Quotes by Fromm
Below are some quotes by Erich Fromm which I
got from Google's cache of the Internet. The specific
references were not provided and the site
(tothineownself) is evidently no longer active. Steve -
Dec 2001
In The Words Of Erich Fromm
Born
in 1900, Erich Fromm trained extensively in
European psychoanalysis before coming to the United
States. Considered a thinker of the neoanalytic tradition
that included Harry Stack Sullivan, Karen Horney, and
Clara Thompson, he brought cultural and historical
factors within the purview of psychology and pointed out
that much of what seemed instinctual human equipment is
actually learned in a particular time and place. He also
examined social issues like economic inequality, freedom,
totalitarianism, the nuclear threat, and mass
mechanization's impact on personality. Influences in his
thought include Hasidism, Zen Buddhism, Freud, Marx,
Spinoza, Eckhart, Maimonides, Russell, existentialism,
humanism, and feminism.
All
suggestions in favor of "team" enthusiasm
ignore the fact that there is only one truly social
orientation, namely the one of solidarity with mankind.
Social cohesion within the group, combined with
antagonism to the outsider, is not social feeling but
extended egotism.
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It would
seem that the amount of destructiveness to be found in
individuals is proportionate to the amount to which
expansiveness of life is curtailed. By this we do not
refer to individual frustrations of this or that
instinctive desire but to the thwarting of the whole of
life, the blockage of spontaneity of the growth and
expression of man's sensuous, emotional, and intellectual
capacities.
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Life has
an inner dynamism of its own; it tends to grow, to be
expressed, to be lived. It seems that if this tendency is
thwarted the energy directed toward life undergoes a
process of decomposition and changes into energies
directed toward destruction.
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Destructiveness
is the outcome of unlived life.
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Yet,
although there are true individuals among us, this belief
is an illusion in most cases and a dangerous one for that
matter, as it blocks the removal of those conditions that
are responsible for this state of affairs.
Ask an average newspaper reader what he thinks about a
certain political question. He will give you as
"his" opinion a more or less exact account of
what he has read, and yet--and this is the essential
point--he believes that what he is saying is the result
of his own thinking.
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The
decisive point is not what is thought but how it is
thought.
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What holds
true of thinking and feeling holds also true of willing.
Most people are convinced that as long as they are not
overtly forced to do something by an outside power, their
decisions are theirs, and that if they want something, it
is they who want it. But this is one of the great
illusions we have about ourselves. A great number of our
decisions are not really our own but are suggested to us
from the outside; we have succeeded in persuading
ourselves that it is we who have made the decision,
whereas we have actually conformed with expectations of
others, driven by the fear of isolation and by more
direct threats to our life, freedom, and comfort.
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It seems
that nothing is more difficult for the average man to
bear than the feeling of not being identified with a
larger group.
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The fear
of isolation and the relative weakness of moral
principles help any party to win the loyalty of a large
sector of the population once that party has captured the
power of the state.
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The
individual's greatest strength is based on the maximum of
integration of his personality, and that means also on
the maximum of transparence to himself. "Know
thyself" is one of the fundamental commands that aim
at human strength and happiness.
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Indeed,
there is less reason to be puzzled by the fact that there
are so many neurotic people than by the phenomenon that
most people are relatively healthy in spite of the many
adverse influences they are exposed to.
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"To
be alive" is a dynamic, not a static, concept.
Existence and the unfolding of the specific powers of an
organism are one and the same. All organisms have an
inherent tendency to actualize their specific
potentialities. The aim of man's life, therefore, is to
be understood as the unfolding of his powers according to
the laws of nature.
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Like the
handbag, one has to be in fashion on the personality
market, and in order to be in fashion one has to know
what kind of personality is most in demand.
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The idea
that all men are created equal implied that all men have
the same fundamental right to be considered as ends in
themselves and not as means. Today, equality has become
equivalent to interchangeability, and is the very
negation of individuality....When the individual self is
neglected, the relationships between people must of
necessity become superficial, because not they themselves
but interchangeable commodities are related.
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The
affirmation of one's own life, happiness, growth,
freedom, is rooted in one's capacity to love, i.e., in
care, respect, responsibility, and knowledge. If an
individual is able to love productively, he loves himself
too; if he can love only others, he cannot love at all.
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We have
become enmeshed in a net of means and have lost sight of
ends. We have radios which can bring to everybody the
best in music and literature. What we hear instead is, to
a large extent, trash at the pulp magazine level or
advertising which is an insult to intelligence and taste.
We have the most wonderful instruments and means man has
ever had, but we do not stop and ask what they are for.
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Because of
the fact that faith and power are mutually exclusive, all
religions and political systems which originally are
built on rational faith become corrupt and eventually
lose what strength they have if they rely on power or
even ally themselves with it.
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As a
matter of fact, these methods of dulling the capacity for
critical thinking are more dangerous to our democracy
than many of the open attacks against it, and more
immortal--in terms of human integrity--than the indecent
literature, publication of which we punish. p
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All this
does not mean that advertising and political propaganda
overtly stress the individual's insignificance. Quite the
contrary; they flatter the individual by making him
appear important, and by pretending that they appeal to
his critical judgment, to his sense of discrimination.
But these pretenses are essentially a method to dull the
individual's suspicions and to help him fool himself as
to the individual character of his decision.
There is perhaps no phenomenon which contains so much
destructive feeling as "moral indignation,"
which permits envy or hate to be acted out under the
guise of virtue.
Fortitude is the capacity to say "no" when the
world wants to hear "yes."
Nations and social classes live through hope, faith, and
fortitude, and if they lose this potential they
disappear--either by their lack of vitality or by the
irrational destructiveness which they develop.
The requirement of maximal efficiency leads as a
consequence to the requirement of minimal individuality.
The truth is that inasmuch as a person is not entirely
dead--in a psychological sense--he feels guilty for
living without integrity.
Valuable or good is all that which contributes to the
greater unfolding of man's specific faculties and
furthers life. Negative or bad is everything that
strangles life and paralyzes man's activeness. All norms
of the great humanist religions like Buddhism, Judaism,
Christianity, or Islam or the great humanist philosophers
from the pre-Socratics to contemporary thinkers are the
specific elaboration of this general principle of values.
It should be added that it is an open question whether
there is a real need to keep as much information secret
as the political and military bureaucracies want us to
believe. First of all, the need for secrecy corresponds
to the wishes of the bureaucracy. It helps support a
hierarchy of various levels, characterized by their
access to various kinds of security classification. It
also enhances their power, for in every group, from
primitive tribes to a complex bureaucracy, the possession
of secrets makes the owners of the secrets appear to be
endowed with a special magic, and hence superior to the
average man...It may turn out that the military and
diplomatic advantages gained by secrecy are smaller than
the losses to our democratic system.
The participant face-to-face group should become part of
all enterprises, whether in business, or education or
health.
