Erich Fromm Quote

As to the contents of the unconscious, no generalization is possible. But one statement can be made; it always represents the whole man, with all his potentialities for darkness and light; it always contains the basis for the different answers which man is capable of giving to the question which existence poses...But man, in any culture, has the potentialities within himself; he is the archaic man, the beast of prey, the cannibal, the idolater, and he is the being with a capacity for reason, for love, for justice. The content of the unconsciousness, then, is neither the good nor the evil, the rational not the irrational; it is both; it is all that is human. The unconsciousness is the whole man minus that part of him that corresponds with society. Consciousness represents the social man, the accidental limitations set by the historical situation into which an individual is thrown. Unconsciousness represents universal man, the whole man, rooted in the cosmos; it represents the plant in him, the animal in him, the spirit in him; it represents his past, down to the dawn of human existence, and it represents his future up to the day when man will have become fully human, and when nature will be humanized as man will be naturalized