ABSTRACT
Erich Fromm paves us a remarkably insightful path toward cultural edification in his 1955 work, The Sane Society, by arguing that culture itself can become symptomatic of serious pathological disorder, not perhaps within relativist contexts but certainly if analysed in concordance with its capability to meet human fundamental needs. One of the greatest mistakes of contemporary psychological practice is, according to Fromm, the supposition that cultural deviancy necessarily implies a sickness of the individual rather than of the society. If the values and practices of culture oppose the conditions of human natural state of being, then from an objective standpoint they institutionalize neuroticism; adherence to them can therefore, as a matter of consequence, only conventionalize neuroticism within the individual. To follow reason would instead be to propose that social unrest in general evidences a semi-logical reaction – resistance – to social variables oppressive to the human condition.