Indeed, out of the very polarity between separateness and
union, love is born and reborn.
Living is a process of continuous birth. The tragedy in
the life of most of us is that we die before we are fully
born.
Well-being I would describe as the ability to be
creative, to be aware, and to respond; to be independent
and fully active, and by this very fact to be one with
the world. To be concerned with being, not with having;
to experience joy in the very act of living--and to
consider living creatively as the only meaning of life.
Well-being is not an assumption in the mind of a person.
It is expressed in his whole body, in the way he walks,
talks, in the tonus of his muscles.
We produce things that act like men and men that act like
things.
The ordinary man with extraordinary power is the chief
danger for mankind--not the fiend or the sadist.
Briefly, then, intellectualization, quantification,
abstractification, bureaucratization, and
reification--the very characteristics of modern
industrial society, when applied to people rather than to
things, are not the principles of life but those of
mechanics. People living in such a system become
indifferent to life and even attracted to death.
All the idols of the various religions represent so many
partial aspects of man.
In a culture in which the marketing orientation prevails,
and in which material success is the outstanding value,
there is little reason to be surprised that human love
relations follow the same pattern of exchange which
governs the commodity and the labor market.
Paradoxically, the ability to be alone is the condition
for the ability to love.
While we teach knowledge, we are losing that teaching
which is the most important one for human development:
the teaching which can only be given by the simple
presence of a mature, loving person.
If it is true, as I have tried to show, that love is the
only sane and satisfactory answer to the problem of human
existence, then any society which excludes, relatively,
the development of love, must in the long run perish of
its own contradiction with the basic necessities of human
nature.
As long as everybody wants to have more, there must be
formations of classes, there must be class war, and in
global terms, there must be international war. Greed and
peace preclude each other.
For the first time in history the physical survival of
the human race depends on a radical change of the human
heart.
The attitude inherent in consumerism is that of
swallowing the whole world...Modern consumers may
identify themselves by the formula: I am = what I have
and what I consume.
Being-authority is grounded not only in the individual's
competence to fulfill certain social functions, but
equally so in the very essence of a personality that has
achieved a high degree of growth and integration. Such
persons radiate authority and do not have to give orders,
threaten, bribe. They are highly developed individuals
who demonstrate by what they are--and not mainly by what
they do or say--what human beings can be. The great
Masters of Living were such authorities, and to a lesser
degree of perfection, such individuals may be found on
all educational levels and in the most diverse cultures.
One must consider that it is much easier for the members
of a small tribe to judge the behavior of an authority
than it is for the millions of people in our system, who
know their candidate only by the artificial image created
by public relations specialists.
It would be better to say that one is in faith than that
one has faith.
The God of the Old Testament is, first of all, a negation
of idols, of gods whom one can have.
There is only one way--taught by the Buddha, by Jesus, by
the Stoics, by Master Eckhart--to truly overcome the fear
of dying, and that way is by not hanging onto life, not
experiencing life as a possession.
If the economic and political spheres of society are to
be subordinated to human development, the model of the
new society must be determined by the requirements of the
unalienated, being-oriented individual.
If human beings are ever to become free and to cease
feeding industry by pathological consumption, a radical
change in the economic system is necessary: we must put
an end to the present situation where a healthy economy
is possible only at the price of unhealthy human beings.
At least two requirements are involved in the formation
of a genuine conviction: adequate information and the
knowledge that one's decision has an effect. Opinions
formed by the powerless onlooker do not express his or
her conviction, but are a game, analogous to expressing a
preference for one brand of cigarette over another. For
these reasons the opinions expressed in polls and in
elections constitute the worst, rather than the best,
level of human judgment...Without information,
deliberation, and the power to make one's decision
effective, democratically expressed opinion is hardly
more than the applause at a sports event.
The bureaucratic method can be defined as one that (a)
administers human beings as if they were things and (b)
administers things in quantitative rather than
qualitative terms, in order to make quantification and
control easier and cheaper. The bureaucratic method is
controlled by statistical data: the bureaucrats base
their decisions on fixed rules arrived at from
statistical data, rather than on response to the living
beings who stand before them; they decide issues
according to what is statistically most likely to be the
case, at the risk of hurting the 5 or 10 percent of those
who do not fit into that pattern. Bureaucrats fear
personal responsibility and seek refuge behind their
rules; their security and pride lie in their loyalty to
rules, not in their loyalty to the laws of the human
heart.
Once the living human being is reduced to a number, the
true bureaucrats can commit acts of utter cruelty, not
because they are driven by cruelty of a magnitude
commensurate to their deeds, but because they feel no
human bond to their subjects. While less vile than pure
sadists, the bureaucrats are more dangerous, because in
them there is not even a conflict between conscience and
duty; their conscience is doing their duty; human beings
as objects of empathy and compassion do not exist for
them.
The idol is the alienated form of man's experience of
himself. In worshipping the idol, man worships himself.
But this self is a partial, limited aspect of man: his
intelligence, his physical strength, power, fame, and so
on. By identifying himself with a partial aspect of
himself, man limits himself to this aspect; he loses his
totality as a human being and ceases to grow. He is
dependent on the idol, since only in submission to the
idol does he find the shadow, although not the substance,
of himself.
Once idols were animals, trees, stars, figures of men and
women. They were called Baal or Astarte and known by
thousands of other names. Today they are called honor,
flag, state, mother, family, fame, production,
consumption, and many other names.
In the process of history man gives birth to himself.
The prophetic concept of peace transcends the realm of
human relations; the new harmony is also one between man
and nature. Peace between man and nature is harmony
between man and nature. Man is not threatened by nature
and stops striving to dominate it; he becomes natural,
and nature becomes human. He and nature cease to be
opponents and become one. Man is at home in the natural
world, and nature becomes a part of the human world; this
is peace in the prophetic sense. (The Hebrew word for
peace, shalom, which could best be translated as
"completeness," points in the same direction.)
Once I have discovered the stranger within myself I
cannot hate the stranger outside of myself, because he
has ceased to be a stranger to me.
It is a peculiar frailty of human reactions that many are
prone to believe that a cynical, "tough"
perspective is more likely to be "realistic"
than a more objective, complex, and constructive one.
People go to churches and listen to sermons in which the
principles of love and charity are preached, and the very
same people would consider themselves fools or worse if
they hesitated to sell a commodity they knew the customer
could not afford.
Do we have totemism in our culture? We have a great
deal--although the people suffering from it usually do
not consider themselves in need of psychiatric help. A
person whose exclusive devotion is to the state or his
political party, whose only criterion of value and truth
is the interest of state or party, for whom the flag as a
symbol of his group is a holy object, has a religion of
clan and totem worship, even though in his eyes it is a
perfectly rational system (which, of course, all devotees
to any kind of primitive religion believe).
There is nothing inhuman, evil, or irrational which does
not give some comfort provided it is shared by a group.
