The Books of My Life: The Lives of Erich Fromm

 

According to historian Lawrence Friedman, author of several biographies on figures in the history in the history of Psychology and Psychoanalysis, the subject of his 2013 biography The Lives of Erich Fromm: Love’s Prophet (New York: Columbia University Press, 2013) lived many lives. He was, for example, a mostly secular Jew, a son. a husband, a student of the Bible, a student of the Talmud, an intellectual, a public intellectual, a sociologist, a social psychologist, a psychoanalytic analyst, an analysand, a student of human psychology, a student of religion, a social ethicist, a commentator on social issues, a member of the famous Frankfurt School, a specialist called to testify before the US Congress, a pundit, an anti-war activist, a celebrity, a critic of nineteenth and twentieth century political Zionism, a prophet of love and hope, a humanist, and an analyst of the human condition.  

Fromm, who was born in Frankfurt in 1900 and died in Locarno in 1980, lived all of his lives, as Friedman notes, in eventful times. He lived, for instance, through the rise of Hitler emigrating from Germany after seeing the writing on the wall. Many of his relatives weren’t as perspicacious. He lived through World War Two with its atrocities and its genocides in Europe and at Hiroshima and Nagasaki. He lived through the Cold War with its latest iteration of great power politics and its potential for destruction on a mass scale thanks to the Bomb and the destructive power of mass murdering social engineers like Yosef Stalin. As Friedman notes these turbulent times helped make Fromm and made him into a critic of Freudian biologically grounded instinct psychology, something that made him a heretic in many Freudian circles including at the Frankfurt Institute which, thanks to the promptings of Herbert Marcuse and Theodor Adorno, turned Fromm into a heretic and ostracised him as a consequence because off his interest in grounding psychology and psychoanalysis in broader economic, political, cultural, and demographic currents than Freud.

I first encountered Fromm as a biblical scholar and a social ethicist when I read his book You Shall Be as Gods (1966) as a teenager. The book appealed to me for a variety or reasons but primarily for its exploration of social ethics. When I was in junior high school I became an opponent of the Vietnam War and eventually all wars and like Fromm was interested in the social ethics of war and, like Fromm, was drawn to Quakerism because of its anti-war stance. I never became a Quaker because, like Marx, Groucho Marx, in the end I could never bring myself to join an organisation that would have me as a member. Despite this, however,  I have continued to have an immense respect for Quakerism and for Quaker activism. Additionally, as was also the case with Fromm, I was drawn to the question of why humans were so aggressive and waged wars on one another in, particularly in the 20th century brutal fashion, and what to do about human aggression and its wars.

Fromm’s attempt to answer the question of why human aggression, why wars, and why human brutality, particularly male brutality, drew him, not surprisingly away from the biological reductionism of Freud and toward Karl Marx and other social science analysts who focused their analyses on the impact of environment, on the impact of economic, political, cultural, and geographical factors on humans. In this he was of a piece with, as Friedman notes, others trying to integrate the psychological, the social, and the cultural such as wholistic American Anthropology,  the interdisciplinary Culture and Personality school of Margaret Mead, Ruth Benedict, Geoffrey Gorer, Gregor Bateson and others, which was connected to wartime US military research, and Edward Sapir, Clyde Kluckhohn, Alfred Kroeber, and Karen Horney among others of a multidisciplinary and interdisciplinary bent who were trying to decipher the mysteries of the relation between personality and culture, what Fromm called human social character. And like many of the early social scientists there was a strong normative, social engineering, and ethical and moral aspect to his attempt to grasp the human condition and transform it in order to make more healthy humans and more healthy societies. The human utopian impulse.

Fromm’s excursion into why humans behaved in the ways they did, as Friedman notes, really began at the Frankfurt School where he and other researchers were engaged in a massive and ultimately problematic (for a variety of reasons) quantitative and qualitative analysis of German workers and particularly the authoritarian tendencies one found among German workers including those on the left in the late 1930s and early 1930s. This study provided the foundation for Fromm’s most famous early book Escape From Freedom/Fear of Freedom in 1941 and a later closely related book The Anatomy of Human Destructiveness which he wrote toward the end of his life in 1973. 

These two books and virtually all of those in between were ultimately concerned with the human aggression and what to do about it. In his works Fromm traced human aggression not to the ego, the id, or the superego in isolation but to social factors that produced sadistic and masochistic authoritarian leaning humans who often, and paradoxically so, led many to surrender their freedoms to a charismatic authoritarian leader who gave them a sense of self-worth and hence an identity. Underlying this authoritarian personality, Fromm argued, was Fromm’s socialised version of Freud’s death instinct, necrophilia, a love of death, a social character trait that resulted, according to Fromm, in greed, egotism, acquisitiveness, violence, brutality, and war. Needless to say, Fromm’s take on necrophilia and its impact on humans and the worlds they have made might provide food for thought for those interested in understanding the rise of Donald Trump and others of his authoritarian and theocratic and fascist ilk including many university presidents at “research universities” like Columbia, NYU, and Indiana who, one assumes, are out to impress their boards of governance along with the right wing populist demagogues in the US Congress who are attacking them, with their hard and manly response to protests in their midst.

Fromm thought it was possible to overcome this culture of necrophilia, which he traced in part to modern capitalism, with its greed, its acquisitiveness, and limited sense of social solidarity with other humans through biophilia, the love of one's life and oneself, the consequent love of the lives of others, and the love of individual freedom and the enlightenment that came with it, all of which, he believed, would give rise to happier and healthier humans and happier and healthier societies and all of which he worked to promote during most of his life. The failure of the reforms of 1968, Friedman points out, would temper Fromm’s utopianism, a utopianism grounded in maternal love and, somewhat like that of Marx, in primitive “communism” its greater egalitarianism, somewhat.

One could, of course, explore other of Fromm’s lives as Friedman does in his fine intellectual biography of Erich Fromm. One could, for example, explore Fromm the author whose many books sold in the thousands, the hundreds of thousands, and the millions. One could focus one’s attention on Fromm the student of comparative political structures and his assessment that the two great powers of the post-World War II era, the USA and the USSR who, as he rightly notes, had a lot in common characterised as they both were by modern bureaucracies and somewhat different forms of modern capitalism. One could explore Fromm’s contention that societies like people can be characterised by greed, acquisitiveness, and necrophilia and so too can be insane something that has become clearer in the wake of the brave new digital media revolution and its social media. 

Anyone interested in any of Fromm's lives—Fromm as a twentieth century psychologist, Fromm as a twentieth century psychoanalyst, Fromm as influenced by anthropology, cultural anthropology, Fromm the twentieth century social ethicist and moralist—would likely profit from reading Friedman’s book, a book that, by the way, does not shy away from criticising Fromm for his sometimes too limited research when writing his books and his tendency to make giant leaps of analytical faith with limited reference to empirical realities. And while Friedman does explore what some might see as failures in Fromm’s personal life, he mercifully keeps this to a minimum, something that keeps The Lives of Erich Fromm from being a scholarly and academic version of a Rupert Murdoch gossip rag.