Fromm, Erich (1900-1980)

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FROMM, ERICH (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.

Paul Roazen

See also: Germany; Horney-Danielson, Karen; International Federation of Psychoanalytic Societies; Marxism and psychoanalysis; Mexico; United States; Politics and psychoanalysis; Sigmund Freud Institut.