Is the alienated person with little love and little sense
of identity not better adapted to the technological
society of today than a sensitive, deeply feeling person?
Even if we disagree on the possibility of constructing
objectively valid values on the basis of the knowledge of
man, it still remains a fact that we simply do not know
what we are doing in our planning unless we understand
the system "man" and integrate it into the
social and organizational system. Otherwise, we are
dealing with the analysis of a social system without
taking into consideration one of its most important
subsystems.
Any idea is strong only if it is grounded in a person's
character structure. No idea is more potent than its
emotional matrix.
Modern society, with its almost limitless readiness for
destruction of human lives for political and economic
ends, can best defend itself against the elementary human
question of its right to so by the assumption that
destructiveness and cruelty are not engendered by our
social system, but are innate qualities in man.
In the bureaucratic system every person controls the one
below him and is controlled by the one above. Both
sadistic and masochistic impulses can be fulfilled in
such a system.
The monocerebral man is so much part of the machinery
that he has built, that his machines are just as much the
object of his narcissism as he is himself; in fact,
between the two exists a kind of symbiotic
relationship...
With his discovery of the discrepancy between thinking
and being, Freud not only undermined the Western
tradition of idealism in its philosophical and popular
forms, he also made a far-reaching discovery in the field
of ethics. Until Freud, sincerity could be defined as
saying what one believed. Since Freud this is no longer a
sufficient definition. The difference between what I say
and what I believe assumes a new dimension, namely that
of my unconscious belief or my unconscious
striving...Since Freud, the sentence I meant well has
lost its function as an excuse.
The most abominable of all human impulses, the need to
use another person for one's own ends by virtue of one's
power over that person, is little more than a refined
form of cannibalism.
We have a literacy rate above 90 percent of the
population. We have radio, television, movies, a
newspaper a day for everybody. But instead of giving us
the best of past and present literature and music, these
media of communication, supplemented by advertising, fill
the minds of men with the cheapest trash, lacking in any
sense of reality, with sadistic phantasies which a
halfway cultured person would be embarrassed to entertain
even once in a while. But while the mind of everybody,
young and old, is thus poisoned, we go on blissfully to
see to it that no "immorality" occurs on the
screen.
To speak of a "sane society" implies a premise
different from sociological relativism. It makes sense
only if we assume that there can be a society which is
not sane, and this assumption, in turn, implies that
there are universal criteria for mental health which are
valid for the human race as such, and according to which
the state of health of each society can be judged.
The fact that millions of people share the same vices
does not make these vices virtues, the fact that they
share so many errors does not make the errors to be
truths, and the fact that millions of people share the
same forms of mental pathology does not make these people
sane.
Indeed, the tremendous energy in the forces producing
mental illness, as well as those behind art and religion,
could never be understood as an outcome of frustrated or
sublimated physiological needs; they are attempts to
solve the problem of being born human.
It follows...that mental health cannot be defined in
terms of the "adjustment" of the individual to
his society, but, on the contrary, that it must be
defined in terms of the adjustment of society to the
needs of man, of its role in furthering or hindering the
development of mental health.
Undoubtedly without quantification and abstractification
modern mass production would be unthinkable. But in a
society in which economic activities have become the main
preoccupation of man, this process of quantification and
abstractification has transcended the realm of economic
production, and spread to the attitude of man to things,
to people, and to himself.
But the abstractifying and quantifying attitude goes far
beyond the realm of things. People are also experienced
as the embodiment of a quantitative exchange value. To
speak of a man as being "worth one million
dollars" is to speak of him not any more as a
concrete human person, but as an abstraction, whose
essence can be expressed in a figure. It is an expression
of the same attitude when a newspaper headlines an
obituary with the words "Shoe Manufacturer
Dies." Actually a man has died, a man with certain
human qualities, with hopes and frustrations, with a wife
and children.
Modern man, if he dared to be articulate about his
concept of heaven, would describe a vision which would
look like the biggest department store in the world,
showing new things and gadgets, and himself having plenty
of money with which to buy them. He would wander around
open-mouthed in this heaven of gadgets and commodities,
provided only that there were ever more and newer things
to buy, and perhaps that his neighbors were just a little
less privileged than he.
If a man work without genuine relatedness to what he is
doing, if he buys and consumes commodities in an
abstractified and alienated way, how can he make use of
his leisure time in an active and meaningful way? He
always remains the passive and alienated consumer. He
"consumes" ball games, moving pictures,
newspapers and magazines, books, lectures, natural
scenery, social gatherings, in the same alienated and
abstractified way in which he consumes the commodities he
has bought....He is not free to enjoy "his"
leisure; his leisure-time consumption is determined by
industry, as are the commodities he buys; his taste is
manipulated, he wants to see and to hear what he is
conditioned to want to see and to hear; entertainment is
an industry like any other, the customer is made to buy
fun as he is made to buy dresses and shoes. The value of
the fun is determined by its success on the market, not
by anything which could be measured in human terms.
Human qualities like friendliness, courtesy, kindness,
are transformed into commodities, into assets of the
"personality package," conducive to a higher
price on the personality market. If the individual fails
in a profitable investment of himself, he feels that he
is a failure; if he succeeds, he is a success. Clearly,
his sense of his own value on factors extraneous to
himself, on the fickle judgment of the market, which
decides about his value as it decides about the value of
commodities.
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One buys a
car, or a house, intending to sell it at the first
opportunity. But more important is the fact that the
drive for exchange operates in the realm of interpersonal
relations. Love is often nothing but a favorable exchange
between two people who get the most of what they can
expect, considering their value on the personality
market. Each person is a "package" in which
several aspects of his exchange value are blended into
one: his "personality," by which is meant those
qualities which make him a good salesman of himself; his
looks, education, income, and chance for success--each
person strives to exchange this package for the best
value obtainable. Even the function of going to a party,
and of social intercourse in general, is to a large
extent that of exchange. One is eager to meet the
slightly higher-priced packages, in order to make contact
and possibly a profitable exchange. 143 Sane Soc.
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Authority
in the middle of the twentieth century has changed its
character; it is not overt authority, but anonymous,
invisible, alienated authority. Nobody makes a demand,
neither a person, nor an idea, nor a moral law. Yet we
all conform as much or more than people in an intensely
authoritarian society would. Indeed, nobody is an
authority except "It." What is It? Profit,
economic necessities, the market, common sense, public
opinion, what "one" does, thinks, feels.
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Having fun
consists mainly in the satisfaction of consuming and
"taking in"; commodities, sights, food, drinks,
cigarettes, people, lectures, books, movies--all are
consumed, swallowed. The world is one great object for
our appetite, a big apple, a big bottle, a big breast; we
are the sucklers, the eternally expectant ones, the
hopeful ones--and the eternally disappointed ones. How
can we help being disappointed if our birth stops at the
breast of the mother, if we are never weaned, if we
remain overgrown babes, if we never go beyond the
receptive orientation?
