Abstract: . . .  the productiveness of per- sons with an I-am-me orientation by psychotherapists, social workers, and educators is the phasing out of auxiliary egos, auxiliary superegos, and auxil- iary ego ideals. This process can only be carried out gradually and should not Page 16 16 overtax the persons involved, yet a clear and challenging concept must be proposed, with the goal that I-am-me oriented persons themselves assume responsibility for their strong and weak egos, their personal ideals, and the accepted norms as well as discontinue utilizing the responsibility of the therapist, the social worker, or educator and exercising control over these. The last word belongs to Erich Fromm: „Productiveness is man's ability to use his powers and to realize the potentialities inherent in him .“ (E. Fromm, Man for Him- self , p. 84) Copyright © 2006 by Dr. Rainer Funk, Ursrainer Ring 24, D-72076 Tübingen Tel. 07071-600004, Fax -600049; E-Mail: frommfunk[at-symbol] aol.com Translated from German by Dr. Jo Van Vliet, Tübingen  . . .
. . .  ability, comparable to the 8 For a thorough discussion of this problem see R. Funk, „Was heißt 'productive Orientierung' bei Erich Fromm?“ in Fromm Forum (German edition), Tuebingen (privately published) 7(2003), pp.14- 27. 9 See R. Funk, Ich und Wir , pp. 221-225. Page 15 15 priest who condemns sex in movies in order to allow a preoccupation with sexual fantasies. The goal is thus to be able to deal with „made“ ability in such a way that the human being does not experience himself or herself as powerless when- ever it is unavailable. To achieve this goal a number of painful steps toward the strengthening of the productive orientation are imperative. To strengthen the productive orientation of a human being with a postmodern mindset means specifically : - To encourage and promote everything that stimulates and leads to the utiliza- tion of individual thought, individual feeling, and acting enabled by individual competencies, and to avoid everything that hinders or attempts to replace the awareness of individual human powers. - Productiveness means above all to be open to the aspects of one's own ex- perience of the ego denied by the I-am-me orientation: one's own limited- ness, one's own helplessness, one's own failure, one's own weakness, one's own experience of powerlessness, one's own conflictual and aggressive ten- dencies, one's own depressiveness and insensitivity. - In order to give the productive orientation a chance it is not, however, suffi- cient to be open to these . . .
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