Fromm, Erich b. March 23, 1900; Frankfurt am Main d. March 18, 1980; Muralto, Switzerland
Eminent German psychologist, psychotherapist, philosopher, and academic teacher in the United States.
Fromm studied Jewish law and religion and graduated from Heidelberg University with a doctorate on the Jewish diaspora.
He trained in psychology at the University of Munich and at the Institute of Psychoanalysis in Berlin. His Jewish family background did not play a particular role in his later professional life but necessitated emigration to New York in 1934 after employment with the Frankfurt Institute of Social Research. In the United States, Fromm once more joined that reopened institute, set himself up as a psychoanalyst, and lectured at Columbia University.Fromm was granted U.S. citizenship in 1940 and was invited to teach at Bennington College in Vermont as well as at Yale University. He had already been inspired by the writings of Karl Marx, Johann Jakob Bachofen, and Sigmund Freud but took issue with the latter’s preoccupation with unconscious drives and the supposed neglect of the importance of social factors in human psychology. In 1951, Fromm moved to Mexico City and obtained a professorship of psychoanalysis at the National Autonomous University. He subsequently
became engaged in the U.S. peace movement directed against forced nuclear armament and the Vietnam War. On retiring in 1965, he edited, together with Ernst Bloch, Herbert Marcuse, and others, Humanist Socialism, a programmatic collection of essays establishing a connection between humanist values established in fifteenthcentury Europe, like tolerance, the right to an education, and the right to free development of the mind, and Socialist thought of the time. The conclusion was, with Marx, that genuine humanism would follow from socialism.
Over the years, Fromm had developed a strong anticapitalist stance. He criticized the notion of progress as measured and evaluated by economic growth alone. In the face of technology and mechanization, informed humanist reasoning as well as unselfish love served as a counterbalance leading toward a more humane society, which, ideally, would be free of psychological oppression (The Art of Loving, 1956 and The Revolution of Hope, 1968).
Work, if it dominates over humanity, is seen as an oppressing and alienating factor responsible for psychological troubles like neuroses and sadism.Fromm had studied such negative drives in history as well as in clinical practice and published his conclusions in The Anatomy of Human Destructiveness in 1973. In To Have or to Be (1976), he analyzed the surplus society according to the American model, which, according to Fromm, favored “having” over “being.” The consumption mode in combination with the emergence of mass culture and the dominance of business over private life had led, so went his line of argument, to modern human beings losing touch with life. As a result, people “have” everything but “are” nothing. The individual remained passive and turned to consumerism and toxic substances as means of compensating for existential fears of alienation and spiritual void. Fromm interpreted the manifold distractions offered by the entertainment industry and the growing sense of numbness as indicators of the longing to be reunified with one’s self as well as with nature.
Mla,rkus Oliver Spitz
See also Frankfurt School; Intellectual Exile;
Marcuse, Herbert; Mexico
References and Further Reading
Burston, Daniel. The Legacy of Erich Fromm.
Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1991. Funk, Rainer. Erich Fromm: His Life and Ideas.
New York: Continuum International, 2003. Funk, Rainer, ed. The Erich Fromm Reader.
With a foreword by Joel Kovel. New Jersey: Humanities Press, 1994.