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Constant
repetition by newspaper, radio, television, does most of
the conditioning. But the crowning achievement of
manipulation is modern psychology. What Taylor did for
industrial work, the psychologists do for the whole
personality--all in the name of understanding and
freedom. There are many exceptions to this among
psychiatrists, psychologists, and psychoanalysts, but it
becomes increasingly clear that these professions are in
the process of becoming a serious danger to the
development of man, that their practitioners are evolving
into the priests of the new religion of fun, consumption
and selflessness, into the specialists of manipulation,
into the spokesmen for the alienated personality. p 164
Sane Soc.
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The
religious "renaissance" which we witness in
these days is perhaps the worst blow monotheism has yet
received. Is there any greater sacrilege than to speak of
"the Man upstairs," to teach to pray in order
to make God your partner in business, to "sell"
religion with the methods and appeals used to sell soap?
p 171 Sane Soc
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The fact is that while the individual citizen believes
that he directs the decisions of his country, he does it
only a little more than the average stockholder
participates in the controlling of "his"
company. Between the act of voting and the most momentous
high-level political decisions is a connection which is
mysterious. p 185 Sane Soc
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If the
modern age has been rightly called the age of anxiety, it
is primarily because of this anxiety engendered by the
lack of self.
The aim of history is the full birth of man, his full
humanization.
Indeed, we have the know-how, but we do not have the
know-why, nor the know-what-for.
It takes powerful constellations and circumstances to
pervert and stifle this innate striving for sanity; and
indeed, throughout the greater part of known history, the
use of man by man has produced such perversion. To
believe that this perversion is inherent in man is like
throwing seeds in the soil of the desert and claiming
they were not meant to grow.
Just to become acquainted with other ideas is not enough,
even though these ideas in themselves are right and
potent. But ideas do have an effect on man if the idea is
lived by the one who teaches it; if it is personified by
the teacher, if the idea appears in the flesh. If a man
expresses the idea of humility and is humble, then those
who listen to him will understand what humility is.
Disobedience, then, in the sense in which we use
it here, is an act of the affirmation of reason and will.
It is not primarily an attitude directed against
something, but for something: for man's capacity to see,
to say what he sees, and to refuse to say what he does
not see. To do so he does not need to be aggressive or
rebellious; he needs to have his eyes open, to be fully
awake, and willing to take the responsibility to open the
eyes of those who are in danger of perishing because they
are half asleep.
The giant corporations which control the economic, and to
a large degree the political, destiny of the country
constitute the very opposite of the democratic process;
they represent power without control by those submitted
to it.
More than ever in history the consolidation of our own
product to an objective force above us, outgrowing our
control, defeating our expectations, annihilating our
calculations, is one of the main factors determining our
development. His products, his machines, and the State
have become the idols of modern man, and these idols
represent his own life forces in alienated form.
To be radical is to go to the roots; and the root is Man.
For the greedy person there is always scarcity, since he
never has enough, regardless of how much he has.
Birth is not one act; it is a process.
I have said that man is asked a question by the very fact
of his existence, and that this is a question raised by
the contradiction within himself--that of being in nature
and at the same time of transcending nature by the fact
that he is life aware of itself. Any man who listens to
this question posed to him, and who makes it a matter of
"ultimate concern" to answer this question, and
to answer it as a whole man and not only by thoughts, is
a "religious" man; and all systems that try to
give, teach, and transmit such answers are
"religions."
Consciousness represents social man, the accidental
limitations set by the historical situation into which an
individual is thrown. Unconsciousness represents
universal man, the whole man, rooted in the Cosmos; it
represents the plant in him, the animal in him, the
spirit in him; it represents his past down to the dawn of
human existence, and it represents his future to the day
when man will have become fully human, and when nature
will be humanized as man will be "naturalized."
Making the unconscious conscious transforms the mere idea
of the universality of man into the living experience of
this universality; it is the experiential realization of
humanism.
We claim that we pursue the aims of the Judaeo-Christian
tradition: the love of God and of our neighbor. We're
even told that we are going through a period of a
promising religious renaissance. Nothing could be further
from the truth. We use symbols belonging to a genuinely
religious tradition and transform them into formulas
serving the purpose of alienated man. Religion has become
an empty shell; it has been transformed into a self-help
device for increasing one's own powers for success. God
becomes a partner in business. The Power of Positive
Thinking is the successor of How to Win Friends and
Influence People.
Love of man is a rare phenomenon too. automatons do not
love; alienated men do not care. What is praised by love
experts and marriage counselors is a team relationship
between two people who manipulate each other with the
right techniques and whose love is essentially an egotism
à deux--a haven from an otherwise unbearable aloneness.
In the nineteenth century the problem was that God is
dead; in the twentieth century the problem is that man is
dead. In the nineteenth century inhumanity meant cruelty;
in the twentieth century it means schizoid
self-alienation.
Each man is a universe for himself, and is only his own
purpose. His goal is the realization of his being,
including those very peculiarities which are
characteristic of him and make him different from others.
Thus, equality is the basis for the full development of
differences, and it results in the development of
individuality.
You might say that twentieth-century political life is a
cemetery containing the moral graves of people who
started out as alleged revolutionaries and who turned out
to be nothing but opportunistic rebels.
This is perhaps one of the most, if not the most,
important problems of today: namely, the relationship of
persons to power. It is not a question of knowing what
power is. Nor is the problem the lack of realism--of
underestimating the role and functions of power. It is a
question of whether power is sanctified or not, and of
whether a person is morally impressed by power. He who is
morally impressed by power is never in a critical mood,
and he is never a revolutionary character.
Human history began with an act of disobedience
and might end with an act of obedience.
Every act of disobedience, unless it is empty
rebelliousness, is obedience to another principle...The
question is not really one of disobedience or
obedience, but one of disobedience or obedience to
what and to whom.
My assertion is that the sane person in an insane world,
the fully developed human being in a crippled world, the
fully awake person in a half-asleep world--is precisely
the revolutionary character. Once all are awake, there
need no longer be any prophets or revolutionary
characters--there will be only fully developed human
beings.
Speaking in the name of man, of peace, or of God--these
words remain ambiguous unless they are accompanied by a
word with which to begin and to end: "In the name of
Life!"
SUGGESTED READING
Fromm,
Erich:
The
Art of Loving
You Shall Be As Gods
Escape From Freedom
The Sane Society
The Forgotten Language
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| Copy of a presentation on Erich
Fromm's work and life Below is a revision of Chapter Vice
President Hugh Gillilan's presentation at the April
general meeting of Humanists of Utah.
Source: http://www.humanistsofutah.org/2000/genmay00.html
In Appreciation: Erich
Fromm
When I made a commitment
to give this presentation some months ago I had no idea
how timely it would be given the current activities of
Fromm devotees around the world. March 23, 2000, marked
the centenary of Erich Fromm's birth, March 23, 1900. As
it turns out the centenary is being observed by the
publication of numerous books and articles in Fromm's
honor, and various lectures and conferences are being
held as well.
