Erich Fromm

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Erich Fromm (1900-1980) achieved international fame for his writings and lectures in the fields of psychoanalysis, psychology, and social philosophy. He wrote extensively on a variety of topics ranging from sociology, anthropology, and ethics to religion, politics, and mythology.

Erich Fromm was born in Frankfurt am Main, Germany, on March 23, 1900, and died in Muralto, Switzerland, on March 18, 1980. He grew up in a devout Jewish family, but abandoned religious orthodoxy early in life when he became convinced that religion was a source of division of the human race. His academic career was impressive. He studied at the Universities of Frankfurt and Munich and received his Ph.D. from the University of Heidelberg. Later, he obtained psychoanalytic training at the prestigious Psychoanalytic Institute of Berlin under the leadership of such prominent Freudian analysts as Hanns Sachs and Theodor Reik. After pursuing a brief career as a psychoanalyst he left Nazi Germany in 1934 and settled permanently in the United States. Fromm taught in various universities such as Bennington College, Columbia, Yale, New School for Social Research, Michigan State, and the Universidad Autónoma de México. In 1962 he became professor of psychiatry at New York University.

Fromm wrote more than 20 books. Some of them became popular bestsellers: Escape from Freedom (1942); Man for Himself (1947); Psychoanalysis and Religion (1950); The Forgotten Language (1951); The Sane Society (1955); The Art of Loving (1956); Marx's Concept of Man (1961); Beyond the Chains of Illusion: My Encounter with Marx and Freud (1962); The Dogma of Christ, and Other Essays on Religion, Psychology and Culture (1963); Zen Buddhism and Psychoanalysis (1960); The Life and Work of Sigmund Freud (1963); The Heart of Man (1964); Social Character in a Mexican Village (1970); The Revolution of Hope (1968); The Crisis of Psychoanalysis (1970); and The Anatomy of Human Destructiveness (1973).

A sincere and profound humanism permeates all of Fromm's writings. He was genuinely concerned with the reality of human existence and the full unfolding of man's potentialities. He searched for the essence of man, the meaning of life, and the nature of individual alienation in the modern technological world. Deeply moved by the destruction and the suffering caused by two world wars, Fromm wrote extensively on the threats of technology and the insanity of the arms race. Faith in the future of man and the unity of humanity was the base of his humanistic vision.

Freud and Marx were the most decisive influences on Fromm's thinking. Originally Freudian in his intellectual orientation and clinical practice, he gradually grew more distant from Freudian therapeutic principles and later became a major critic of Freud. Along with Karen Horney, Harry Sullivan, and Karl Jung, Fromm was considered a Freudian revisionist and the founder of the neo-Freudian school. He rejected Freud's libido theory, the Oedipus complex, and the instincts of life and death as universally constant in the human species. Instead, he insisted on cultural variations and the influence of the larger context of history and social conditions upon the character of the individual. The concept of the unconscious and the dynamic conception of character were considered to be Freud's major achievements. The task of analytical social psychology, Fromm wrote, is that of understanding unconscious human behavior as the effect of the socio-economic structure of society on basic human psychic drives. Likewise, the character of the individual is rooted in the libidinal structure of society, understood as a combination of basic human drives and social forces. In the last analysis, Fromm rejected Freudian theory as authoritarian, repressive, and culturally narrow, enabling the individual to overcome the conflict between society and personal gratification and accept bourgeois norms.

In contrast, Fromm's admiration for Marx was complete. He considered Marx a sincere humanist who sought an end to human alienation and the full development of the individual as the precondition for the full development of society (Marx's Concept of Man). Marx's emphasis on the socio-economic base of society as a major determinant of human behavior was accepted as a given by Fromm. Marxism, though, needed to be completed by a dynamic and critical psychology - that is, a psychology which explained the evolution of psychic forces in terms of an interaction between man's needs and the socio-historical reality in which he lives (The Crisis of Psychoanalysis). Fromm never renounced his project of merging psycho-analysis and Marxism. This was his major work as a member of the Frankfurt School (The Institute for Social Research), a school committed to Critical Theory, a critique of the repressive character of bourgeois society. Psychological theory, he wrote, can demonstrate that the economic base of a society produces the social character, and that the social character produces ideas and ideologies which fit it and are nourished by it. Ideas, once created, also influence the social character and, indirectly, the socio-economic structure of society (Socialist Humanism).

