Escape Velocities
On Erich Fromm’s lost social character
J.E. Morain
Despite being one of the most well-known psychoanalysts, Erich Fromm is little read today by both practicing analysts and psychoanalytically inclined social scientists. In sociologist Neil McLaughlin’s words, Fromm has become a “forgotten intellectual,” mostly remembered in name only. This has been the case for some time: Lynne Layton, an analyst and former editor at the critical theory journal Telos, reports that his works were ignored by those inclined towards critical theory since at least the 1970s. Another analyst, Roger Frie, tells us that even at the William Alanson White Institute—where Fromm was a founding member and periodically taught for decades—he was scarcely ever mentioned. This neglect is quite puzzling.
Fromm came to psychoanalysis in a rather convoluted way. As an adolescent, he wanted nothing more than to travel to Lithuania to study there with the rabbis to become a great scholar of the Talmud. His parents, however, were protective and less pious than him. They convinced him to attend the University of Heidelberg in 1919. The fruit of his three-year stint in Heidelberg—the only formal university education Fromm ever received—was a PhD in sociology earned under the direction of Alfred Weber, brother of the more famous Max. His dissertation, entitled The Jewish Law: A Contribution to the Sociology of the Jewish Diaspora, was as much influenced by Weber as by his various Jewish teachers—the most important of whom was Salman Baruch Rabinkow, a romantic Hasidic socialist from Russia.
Despite receiving high marks on his dissertation, he left the academy and struck out on his own. Around this time, he rejected Zionism. After spending several years in the German Zionist movement, he began to see it as a particularistic, nationalist perversion of the universalist humanism for which Judaism stood; he later claimed that upon his departure from the movement in 1923 he considered Zionists “no better than Hakenkreuzer [swastika wearers].” Fromm remained a critic of Zionism, and indeed all nationalism, for the rest of his life. Nationalism was fundamentally at odds with the conception of Judaism he absorbed from the works of Hermann Cohen, the Jewish philosopher and socialist who described Judaism as a universalist “religion of reason.” According to Cohen, the ultimate goal of Judaism was messianism: the achievement of a universalist ethical society free of injustice here on Earth. This notion of messianism would form the basis for much of Fromm’s political and ethical development.
“This notion of messianism would form the basis for much of Fromm’s political and ethical development.”
He only discovered psychoanalysis after becoming involved with Frieda Reichmann in the early 1920s, an Orthodox Jewish psychiatrist then studying to become an analyst. She was eleven years older than him. The maternal character of his relationship, in which Reichmann was the responsible breadwinner, was one of a more general kind: Karen Horney, with whom Fromm began an affair in 1934 after separating from Reichmann, was 15 years his senior, too. Reichmann initially served as Fromm’s analyst, but as their relationship turned romantic, they broke off the analysis. In 1924, Reichmann founded, with assistance from Fromm, a veritably singular institution.
Officially called the Heidelberg Sanitarium or Therapeuticum, this was a religious (Orthodox Jewish) therapeutic community. The Therapeuticum’s Jewishness was so central to its practice that some jokingly referred to it as the “Torah-peuticum.” They treated in-patients and out-patients, allowing those who could not afford to pay to do labor for the Therapeuticum. A form of group therapy was apparently practiced, but the actual nature of this practice remains a mystery. Patients were expected to uphold the Orthodox Jewish way of life: keeping kosher, respecting the Sabbath, and generally following halakhah. In addition to the communal activities directly related to Judaism and the aforementioned group therapy, patients were also individually analyzed by Reichmann. The institution convened an engrossing and meaningful, if chaotic, experience for both the staff and patients: the cooks at the Therapeuticum were paid with analysis and the analytic patients paid by working. After a few years, the Therapeuticum was closed in 1927.
At the time, Fromm and Reichmann turned towards atheism, encountered relationship troubles, and realized that most patrons were more interested in using it as a Jewish community center than a therapeutic facility. Still, Fromm had met, and befriended, many of the most important heterodox analysts in Germany, such as George Groddeck, Wilhelm Reich, and Karen Horney. All three, as well as Groddeck’s close friend Sándor Ferenczi, would leave a lasting influence on Fromm’s trajectory as a psychoanalyst. Fromm embraced Marxism in these years, giving a more concrete political direction to the socialistic humanist ethical perspective he had developed as a young adult and profoundly altering his approach to social science.
