Erich Fromm

Fromm was the one who brought psychoanalysis into the Institute for Social Research’s study of society. His essay “On the Method and Task of an Analytical Social Psychology,” which opened the first issue of the Zeitschrift für Sozialforschung in 1932, is judged to have shaped the Institute’s theoretical orientation, the empirical design of the Studies on Authority and the Family (1936) and even The Authoritarian Personality (1950) of Adorno and his colleagues. Earlier still, in 1929–1930, he sent 3,000 questionnaires, a method then hardly used in Germany, to workers and employees, and 1,150 came back; many were lost in the Institute’s emigration, and the analysis rested on the 584 that remained in 1934. Classifying the respondents as authoritarian characters, radical or revolutionary characters able to criticize their society on rational grounds, and mixed characters, this survey was the first empirical study of the authoritarian character.

Fromm’s question was why the power ruling a society is as effective as history shows it to be. Fear of physical force alone does not explain it. He found an answer by reworking Sigmund Freud. The child first meets social authority in the family, in the parents and especially the father; but the father is not the model of that authority, only its copy. Fromm thus derived the formation of conscience, the superego, which Freud had explained within the small family, from the social power that authorizes the father. Conversely, social authorities always carry something of the father, as in talk of the “father of the nation” or politicians who make a show of picking up children.

From this comes the concept of social character: the structure of thinking and behaviour that most members of a society share. They take it on as values and norms, like a second nature, and so ensure that the society and its culture continue. The concept became a bridge between sociology and psychology.

Escape from Freedom (1941) applied these ideas to the age of Nazism. Medieval people were not free in the modern sense, but each had a fixed place from birth, so they were not alone, and life had a meaning that left no room for doubt. Modernity released people from such “primary ties.” Yet when economic, social and political conditions offer no basis for realizing individuality, freedom becomes an unbearable burden to people who have lost their security, and they flee into submission that promises relief from uncertainty, even at the cost of their freedom. Fromm named the main mechanisms of escape: authoritarianism, handing oneself over to another; destructiveness, the urge to do away with the world; and “automaton conformity,” remaking oneself into the type society prefers. The way out he proposed was active solidarity with all people and spontaneous activity, love and work, which unite the individual with the world again, not through primary ties but as a free and independent person. The book is counted among the founding works of political psychology.

In the late 1930s Fromm questioned Freud’s view that the libidinal drives decide everything, and his colleagues at the Institute grew uneasy as he moved away from Freudian orthodoxy. He broke with the Institute at the end of 1939, and in America he was grouped with Karen Horney and Harry Stack Sullivan as a neo-Freudian.

The conflict became a public debate in 1955. In the epilogue to Eros and Civilization, “Critique of Neo-Freudian Revisionism,” Herbert Marcuse charged Fromm and other analysts with discarding key insights of Freud such as the libido theory, the death instinct and the Oedipus complex, and so turning psychoanalysis into a psychology of conformity. Fromm, he said, had moved away from the instinctual basis of human personality and embraced a “positive thinking” that leaves the negative where it is. Fromm replied in “The Alleged Radicalism of Herbert Marcuse” that Marcuse had fundamentally misread Freud, a typical representative of the bourgeoisie and an opponent of socialism, as a revolutionary thinker, and that by deliberately setting clinical observation and experience aside he had seriously hampered his understanding of psychoanalytic theory. Carried on in the journal Dissent, the debate was so bitter that it marked Fromm’s banishment from the sphere of critical theory and ended the friendship between the two men. The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy judges that the two thinkers spoke past each other: Fromm was more concerned with how society shapes character, which did not make him less critical, and he too was trying to rescue Eros from the oppressive forces of capitalism.

The Sane Society, published the same year, was the culmination of Fromm’s social and political philosophy. Drawing mainly on Karl Marx’s early writings, he put back in front the ideal of freedom that had largely gone missing from Soviet Marxism. His socialism rejected both Western capitalism and Soviet communism as dehumanizing, and took aim at the alienation common to modern people under both. Alienation is the state in which what people have done confronts them as an alien power that rules them. In the early 1960s he published a book on Marx’s concept of man and Beyond the Chains of Illusion, bringing Marx’s humanist message to readers in America and Western Europe. In 1965, to encourage cooperation between Marxist humanists of East and West, he edited the collection Socialist Humanism, and in the 1960s he took part in a Christian–Marxist dialogue group organized by Milan Machovec and others in communist Czechoslovakia.

Practice followed. In the mid-1950s he joined the Socialist Party of America, hoping to offer an alternative to the McCarthyist drift of American politics, and he co-founded the anti-nuclear organization SANE, opposing the nuclear arms race and US involvement in the Vietnam War. After backing Senator Eugene McCarthy’s losing bid for the Democratic presidential nomination in 1968, he largely withdrew from the American political scene.