In his popular book Escape from Freedom Fromm analyzed the existential condition of man. The source of man's aggressiveness, the human instinct of destructiveness, neurosis, sadism, and masochism were not viewed as sexually derived behavior, but as attempts to overcome alienation and powerlessness. His notion of freedom, in contrast to Freud and the critical theorists of the Frankfurt School, had a more positive connotation. It was not a matter of attaining "freedom from" the repressive character of the technological society, as Herbert Marcuse, for instance, held, but "freedom to" develop the creative powers of man. In Man for Himself Fromm focussed on the problem of neurosis, characterizing it as the moral problem of a repressive society, as the failure of man to achieve maturity and an integrated personality. Man's capacity for freedom and love, he noted, are dependent upon socio-economic conditions, but are rarely found in societies where the drive of destructiveness prevails.

In the Sane Society he attempted to psychologize society and culture and showed that psychoanalytic principles can be successfully applied to the solution of social and cultural problems. In a society becoming increasingly insane, he wrote, only a concern for ethics can restore sanity. Each person needs to develop high ethical standards in order to rejuvenate society and to arrest the process of robotization of the human being. Technological domination is destructive of human personality. Man's need to destroy, for Fromm, stemmed from an "unlived life," that is, the frustration of the life instinct. Love becomes the only answer to human problems (The Art of Loving). He advocated a "socialist humanism" which in theory and practice is committed to the full development of man within the context of a socio-economic system that, by its rationality and abundance, harmonizes the development of the individual and society (Socialist Humanism).

In contrast to the pessimistic and deterministic conclusions of Freudian theory and the nihilistic implications of Critical Theory, Fromm functioned as a voice of conscience. He maintained that true happiness could be achieved and that a happiness-oriented therapy, through empathy, was the most successful one. He severely criticized established psychoanalysis for contributing to the dehumanization of man (The Crisis of Psychoanalysis). Also, consistent with his philosophy of love and peace, Fromm fought against nuclear weapons and helped organize a "sane society" movement to stop the insanity of the arms race.

His influence on humanistic psychology was enormous. Many later social analysts were inspired by Fromm's writings. An example would be the work of Christopher Lasch on the Culture of Narcissism, which continued in the United States Fromm's effort to psychoanalyze culture and society in a neo-Freudian and Marxist tradition.

Further Reading

Fromm is listed in most social science encyclopedias. For a general summary of his work, a more complete intellectual biography, and a critical assessment of his theories see: Jay Martin, The Dialectical Imagination: A History of the Frankfurt School (1973); Don Hausdorff, Erich Fromm (1972); B. Landis and E. Tauber (editors), In the Name of Life: Essays in Honor of Erich Fromm (1979) and "Erich Fromm: Clinician and Social Philosopher," in Contemporary Psychoanalysis (1979); and Richard Evans, Dialogue with Erich Fromm (1966).

Numerous dissertations have been written on Fromm. See J. Zimmerman, "Transcendent Psychology: Eric H. Erikson, Erich Fromm, Karen Horney, A. Maslow and Harry S. Sullivan and the Quest for a Healthy Humanity," Dissertation Abstracts International (1982); S. J. Dembo, "Synthesis of Liberation: Marx-Freud and the New Left, An Examination of the Work of W. Reich, E. Fromm and H. Marcuse," Ph.D. Dissertation, Rutgers University (1975); and C. E. Daly, "The Epistemology and Ethical Theory of Erich Fromm as the Basis for a Theory of Moral Education," Ph.D. Dissertation, New York University (1977).

Additional Sources

Evans, Richard I. (Richard Isadore), Dialogue with Erich Fromm, New York, N.Y.: Praeger, 1981, 1966.

Knapp, Gerhard Peter, The art of living: Erich Fromm's life and works, New York: P. Lang, 1989.

