As Asami read "the Sane Sosiety" by Erich Fromm she thought that nature and its balance are truly amazing.
Right now she was traveling through Nathan's and Gabriel's story once more.
And just recently they have met Ledger who spoke of Essence.
And Asami was willing to learn more about it, the earth, nature and human relatedness to it. She is learning it from Gabriel and Nathan.
And at this very time in her journey she comes across Fromm's work, and it lets her understand what what the story may teach her better.
What a coincidence. Everything turns out to happen the best possible (probably) way.
How did she know about Fromm for a start?
Ritsuka read his works. He inspired her to read books on psycoligy.
Yuko loved to say that nothing is accidential. Asami never doubted her words.
"The problem of man's existence is unique in the whole of nature: he has fallen out of nature, as it were, and is still in it. He is partly devine, partly animal, partly infinite, partly finite.
The necessity to find ever-new solutions for the contradictions in his existence,
to find ever-higher forms of unity with nature, his fellowmen and himself
is the source of all psychic forces which motivate man,
of all his passions, affects and anxieties."
Fromm considers that himan nature consists on the on side of biological endowment, which provide for biological drives, and on the other side, of non-biological capacities which are self-awareness, reason and imagination. The tension between the two results in "human condition".
Fromm finds 5 essential needs of man:
1) Relatedness
with other living beings
(a consequence of being "torn away from the primary union with nature)
2) Creativeness vs. destructiveness
"Being endowed with reason and imagination, man cannot be content with the passive role of the creature."
The need to assert himself, transcendence, can take the form of either creativity or destructiveness.
"Creation and destruction, love and hate, are both answeres to the same need for transcendence, and the will to destroy must rise when the will to create cannot be satisfied."
3) Rootedness
A yearning for union - a state of blissful symbiosis with family, mother, nature.
While its vital for its nurturing qualities it should be kept in check as it can lead away from our true vocation as human beings and lure us back to a state of nature.
4) Sense of identity - individuality vs. herd conformity
5) The need for orientation and devotion - reason vs. irrationality
2 components:
a need to be able to make sense of the world in a more than purely intellectual way (devotion)
preference for "objectivity", understanding which corresponds with reality
"Mental health is characterized
by the ability to love and create,
by the emergence from regressful symbiosis with nature (mother's body, overwhelming protection) to clan and soil,
by a sense of identity based on one's experience of self as the subject and agent of one's powers,
by the grasp of reality inside and outside ourselves, that is, by the development of objectivity and reason."
One's ability to achive mental health, and the way in which one does so, depends to a small extent on individual factors, but is largely a question of what society makes possible.
***
How funny.
Asami could glimpse episodes of Nathan's life reflected in every statement.