Book
The Heart of Man: Its Genius for Good and Evil
What it shows
- 1964
Erich Fromm introduced Biophilia
Fromm coined biophilia in The Heart of Man (1964) for the love of life that he held to be the primary orientation of a healthy person, two decades before the biologist E. O. Wilson used the same word in a different sense.
- 1964
Erich Fromm introduced Necrophilous character
In The Heart of Man (1964) Fromm took the word necrophilia from its sexual sense to name a character orientation drawn to death, decay and the mechanical, and developed it further in The Anatomy of Human Destructiveness (1973).
- 1964
Erich Fromm introduced Malignant narcissism
Fromm distinguished benign from malignant narcissism in The Heart of Man (1964), calling malignant the narcissism whose object is what a person has or is rather than what they produce, and placing it with necrophilia and incestuous symbiosis in the syndrome of decay; Otto Kernberg later took up the phrase for a clinical syndrome.
- 1964
Erich Fromm developed Narcissism
Fromm extended Freud's concept of narcissism from the individual to the group, describing a social narcissism invested in nation, race or creed that can feed collective violence.
Biophilia opposes Necrophilous character
Fromm presented love of life and love of death as the two basic and opposed orientations, mixed in most people in varying proportions.