1900-1980

Erich Fromm, a German psychoanalyst and sociologist, was born on March 23, 1900, in Frankfurt, Germany, and died on March 18, 1980, in Locarno, Switzerland. He grew up in a Jewish family in Germany. From age eighteen to twenty-two he attended the University of Heidelberg, where he studied sociology, receiving his doctorate under the supervision of Alfred Weber. He wrote his thesis on Talmudic law in three separate Jewish communities. In 1924 he met Frieda Reichmann, who became his first analyst and later his wife. At the time she was running a small sanatorium in Frankfurt. Fromm had two other analysts before he moved to Berlin, where in 1927 he was analyzed by the Viennese Hanns Sachs.

From the 1930s, after about ten years of being a traditional Freudian, Fromm began to look critically at the central moral and philosophical bases of Freud's writings. As a Marxist, Fromm was shrewd in spotting the middle-class, liberal assumptions Freud had taken for granted. As a psychologist, Fromm's special theoretical contribution was an understanding of the social forces that stabilize or undermine the political community. In Escape from Freedom (1941), a landmark in modern social science, Fromm enunciated the important concept of "social character" in building theoretical bridges between the study of the individual and the study of society. He was fascinated with the problem of social change and how sociological issues can be understood in the light of depth psychology. He also wanted to examine people in their social milieus. Fromm had his predecessors within psychoanalysis, the most notable perhaps being Wilhelm Reich, who also tried to synthesize Marxist and Freudian principles. Fromm has his detractors: not only strict psychoanalysts but also Marxist hardliners, who have been determined to dismiss Fromm as a so-called social democrat.

After Fromm fled from Nazi Germany in 1933, he moved to the United States, where he was soon in contact with a whole new school of analysts, anthropologists, and sociologists that became known as the neo-Freudian movement. This group included analysts like Harry Stack Sullivan, Karen Horney, Abram Kardiner, and Clara Thompson, as well as academics such as Margaret Mead, Ruth Benedict, and Ralph Linton. Fromm found that he had been quietly dropped as a direct member of the International Psychoanalytical Association. Despite this setback, he was made clinical director of the William Alanson White Institute in New York City, which focuses on training psychoanalysts, and served from 1946 until 1950.

In 1949 Fromm moved for much of the year to Mexico for his second wife's health. There he founded the Mexican Institute of Psychoanalysis, where his ideas are still being taught in a clinical context as of 2005. He also continued to write in his isolated retreat near Mexico City. Especially in Germany, where the International Erich Fromm Society is headquartered, but also in Italy and elsewhere, Fromm's clinical concepts are still being extended.

Millions of people around the world read Fromm's works, but it has usually been his social philosophy that catches the public's attention. Works like The Sane Society (1955) represent a serious indictment of modern capitalist culture. Man for Himself (1947) was an early popular effort to extract a humanitarian core from analytic teachings. The Art of Loving (1956) is perhaps Fromm's best-selling book. The Anatomy of Human Destructiveness (1973) showed the comprehensive nature of Fromm's system of thought. To Have or to Be? (1976) was a widely read restatement of his attempt to connect humanistic Marxism with analysis. More technical works like The Forgotten Language (1951) and Psychoanalysis and Religion (1950) are of direct clinical relevance, even though they are no longer studied at most professional training centers.

Fromm was one of the first and boldest to challenge the ideological underpinnings of Ernest Jones's quasi-official three-volume life of Freud. In Sigmund Freud's Mission (1959) he gave a path-breaking response to the orthodox version of Freud's career and its controversies. For example, he asked some serious questions about Freud's relationship with his mother—a subject that has not received adequate attention in the literature. Fromm also discredited Jones's account of the supposed mental deterioration of both Sándor Ferenczi and Otto Rank.

Fromm, one of the most conceptually clear-cut thinkers in the tradition of dissenting analysts, claimed to be truer to the intellectually radical implications of the spirit of Freud's thought than the organized following generally supposed to be Freud's heirs. One cannot correct some central problems where Freud could be mistaken by piously fixing translations or re-editing Freud's writings. By pointing out some of these central problems, Fromm ranks as an important critic of Freud's. Part of Fromm's strength came from a deep identification with Freud as a warrior of the spirit; to be genuinely like Freud meant also to be independent-minded. Fromm proved fearless in expressing his analytic convictions, even though the orthodox-minded to reacted to him by branding him as a dissenting voice.

Bibliography

Burston, Daniel. (1991). The legacy of Erich Fromm. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Fromm, Erich. (1941). Escape from freedom. New York: Holt, Rinehart, and Winston.

