Fromm, Erich

FROMM, ERICH (1900–1980). A world-renowned psychoanalyst, social theorist, and public intellectual, Erich Fromm was the author of fourteen books, the most important of which were Escape from Freedom (1941) and Man for Himself (1947). Although he felt drawn to the ideas of revolutionary transformation that he found in Marx, and the way in which Marx made spirit a dialectical projection of the alienated and unrealized human potential suppressed by the existing social order, he found the psychological foundations of Marxism lacking. He sought to remedy this failing by linking Marxism’s psycho-spiritual foundations to a number of important developments in Western psychological and spiritual thought.

Born in Frankfurt am Main, educated at the University of Heidelberg, and trained by and affiliated with the Institute for Social Research (or Frankfurt School) from 1930 to 1938, Fromm fled Germany in 1933 and resettled in the United States, lecturing at several universities. During this period, he sought to give Marxian psychology an orthodox Freudian base. By introducing concepts such as neurosis, the unconscious, libido, and resistance, Fromm hoped to deal more effectively with the popular attachments to authority and other problems that evidently blocked social transformation. As he continued to develop his ideas, however, he broke with the Frankfurt School, became a formulator of neo-Freudianism, and repeatedly reformulated the Marx-Freud synthesis.

In Escape from Freedom and other books capturing a large public audience, Fromm searched for a theory of human nature that would do justice to the concepts of spirit and transformation in Marx’s own writings. Rejecting libido theory, the universality of the death complex, and the death instinct, he developed a philosophical anthropology that defined the distinctive essence of human nature in its ontological incompleteness.

A bold figure during the Cold War era, assailing capitalism’s pseudo-solutions in Man for Himself and The Sane Society (1955), Fromm was a founder of the National Committee for a Sane Nuclear Policy—it was his suggestion to call it SANE for short—and a prominent leader of the Ban the Bomb movement. Although often seen as a moderate and comfortable idealist in retrospect, his ideas and even more his gift for popularization made him an important figure for the early New Left. From the middle 1960s, however, Fromm grew more politically cautious as he fell out of favor with radical youths. Engaged in a long-running battle with Herbert Marcuse (whom he attacked as a “nihilist”), he associated himself with the social democratic wing of the peace movement unwilling to break entirely with mainstream liberalism or to demand the withdrawal of US troops from Southeast Asia. For these reasons among others, Fromm seemed to many readers an outdated figure.

However, in the first two decades of the twenty-first century, which have had to absorb the collapse of the Soviet bloc and the hegemonic rise of Chinese market socialism, interest in Fromm’s work persisted as the search continued for new visions of the socialist alternative. Particularly interesting have been the references to and the panels and conferences organized on his work at forums such as the American Sociological Association, the CUNY Graduate Center, and the Left Forum. These persisting interests continued to center around Fromm’s humanism and the psycho-spiritual ground that he sought for it.

Burston, Daniel. The Legacy of Erich Fromm. Cambridge: Harvard University Press (1991)

Friedman, Lawrence J. The Lives of Erich Fromm: Love’s Prophet. New York: Columbia University Press, 2013.

Funk, Rainer. Erich Fromm: The Courage to Be. New York: Continuum, 1982.

Landis, Bernard, and Edward S. Tauber, eds. In the Name of Life: Essays in Honor of Erich Fromm. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1971.

Mclaughlin, Neil. “Optimal Marginality: Innovation and Orthodoxy in Fromm’s Revision of Psychoanalysis.” The Sociological Quarterly. Vol.42, No.2 (Spring, 2001).

Schaar, John H. Escape from Authority: The Perspectives of Erich Fromm. New York: Basic Books, 1961.