After the shuttering of the “Torah-peuticum,” Fromm completed his training analysis under Hanns Sachs and Theodor Reik in 1929. Almost immediately, he became both a practicing lay analyst in Berlin and a lecturer at the newly inaugurated Frankfurt Psychoanalytic of Institute, which was the first university- affiliated psychoanalytic institute in the world. Through his contacts in Frankfurt—namely his old friend Leo Löwenthal and fellow analyst Karl Landauer—he was introduced to Max Horkheimer. By 1930, he had become the tenured chair of social psychology at the Institute for Social Research under Horkheimer’s direction.
Throughout the 1930s he published essays in the Institute’s Zeitschrift für Sozialforschung which outlined his Freudo-Marxist “analytic social psychology.” These essays ranged across the family, psychoanalytic therapy, and the psychology of authority. While he critiqued Freud on some points in these texts— rejecting the idea of the death drive, for instance—he largely maintained the appearance of a relatively ortho dox Freudian. Alongside Horkheimer and the other members of the Institute, he contributed to the collaborative approach to social research and theory which historians of the Frankfurt School have come to call “interdisciplinary materialism,” and worked for several years on an innovative social-psychological study of German workers which for a number of reasons was, unfortunately, only published in 1981 after Fromm’s death. Fromm was also on the move during this period—first to Switzerland for his acute tuberculosis and then to the United States, where he used his contacts to help secure a place for Horkheimer’s Institute at Columbia University.
In 1936, Fromm began formulating a theoretical revision of some basic tenets of Freudian psychoanalysis. He wanted to dispose of Freud’s libido theory in favor of a historicized metapsychology centered around object relations that drew on Marx’s historical materialism and contemporary cultural anthropology to create a model of the psyche that was fundamentally social. Fromm’s rejection of libido theory was seen as anti-materialist by Horkheimer and others, and his effort to preserve Freud’s clinical contributions was probably glossed over by colleagues who did not care about the clinical side of psychoanalysis. Further, Fromm’s social revision of psychoanalysis clashed with Horkheimer and Adorno’s interpretation of Freud as a contradictory figure of bourgeois individualism with a covert social critique that could only be brought out with a specific dialectical reading: if psychoanalysis went beyond Freud, then it may lose touch with the radical singularity of his thought. Ultimately shelved and only published posthumously, the resulting essay was repeatedly rejected for publication in the Zeitschrift by Horkheimer.
Financial troubles and thinly veiled personal animosity led to tensions with the “inner circle” of the Institute, and Fromm left the Institute on less than amicable terms in late 1939. Following his departure, Horkheimer and Adorno developed paranoid delusions that Fromm was forming a “united front” against them with another ex-Institute member, Karl Wittfogel. For many years afterward, they continued to hold a, frankly, pathological grudge against him. At one point, Horkheimer wrote in a letter that he “[did] not know of anyone whose contact could cause [him] greater revulsion than [Fromm’s.]” No doubt this was due, in no small part, to the fact that Fromm’s exit from the Institute resulted in them paying him a severance to the tune of $20,000—a small fortune at the time. Adorno’s hatred for Fromm is more mysterious, older, and probably also more pathological: he privately attacked him as a “professional Jew” and “social-democratic anarchist,” among other things, throughout the 1930s. This distaste for Fromm may have its origins in Adorno’s outrage at Horkheimer’s decision to hire Fromm to the Institute instead of Adorno’s close friend Walter Benjamin, who was several years Fromm’s senior and already had a considerable body of work.