In an audience such as
this one I would expect that there would be a number of
humanistically oriented authors that are favorites such
as Isaac Asimov, E.O. Wilson, Robert Ingersoll, Corliss
Lamont, Paul Kurtz, Bertrand Russell, Carl Sagan, and , I
would hope, Erich Fromm. I certainly enjoy all of these
authors but Fromm holds a special place in my life for
he, more than the others, was very much a mentor for me
as I was making my philosophical transition from
traditional Christianity to humanism, and my career
evolution from minister to psychologist. I never
conversed with Fromm in person although I did have the
pleasure of hearing him speak once at the University of
Utah years ago. What I did have the opportunity to do was
to avidly read his books once I discovered them,
especially from the late 1950s to the time of his death
in 1980.
My assumption is that
Fromm may be fading into obscurity, particularly in this
country and with younger persons because the American
attention span is so short. I think that's unfortunate
given his status in the evolution of humanism over the
last 60 years. Gerhard Knapp, for instance, has described
Fromm as "one of the most influential humanists of
this century." But I express my appreciation for
Fromm tonight not just for his personal contribution to
me or for his historical contribution but also because I
heartily believe his writings are still very relevant as
we move into the challenges of the 21st century.
Before dipping into just a
few of his books let me quickly sketch in a bit of the
Fromm biography. He was born, as indicated earlier, March
23, 1900, in Frankfurt Germany, the only child of
Orthodox Jewish parents. Fromm later described his mother
as overprotective, his father distant and himself as an
"unbearable, neurotic child." And further,
"being the only child of two overly anxious parents
did not, of course, have an altogether positive effect on
my development, but over the years I've done what I could
to repair that damage." (It has been said that those
of us in the mental health profession often choose that
line of work to cure our parents-or ourselves!)
The Fromm family was
steeped in Jewish tradition and the young Fromm was an
avid scholar of the Talmud and the old Testament,
particularly the prophets Isaiah, Amos, and Hosea with
their emphasis on justice, righteousness, and universal
peace, motifs which would echo through all of Fromm's
later writings. In 1926, however, at the age of 26 he
officially abandoned his Jewish faith. I was interested
to note that was about the same age I officially
abandoned my Methodist affiliations.
Fromm's formal education
focused on psychology, philosophy, sociology, and later,
psychoanalysis. The major intellectual influences for him
were Sigmund Freud and Karl Marx although Fromm was
eventually to be a revisionist of both of these men.
In 1926 Fromm married a
woman ten years his senior who had been his
psychoanalyst, Frieda Reichman, but the marriage lasted
only four years. (There are many good reasons not
to marry your therapist!) Nonetheless, Fromm and Freida
Fromm Reichman continued to be friends and professional
collaborators and she had her own distinguished career as
an author and psychotherapist.
In 1933 Fromm left Germany
because of the rising tide of Nazism, just one of
millions who fled from or perished at the hands of
Hitler's legions. In addition to the horrific and
incomprehensible genocide of those days, how can one
really imagine the incalculable loss to Germany and the
occupied countries of the intellectuals, professionals,
artisans, and myriad other talented persons who either
died or fled to other countries-much to the enrichment of
their adopted countries.
Here in America Fromm
became one of the founders of the William Alanson White
Institute of Psychiatry, Psychoanalysis and Psychology.
At different times he taught at Yale, Columbia,
Bennington College, New York University, the University
of Michigan and Michigan State as well as the National
Autonomous University in Mexico City. He also maintained
a psychoanalytic practice for more than forty five years.
Fromm married his second
wife in 1944 and moved to Mexico City seeking a more
favorable climate for her health. Unfortunately, she died
an untimely death in 1952. Fromm was later to marry for a
third time, obviously a firm believer in the institution.
In the middle fifties
Fromm joined the American Socialist Party and tried to
formulate a progressive program for that party-without a
great deal of success. However, he continued to be a firm
believer in democratic socialism as the most humane and
humanistic of political systems. Another prime political
interest was the international peace movement and he was
a co-founder of SANE, an organization opposing both the
atomic arms race and the war in Vietnam. He also was a
vigorous supporter of Senator Eugene McCarthy during the
1968 presidential campaign. After Nixon's election,
however, Fromm withdrew from political activism. Nixon
was surely the cause of many folks questioning their hope
for mankind!
During his lifetime Fromm
suffered two major bouts of tuberculosis and three heart
attacks before finally succumbing to a fourth attack on
March 18, 1980, in the Swiss village of Muralto, just
five days shy of his 80th birthday.
Gerhard Knapp has said of
Fromm that he "Consistently devoted himself and work
to one single goal: the propagation of a great visionary
hope for a better and more dignified life for all of
humanity. [He] clung tenaciously to his unflagging faith
in humanity's potential for self-regeneration. This
unbroken hope is the spiritual center of his life and his
works." Daniel Burston, author of The Legacy of
Erich Fromm, has written: [Fromm] was a man who
cherished an abiding love for the values of humanistic
religion and the Jewish tradition in which he was raised.
[He] was nonetheless a committed atheist who regarded
belief in a personal creator God as an historical
anachronism." Fromm described himself as "an
atheistic mystic, a Socialist who is in opposition to
most Socialist and Communist parties, a psychoanalyst who
is a very unorthodox Freudian."Fromm was a very
prolific writer with hundreds of articles and almost two
dozen books in English to his credit. The range of his
subject matter was broad including psychology and
psychoanalysis, sociology, humanism, religion, ethics,
Buddhism, Marxism, socialism and foreign policy. The
International Erich Fromm Society is currently completing
the publication of all of his collected works in twelve
volumes and 6,000 pages in length! How then to deal
adequately tonight with that mass of material in our time
remaining? Obviously we can't, but let me just dip
lightly into a few of his works to illustrate some of his
concerns which I think still have decided relevance for
the present.
Fromm's first book in
English was Escape From Freedom published in 1941,
almost 60 years ago in the midst of World War II. The
book opens with three provocative questions from the
Talmud that I have found useful with numerous clients and
classes:
- If I am not for
myself, who will be for me?
- If I am for myself
only, what am I?
- If not now, when?
The first question,
"If I am not for myself, who will be for me?"
must surely be answered, "no one." The second
question, "If I am for myself only, what am I?"
provides the balance between self interest and concern
for others and suggests to me the answer,
"lonely", for persons completely
self-preoccupied are not very enjoyable folks to be
around. The third question provides the kicker, "If
not now, when?" If we are not fully living now when
do we plan to get around to it? Perhaps never!
