Erich Fromm

Erich Seligmann Fromm (Frankfurt am Main, Hesse, Germany, March 23, 1900-Muralto, Canton Ticino, Switzerland, March 18, 1980) was a prominent psychoanalyst, social psychologist and humanist philosopher of German Jewish origin. During a part of his career, he positioned himself politically defending the Marxist variant of democratic socialism.

A member of the Institute for Social Research at the University of Frankfurt, Fromm actively participated in the first phase of interdisciplinary research at the Frankfurt School, until he broke with them at the end of the 1940s due to the unorthodox interpretation of the Freudian theory developed by said school, which tried to synthesize psychoanalysis and the postulates of Marxism (Freudo-Marxism) in a single discipline. He was one of the main renovators of psychoanalytic theory and practice in the mid-20th century.

Biography

Erich Fromm grew up in Frankfurt am Main, in a Jewish family that strictly followed the precepts of the religion of that culture: many of its members were rabbis. Erich Fromm himself also initially wanted to follow this life path. However, he first studied law in Frankfurt, then moved to Heidelberg to study sociology, where he did his doctorate in 1922 under the advice of Alfred Weber, on Jewish law. Until 1925 he attended Talmud classes with Salman Baruch Rabinkow. In 1926 he married the psychoanalyst Frieda Reichmann. In the late 1920s Fromm began his training as a psychoanalyst at the Berlin Psychoanalytic Institute with a non-medical disciple of Freud's, the legal scholar Hanns Sachs. At that time, he and his wife left Orthodox Jewish religious life. From 1929, Fromm practiced as a "layman" (the then called Laienpsychanalitiker, German term to refer to non-medical) in Berlin. At this time he began his interest and study of Marx's theories. In 1930 he was invited by Max Horkheimer to head the Psychology Department of the newly created Institute for Social Research (Institut für Sozialforschung).

In 1931, she divorced Reichmann, with whom she maintained a close lifelong friendship. On May 25, 1934, after the Nazi party took power, she emigrated with other members of the institute to the United States. Her intellectual differences with other members of the institution, especially Herbert Marcuse and Theodor Adorno, led to her separation from it in 1939.

During the 1940s Fromm carried out important editorial work, publishing several books that were later considered classics on the authoritarian tendencies of contemporary society and deviating markedly from the original Freudian theory. In 1943 he was one of the founding members of the New York branch of the Washington School of Psychiatry, after which he collaborated with the William Alanson White Institute of Psychiatry, Psychoanalysis, and Psychology. In 1944 he married a second marriage to a German-Jewish immigrant, Henny Gurland; around 1950 they moved to Mexico, where Gurland would die two years later. Fromm taught at the National Autonomous University of Mexico, where he founded the Psychoanalytic Section of the medical school and the Mexican Institute of Psychoanalysis.

On December 18, 1953, he remarried Annis Glove Freeman. From the middle of the decade he was heavily involved with the American peace movements, and was a prominent opponent of the Vietnam War. He moved away from all support for real socialism, especially the totalitarian model of the Soviet state, while at the same time criticizing capitalist society. This, together with his perspectives on personal freedom and the development of a free culture, causes him to be associated with the anarchist line with some frequency. However, from another side, in certain polemics of the Frankfurt School he was criticized as "revisionist" or even "social democrat", a term with a pejorative connotation in this context. By positioning himself —for example in Beyond the Chains of Illusion (1962)— he recognized the key influence of Marx and Freud in his thought, while declaring himself a supporter of a humanist and democratic socialism. Another philosopher who had an influence on his thought is Daisetsu Teitaro Suzuki, with whom he came into contact at a historic seminar organized in 1957 by the Psychoanalysis Department of the UNAM School of Medicine and with whom he jointly published the book Zen Buddism & Psychoanalysis (1960)

Between 1957 and 1961 Fromm combined his activity at UNAM with a professorship at Michigan State University. In 1965 he retired; After traveling for a few years, in 1974 he settled in Muralto, in Switzerland. He died in his home five days before his eightieth birthday.