As for Fromm, he tended to downplay his time with the Frankfurt School and leave it out of his autobiography. Rainer Funk’s biography Erich Fromm: His Life and Ideas, largely based on interviews with Fromm conducted by Gérard Khoury during the last few years of his life, dedicates little space to his relationship with the luminaries of the Institute for Social Research. This tendency seems to have been more influenced by his later debate with Marcuse in the mid-1950s than the initial break with Horkheimer in 1939, as positive references to Institute publications by Horkheimer and others are still found in Escape from Freedom (1941). However, Fromm had reasons to dislike Horkheimer beyond his unkind termination practices: Horkheimer had once denied Fromm’s request for a loan of $500 to pay for his mother’s passage to the U.S. from England—she, like most of Fromm’s family, was a refugee from Nazi Germany. Ultimately, Fromm’s decision to put the Frankfurt School behind him led to a lasting marginalization in the reception of critical theory and a separation from the intellectual tradition closest to his own thought during his lifetime.
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Some aspects of Fromm’s work appear terminally dated. Peacenik humanism is politically dead. His social critique was largely directed at an “affluent society” form of capitalism which no longer exists. His odes to love are too cisheteronormative. He failed to produce a distinct intellectual school or tendency in his lifetime. He picked the losing side in several of the crucial theoretical debates of the mid-20th century, such as humanism vs. anti-humanism and the original controversy over “revisionism” in psychoanalysis. His decision to focus on popularized writing resulted in a lack of systematic theoretical works. All of these are certainly true, but ultimately both uninteresting and inconclusive as far as an explanation of his present neglect. Yet, beyond these byways or dead ends, one reason Fromm’s star has blinked out of the constellation of critical traditions is a more prosaic one: his theoretical contributions are forgotten because he is embarrassing and, thus, discomforting to us. This also neatly explains why he has a niche appeal among certain Trotskyist academics, as Trotskyists are immune to being embarrassed.
“His theoretical contributions are forgotten because he is embarrassing and, thus, discomforting to us.”
The public intellectual role Fromm filled no longer exists. His mature works were written in a style both popular and scholarly, but he leaned more toward the former. Even as he lost academic prestige following his 1955 exchange with Marcuse over the merits of psychoanalytic “revisionism,” he retained immense popularity and sold millions of books. That debate saw Marcuse aggressively accusing Fromm of abandoning the radicality of Freud’s original metapsychology in favor of theoretical and practical conformism, and Fromm responding by trying to bring in some nuance and criticizing the undue elevation of libidinal satisfaction he found in Marcuse’s formulations. This attempt at defense did not work very well, and his reputation was so tarnished by the scuffle that Paul Robinson could later summarily dismiss him as a “rabid sexual conservative” in his otherwise excellent study The Freudian Left (1969). His texts are full of ethical exhortations to the reader, and he paid no heed to the “ban on graven images” upheld by his erstwhile colleagues Adorno and Horkheimer. Numerous commentators have likened his tone to that of a preacher or prophet— I am inclined to agree with their judgment. From 1962, Beyond the Chains of Illusion goes so far as to close with an extended confession of faith: “I believe that the only force which can save us from self-destruction is reason.” To a generation brought up on Lacanian irony or Foucault’s critique of confessionality, this is both mortifyingly embarrassing and an easy target for ridicule. I was myself embarrassed by Fromm’s unflinching forthrightness upon opening up Escape from Freedom for the first time and discovering that it is prefaced by an epigraph from Thomas Jefferson.
His political ideas could also be cringeworthy at times. The political manifesto The Revolution of Hope (1968), written in connection with the Eugene McCarthy presidential campaign, closes with a proposal to form a fifty-person National Council to serve as the “Voice of American Conscience.” This included a tearout questionnaire, which readers could mail in to nominate candidates for this Council. Postage for the questionnaire was not included, with Fromm writing that he “[had] not provided a prepaid envelope,” because “[e]ven the first small step requires initiative at least to address the envelope yourself and spend the money for a stamp.” In other words, not all of his ideas are worth recovering.