In Escape From Freedom
Fromm describes the growth of human freedom and
self-awareness from the Middle Ages to modern times but
with a problematic result. Modern man, freed from
pre-individualistic bonds of servitude and old securities
of stifling and outworn cosmologies can find himself
isolated, anxious, and alone. To escape that unpleasant
condition one can easily enter into new dependencies and
turn to authoritarian states and institutions for meaning
and identity. In 1941 Fromm clearly put Nazism in that
role-with hideous results in World War II and its
aftermath. How distressing it is today to see a
resurgence of Nazi motifs whether in Europe or in
Northern Idaho or elsewhere! The alternative to abject
dependency and compliance to authority, Fromm wrote, was
to advance toward a positive freedom based upon the
uniqueness and individuality of persons working in
concert for the greater good of humankind. The challenge
of enjoying and capitalizing upon diversity among persons
and life styles is an ever present challenge. (We can
cite the current diversity deficit at the University of
Utah as a prime example.)
Fromm's second book, Man
For Himself, published in 1947, is my personal
favorite. My copy is dog-eared, heavily underlined
throughout, and the source of many useful quotations. For
instance, in discussing the existential realities of
human existence, Fromm wrote what I deem to be a classic
statement of the humanist stance:
There is only one
solution to [the human condition]: for one to face
the truth, to acknowledge his fundamental aloneness
and solitude in a universe indifferent to his fate,
to recognize that there is no power transcending him
which can solve his problem for him. Man must accept
the responsibility for himself and the fact that only
by using his powers can he give meaning to his life.
If he faces the truth without panic he will recognize
that: there is no meaning to life except the meaning
man gives his life by the unfolding of his powers, by
living productively; and that only constant
vigilance, activity, and effort can keep us from
failing in the one task that matters-the full
development of our powers within the limitations set
by the laws of our existence. Only if he recognizes
the human situation, the dichotomies inherent in his
existence and his capacity to unfold his powers, will
he be able to succeed in his task: to be himself and
for himself and to achieve happiness by the full
realization of those faculties which are peculiarly
his-of reason, love, and productive work.
The key words here are
"reason," "love," and
"productive work" that Fromm elaborates upon
throughout much of his writings; "reason,"
"love", and "productive work" as the
basic ingredients for a fulfilling human life.
In describing humanistic
ethics, Fromm wrote (and I've collected several
quotations here):
Humanistic ethics is
based on the principle that only man himself can
determine the criterion for virtue and sin, and not
an authority transcending him: "good" is
what is good for man and "evil" what is
detrimental to man; the sole criterion of ethical
value being man's welfare. Man indeed is the
"measure of all things." The humanistic
position is that there is nothing higher and nothing
more dignified than human existence.
...it is one of the
characteristics of human nature that man finds his
fulfillment and happiness only in relatedness to and
solidarity with his fellow men.
Love is not a higher
power which descends upon man nor a duty which is
imposed upon him; it is his own power by which he
relates himself to the world and makes it truly his.
Undoubtedly Fromm's most
popular book was a little volume entitled The Art of
Loving. It was translated into 28 languages and had
sold more than one and a half million copies in English
alone by 1970. Reportedly upon publication some
librarians and book sellers thought they would have to
keep the book behind the counter-a clear indication they
hadn't read the book. The Art of Loving is a far
cry from Alex Comfort's The Joy of Sex for
instance, or many a tome currently available in libraries
and book stores. The Art of Loving quickly makes
the point that loving is a very demanding human activity.
The very first two sentences in Chapter I read: "Is
love an art? Then it requires knowledge and effort,"
Further, the mastery of an art requires that it be a
matter of ultimate concern; "there must be nothing
else in the world more important than the art." What
proportion of humankind do you imagine has loving as it's
ultimate concern? "In spite of the deep-seated
craving for love, almost everything else is considered to
be more important than love: success, prestige, money,
power-almost all our energy is used for the learning of
how to achieve these aims, and almost none to the art of
loving." A substantive love, Fromm wrote, is not
just a strong feeling, "It is a decision, it is a
judgment, it is a promise. If love were only a feeling,
there would be no basis for the promise to love each
other forever. A feeling comes and it may go. How can I
judge that it will stay forever, when my act does not
involve judgment and decision"
In an age of throw-away
relationships with passing fancies those words sound
rather quaint, don't they? Somewhere in the back of my
head I hear the lament of a popular song, "doesn't
anyone stay together anymore?" But not just judgment
and decision are called for. Fromm cites other basic
elements common to all forms of love: care,
responsibility, respect and knowledge. These quotes:
- Love is the active
concern for the life and growth of that which we
love. Where this active concern is lacking, there
is no I owe.
- Respect means the
concern that the other person should grow and
unfold as he is. Respect, thus, implies the
absence of exploitation. I want the loved person
to grow and unfold for his own sake, and in his
own ways, and not for the purpose of serving me.
- To respect a person
is not possible without knowing him; care and
responsibility would be blind if they were not
guided by knowledge.
In a contrary mode, how
often do we hear about couples who have a frenzied
courtship and marry after only a few days or weeks? Or
how often do we read about persons who kill the person
they supposedly love but feel alienated from and are
quoted as saying, "If I can't have her, no one
will!" Love, Fromm said, requires care,
responsibility, respect and knowledge.
In a little volume
entitled Psychoanalysis and Religion, Fromm spells
out the differences between authoritarian and humanistic
religion:
The essential element
in authoritarian religion and in the authoritarian
religious experience is the surrender to a power
transcending man. The main virtue of this type of
religion is obedience, its cardinal sin is
disobedience. Just as the deity is conceived as
omnipotent or omniscient, man is conceived as being
powerless and insignificant. Only as he can gain
grace or help from the deity can he feel strength.
Humanistic religion, on
the other hand,
"is centered
around man and his strength. Man must develop his
power of reason in order to understand himself, his
relationship to his fellow men and his position in
the universe. He must recognize the truth, both with
regard to his limitations and potentialities. He must
develop his powers of love for others as well as for
himself and experience the solidarity of all living
beings. Man's aim in humanistic religion is to
achieve the greatest strength, not the greatest
powerlessness; virtue is self-realization, not
obedience. Faith is certainty of conviction based on
one's own experience of thought and feeling, not
assent to propositions on credit of the proposer. The
prevailing mood is that of joy, while the prevailing
mood in authoritarian religion is that of sorrow and
guilt.
The last book that I want
to mention and one of the last that Fromm wrote was To
Have or to Be published in 1976. It's is an admirable
book to read for anyone currently interested in
simplicity movements and de-escalating frantic life
styles and the perpetual accumulation of material
possessions. (However, looking around the benches of this
valley it doesn't look like many folks in our part of the
world are much into simplicity!) It is interesting to
note that To Have or to Be has consistently been
more popular in Europe than here in the U.S.