——. (1947). Man for himself. Greenwich, CT: Fawcett Premier Books.

——. (1950). Psychoanalysis and religion. New Haven: Yale University Press.

——. (1951). The forgotten language: An introduction to the understanding of dreams, fairy tales, and myths. New York: Rinehart.

——. (1955). The sane society. Greenwich, CT: Fawcett Premier Books.

——. (1956). The art of loving. New York: Harper.

——. (1959). Sigmund Freud's mission: An analysis of his personality and influence. New York: Harper.

——. (1973). The anatomy of human destructiveness. New York: Holt, Rinehart, and Winston.

——. (1976). To have or to be? New York: Harper and Row.

Funk, Rainer. (1982). Erich Fromm: The courage to be human (Michael Shaw, Trans.). New York: Continuum.

—PAUL ROAZEN

Quotes:

"Just as modern mass production requires the standardization of commodities, so the social process requires standardization of man, and this standardization is called equality."

"Man is the only animal for whom his own existence is a problem which he has to solve."

"Only the person who has faith in himself is able to be faithful to others."

"The danger of the past was that men became slaves. The danger of the future is that men may become robots. True enough, robots do not rebel. But given man's nature, robots cannot live and remain sane, they become Golems, they will destroy their world and themselves because they cannot stand any longer the boredom of a meaningless life."

"By alienation is meant a mode of experience in which the person experiences himself as an alien. He has become, one might say, estranged from himself. He does not experience himself as the center of his world, as the creator of his own acts -- but his acts and their consequences have become his masters, whom he obeys, or whom he may even worship. The alienated person is out of touch with himself as he is out of touch with any other person. He, like the others, is experienced as things are experienced; with the senses and with common sense, but at the same time without being related to oneself and to the world outside positively."

"Greed is a bottomless pit which exhausts the person in an endless effort to satisfy the need without ever reaching satisfaction."

See more famous quotes by Erich Fromm

For the tennis player, see Eric Fromm.

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Erich Fromm

Western Philosophy 20th century
Full name	Erich Fromm
Born	March 23, 1900 Frankfurt am Main, Germany
Died	March 18, 1980 (aged 79) Switzerland
School/tradition	Frankfurt School, critical theory, humanistic psychoanalysis, Humanistic Judaism
Main interests	social theory, Marxism
Notable ideas	Being and Having Modes of Existence; Security versus Freedom; Social character
Influenced by Spinoza, Eckhart, Kierkegaard, Marx, Freud, Alfred Weber

Erich Seligmann^[1] Fromm (March 23, 1900 – March 18, 1980) was an internationally renowned social psychologist, psychoanalyst, humanistic philosopher, and democratic socialist. He was associated with what became known as the Frankfurt School of critical theory.

Contents 1 Life 2 Psychological theory 2.1 Five orientations 2.2 Fromm's influence on other notable psychologists 3 Critique of Freud 4 Political ideas and activities 5 Criticism 6 Bibliography 6.1 Early work in German 6.2 Later works in English 7 See also 8 References 9 External links

Life

Erich Fromm was born on 23 March 1900, at Frankfurt am Main, the only child of Orthodox Jewish parents. He started his academic studies in 1918 at the University of Frankfurt am Main with two semesters of jurisprudence. During the summer semester of 1919, Fromm studied at the University of Heidelberg, where he switched from studying jurisprudence to sociology under Alfred Weber (brother of the famous sociologist Max Weber), the brilliant psychiatrist-philosopher Karl Jaspers, and Heinrich Rickert. Fromm received his Ph.D. in sociology from Heidelberg in 1922. And, then during the mid 1920s, he was trained to become a psychoanalyst through Frieda Reichmann's psychoanalytic sanatorium in Heidelberg. He began his own clinical practice in 1927. In 1930, he joined the Frankfurt Institute for Social Research and completed his psychoanalytical training. After the Nazi takeover of power in Germany, Fromm moved to Geneva and then, in 1934, to Columbia University in New York. Karen Horney's long-term infatuation with Fromm is the subject of her book Self Analysis and it is reasonable to believe that each had a lasting influence on the other's thought. After leaving Columbia, Fromm helped form the New York branch of the Washington School of Psychiatry in 1943, and in 1946 co-founded the William Alanson White Institute of Psychiatry, Psychoanalysis, and Psychology. He was on the faculty of Bennington College from 1941-1950.