When Fromm does come up in contemporary psychoanalytic literature, he is represented as a minor character in the broader “relational” tendency, encompassing the British object relations tradition and American ego psychology and interpersonal traditions. Fromm praised and cited analysts such as Horney, Michael Balint, D.W. Winnicott, RD Laing, and his ex-wife Frieda Fromm-Reichmann, yet his own contributions were more coldly received by even these heterodox members of the analytic establishment. He was formally excluded from the orthodox International Psychoanalytic Association and informally isolated at both heterodox psychoanalytic associations in the U.S.—the Association for the Advancement of Psychoanalysis and the William Alanson White Institute—despite being a founding member of the latter and a training analyst at the former. Although he founded the Sociedad Psicoanalítica Mexicana and exerted considerable personal and theoretical influence there for many years even after the organization was reconstituted as the Instituto Mexicano de Psicoanálisis in 1963, the IMPAC is not an exclusively “Frommian” institution today, although it does advertise his status as their founder.
Why the cold shoulder? The orthodox Freudians at the IPA shunned and expelled him for being a revisionist, and even the heterodox psychoanalysts like Horney were wary of him because he was a mere lay analyst who lacked a medical doctorate. In the case of Horney’s AAP, there were clear interpersonal motives involved as well: after their affair ended around 1940, Horney sustained a more limited, strictly professional relationship with Fromm and then sidelined him in 1943 to strengthen her leadership in the association. His socialist politics and repeated attempts to add an activistic bent to clinical practice—he tried to get the William Alanson White Institute to adopt a policy of socially engaged “therapeutic worthwhileness” in choosing patients and encouraged a similar approach in his Mexican students—probably didn’t win him any friends either. Neil McLaughlin has argued that Fromm’s work exposes the disavowed “nightmare” of the discipline. Most analysts’ work is grounded, implicitly or otherwise, in the belief that private clinical intervention can, and will, meaningfully heal the world by itself. Because Fromm criticized this illusion, he is unacceptable. The analytic establishment was afraid of society, and Fromm threatened to bring society into the clinic.
As already stated, Fromm did not produce any systematic synthesis of his thought. However, in the late 1960s, he set out to write a four-volume series on “humanistic psychoanalysis,” the suggestive term that Fromm used to describe his analytic enterprise. He only produced one preliminary volume largely consisting of previously published essays (The Crisis of Psychoanalysis), and a fragmentary draft for a second volume which has since been published as The Revision of Psychoanalysis. In the second chapter of that text, he outlines the five fundamental points of his dialectically revised humanistic psychoanalysis: 1) a shift from mechanistic materialism to historical materialism; 2) a new interpersonal conception of psychoanalytic knowledge; 3) a fundamentally social model of the human being (“man”); 4) a (radical) humanist orientation which “assumes the basic identity of the potential in all human beings as well as the unconditional acceptance of the other as being no other than myself”; and 5) a socially critical perspective which sees the search for truth as a process of liberation. He ultimately dedicated his efforts in his last decade to finishing The Anatomy of Human Destructiveness (1973) and To Have or To Be (1976). He never found the time to put down, in full, his ideas on clinical technique. But still, I ask, what psychoanalytic corpus can’t be described as fragmentary and full of half-complete arguments?
Fromm’s oeuvre, as just outlined, offers many compelling ideas and theories at varying levels of completeness and cogency. The name he gave to his project as a whole was humanistic psychoanalysis. The most promising and developed part of his corpus, however, is his analytic social psychology, and the core concept of his mature analytic social psychology is that of “social character.” The psychoanalytic theory of character was a primary area of research for analysts at the Berlin Psychoanalytic Institute such as Karl Abraham and Wilhelm Reich in the 1920s and 1930s. It was in this milieu that the importance of the concept was impressed on Fromm and mingled with his earlier sociological research on social cohesion in his dissertation. Unfortunately, the concept of character (or personality) has lost much of its import since the middle 20th century. In contemporary psychoanalysis, the concept of character has largely been contracted back to the clinic, and most research on the topic is firmly in the area of what are now called personality disorders—what generally would have been referred to as “character neuroses” or “neurotic character- types” back in the 1920s and 1930s.
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As a young man coming of age during the First World War, Fromm struggled to comprehend how it was socially and psychologically possible for millions of people to slaughter each other. Despite never being in the war, he was still impressed by the savage course history had taken, naming it as “the event that determined more than anything else [his] development.” Fromm described how this developmental change— psychologically and historically—was possible through his synthesis of Marx and Freud. This further entailed a revision of the Marxian theory of what is often glossed as the difference between the economic base and cultural-political superstructure.
