fundamental and unmistakable.
The experience of “ego”,
and of ego-identity, is based on the concept of having. I have “me” as I have all other
things which this “me” owns. Identity of “I” or self refers to the category of
being and not having. I am “I” only to the extent to which I am alive,
interested, related, active, and to which I have achieved an
integration between my appearance – to others and /or to myself – and
the core of my personality. The identity crisis of our times is based
essentially on the increasing alienation and reification of man, and it can be
solved only to the extent to which man comes to life again, becomes active
again. There are no psychological shortcuts to the solution to the identity
crisis except the fundamental transformation of alienated man into living man.
The ego, static and unmoved, relates to the world in terms
of having objects, while the self is related to the world in the process of
participation. The person who experiences himself as an ego and whose sense of
identity is that of ego-identity naturally wants to
protect this thing – him, his body, memory, property, and so on, but also his
opinions and emotional investments which have become part of his ego. He is
constantly on the defensive against anyone or any experience which could
disturb the solidity of his mummified existence. In contrast, the person who
experiences himself not as having but as being permits himself to be
vulnerable. Nothing belongs to him except that he is by being alive.
This discussion of “humane experiences” would remain utterly
incomplete without making explicit the phenomenon which implies the concepts
discussed here: transcendence. Transcendence is customarily used in a
religious concept and it refers to transcending the human dimension in order to
arrive at the experience of the divine. Such definition of transcendence makes
good sense in a theistic system; from a non theistic standpoint it can be said
that the concept of God was a poetic symbol for the act of leaving the
prison of one’s ego and achieving the freedom of openness and relatedness to
the world. If we speak of transcendence in a non theological sense, there
is no need for the concept of God. However, the psychological reality is the
same. The basic for love, tenderness, compassion, interest, responsibility,
and identity is precisely that of being versus having, and that means
transcending the ego. It means letting go of one’s ego, letting go of one’s
greed, making oneself empty in order to fill oneself, making oneself poor in
order to be rich.
This discussion of “humane experiences” culminates in the
statement that freedom is a quality of being fully humane. Inasmuch as
we transcend the realm of the physical survival and inasmuch as we are not
driven by fear, impotence, narcissism, dependency, etc., we transcend
compulsion. Love, tenderness, reason, interest, integrity and identity –
they all are the children of freedom.
(Erich Fromm:
The revolution of hope, pg 86-90)