When Fromm moved to Mexico City in 1950, he became a professor at the National Autonomous University of Mexico and established a psychoanalytic section at the medical school there. He taught at UNAM until his retirement in 1965. Meanwhile, he taught as a professor of psychology at Michigan State University from 1957 to 1961 and as an adjunct professor of psychology at the graduate division of Arts and Sciences at New York University after 1962. In 1974 he moved to Muralto (or Locarno?), Switzerland, and died at his home in 1980, five days before his eightieth birthday. All the while, Fromm maintained his own clinical practice and published a series of books.

Psychological theory

Beginning with his first seminal work of 1941, Escape from Freedom (known in Britain as Fear of Freedom), Fromm's writings were notable as much for their social and political commentary as for their philosophical and psychological underpinnings. Indeed, Escape from Freedom is viewed as one of the founding works of Political psychology. His second important work, Man for Himself: An Inquiry into the Psychology of Ethics, first published in 1947, continued and enriched the ideas of Escape from Freedom. Taken together, these books outlined Fromm's theory of human character, which was a natural outgrowth of Fromm's theory of human nature. Fromm's most popular book was The Art of Loving, an international bestseller first published in 1956, which recapitulated and complemented the theoretical principles of human nature found in Escape from Freedom and Man for Himself—principles which were revisited in many of Fromm's other major works.

Central to Fromm's world view was his interpretation of the Talmud, which he began studying as a young man under Rabbi J. Horowitz and later studied under Rabbi Salman Baruch Rabinkow while working towards his doctorate in sociology at the University of Heidelberg and under Nehemia Nobel and Ludwig Krause while studying in Frankfurt. Fromm's grandfather and two great grandfathers on his father's side were rabbis, and a great uncle on his mother's side was a noted Talmudic scholar. However, Fromm turned away from orthodox Judaism in 1926, towards secular interpretations of scriptural ideals.

The cornerstone of Fromm's humanistic philosophy is his interpretation of the biblical story of Adam and Eve's exile from the Garden of Eden. Drawing on his knowledge of the Talmud, Fromm pointed out that being able to distinguish between good and evil is generally considered to be a virtue, and that biblical scholars generally consider Adam and Eve to have sinned by disobeying God and eating from the Tree of Knowledge. However, departing from traditional religious orthodoxy, Fromm extolled the virtues of humans taking independent action and using reason to establish moral values rather than adhering to authoritarian moral values.

Beyond a simple condemnation of authoritarian value systems, Fromm used the story of Adam and Eve as an allegorical explanation for human biological evolution and existential angst, asserting that when Adam and Eve ate from the Tree of Knowledge, they became aware of themselves as being separate from nature while still being part of it. This is why they felt "naked" and "ashamed": they had evolved into human beings, conscious of themselves, their own mortality, and their powerlessness before the forces of nature and society, and no longer united with the universe as they were in their instinctive, pre-human existence as animals. According to Fromm, the awareness of a disunited human existence is a source of guilt and shame, and the solution to this existential dichotomy is found in the development of one's uniquely human powers of love and reason. However, Fromm distinguished his concept of love from unreflective popular notions as well as Freudian paradoxical love (see criticism by Marcuse below).

Fromm considered love to be an interpersonal creative capacity rather than an emotion, and he distinguished this creative capacity from what he considered to be various forms of narcissistic neuroses and sado-masochistic tendencies that are commonly held out as proof of "true love." Indeed, Fromm viewed the experience of "falling in love" as evidence of one's failure to understand the true nature of love, which he believed always had the common elements of care, responsibility, respect, and knowledge. Drawing from his knowledge of the Torah, Fromm pointed to the story of Jonah, who did not wish to save the residents of Nineveh from the consequences of their sin, as demonstrative of his belief that the qualities of care and responsibility are generally absent from most human relationships. Fromm also asserted that few people in modern society had respect for the autonomy of their fellow human beings, much less the objective knowledge of what other people truly wanted and needed.

