Erich Fromm.
Fromm is the first writer to introduce me into the
world of psychoanalysis. His greatest book, for me anyway, is "Escape
from the freedom". It pointed me to understand the relationship
between personal psyche and the socioeconomic environment. It remember
reading the Thai version of it when I was in the 8th grade, summing
up to the mad attempt that I've wrote, at the end of 8th grade for
my sciences class, a work that try to combine liberty, pyschoanalysis,
Marx and modern physics (after reading Capra and Hawking, of course)
in a hope to reconcile the problem of human alienation and its loney
position in the universe.
It put me to understand that actually the feeling
I was starting to have during the 7th grade was actually alienation.
I've learned the humanistic and logical value of studying history
in order to yield psychological and socioeconomical insight. It is
probably when I've approached Marx in a much more broader view than
pure economics. In an essence, Fromm illustrated, in my view, how
historical aspect of "freedom and responsibility" and how
it effects the psychology of human beings. That there are great difficulties
in truely accept the higher degree of freedom due to the consequences
of responsibilities.
Hence, there are people who are always escape freedom
in many forms such as sadistic, masochistic and machine-like acceptance.
This taught me some lessons that freedom is a difficult thing to have
and even harder to truely live with it responsibly. This prevents
me from being an anarchist due to my extreme liberal position. It
helps me understand modern day mass psyche, why they tends to believe
mass propaganda from product-branding to Nazi german.
It become clear to me why some of my friends always
display some psychologically sadistic or mashochistic trend (that
they must be in control of or being controlled by the others). It
has provided the best ground for me to study Freud by approaching
first the nature of defend mechanism rather than his sexual theory,
which, I've turned to Jung for the more deeper roots of human psyche.
His works contributed greatly to my strong attitude
towards the attainment of freedom. It helps me to realize that it
is difficult and must be thought of throughly in order to help people
progress in to the responsible state of freedom. I've always keep
that in mind on my journey to construct the theory and the world based
the idea of open society.
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