Erich Fromm

Fromm was born Erich Seligmann Fromm on 23 March 1900 in Frankfurt am Main. He was the only child of Naphtali Fromm, an Orthodox Jewish wine merchant, and Rosa Fromm, née Krause. His paternal grandfather and two of his great-grandfathers were rabbis.

As a young man he studied the Talmud in Frankfurt, with Nehemia Nobel and Ludwig Krause among others. From 1920 to 1925 he studied it in Heidelberg with Salman Baruch Rabinkow, a Chabad Hasid. Under Nobel's influence he was briefly a Zionist, but he left the movement because of his universalist messianism and humanism. He gave up orthodox Judaism in 1926 and later called his own outlook a nontheistic mysticism.

After leaving school in 1918 he studied law for two semesters at Frankfurt. In the summer of 1919 he moved to Heidelberg, where he turned to sociology under Alfred Weber and also studied with Karl Jaspers and Heinrich Rickert. He received his doctorate in sociology in 1922. His dissertation, Das jüdische Gesetz, was a study of the sociology of Diaspora Judaism.

His way into psychoanalysis ran through Frieda Reichmann. In 1924 she and Fromm opened a psychoanalytic sanatorium in Heidelberg, the "Therapeutikum". She was his first analyst, and the analysis became a love affair. They married on 16 June 1926, separated in 1931 and divorced in 1942.

After Reichmann he was analysed by Wilhelm Wittenberg in Munich. He then had a training analysis with Hanns Sachs at the Berlin Psychoanalytic Institute; accounts date its start to 1928 or to about February 1929. In 1929 he co-founded the South German Institute for Psychoanalysis in Frankfurt with Karl Landauer, Heinrich Meng and Frieda Fromm-Reichmann. He completed his training in Berlin in 1930 and opened a practice there. His first publications, from 1927, were written as an orthodox Freudian.

In 1930 Fromm joined the Institute for Social Research in Frankfurt, where he was responsible for psychoanalysis and social psychology. In 1932 he published an essay on the method and function of an analytical social psychology in the first issue of the institute's journal, the Zeitschrift für Sozialforschung. In 1930 he began an empirical study of German workers and employees, and he kept working on its results after he emigrated. His concept of the authoritarian character appeared in Max Horkheimer's collective Studies on Authority and the Family (1936).

He fell ill with pulmonary tuberculosis in 1931 and spent long periods in Davos until 1934. When the Nazi regime forced him to emigrate, he went by way of Geneva to Columbia University in New York, arriving on 31 May 1934. In 1937 he recast psychoanalysis as an analytical social psychology built on a theory of relatedness rather than on drive theory. Horkheimer, Leo Löwenthal, Herbert Marcuse and Theodor Adorno rejected the revision. Fromm left the institute in 1939 and became an American citizen in 1940.

In America his closest colleagues were Horney and Sullivan. Horney invited him to lecture in Chicago in 1933, and a long personal relationship followed. When she left the New York Psychoanalytic Society in 1941, he joined her in founding the Association for the Advancement of Psychoanalysis and its American Institute for Psychoanalysis. In 1943 his training privileges there were withdrawn on the ground that he was not a physician, and he left; Sullivan and Thompson left with him. Susan Quinn's biography of Horney, A Mind of Her Own⁶, tells the story of this split among others. In her account the dissident association came to reproduce the autocracy its founders had fled.

From 1935 Fromm worked with Sullivan and Thompson. In 1939 Sullivan published Fromm's essay on selfishness and self-love in his journal Psychiatry and cited it as close to his own view, as Helen Swick Perry's Psychiatrist of America⁷ records. Fromm taught at the Washington School of Psychiatry. In 1943 he was among the founders of its New York branch, which became the William Alanson White Institute.

During the 1940s he taught at the New School for Social Research from 1941 and at Bennington College in Vermont. In 1944 he married Henny Gurland. In 1948 he gave the Terry Lectures at Yale on psychoanalysis and religion.