Fromm believed that freedom was an aspect of human nature that we either embrace or escape. He observed that embracing our freedom of will was healthy, whereas escaping freedom through the use of escape mechanisms was the root of psychological conflicts. Three main escape mechanisms that Fromm outlined are automaton conformity, authoritarianism, and destructiveness. Automaton conformity is changing one's ideal self to what is perceived as the preferred type of personality of society, losing one's true self. The use of automaton conformity displaces the burden of choice from the self to society. Authoritarianism is allowing oneself to be controlled by another. This removes the freedom of choice almost entirely by submitting that freedom to someone else. Lastly, destructiveness is any process which attempts to eliminate others or the world as a whole to escape freedom. Fromm said that "the destruction of the world is the last, almost desperate attempt to save myself from being crushed by it" (1941).

The word biophilia was frequently used by Fromm as a description of a productive psychological orientation and "state of being". For example, in an addendum to his book The Heart of Man: Its Genius For Good and Evil, Fromm wrote as part of his famous Humanist Credo:

"I believe that the man choosing progress can find a new unity through the development of all his human forces, which are produced in three orientations. These can be presented separately or together: biophilia, love for humanity and nature, and independence and freedom." (c. 1965)

Erich Fromm postulated six basic needs:

1. Relatedness - relationships with others, care, respect, knowledge;
2. Transcendence - creativity, develop a loving and interesting life;
3. Rootedness - feeling of belonging;
4. Sense of Identity - see ourselves as a unique person and part of a social group.
5. A frame of orientation - the need to understand the world and our place in it.
6. Need for Excitation and Stimulation - The need to actively strive for a goal rather than simply respond.

Fromm's thesis of the "escape from freedom" is epitomized in the following passage. The "individualized man" referenced by Fromm is man bereft of "primary ties" of belonging (nature, family, etc.), also expressed as "freedom from":

"There is only one possible, productive solution for the relationship of individualized man with the world: his active solidarity with all men and his spontaneous activity, love and work, which unite him again with the world, not by primary ties but as a free and independent individual.... However, if the economic, social and political conditions... do not offer a basis for the realization of individuality in the sense just mentioned, while at the same time people have lost those ties which gave them security, this lag makes freedom an unbearable burden. It then becomes identical with doubt, with a kind of life which lacks meaning and direction. Powerful tendencies arise to escape from this kind of freedom into submission or some kind of relationship to man and the world which promises relief from uncertainty, even if it deprives the individual of his freedom." (Erich Fromm, Escape from Freedom [N.Y.: Rinehart, 1941], pp. 36-7. The point is repeated on pp. 31, 256-7.)

Five orientations

Fromm also spoke of "orientation of character" in his book "Man For Himself", which describes the ways an individual relates to the world and constitutes his general character, and develops from two specific kinds of relatedness to the world: acquiring and assimilating things ("assimilation"), and reacting to people ("socialization"). Fromm considers these character systems the human substitute for instincts in animals. These orientations describe how a man has developed in regard to how he responds to conflicts in his or her life; he also said that people were never pure in any such orientation.
These two factors form four types of malignant character, which he calls Receptive, Exploitative, Hoarding and Marketing. He also described a positive character, which he called Productive.

Fromm's influence on other notable psychologists

Fromm's four non-productive orientations were subject to validation through a psychometric test, The Person Relatedness Test by Elias H. Porter, Ph.D. in collaboration with Carl Rogers, Ph.D.at the University of Chicago's Counseling Center between 1953 and 1955. Fromm's four non-productive orientations also served as basis for the LIFO test, first published in 1967 by Stuart Atkins, Alan Katcher, Ph.D., and Elias Porter, Ph.D. and the Strength Deployment Inventory, first published in 1971 by Chris H. Porter, Ph.D. [1], [2]

Critique of Freud

Fromm examined the life and work of Sigmund Freud at length. He identified a discrepancy between early and later Freudian theory: namely that prior to World War I, Freud described human drives as a tension between desire and repression, but after the war's conclusion, he framed human drives as a struggle between biologically-universal Life and Death (Eros and Thanatos) instincts. Fromm charged Freud and his followers with never acknowledging the contradictions between the two theories.