From 1931 onwards, he claimed that psychoanalysis provided the key for understanding their mutual influence. Between these two “structures,” there was a third force of formation—a social-psychological one which mediated between them. He tried out a variety of names for this structure. Through the 1930s, he variously called this society’s libidinal structure, spirit, drive structure, and psychic structure. He eventually settled on a pair of terms: “social character” and “social unconscious.” “Social character” designates the aspects of character structure common to a distinct social group, such as a class. While Fromm revised Freud on many points, he maintained a psychodynamic conception of character where internal psychological forces shape a person beyond mere external behavior. The concept of social character is basically functionalist, explaining why people generally “want to do what they have to do,” or how socially functional needs become “second nature” to individuals.[1] Individuals internalize the social “character matrix” of different traits principally through childhood experience in the family, which Fromm described as the “psychological agency of society” from 1931 onwards.
It should be recognized, however, that Fromm’s functionalism is distinctively critical. A society which turns human beings into functionalistic “automatons” inevitably creates dysfunctional tendencies and is, in Fromm’s words, “insane.” The reproduction of class society necessitates the repression of human needs which conflict with oppression and point towards liberation. Repressive functionalism is the result of an oppressive society, not an a priori characteristic of human society in general. Moreover, even within a repressive society, people always have the potential to, in Sartre’s words, “make something out of what was made of them” and perhaps find love.
Despite his presentation of social character as a distinct level between the economic base and cultural superstructure, the concept’s full articulation is more nuanced and dialectical. Social character, Fromm posits, is also constitutive of the economic base so far as it determines the qualitative aspect of human labor-power in each social formation. The way that people approach physical labor, the distinction between free time and being on the clock, and the wage relation under capitalism cannot be accounted for without recognition of the psychological aspect. At the same time, social character has no self-existent “support” outside of concrete human individuals and the institutions they construct. In a certain sense, social character is more like a dimension of both the base and superstructure than a level sandwiched between them.
His most in-depth exploration and application of the concept of social character is undoubtedly the criminally underrated “sociopsychoanalytic” study Social Character in a Mexican Village (1970), co-authored with Michael Maccoby. The book is an in-depth qualitative and quantitative social-psychological study of a small Mexican peasant village based on surveys, historical research, and participant observation conducted over the course of several years. Quantitative research showed that the majority of villagers had dominantly receptive or hoarding characters—oral and anal characters in the orthodox Freudian idiom —while further analysis explained this fact as a result of adaptation to the semi-feudal mode of production and oppressive political superstructure which characterized Mexican society for centuries. Other salient traits of the social character of the villagers were also explained on the basis of the social history of Mexico. For example, the predominance of mother-fixation in the face of an ostensibly patriarchal social order was posited to be a consequence of the destruction of indigenous Mexican society and the subsequent eclipse of paternal authority by class authority in institutions such as the hacienda. More recent historical events in Mexico also had a psychological impact: villagers with roots in the old hacienda system were more likely to have a receptive and passive character, and hence a similar approach to labor and society, than those from families that had experienced social and economic advancement during the Mexican Revolution.
With the concept of a “social unconscious,” Fromm designated “those areas of repression which are common to most members of a society.” “These commonly repressed elements are those contents [in] a given society,” he elaborates, which “it cannot permit its members to be aware of if the society with its specific contradictions is to operate successfully.” This concept of a “social unconscious” is also diagnostic and functionalist. In other words, through a social unconscious, we can more directly articulate the origins of mental pathology by contextualizing them. Yet, importantly, the context here is in the demands placed on people to reproduce historically specific social forms within the modes of production in a class society. Fromm outlines a repression endemic to class society, one that leaves most people on a knife’s edge. We live objectively unsatisfying lives mostly devoid of freedom and love, yet people generally manage to keep themselves from falling into the acute level of mental suffering that can warrant psychiatric intervention.
“Fromm outlines a repression endemic to class society, one that leaves most people on a knife’s edge.”
