| Erich Fromm
Erich Fromm (March 23, 1900 – March 18, 1980) was an internationally
renowned German-American psychologist and humanistic philosopher.
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 studying sociology under
Alfred Weber (brother of Max Weber), Karl Jaspers, and Heinrich
Rickert. Fromm received his Ph.D. in sociology from Heidelberg in
1922, and completed his psychoanalytical training in 1930 at the
Psychoanalytical Institute in Berlin. In that same year, he began
his own clinical practice and joined the Frankfurt Institute for
Social Research. After the Nazi takeover of power in Germany, Fromm
moved to Geneva, then, in 1934, to Columbia University in New York.
After leaving Columbia, he helped form the New York Branch of the
Washington School of Psychiatry in 1943, and in 1945 the William
Alanson White Institute of Psychiatry, Psychoanalysis, and Psychology.
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 the university 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 seminal work, Escape from Freedom (known
in Britain as The Fear of Freedom), first published in 1941, Fromm's
writings were notable as much for their social and political commentary
as for their philosophical and psychological underpinnings. His
second seminal work, Man for Himself: An Inquiry into the Psychology
of Ethics, first published in 1947, was a continuation 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
and turned 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 a
part of it. This is why they felt "naked" and "ashamed":
They had 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 the source
of all 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 Talmud, Fromm pointed to the story of
Jonah, who did not 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.
Politics
The culmination of Fromm's social and political philosophy was his
book The Sane Society, published in 1955, which argued in favor
of humanist, democratic socialism. Building primarily upon the works
of Karl Marx, Fromm was the first political and social commentator
in this school of thought to introduce the ideal of personal freedom,
more frequently found in the writings of classic liberals. 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.
Fromm was very active in American politics. He joined the American
Socialist Party in the 1950s, and did his best to help them provide
an alternative viewpoint to the prevailing McCarthyism of the time,
a viewpoint that 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 interest was
in the international peace movement, fighting against the nuclear
arms race and America's involvement in the Vietnam war. After supporting
then 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.
Major works
- Escape from Freedom (AKA The Fear of Freedom), 1941
- Man for Himself: An Inquiry into the Psychology of Ethics, 1947
- The Sane Society, 1955
- The Art of Loving, 1956
- Heart of Man, 1964
- You Shall Be as Gods, 1966
- The Anatomy of Human Destructiveness, 1973
- To Have or to Be, 1976
- The Art of Being, edited by Rainer Funk, 1989
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