Mechanisms of escape

In Escape from Freedom (1941), the ways in which a person freed from the primary ties of traditional society, and left isolated and powerless, gives up the independence of the self in order to be rid of that aloneness. Fromm described three: authoritarianism, which fuses the self with someone or something outside it by submitting or dominating; destructiveness, which does away with the world that threatens; and automaton conformity, in which a person becomes exactly what the culture expects and so ceases to feel separate. He set against them positive freedom, the spontaneous activity of love and work.