Fromm was severely
critical of the consumerism that drives our economy,
depleting natural resources, increasing the gap between
the rich and the poor, exploiting the resources and
people of developing countries, and promoting a radical
hedonism that breeds indifference to pervasive social
needs. To quote Fromm: "The selfishness the system
generates makes leaders value personal success more
highly than social responsibility. At the same time, the
general public is also so selfishly concerned with their
private affairs that they pay little attention to all
that transcends the personal realm." (We can think
of the abysmally low voter turnout for elections in this
country as just one of many examples.) The nagging
question for us still today is, are we really happy for
all of our expansive homes, accumulating toys and endless
consumption? Have things really changed much from Fromm's
description of life twenty five years ago? The observable
data show most clearly that our kind of "pursuit of
happiness" does not produce well-being. We are a
society of notoriously unhappy people; lonely, anxious,
depressed, destructive, dependent-people who are glad
when we have killed the time we were trying so hard to
save." And further, "The need for speed and
newness, which can only be satisfied by consumerism
reflects restlessness, the inner flight from oneself.
Looking for the next thing to do or the newest gadget to
use is only a means for protecting oneself from being
close to oneself or another person." (Psychologists
and psychiatrists are always messing with our heads!)
"Being," in
Fromm's terms, is living simply with modest wants, with
depth and vitality, deeply involved with caring
communities, sensitive to the natural world around us,
and mindful of the rightful place of all of earth's
people. The "having mode" in contemporary life
might well be typified by a Wall Street Journal
cartoon I saw recently which pictured a man walking
determinedly down the street, briefcase in hand, with a
long stick arching from his back forward over his head
and dangling a dollar bill in front of him. (The Wall
Street Journal is an interesting place for such a
cartoon!)
Well, there is no way I
can do justice to the depth of Fromm's writings in this
piecemeal fashion, and there is so much more of his work
that I would enjoy discussing but time is limited. I
would invite you to consider his writings either again or
perhaps for the first time. There are significant books
that I have not even mentioned and topics that I imagine
you would find both provocative and enlightening.
Fortunately, virtually all of Fromm's books are still in
print, and I have a sheet available listing all of his
published works in English. I commend them to you for a
consciousness raising experience. The sheet also cites
the web address of the International Erich Fromm Society
for those of you into cyber exploration.
Let me add this one
postscript (and speaking of consciousness raising). Fromm
wrote in an era when it was the norm to use the generic
term, "man" to refer to all humans and
"he" as the accompanying personal pronoun. You
heard that usage in the quotations and you may well have
winced a bit when you heard them, especially if you are a
woman. Time has moved on since Fromm last wrote and
feminists have appropriately helped us to be more
sensitive in our language usage. Our language is still
cumbersome on the point but gender equity demands that we
speak and write without disenfranchising either gender.
On the other hand, perhaps fair play would now suggest we
typically use "woman" in a generic sense-and,
of course, that includes "man"!
Note on "Emotional
maturity" from The Sane Society
In The Sane Society,
written in 1955, Fromm argues that Western world, and in
particular the USA, has reached a point where the society
itself is mentally unhealthy. He says that people have
sought identity with their countries, their religions,
their races, their religions and their careers instead of
developing their individuality. He says that in such
societies the emotionally healthy or emotionally mature
person is said to be the one who conforms to the
unhealthy standards, lifestyle and values. He offers
evidence of this in this quote from Dr. E. A. Strecker's
1951 book, Their Mother's Sons. Strecker gives
us this definition of "emotionally maturity." I
note it because it is so similar to Goleman's definition
of emotional intelligence, especially his corporate
version of the definition.
I define maturity as
the ability to stick to a job, the capacity to give
out more on any job than is asked for, reliability,
persistence to carry out a plan regardless of the
difficulties, the ability to work with other people
under organization and authority, the ability to make
decisions, a will to life, flexibility, independence
and tolerance.
Fromm has this to say
about Strecker's definition: "It is quite clear that
what Strecker here describes as maturity are the virtues
of a good worker, employee or soldier in the big social
organizations of our time; they are the qualities which
are usually mentioned in advertisements for a junior
executive."
This definition of
"emotional maturity" which Fromm criticizes is
similar to Golemans corporate definition of EI. For
example, when Fromm said Strecker's definition sounded
like an advertisement for a junior executive, I am
reminded that Goleman used job descriptions as the basis
for his claim that EI was twice as important as IQ and
technical knowledge combined.
Also, like Goleman's
corporate definition of EI, Strecker lists a lot of
traits which are desirable for "junior
executives", or even a senior manager who carries
out the will of the Board of Directors and the
stockholders, who let us not forget, have invested in the
company not out of a deep desire to help mankind, but out
of a simple desire to make money. And notice that
Strecker does not mention intelligence anywhere in the
list. In a similar way Goleman's list of "emotional
competencies" seems to also be lacking an emphasis
on intelligence, something which the original creators of
the concept had built in as an essential component of it.
Without the "intelligence" part, it is simply
no longer "emotional intelligence" that one is
talking about.
Related
The
Perfect Private Secretary
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| Full text of maccoby's writing: - with comments added
by S. Hein The Two
Voices of Erich Fromm: The Prophetic and the Analytic
by Michael Maccoby
Published in: Society,
July/August. This article is adapted from a lecture given
at the Erich Fromm International Symposium, Washington,
DC, May 6 1994.
Erich Fromm's contribution
to our knowledge of individual and social behavior has
neither been fully appreciated nor developed. Fromm's
most popular books which expand our understanding of both
love and destructiveness have, to a large extent, been
assimilated into that body of knowledge which forms the
foundation of intellectual thinking in Europe and the
United States. Although he introduced many American
intellectuals of the 40s and 50s to the relevance of
psychoanalysis to understanding 20th century social
pathology, typical intellectuals of today think of Fromm,
if at all, as a critic of the mass consumer society. A
smaller number recognize the contribution he made in
Escape from Freedom to understanding the psychic appeal
of fascism, an understanding relevant to current events
in Russia and the Balkans. But relatively few appreciate
his most valuable and original legacy: understanding
human character in relation to society.
Why has Fromm's work been so neglected? To start with,
his ability to write directly to a large general audience
as in The Art of Loving , which was a best seller in the
late 50s, made him suspect to the academic Mandarins
whose criteria for profundity includes
incomprehensibility to the uninitiated. In fact, Fromm
provoked defensiveness and even a kind of antipathy from
academics he termed alienated and psychoanalysts he
criticized as bureaucratic in their technique and poorly
educated in the humanities and social sciences.
Furthermore, Fromm would not fit himself into a neat
intellectual category. Although he fully acknowledged his
debt to Freud, he relentlessly criticized the limitations
and contradictions in Freud's theories. Although he
explored the influence of culture on character
development, he strongly differentiated himself from
"culturalists" such as Sullivan, Horney and
Margaret Mead who described culture in terms of behavior
patterns and did not analyze socio-economic factors.