Thought

Three books are particularly important to understand the thought of the German author. The first is The fear of freedom, the second The art of loving and the third is The heart of man. dissatisfied with his belonging to a new "school" of psychoanalysis, to conclude by saying that he proposes a different philosophical structure of reference, that of dialectical humanism. Despite this, it is considered that the books The fear of freedom, Ethics and psychoanalysis and Psychoanalysis of contemporary society also present a continuity with regard to the psychological thought of Erich Fromm, in addition to the fact that in the latter he founded what he calls humanistic psychoanalysis, while in Ethics and psychoanalysis he replaced the Freudian system of libido development with one which is based on the processes of assimilation and socialization of the individual. He himself mentions, at the beginning of Ethics and psychoanalysis, that it is necessary to read that book together with The fear of freedom to fully understand its characterology.

Fromm says, in the preface to The Heart of Man, that Fear of Freedom was the fruit of his clinical experience and theoretical speculation to understand both freedom, such as aggression and the destructive instinct. The thinker distinguishes between aggression in the service of life, biophilia, and necrophilia or aggression in the service of death.

In a later book, The Art of Loving, Fromm analyzed the capacity to love and, on the contrary, The Heart of Man has as its axis the enunciation and characterization of two syndromes, growth (love of life, independence and overcoming narcissism) and decay (love of death, incestuous symbiosis and malignant narcissism).

For Fromm, who lived in the midst of the Cold War, this is a reflection of the decadence syndrome, because despite the enormous risk of death, hatred inspired by a malignant, suicidal narcissism prevails; prevails between the governments of the superpowers.

Fromm is interested in the vision of Thomas Hobbes, in the sense that man is a wolf to man, but at the same time highlights the human inclination to self-sacrifice. He wonders about this dual condition if he is the werewolf or the lamb of himself. In search of an answer, he turns to the New Testament to finally conclude that this book reflects both one condition and the other, and concludes that the individual is both a wolf and a lamb.

However, not all men have developed both conditions in the same way, since in the vast majority the lamb predominates, while a minority is dominated by the wolf condition, but this minority has known how to exalt the wolf condition that exists in the vast majority, and I quote:

But if most men were lambs, why is man's life so different from that of the lamb? His story was written with blood; it is a story of constant violence, in which force was almost invariably used to double its will. Did Talaat Pachá alone solve millions of Armenians? Did Hitler alone exterminate millions of Jews? Did Stalin alone exterminate millions of political enemies? Those men were not alone, they had thousands of men who killed for them and who did it not only voluntarily, but with pleasure.

Fromm concludes that "The ordinary man with extraordinary power is the main danger for humanity and not the evil one or the sadist", which can be concretized when the three orientations that form the decadence syndrome are combined in him and that "Moves man to destroy for the pleasure of destruction and to hate for the pleasure of hating."

In contrast, he describes the growth syndrome: “the love of life (as opposed to the love of death) the love of man (as opposed to narcissism) and the love of independence (as opposed to symbiotic-fixation). incestuous).

Of course, a mentality as rich and creative as that of Erich Fromm who lived his time intensely, who embraced a Marxism far removed from the prevailing totalitarianism and who rejected a ferocious capitalism, who was also an educator, a writer of great appeal because his books are easy to read and he combined both his clinical experience with his philosophical meditation, produced a rich thought endowed with many edges exposed throughout more than twenty books that it is impossible to classify in a chapter like the one in this article. However, the previous suspicion is the center that remains reiterated both in his farsighted books on society and in the trial of the great characters of our history.

His studies on the relationship between totalitarian political systems and monotheistic religions are of transcendental importance. According to Fromm, monotheistic religions educate individuals in blind obedience to a higher authority, which puts the rules above any reason or discussion. Thus, the individual is reduced to a mere servant of an all-powerful god. This masochistic mentality, acquired since childhood, would be the psychological basis that has made many men blindly follow dictators like Hitler. It is interesting to note how similar these ideas of Fromm's about monotheism are to those of another great thinker: Joseph Campbell. Shortly before he died, Fromm published a book that marked a step forward in his thinking: Anatomy of Human Destructiveness . In this writing he raised the idea that man opts in his life between two forces: biophilia and necrophilia. The first is the force that drives the human being to love life and to create. Necrophilia arises when man opts for selfishness, and entails pride, greed, violence, the desire to destroy and hatred of life. It is noteworthy the magnificent study that Fromm did, in this book, about Hitler's personality based on this theory of biophilia-necrophilia.