Reminiscent of how Marx asserted how we should seek the anatomy of civil society in the political economy, Fromm’s higher-level concepts delineated an anatomy of dominant forms of social psychology. While this makes for a serviceable critique of dominant psychological notions, an exclusive focus on this part of his thought would leave out his account of the nature and causes of alienation, or what Fromm called “socially patterned defects.” His mature account begins with Escape from Freedom (1941). The social fact of isolation, he argued, begets anxiety and, in turn, the socially endemic pathologies of capitalism. Marked by a certain velocity, pathologies are attempts to “escape” from alienation and isolation.
In this respect, Fromm took much from developmental psychological accounts, taking cues from the works of Piaget, Ferenczi and the Balints, and, especially, from Fromm’s friend and colleague Harry Stack Sullivan. Sullivan had developed an account of the origin of anxiety in the infant’s relation to the mother—or “mothering one” in Sullivan’s terminology. This fit nicely with Fromm’s own thoughts: in post-Freudian terms, he emphasized the pre-oedipal stage, describing infancy as a period of symbiotic existence with the mother. Maternal care guarantees security, but totally lacks freedom.
Moreover, he introduced the term “primary ties” to likewise signify the “ties that exist before the process of individuation has resulted in the complete emergence of an individual.” Primary ties include not just the connection of a child to its family—in particular, the mother—but also the individual to the community in pre-capitalist societies. Many pre-capitalist societies provided security—or at least the feeling of security— through communally embedded systems of mutual aid, economic redistributionby a central authority, and/or noblesse oblige. Cutting these ties leads to the growth of individual ability, psychological independence, and ego strength, but it also leads to aloneness and the loss of previous security, both psychologically and socially. The former was styled as positive freedom, and the latter as negative freedom. Negative freedom is a prerequisite for positive freedom in Fromm’s conception, but by itself, negative freedom and its derivatives engender anxiety and, therefore, a person attempts to “escape” the resulting isolation by various regressive and ultimately futile means. Capitalism banks on the fear and anxiety brought about by negative freedom to reproduce itself and thereby creates dysfunctional, destructive, and regressive tendencies in society, tendencies which eventually culminate in fascism.
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Fromm’s theory of character was greatly influenced at an early stage by Karl Abraham’s Psychoanalytische Studien zur Charakterbildung (1925) and to a lesser extent by Wilhelm Reich’s characterology in his Charakteranalyse (1933). Abraham’s Studien—a book which, alongside his Versuch einer Entwicklungsgeschichte der Libido (1924), was one of the most influential psychoanalytic texts not written by Freud for many years—was the first real authoritative synthesis and expansion of Freud’s scattered remarks on psychological character in papers like “Character and Anal Erotism” (1908). In his two studies of character and development, Abraham developed a systematic account of character-types defined by the various stages of libidinal development: the oral character, the anal character, and the genital character. The whole of psychological development was analyzed as the retention or transcendence of traits acquired by the individual as a direct result of their libidinal development, which was essentially unilinear and biologically fixed. Despite this biologism, Abraham also gave space to describing and analyzing the forms of object relation which predominated in each stage of libidinal development, thereby providing crucial material for early proponents of a relational approach to psychoanalysis such as Fromm.
Reich’s theory of “character analysis” built directly on Abraham’s work and took it in a radical direction. On the one hand, he underlined the clinical importance of understanding the analysand’s overall character structure and not just their particularly debilitating symptoms. This new perspective on character also extended to some incomplete exploration of the relationship between society and character in works like Der Einbruch der Sexualmoral (1931). On the other hand, Reich’s trademark sexual reductionism led him to see psychological character—and the structure ego in general—as an inherently pathological defense mechanism; he likened it to a protective but ultimately restrictive suit of armor donned by the id. For Reich, the healthy genital character had a minimal ego, no superego, and no really distinctive character structure because ego, superego, and character were all defense mechanisms, the results of fixation at or regression to pre-genital stages of libidinal organization.
