The Emergence of the Individual and the Ambiguity of Freedom Summary and Analysis

In the second chapter, Fromm takes a psychoanalytic look at the development of the idea of individuality. Early man did not imagine himself as separate from nature, Fromm claims, and only gradually he began to thin of himself as being somehow separate from nature and other men. The process of "individuation" took place throughout the medieval period and peaked after the time of the Reformation, he claims.

Fromm likens this process to that which takes place in an individual, who as an infant and child has no real concept of themselves as an individual. Children are connected to their parents by "primary ties" that eventually are cut as the child gains a stronger sense of its own individuality. This growing sense of individuality...