He also criticized Freud's dualistic thinking. According to Fromm, Freudian descriptions of human consciousness as struggles between two poles was narrow and limiting. Fromm also condemned him as a misogynist unable to think outside the patriarchal milieu of early 20^th century Vienna. However, Fromm expressed a great respect for Freud and his accomplishments, in spite of these criticisms.

Political ideas and activities

Fromm's most well-known work, Escape from Freedom, focuses on the human urge to seek a source of authority and control upon reaching a freedom that was thought to be an individual’s true desire. Fromm’s critique of the modern political order and capitalist system led him to seek insights from medieval feudalism. In Escape from Freedom, he found favor with the lack of individual freedom, rigid structure, and obligations required on the members of medieval society:

“

What characterizes medieval in contrast to modern society is its lack of individual freedom…But altogether a person was not free in the modern sense, neither was he alone and isolated. In having a distinct, unchangeable, and unquestionable place in the social world from the moment of birth, man was rooted in a structuralized whole, and thus life had a meaning which left no place, and no need for doubt…There was comparatively little competition. One was born into a certain economic position which guaranteed a livelihood determined by tradition, just as it carried economic obligations to those higher in the social hierarchy.[2]

”

The culmination of Fromm's social and political philosophy was his book The Sane Society, published in 1955, which argued in favor of humanistic and democratic socialism. Building primarily upon the early works of Karl Marx, Fromm sought to re-emphasise the ideal of freedom, missing from most Soviet Marxism, and more frequently found in the writings of libertarian socialists and liberal theoreticians. Fromm's brand of socialism rejected both Western capitalism and Soviet communism, which he saw as dehumanizing and that resulted in a virtually universal modern phenomenon of alienation. He became one of the founders of socialist humanism, promoting the early writings of Marx and his humanist messages to the US and Western European publics.

In the early 1960s, Fromm published two books dealing with Marxist thoughts (Marx's Concept of Man and Beyond the Chains of Illusion: my Encounter with Marx and Freud). In 1965, working to stimulate the Western and Eastern cooperation between Marxist humanists, Fromm published a series of articles entitled Socialist Humanism: An International Symposium. In 1966, the American Humanist Association named him Humanist of the Year.

For a period, Fromm was also active in US politics. He joined the Socialist Party of America in the mid-1950s, and did his best to help them provide an alternative viewpoint to the prevailing McCarthyism of the time. This alternative viewpoint was best expressed in his 1961 paper May Man Prevail? An Inquiry into the Facts and Fictions of Foreign Policy. However, as a co-founder of SANE, Fromm's strongest political activism was in the international peace movement, fighting against the nuclear arms race and US involvement in the Vietnam War. After supporting Senator Eugene McCarthy's losing bid for the Democratic presidential nomination, Fromm more or less retreated from the American political scene, although he did write a paper in 1974 entitled Remarks on the Policy of Détente for a hearing held by the U.S. Senate Committee on Foreign Relations.

Criticism

In Eros and Civilization Herbert Marcuse condemns Fromm, that in the beginning he was a radical theorist who later turned to conformity. Marcuse also argued that Fromm, as well as his close colleagues Sullivan and Karen Horney, removed Freud's libido theory and other radical concepts, which thus reduced psychoanalysis to a set of idealist ethics, which only embrace the status quo.^[3] Fromm's response, in both The Sane Society ^[4] and in The Anatomy of Human Destructiveness,^[5] argues that Freud indeed deserves substantial credit for recognizing the central importance of the subconscious, but also that he tended to reify his own concepts that depicted the self as the passive outcome of instinct and social control, with very minimal volition or variability. Fromm argues that later scholars such as Marcuse accepted these concepts as dogma, whereas social-psychology requires a more dynamic theoretical and empirical approach.

Bibliography

Early work in German

• Das jüdische Gesetz. Ein Beitrag zur Soziologie des Diaspora-Judentums., Promotion, 1922. ISBN 345309896X
• Über Methode und Aufgaben einer analytischen Sozialpsychologie. Zeitschrift für Sozialforschung, Bd. 1, 1932, S. 28-54.
• Die psychoanalytische Charakterologie und ihre Bedeutung für die Sozialpsychologie. Zeitschrift für Sozialforschung, Bd. 1, 1932, S. 253-277.
• Sozialpsychologischer Teil. In: Studien über Autorität und Familie. Forschungsberichte aus dem Institut für Sozialforschung. Alcan, Paris 1936, S. 77-135.
• Zweite Abteilung: Erhebungen (Erich Fromm u.a.). In: Studien über Autorität und Familie. Forschungsberichte aus dem Institut für Sozialforschung. Alcan, Paris 1936, S. 229-469.

