Erich Fromm

Introduction

Erich Fromm (23 March 1900 – 18 March 1980) was a German-American psychoanalyst and social philosopher who spent his career on a question most of his profession was not asking: what does the economic and social order do to the character of the people living inside it?

His answer, in Escape from Freedom (1941), is that freedom is not simply a good. The dissolution of feudal bonds — from land, from guild, from church, from the fixed place in a hierarchy — delivered the modern individual into a condition of unprecedented autonomy and unprecedented isolation. What people do with that condition, Fromm argued, depends on whether they can bear it. Many cannot, and seek relief in submission: to a leader, a party, a nation, or the conformities of the market.

He was a revisionist within psychoanalysis rather than an opponent of it. He kept Freud's central insight — that character is formed early, that people are not transparent to themselves, that much of mental life is unconscious — and rejected the mechanism Freud used to explain it. Drives do not account for the historical variation in human character; social and economic structure does.

Early Life and Education

Fromm was born in Frankfurt am Main in 1900, the only child of an Orthodox Jewish family. His grandfather and two great-uncles were rabbis, and a great-uncle by marriage was a noted Talmudic scholar. He studied Talmud seriously from childhood, and the training never left him — his later readings of Biblical narrative are rabbinic in method even where they are secular in conclusion.

He entered the University of Frankfurt to read law in 1918, transferred to Heidelberg in 1919, and switched to sociology, studying under Alfred Weber (Max Weber's brother), Karl Jaspers, and Heinrich Rickert. He completed his doctorate in sociology in 1922.

He then trained in psychoanalysis: further study at Munich, and from 1925 to 1930 at the Berlin Psychoanalytic Institute. He began clinical practice in 1930 and joined the Frankfurt Institute for Social Research, the institution that would become known as the Frankfurt School, where he worked alongside Horkheimer, Adorno, and Marcuse.

In 1926 he abandoned Orthodox practice, moving toward a humanistic reading of scripture that he kept for the rest of his life. His interpretation of the Adam and Eve narrative supplied the philosophical foundation for everything after: the expulsion from Eden is not a fall but the birth of human freedom, and the shame that follows is the consciousness of separation. The remedy is not obedience but the full development of the two capacities that distinguish humans — reason and love.

Academic and Professional Career

Nazi rule drove him out. He moved first to Geneva, then in 1934 to Columbia University, where he taught until 1941. It was during these years that he broke with the Institute — partly over his reading of Freud, partly through personal conflict with Adorno and Marcuse — and began publishing the books that made him internationally known.

From 1941 to 1950 he taught at Bennington College. In 1943 he helped found the New York branch of the Washington School of Psychiatry, and in 1945-46 was involved in establishing the William Alanson White Institute of Psychiatry, Psychoanalysis, and Psychology — the institutional home of the interpersonal and cultural tradition in American psychoanalysis, and where he worked alongside Harry Stack Sullivan and Clara Thompson.

In 1950 he moved to Mexico City, taking a professorship at the National Autonomous University of Mexico, where he founded and from 1955 to 1965 headed the psychoanalysis department at the medical school. He held concurrent appointments at Michigan State (1957–61) and New York University (from 1962), and moved to Muralto, Switzerland, in 1974. He died at home on 18 March 1980, five days short of his eightieth birthday.

He practised as a clinician from the late 1920s into the 1960s and remained politically active throughout — helping to organise the National Committee for a Sane Nuclear Policy in 1957, campaigning against nuclear weapons, and opposing the Vietnam War.

Major Contributions to Psychology

Escape from freedom

The argument of the 1941 book traces the growth of individuality from the Middle Ages onward and asks what it costs. The medieval person was unfree but embedded: a place, a role, an unquestioned order. The modern person is free but unmoored, and the freedom manifests as powerlessness — before economic forces they do not control, before markets that distribute success and failure impersonally.

Fromm's thesis is that this condition produces anxiety severe enough that people will trade freedom for security. The escape routes he identified were submission to authority, destructiveness, and mechanical conformity — becoming what the market wants rather than what one is. He wrote the book to explain how a country as educated and cultured as Germany had embraced Nazism, and his answer was that fascism offers the isolated individual a restored belonging at the price of the self.

The mechanism has outlived its occasion. The prediction that societies undergoing rapid dissolution of traditional bonds will produce authoritarian movements has been borne out repeatedly since.

Fromm's central theoretical construct holds that every society produces a character structure shared by most of its members — the social character — whose function is to make people want to do what they must do. A social order that required constant coercion would be unstable; instead, the economic structure shapes child-rearing, education, and the habits of daily life so that the required dispositions appear as nature.

This is the device by which he connected Marx to Freud. Marx supplies the claim that material conditions shape consciousness; Freud supplies the mechanism by which those conditions become internal, unconscious, and resistant to argument.

He described five character orientations: receptive (receiving everything from outside), exploitative (taking by force or cunning), hoarding (securing by possession and guarding), marketing (treating oneself as a commodity to be sold), and productive. Only the last is healthy; the others are strategies for managing insecurity.