Like the above, Fromm was a staunch defender of women's rights, which is why he was always enthusiastic about Bachofen's works, as he expressed it: “The full understanding of this patriarchal ideology would require a more detailed analysis. Suffice it to say that women constitute a class dominated and exploited by men in all patriarchal societies; Like all exploiting groups, dominant men must produce ideologies in order to explain their domination as natural, and therefore necessary and justified. Women, like most of the dominated classes, have accepted the masculine ideology, although in private they held their own contrary ideas. It seems that women's liberation began in the 20th century, and that it is accompanied by a weakening of the patriarchal system in industrial society, although even today there is no de facto full equality of women in any country.

The subject of the domination of women was one of the main concerns for Fromm, that is why he rescued Bachofen and that is why he stated: “The dominance of men over women is the first act of conquest, and the first exploitative use of force…”

The current human condition

Erich Fromm affirms, in his work The heart of man, that the current human being is characterized by his passivity and identifies with the values of the market because man has transformed himself into a consumer good and feels his life as a capital that must be invested profitably. Man has become an eternal consumer, and the world for him is nothing more than an object to satisfy his appetite.

According to the author, in today's society success and failure is based on knowing how to invest your life. Human value has been limited to the material, in the price you can obtain for your services and not in the spiritual (love qualities, nor your reason, nor your artistic capacity). Self-esteem in the human being depends on external factors and feeling successful with respect to the judgment of others. Hence, he lives aware of others, and that his security resides in conformity; in not straying from the herd. The individual must agree with society, go the same way and not stray from the opinion or what is established by it.

For the consumer society to function well, it needs a class of individuals who meekly cooperate in large groups who want to consume more and more, whose tastes are standardized and who can be easily influenced and anticipated. This type of society needs members who feel free or independent, who are not subject to any authority or principle or moral conscience and who, nevertheless, are willing to be ordered, to do what is expected, to fit smoothly into the social machine.. Today's men are guided without strength, driven without leaders, driven without any goal, except to continue moving, to advance. This kind of individual is the automaton, a person who allows himself to be directed by another.

Humans must work to satisfy their desires, which are constantly stimulated and directed by the economic machinery. The automated subject faces a dangerous situation, since his reason deteriorates and his intelligence decreases; he acquires the most powerful material force without the wisdom to employ it.

The danger that the author sees in the future of humans is that they become robots. It is true that robots do not rebel. But, given the nature of the human being, robots cannot live and stay sane. Then they will seek to destroy the world and themselves, for they will no longer be able to bear the tedium of a meaningless and completely aimless life.

To overcome that danger, the author says you must overcome alienation, you must overcome the passive and market-oriented attitudes that now dominate you and choose instead a mature and productive path. He must regain the feeling of being himself and regain the value of his inner life.

Giuseppe Amara Pace, a disciple of Dr. Fromm, stated in an interview for Proceso magazine that, for Erich Fromm, the revolution did not consist of bullets and weapons but in a change of ideas, emancipation and solidarity. This is the revolution that would help change Mexico.

Work

• Fear of freedom (1941)
• Ethics and psychoanalysis (1947)
• Erich Fromm: a school of life
• The forgotten language (1951)
• Chains of illusion: an intellectual autobiography
• Love of life
• The art of love (1956)
• The real life
• The art of listening
• Marx and his concept of man (1959)
• Sigmund Freud's mission: his personality and influence (1959)
• Zen Buddhism and psychoanalysis(1960), written in collaboration with D. Suzuki and R. de Martino.
• The dogma of Christ
• Humanism as Real Utopia
• Can the man survive? (1961)
• Spirit and society
• Ethics and policy
• The attraction of life
• The current human condition
• The Psychoanalysis Crisis
• The pathology of normality
• The social unconscious
• About disobedience
• And you will be like gods
• The Heart of Man: His Power for Good and Evil
• Anatomy of human destruction (1975)
• Greatness and limitations of Freud's thought
• The Revolution of Hope: Towards Humanized Technology
• From having to being (1976)
• Contemporary industrial society
• Psychoanalysis of contemporary society: towards a healthy society
• Sociopsychoanalysis of the Mexican peasant: study of the economy and psychology of a rural community
• Psychoanalysis and religion