Erich Fromm
Many people find freedom frightening and flee into obedience or conformity; a good life means being and loving rather than having and owning.
Placement
Psychoanalyst and social philosopher, member of the Frankfurt Institute for Social Research until 1939: modern people flee from freedom into conformity and authority; “To Have or to Be?” contrasts possessing with living.
Key ideas
- Escape from freedom
- Social character
- Having or being
- Humanistic socialism
Influence
Influenced by 4
Meister Eckhart
influenced by ✓
Fromm took Meister Eckhart’s sermon on poverty of spirit as a model of the being mode, as opposed to the having mode (To Have or to Be?, 1976). E. Fromm, To Have or to Be? (1976); Meister Eckhart, sermon “Beati pauperes spiritu”
Evidence: also in Wikidata · Wikidata
Meister Eckhart › c. 1260–1328
Baruch de Spinoza
influenced by ✓
Fromm took Spinoza’s Ethics as a model of humanistic ethics, in which virtue is the realisation of one’s own powers (Man for Himself, 1947). E. Fromm, Man for Himself: An Inquiry into the Psychology of Ethics (1947); B. Spinoza, Ethica (1677)
Evidence: also in Wikidata · Wikidata
Baruch de Spinoza › 1632–1677
Johann Jakob Bachofen
influenced by ✓
Fromm read Bachofen’s mother right as the image of a society built on unconditional maternal love, a counterweight to patriarchal bourgeois order (‘Die sozialpsychologische Bedeutung der Mutterrechtstheorie’, 1934). E. Fromm, “Die sozialpsychologische Bedeutung der Mutterrechtstheorie”, Zeitschrift für Sozialforschung 3 (1934); J. J. Bachofen, Das Mutterrecht (1861)
Evidence: also in Wikidata · Wikidata
Johann Jakob Bachofen › 1815–1887
Karl Marx
influenced by ✓
In Marx’s Concept of Man (1961), which printed the Paris Manuscripts in English, Fromm presented Marx as a humanist whose aim was to overcome alienation. E. Fromm, Marx’s Concept of Man (1961), with the Paris Manuscripts tr. T. B. Bottomore
Evidence: also in Wikidata · Wikidata
Karl Marx › 1818–1883
Influenced 1
Paulo Freire
influenced
Freire took Fromm’s distinction of necrophilous and biophilous character to describe oppression as a love of control over the living (Pedagogia do oprimido, written 1968). P. Freire, Pedagogia do oprimido (written 1968); E. Fromm, The Heart of Man (1964)
Evidence: AI draft
Paulo Freire › 1921–1997
Criticism
Criticized by 1
Herbert Marcuse
criticised by
In the epilogue to Eros and Civilization (1955) Marcuse attacked Fromm’s neo-Freudian revisionism for dropping drive theory and turning psychoanalysis into an idealist ethics of adjustment. H. Marcuse, Eros and Civilization (1955), Epilogue “Critique of Neo-Freudian Revisionism”; Fromm’s reply and the ensuing exchange in Dissent (1955–56)
Evidence: AI draft
Herbert Marcuse › 1898–1979
Criticizes 2
Sigmund Freud influenced by
influenced by ✓
In ‘Über Methode und Aufgabe einer analytischen Sozialpsychologie’ (1932) Fromm joined Freud’s psychoanalysis to historical materialism, tracing shared drive structures to a society’s economy. E. Fromm, “Über Methode und Aufgabe einer analytischen Sozialpsychologie”, Zeitschrift für Sozialforschung 1 (1932); Escape from Freedom (1941)
Evidence: also in Wikidata · Wikidata
criticised
Fromm rejected Freud’s libido theory as mechanistic and bound to bourgeois society, explaining character from social relations rather than drives (Escape from Freedom, 1941, appendix). E. Fromm, Escape from Freedom (1941), appendix “Character and the Social Process”; Greatness and Limitations of Freud’s Thought (1979)
Evidence: AI draft
Sigmund Freud › 1856–1939
C. G. Jung
criticised
Fromm objected that Jung reduces religion to a psychological phenomenon while elevating the unconscious to a religious one (Psychoanalysis and Religion, 1950, ch. 2). E. Fromm, Psychoanalysis and Religion (1950), ch. II “Freud and Jung”
Evidence: AI draft
C. G. Jung › 1875–1961
Works
Freed from medieval ties but isolated, modern people flee into submission, destructiveness or conformity – a social psychology of fascism.
Two modes of existence: the having mode defines us by what we own, the being mode by what we do and share – with Eckhart, Marx and the Buddha as witnesses.
Position
Fromm set out to join Freud and Marx: the drives and anxieties of individuals are shaped by the economic structure of their society, and every society produces a typical “social character” that makes people want to do what they have to do. At the Institute he led an empirical study of German workers and employees, which found that many who voted for the left had authoritarian attitudes. Escape from Freedom (1941) traced the long history of this: modern people have been freed from medieval bonds but feel isolated and powerless, and many flee into submission, destructiveness or automatic conformity – the psychological soil of fascism. In Man for Himself (1947) and The Sane Society (1955) he developed a humanistic ethics in which the goal is productive activity and love, and The Art of Loving (1956) treats love as an art that needs practice. His departure from Freud’s libido theory led Herbert Marcuse to attack him in 1955 as a conformist “revisionist”. Fromm introduced Marx’s early manuscripts to American readers and drew on Spinoza, Meister Eckhart and Zen Buddhism. To Have or to Be? (1976) contrasts two modes of existence and became a text of the ecological and peace movements.
Life & context
Erich Fromm was born in 1900 in Frankfurt am Main, the only child of an observant Jewish family with several rabbis among his ancestors. He studied in Frankfurt and Heidelberg, where he took his doctorate in sociology in 1922 with a thesis on Jewish law in the Diaspora under Alfred Weber. He trained as a psychoanalyst, partly in the Heidelberg sanatorium of Frieda Reichmann, whom he married in 1926, and broke with religious practice the same year. From 1930 to 1939 he worked at the Institute for Social Research, which he followed to New York in 1934. In 1949 he moved to Mexico City, where he taught at the National Autonomous University and helped found psychoanalytic training. He co-founded the disarmament organisation SANE in 1957, moved to Muralto in Switzerland in 1974 and died there in 1980.
Further main works
- Man for Himself (1947)
- The Sane Society (1955)
- The Art of Loving (1956)
- Marx’s Concept of Man (1961)
- The Anatomy of Human Destructiveness (1973)
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