The Reichian concept of “character analysis” was also a clinical keystone of the interpersonal or “neo- Freudian” movement in psychoanalysis, as it provided a vehicle for the analysis of psychological phenomena which either did not reach the severity of a classic clinical psychoneurosis or did not manifest in the form of distinctive neurotic symptoms. At its best, the concept of character could serve as a stepping stone in the broadening of psychoanalysis from a special theory of psychopathology to a general psychological theory, while at its worst—in some parts of Reich’s work, for example—it reduced to pathology the entire activity of the psyche outside a narrowly prescribed range of genitality. Fromm followed the first path in his approach to character analysis.
Building upon Reich’s urgings and his own previous research at Horkheimer’s Institute, in Escape, Fromm offers his own approach to the problem of the “authoritarian character.” Yet, rather than start from an analysis of specifically libidinal sadomasochistic dynamics, Fromm maintains there’s a symbiotic element here, too. The authoritarian, for Fromm, seeks to establish ties that replicate the security they felt in infancy, not to say in prenatal existence. Insofar as they have achieved psychic and social individuation, they desire to undo this. The masochist, in turn, attempts to escape the isolation bestowed on them by individuation by submitting to another—or to their own superego, itself an internalization of other, socially dominating people. The sadist tries to achieve the same thing by dominating others, becoming psychologically dependent on them, another iteration of lordship and bondage. For this reason, Fromm considered sadism and masochism to be active and passive sides of a greater “symbiotic complex” that has its socio-political expression in authoritarianism.
It is interesting that, although Klaus Theweleit’s psychoanalysis of fascism in the second volume of Male Fantasies has considerable resemblance to the ideas of Escape from Freedom, he only cites Fromm’s later Anatomy of Human Destructiveness, and mostly to critique it. The key difference between their theories is that Theweleit considers the “warrior male” to have never been “fully born” (individuated) in the first place, whereas Fromm sees the “authoritarian” as someone attempting to escape from the individuation imposed on them by the atomizing order of capitalism and process of individual human maturation. Outside of this difference, Theweleit’s work offers a strong possibility of cross-fertilization with that of Fromm.
For Fromm, authoritarian sadomasochists are a somewhat exceptional case. Most people, according to him, cope with the isolation and alienation imposed by capitalist society through conformism. They repress or suppress the socially undesired parts of their character and unconsciously regear their desires towards ends compatible with the prevailing social mores, not to say those spread by mass media and propaganda. Commodity fetishism is extended over the whole of society and interpersonal relationships: people increasingly see the world as an amorphous set of abstract and quantifiable objects to be bought and sold. Fromm speaks of the “idolatry” of capitalist society, as “man bows down to the work of his own hands” and submits to forces which are the product of “his” own alienation. Alienation and conformism are mutually reinforcing tendencies, as alienated human powers overwhelm the isolated individual and make autoplastic adaptation to inhumane society the path of least resistance for self-preservation and the maintenance of social and interpersonal relations. This tendency in society produces a distinctive and novel character structure that Fromm labeled the marketing orientation. Those exhibiting this character orientation tend to conceive of their personality as a set of alienated and alienable commodities selected in an attempt to cover up the emptiness underlying these changeable traits and attain external validation.
Insofar as the attempt to “escape from freedom” is an attempt to reobtain the unconditional love and security of the mother–child relation, it has clear feminine connotations. When placed alongside Fromm’s praise for male-coded independence, his theory can begin to sound somewhat sexist. Indeed, Fromm directly associated the growth of independence with masculinity and the “fatherly principle” in The Art of Loving (1956), drawing on the ambiguous ideas of nineteenth-century scholar Johann Jakob Bachofen just as much as the often sexist notions of twentieth-century psychoanalysis and psychology. However, Fromm conceived human flourishing, on both the individual and social levels, as a reconciled combination of the maternal and fatherly principles in which individuals “spontaneously” relate to one another and the world through both love and “productive work.”[2]
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“The psychic basis of the Marxist social programme,” Fromm wrote at the end of his 1934 essay on the theory of matriarchy, “was predominantly the matricentric complex.” The force standing behind revolutionary socialism, at least at the psychological level, was nothing other than love itself. By linking Bachofen’s fanciful theories about matriarchy to the works of Engels, Lafargue, and Bebel—via the concept of the matricentric complex—Fromm created a covert link between Marxism and the messianic radical humanism he had internalized in the early 1920s. Socialism promised a society that reconciled the unconditional love of the mother with the freedom which could only be won by growing up and separating from her. Despite this very high-minded, almost idealist notion of the psychological basis of socialism, Fromm was not naive— at least not in the derogatory sense.