• Die Furcht vor der Freiheit, 1941 (engl. Original: Escape from Freedom). ISBN 3423350245
• Psychoanalyse & Ethik, 1946. ISBN 3423350113
• Psychoanalyse & Religion, 1949. ISBN 342334105X (The Dwight H. Terry Lectureship 1949/1950)

Later works in English

• Escape from Freedom (US), The Fear of Freedom (UK) (1941)
• Man for himself, an inquiry into the psychology of ethics (1947)
• Psychoanalysis and Religion (1950)
• Forgotten language; an introduction to the understanding of dreams, fairy tales, and myths (1951)
• The Sane Society (1955)
• The Art of Loving (1956)
• Sigmund Freud's mission; an analysis of his personality and influence (1959)
• Psychoanalysis and Zen Buddhism (1960)
• May Man Prevail? An inquiry into the facts and fictions of foreign policy (1961)
• Marx's Concept of Man (1961)
• Beyond the Chains of Illusion: my encounter with Marx and Freud (1962)
• The Dogma of Christ and Other Essays on Religion, Psychology and Culture (1963)
• The Heart of Man, its genius for good and evil (1964)
• Socialist Humanism (1965)
• You Shall Be as Gods: a radical interpretation of the Old Testament and its tradition (1966)
• The Revolution of Hope, toward a humanized technology (1968)
• The Nature of Man (1968)
• The Crisis of Psychoanalysis (1970)
• Social character in a Mexican village; a sociopsychoanalytic study (Fromm & Maccoby) (1970)
• The Anatomy of Human Destructiveness (1973)
• To Have or to Be? (1976)
• Greatness and Limitation of Freud's Thought (1979)
• On Disobedience and other essays (1984)
• The Art of Being (1993)
• The Art of Listening (1994)
• On Being Human (1997)

See also

• American philosophy
• List of American philosophers

References

1. ^ Funk, Rainer. Erich Fromm: His Life and Ideas. Translators Ian Portman, Manuela Kunkel. New York: Continuum International Publishing Group, 2003. ISBN 0826415199, ISBN 9780826415196. P. 13:

   "For a second name he was given that of his grandfather on his father's side–Seligmann Pinchas Fromm, although the registry office in Frankfurt does not record him as Erich Pinchas Fromm, but as Erich Seligmann Fromm. Also his parents addressed his mail to 'Erich S. Fromm.'"

2. ^ Fromm, Erich “Escape from Freedom” New York: Rinehart & Co., 1941, p. 41 – 42
3. ^ John Rickert, The Fromm-Marcuse debated revisited, 1986 in „Theory and Society“, vol. 15, pp. 351-400. Martinus Nijhoff Publishers, Dordrecht
4. ^ Erich Fromm, [1955] 1990 The Sane Society, New York: Henry Holt
5. ^ Erich Fromm, [1973] 1992, The Anatomy of Human Destructiveness, New York: Henry Holt.

External links

Wikiquote has a collection of quotations related to: Erich Fromm

• www.erich-fromm.de – Erich Fromm Archives; Literary Estate
• www.frommsociety.com - International Erich Fromm Society
• Summary of Fromm's life by Rainer Funk
• Erich Fromm on the Mystical Site www.mysticism.nl
• Clark, Neil. "Wanted: an Erich Fromm party." Guardian Unlimited, February 20, 2007.
• Clark, Neil. "Fromm me to you ." Guardian Unlimited, December 14, 2007.
• International Foundation Erich Fromm
• Erich Fromm Interview Excerpt. youtube.com.
• [3]1958 Mike Wallace interview

Persondata
NAME	Fromm, Erich Pinchas
ALTERNATIVE NAMES
SHORT DESCRIPTION
DATE OF BIRTH	March 23, 1900
PLACE OF BIRTH	Frankfurt am Main, Germany
DATE OF DEATH	March 18, 1980
PLACE OF DEATH	Switzerland

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