Everything about Erich Fromm totally explained
Erich Pinchas Fromm (
March 23,
1900 –
March 18,
1980) was an internationally renowned
Jewish-
German-
American social psychologist, psychoanalyst, and
humanistic philosopher. He was associated with what became known as the
Frankfurt School of
critical theory.
Life
Erich Fromm started his 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, the
Jewish 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's 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, 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 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'd
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 so distinguished his concept of love from popular notions of love that his reference to this concept was virtually paradoxical.
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 didn't 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 five basic needs:
- Relatedness - relationships with others, care, respect, knowledge;
- Transcendence - creativity, develop a loving and interesting life;
- Rootedness - feeling of belonging;
- Sense of Identity - see ourselves as a unique person and part of a social group.
- A frame of orientation - the need to understand the world and our place in it.
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 . . . don't 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 Elias H. Porter, Ph.D.
(External Link
),
(External Link)
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 failings.
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. 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 personal 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 bureaucratic social structures 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.
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.
Bibliography
Escape from Freedom (US), 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)
(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)
(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)
Erich Fromm, His Life and Ideas, An Illustrated Biography (2000)Further Information
Get more info on 'Erich Fromm'.
|
External Link Exchanges
Do you know how hard it is to get a link from a large encyclopaedia? Well we're different and will prove it. To get a link from us just add the following HTML to your site on a relevant page:
<a href="http://erich_fromm.totallyexplained.com">Erich Fromm Totally Explained</a>
Then simply click through this link from your web page. Our crawlers will verify your link, extract the title of your web page and instantly add a link back to it. If you like you can remove the words Totally Explained and embed the link in article text.
As long as your link remains in place, we'll keep our link to you right here. Please play fair - our crawlers are watching. Your site must be closely related to this one's topic. Any kind of spamming, dubious practises or removing the link will result in your link from us being dropped and, potentially, your whole site being banned. |