In June 1950 Fromm settled in Mexico City. The next year he became a professor in the medical faculty of the National Autonomous University of Mexico, where he set up a section for psychoanalytic training. Henny Gurland died in 1952, and in 1953 he married Annis Freeman. In 1956 he founded the Mexican Psychoanalytic Society and moved to Cuernavaca. In 1957 he held a seminar on Zen and psychoanalysis with D. T. Suzuki and began preparing field research among Mexican peasants; the study, written with Michael Maccoby, appeared in 1970. He became emeritus at the university in 1965 and taught at the Mexican society until 1974.

He also taught at Michigan State University from 1957 to 1961 and at New York University from 1962. In 1962 he helped found the International Federation of Psychoanalytic Societies, an alternative to the International Psychoanalytical Association.

Fromm took part in American political life. He joined the Socialist Party of America in the mid-1950s and helped found SANE, campaigning against the nuclear arms race and the Vietnam War. He attended a peace conference in Moscow in 1962 and supported Eugene McCarthy's presidential campaign in 1968. In 1974 he set out his views on détente for the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.

In 1958 he publicly contested the claim in Ernest Jones's biography of Freud, The Life and Work of Sigmund Freud⁸, that Otto Rank and Sándor Ferenczi had become psychotic. He drew on testimony from people close to Ferenczi. He extended his criticism of Jones's account of Freud in Sigmund Freud's Mission (1959).

A heart attack in December 1966 ended his active duties in Mexico, and he began to spend long periods in Europe. From 1974 he lived year-round in Ticino, Switzerland, at Muralto. He received the Nelly Sachs Prize in 1979. He died at Muralto on 18 March 1980, after a fourth heart attack, five days before his eightieth birthday.

Fromm took from Freud the dynamic concept of character and the method of uncovering unconscious motivation. He rejected the libido theory and Freud's picture of the individual as essentially opposed to society. His 1935 essay on the social determination of psychoanalytic therapy took Ferenczi's side. Fromm favoured Ferenczi's call for an analyst who offers warmth and unconditional affirmation over the reserve he called Freud's "patricentric" attitude.

The concept of social character had its roots in Fromm's Frankfurt years. In the early 1930s he sketched the idea as the "libidinal structure of society". In the 1935 essay he spoke of "social character structure", and in the appendix to Escape from Freedom¹ he set the concept out systematically. Social character is the core of character structure that most members of a group share. It is formed by the way of life that their society's economic and social conditions impose. It channels psychic energy so that people come to want to do what they have to do, and in this way it links the economic base of a society to its ideas and ideals.

The authoritarian character, framed in Fromm's contribution to Studies on Authority and the Family, is a sado-masochistic structure. It admires and submits to the authority above it and dominates those beneath it. In Fromm's account, submission and the craving for power are two sides of one inability to bear the independent self. In Escape from Freedom it appears as the social character of the lower middle class, the trait that made that class receptive to Nazism.

Escape from Freedom takes up the situation of the modern individual. Freed from the primary ties of traditional society, that individual is isolated and powerless, and may give up the independence of the self to be rid of aloneness. The book's fifth chapter names three mechanisms of escape. Authoritarianism fuses the self with someone or something outside it, by submitting or by dominating. Destructiveness does away with the threatening world. Automaton conformity makes the person exactly what the culture expects. Against these Fromm set positive freedom, the spontaneous activity of love and work.

Man for Himself² recast the theory of character in terms of character orientations. These are relatively stable ways of relating to the world, both in acquiring and assimilating things and in relating to people. Fromm distinguished four nonproductive orientations, the receptive, the exploitative, the hoarding and the marketing, and set the productive orientation against them. An actual character blends several orientations, with one dominant.

He acknowledged that the receptive, exploitative and hoarding orientations correspond to Freud's oral and anal types. The difference was that he grounded character in ways of relating rather than in the libidinal stages of psychosexual development.

The marketing orientation was his own addition. It is the character type proper to a market economy: the person experiences themselves as a commodity whose worth is their exchange value on the "personality market". Their self-esteem depends on the market's verdict, and their identity becomes adaptable and empty.

The productive orientation is the use of one's own powers in reason, love and work. Productiveness here means an attitude of relating to the world, not the making of useful things. Fromm made it the goal of human development and the basis of a humanistic ethics.

