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view that the energy of narcissism can be directed to all humanity. E. Fromm
operates with the term "identity" in the process of considering a holistic personality
develpment. In E. Fromm’s view, the identity crisis is caused by a modern society,
impersonal and dehumanized, whose members turned into impersonal instruments

in the hands of a bureaucratic machine. In order to overcome the crisis, it is
necessary to create conditions for an individual initiative in daily life, for personal
potential realization of every person. This is the core principle of Fromm’s

humanistic ethics.
It is impossible to understand identity in scientific works of Fromm without
studying his concept of needs. According to Fromm, the most powerful personality

motivation is the conflict between two aspirations: freedom and security. In turn,
they determine the very existence of five existential needs: a need for establishing
relationships, overcoming obstacles, for rooting, for identity, for a system of views

and loyalty.
E. Fromm argued that every person has an internal need for identity within
oneself – an identity through which he/she feels his/her difference from others and
realizes who he/she really is. Fromm emphasizes that individuals with a clear

awareness of their individuality show a higher personal efficiency than people with
a conformal mode of thinking and behavior that copy others’ behavior and can not

achieve a true sense of identity.
In parallel with E. Erickson, E. Fromm derives the key characteristic of
personal identity, "man himself appears to us as a being that always changes as a
process that has no end". At the same time, the scientist warns against socially

determined depersonalization and loss of identity, "An individual lives in a society
that supplies ready patterns of thinking and behavior; these stereotypes create an
illusion of a life meaning". Fromm understands the identity of a person as a

structural unit of her integrity, and emphasizes that the notion of integrity includes
the notion of identity.
The crisis of identity is seen by Fromm as a crisis of modern society, which

manifests itself in the fact that "the members of this society have become faceless
instruments whose sense of identity is based on participation in the activities of
corporations or other gigantic bureaucratic organizations. There, where there is no

authentic personality, there can be no sense of identity.
In the work "Escape from Liberty" Fromm points to the mechanism of
forming the identity of a child by losing identification with other people, separating
from them. According to Fromm, the development of an individual identity

correlates with individualization. Scientists point to the dialectical nature of the
process of individualization, which is accompanied by the growth of individual
freedom, the ability to express the essence, the development and strengthening of a

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