The needs he took to be basic

Against Freud's libido, Fromm proposed a set of needs arising from the human condition itself: relatedness (the need to connect rather than remain separate), transcendence (to create rather than merely be created), rootedness (to belong somewhere), identity (to be someone rather than anything), and a frame of orientation (to have a workable picture of the world).

The list is an explicit rejection of drive theory: these are existential requirements, not discharge requirements, and the failures they produce are failures of a life rather than of an apparatus.

The art of loving

The Art of Loving (1956) was a worldwide bestseller and is the book most people know him by. Its argument is that love is a capacity rather than an event — that the reason people fail at it is not bad luck in finding the right object but the absence of a developed ability. The four components he identified are care, responsibility, respect, and knowledge.

The book also drew his sharpest distinction between immature and mature love: the child loves because they are loved; the adult loves and therefore is loved. And his account of self-love as the precondition for loving others rather than its opposite was directed against a moralism he thought produced more damage than the selfishness it condemned.

Having and being

In To Have or to Be? (1976) he framed the central choice of modern life as between two modes of existence: one organised around possession and consumption, the other around activity and presence. The having mode turns every experience, including relationships, into property; the being mode is what is left when the acquisition stops.

Destructiveness

The Anatomy of Human Destructiveness (1973) argued against the then-fashionable view that aggression is instinctual. Fromm distinguished benign aggression — the phylogenetically old defensive response to threat, which is adaptive and ceases when the threat does — from malignant destructiveness, which has no survival function and appears specifically in human beings. The latter, he argued, is a characterological solution to the failure to live productively: the attempt to escape the pain of unlived life by destroying.

Major Publications

Escape from Freedom (1941)
Man for Himself: An Inquiry into the Psychology of Ethics (1947)
Psychoanalysis and Religion (1950)
The Sane Society (1955)
The Art of Loving (1956)
Sigmund Freud's Mission (1959)
Marx's Concept of Man (1961)
The Heart of Man: Its Genius for Good and Evil (1964)
Social Character in a Mexican Village (1970, with Michael Maccoby)
The Anatomy of Human Destructiveness (1973)
To Have or to Be? (1976)
Greatness and Limitation of Freud's Thought (1979)

Impact and Legacy

Fromm is the main bridge between psychoanalysis and social criticism, and the founder of what is now political psychology. Escape from Freedom is one of the canonical works of twentieth-century social psychology and has been read continuously since, with renewed attention in each period of authoritarian resurgence. The concept of social character made it possible to ask empirical questions about the psychological effects of economic systems, which is now a substantial research literature.

His clinical influence ran through the William Alanson White Institute and the interpersonal tradition, and The Art of Loving has sold in the millions.

Criticism. The most serious exchange was with Herbert Marcuse, his former Frankfurt colleague. Marcuse attacked him in 1955 as a neo-Freudian revisionist whose "productive character" merely reproduced the productivism intrinsic to capitalism, and whose celebration of love and religion reproduced the dominant idealist ideology under a progressive label. Fromm replied by calling Marcuse a nihilist and a utopian. The dispute was never settled and is instructive: it is an argument about whether a critique of capitalism that appeals to human flourishing is radical or merely consoling, and both positions retain defenders.

Freudians made a related charge less politely: that Fromm's American success came from diluting Freud's European pessimism into something more marketable, and that The Art of Loving in particular offered readers reassurance where Freud had offered an unflattering account of what people are. There is something to this — Fromm's prescriptions are markedly more optimistic than Freud's, and he never fully answered the accusation that he had retained Freud's authority while discarding Freud's substance.

He was also attacked from the right, and not only intellectually. His opposition to the Vietnam War, to nuclear weapons, and to American-led "modernisation" made him a target; Allan Bloom's The Closing of the American Mind (1987) installed him as a principal villain in the story of how European thought allegedly corrupted American life.

On the scholarly side there is a standing objection that his work is not empirical. He trained as a sociologist, not a physician, and much of his output is interpretive. This is fair up to a point and is answered in part by Social Character in a Mexican Village, a genuine empirical study conducted with Michael Maccoby, and by the Anatomy, which engages in detail with ethological and neuroscientific evidence. He did do empirical work; there is simply less of it than there is theory.

The deepest objection is the one Marcuse pressed: that Fromm's account of what human flourishing consists in is never argued for, only asserted, and that the "productive character" looks very much like the values of a particular educated European at a particular moment, universalised without evidence. His five basic needs have the same problem — they are a philosopher's list, not a finding, and alternative lists are easy to construct.

Learn More

Rollo May — his colleague at the William Alanson White Institute
Sigmund Freud — whose drive theory Fromm revised into a social account
Carl Jung — the other major Freudian revisionist, revising in a different direction
Abraham Maslow — whose humanistic psychology Fromm's work runs alongside
History of Psychology — the Frankfurt School, and psychoanalysis in American exile

References

Fromm, E. (1941). Escape from Freedom. Farrar & Rinehart.