In The Sane Society⁹ he carried this critique to modern society as a whole and argued for a communitarian socialism. The Art of Loving³ followed a year later.

In The Heart of Man⁴ Fromm named two basic, opposed orientations, which most people combine in varying proportions. Biophilia, the love of life, is the primary orientation of a healthy person. It is drawn to growth, structure and the new rather than to the mechanical and fixed, and it influences others by love, reason and example rather than by force. In Fromm's account destructiveness is the failure of biophilia. He coined the word two decades before the biologist E. O. Wilson used it in a different sense.

Against biophilia stands the necrophilous character. Fromm took the word from its sexual sense to name an orientation attracted to the dead, the decaying, the mechanical and the inorganic. It seeks to turn the living into things, loves force and control, and is oriented to the past.

The same book extended Freud's concept of narcissism from the individual to the group: social narcissism invested in a nation, a race or a creed can feed collective violence. Fromm also distinguished benign from malignant narcissism. Malignant narcissism takes as its object what a person has or is, not what they produce, and he saw this extreme self-worship at the root of destructiveness.

The necrophilous orientation, malignant narcissism and incestuous symbiosis together form what Fromm called the "syndrome of decay". He developed this line further in The Anatomy of Human Destructiveness (1973), the outcome of the theory of aggression he had begun to work out in 1968.

Fromm's late social critique is framed by the distinction between having and being, set out in To Have or to Be?⁵. The book appeared in the same year in English and, as Haben oder Sein, in German. In the having mode a person relates to the world, to others, to knowledge and to themselves as possessions. In the being mode they use their own powers, sharing, loving and growing. Fromm argued that industrial society had made the having mode dominant, and that a change of character toward being was a condition of human survival.

Horney and Fromm influenced each other's thought. Horney credited him with sharpening her sense of the cultural and social determinants of neurosis, both in New Ways in Psychoanalysis¹⁰ and in Our Inner Conflicts¹¹.

With Sullivan, Thompson and Fromm-Reichmann, Fromm is counted among those who carried forward interpersonal psychoanalysis and gave it a home at the William Alanson White Institute. The American interpersonal tradition of Sullivan, Fromm and Thompson later fed into relational psychoanalysis, mostly through analysts trained at the White Institute.

His revision of Freud also drew sharp criticism. In Eros and Civilization, Herbert Marcuse charged Fromm, Horney and Sullivan with discarding the libido theory and turning psychoanalysis into an idealist ethics that accepted the status quo. Fromm replied in The Sane Society and in The Anatomy of Human Destructiveness.

Several of Fromm's ideas were taken up outside his own circle. Otto Kernberg later used the phrase malignant narcissism for a clinical syndrome, in Severe Personality Disorders (1984). Escape from Freedom is regarded as one of the founding works of political psychology. The four nonproductive orientations underlie several personality instruments, among them the Person Relatedness Test, LIFO and the Strength Deployment Inventory.

The Art of Loving became a worldwide bestseller and is described as his most popular book. He was named Humanist of the Year in 1966, and in the late 1970s he was a leading figure of the alternative movement in Germany and Italy.

Fromm's first two American books were Escape from Freedom¹ (1941), published in Britain as The Fear of Freedom, and Man for Himself: An Inquiry into the Psychology of Ethics² (1947).

Psychoanalysis and Religion (1950) and The Forgotten Language (1951) were followed by The Sane Society⁹ (1955) and The Art of Loving³ (1956).

His books of the late 1950s and early 1960s were Sigmund Freud's Mission (1959), Zen Buddhism and Psychoanalysis (1960), May Man Prevail? (1961), Marx's Concept of Man (1961) and Beyond the Chains of Illusion (1962).

His later books were The Heart of Man: Its Genius for Good and Evil⁴ (1964), You Shall Be as Gods (1966), The Revolution of Hope (1968) and The Crisis of Psychoanalysis (1970). Social Character in a Mexican Village (1970) was written with Michael Maccoby. Then came The Anatomy of Human Destructiveness (1973), To Have or to Be?⁵ (1976) and Greatness and Limitation of Freud's Thought (1979).