He recognized that revolutions are fueled by hatred just as much as love, claiming that “there are millions of people who would rather go hungry for years than uphold this social order” and that “psychoanalysis shows that the desire for the ruin of the ruling class can indeed be stronger than the desire for a decent life and security!”[3] He refused to condemn the “strong sadistic impulses” unleashed by class struggle, considering them an objectively appropriate reaction to oppression and exploitation. Besides his immediate acquaintance with the revolutionary conflicts in Germany, which ran from 1918 to 1921, Fromm made this (conditionally) positive appraisal of class hatred based on his 1930 study of early Christianity. Translated as The Dogma of Christ, Fromm’s description of the first Christians as “a brotherhood of socially and economically oppressed enthusiasts held together by hope and hatred” still holds true—though it lacked more robust scholarly rigor—and, moreover, gets at something essential about revolution.
Fromm did not unequivocally praise hatred, however. In the mid-1930s, he developed a distinction between “rebellion” and “revolution.” The psychological rebel, or “authoritarian rebellious character,” revolts against the presently existing authorities, but maintains the fundamental social and psychological structure of authority. They are riven by ambivalent feelings of both love and hatred for authority, and their struggle is fueled by repressed and misunderstood motivations. A true psychosocial revolution, on the other hand, would radically destroy the structures of irrational authority that characterize class society, relegating the superego to the dustbin of history alongside class divisions and private property.[4] Every historical revolution has shown a mixture of merely rebellious and truly revolutionary moments; one of the principal tasks of a renewed Frommian social psychoanalysis would be the investigation of how these two poles interact in contemporary social movements.
The true revolutionary is motivated by hope and love. Hope and love are both active for Fromm. To truly hope is to see the future in the present and work towards its realization. True love is an active concern for and relation to not just the particular “objects” of love, but also oneself and the world as a whole. Fromm’s view of love and hope as distinctively active was decisively influenced by both Spinoza and Marx. Indeed, Fromm’s concept of mental health—and general human flourishing—can nearly be equated with Spinoza’s doctrine of virtus, seeing as it strongly emphasizes an atheist yet mystic beatitudo (the active affect correlated with amor Dei intellectualis). Meanwhile, Marx’s description of communism as a society “in which the free development of each is the condition for the free development of all” summarizes Fromm’s sentiments on the relation between individual and social flourishing in a single sentence. A truly liberated society— that is, a socialist/communist one—is one in which the betterment of the individual harmonizes with the good of all. Echoing the utopian ideas of Charles Fourier, Fromm once claimed that socialism would even turn narcissism to prosocial ends.
[1] Fromm’s use of the formulation “want to do what they have to do” can be misleading. A lot of people do not like wage labor but do it anyway. However, most people also like unemployment less than wage labor, and not just because of the obvious economic consequences of being unemployed.
[2] The phrase “productive work” in Fromm’s use means something like “activity that is fulfilling and humanly beneficial;”; it is a cousin to the emphatic meaning given to the term “praxis” in humanist Marxism. The choice of phrase was no doubt made to render his ideas more palatable to a broad Anglo-American audience, which would probably have been puzzled by some equivalent but more erudite Germanism or Hellenism drawn from Kant, Hegel, or Marx. Unfortunately for Fromm, the phrase also allowed critics such as Marcuse and Jacoby to paint him as a conformist advocate for productivity in the capitalist sense, despite Fromm’s repeated protestations that labor under capitalism is anything but humanly productive.
[3] The two foregoing quotations are translated from an unpublished archive document—a set of lecture notes from 1931—held at the New York Public Library.
[4] In at least one instance—namely in an unpublished archive document “Zur psychologischen Struktur der Autorität” written ca. 1935–1936—Fromm claimed that such a revolution would also transform the human attitude towards “the old Buddhist trio: aging, sickness, and death.”