Although Fromm agreed with Marx's analysis of social
change and shared his messianic view of history, he was
also a deeply religious non-theist who drew his concept
of human development from the Jewish bible, Zen Buddhism,
and Christian mysticism. Although he shared, to a large
extent, their critique of capitalism, Fromm was rejected
by the psychoanalytic left. His former colleagues at the
Frankfort School, particularly Herbert Marcuse, dismissed
him as a conformist unwilling to support the radical
action necessary to change society.
Inevitably, experts in one or another social science or
version of psychotherapy were put off by Fromm's unlikely
mix of Freud, Marx and religious mysticism. For example,
although Erik Erikson told me he had learned a great deal
reading Escape from Freedom, he was not prepared to
accede to the demand of The Sane Society to accept
communitarian socialism as the prescription for social
well being and healthy character development.
My purpose is not to defend Fromm from his critics. Like
any major thinker, Fromm's views changed over time and
there are, as I shall describe, contradictions in his
views and limitations in his approach, especially his
psychoanalytic technique. Rather, I shall try to describe
and clarify what I hear as the two dominant voices in
Fromm's work, the analytic and the prophetic. William
James wrote that theory, like music, expresses the
composer's personality, and both of these voices came
from deep inside of Fromm. I believe that by scoring them
separately so to speak, they can be better understood and
most important, usefully developed. When Fromm is most
convincing, the two voices harmonize. When he is least
convincing, the prophetic drowns out the analytic.
My analysis of these two voices is based not only on my
reading of Fromm, but also hearing them directly when I
worked with him in the 60s.
My Experience with Fromm
In the summer of 1960,
when I drove from Cambridge, Massachusetts to Cuernavaca,
Mexico with my wife, Sandylee, it was to enter into an
eight year apprenticeship to Fromm. That June, I had
received a doctorate from Harvard in Social Relations,
combining clinical and cognitive psychology with
sociology and anthropology. I had decided that my next
step should be psychoanalytic training, since
psychoanalytic investigation seemed the best way to
further my understanding of human motivation. In seeking
psychoanalytic education, I considered the Boston
Institute where I had helped Ives Hendrick with his
research, and I talked with Erik Erikson about working
with him at Austen Riggs. Both were encouraging. However,
David Riesman, who had been analyzed by Fromm and who I
had worked with as a teaching assistant, reported that
Fromm was looking for a research assistant in Mexico and
suggested that we meet. The reason I decided to study
with Fromm was the appeal of both voices, the analytic
and the prophetic. Fromm defined the meaning of human
development in a way that appealed to me emotionally as
well as intellectually. It seemed to me that Fromm's call
to create a sane society was urgently required by a world
teetering on the edge of nuclear war. World War II and
the holocaust was a recent and searing memory. Fromm's
analysis of human destructiveness provided some
understanding of behavior that seemed incomprehensible
and inhuman. I hoped that through my personal
psychoanalysis, Fromm would help me to develop not only
my capability as a researcher, but also my capacity for
love and reason.
I should note here that when I told Grete Bibring of the
Boston Psychoanalytic Institute that I was considering
training with Fromm, she said "you will probably get
along very well together, but he will never analyze the
transference." To a large extent, she was correct,
for reasons I shall describe.
Before leaving for Mexico, I joined Fromm, David Riesman
and others in founding The Committee of Correspondence
and writing for its newsletter arguing for arms control
and improved relations with the Soviet Union.
Fromm accepted me as an apprentice. He needed someone
with training in research design, statistics, and
projective testing to work with him on the
sociopsychoanalytic study of a Mexican village, and in
return for my assistance, he agreed to admit me to the
Mexican Psychoanalytic Institute and to be my training
analyst. He also made it clear that my personal goals for
analysis and my political engagement were important in
his decision to work with me. During the next eight
years, I was Fromm's research assistant, analysand,
supervisee, and collaborator, culminating in 1970 with
the publication of our book, Social Character in a
Mexican Village.
I agreed to Fromm's condition of apprenticeship, that I
first learn his theory and work with it, before
criticizing it, as he expected I would someday do. He
said that he hoped I would be able to express this theory
in my own words and expand it, and this has been my goal.
The Two Voices
During the time I was in analysis with him, Fromm's
technique changed from one that was extremely influenced
by his then recent exploration into Zen Buddhism with D.
T. Suzuki to one which emphasized a more systematic
investigation into the patient's character and psyche. At
times, he experimented with technique using the active
methods pioneered by Sandor Ferenczi, including
relaxation exercises and suggestion about associating to
a theme. He also tried techniques used by Wilhelm Reich
to attack character armor. While his shifting of analytic
approach complicated his attempts to describe his
practice, this does not fully explain his dissatisfaction
with the drafts he wrote on technique. I believe that
what blocked his writing on technique and also limited
his effectiveness as an analyst was the inability to
always harmonize the analytic and prophetic voices. This
disharmony resulted in a confusion concerning the goals
and methods of psychoanalysis.
At its purist, Fromm's analytic voice was exploratory,
experimental, and skeptical. It asked for evidence and
questioned conclusions drawn too quickly. His prophetic
voice was urgent, impatient, and judgmental. It
contrasted reality with a demanding ideal of spiritual
development. It condemned rather than analyzed evil. At
times, Fromm the analyst was transformed into Fromm the
rabbi or Zen master who responded to the student's
inauthentic behavior not by analysis, but with disgust or
the verbal equivalent of cracking him over the head with
a stick.
At his most analytic, Fromm conceived of psychoanalysis
as a method to help suffering people to liberate
themselves from crippling fear and to realize more of
their creative potential. In this mode, he emphasized the
importance of psychoanalytic diagnosis at the start of
treatment, and he was realistic about the patient's
prognosis and limitations.
At his most prophetic, Erich Fromm's mission was to bring
about a messianic age of peace and human solidarity, and
he used psychoanalysis as a spiritual discipline for
himself and his disciples. He viewed neurotic symptoms as
a partial rejection of oppressive or alienating
authority. The psychoanalyst's role was to help give
birth to the revolutionary within the neurotic.
Fromm's inconsistent approach to therapy expressed the
contradiction between his theory of social character and
his ideal of the productive character which became
increasingly mystical. I shall return to this point that
the disciplines of therapeutic psychoanalysis and
spiritual development, while they share elements in
common, are essentially different, and that Fromm
sometimes confused the two.
Fromm believed that his most original ideas were the
theory of social character, the interpretive
questionnaire as a method of studying character, and the
theory of destructiveness. He described each of these in
his analytic voice. In two major studies, one of German
workers and employees in 1930 and the other of Mexican
villagers in the 1960s, Fromm tested and developed the
theory and methods of social character research.
He continually elaborated his theory of destructiveness.
The sociopsychoanalytic analysis of sadomasochism and
malignant destructiveness was well-tested both clinically
and in the social character research. The more
controversial and less well studied theory of
necrophilia, defined as the love of death, decay and
rigid order which he first described in his 1964 book The
Heart of Man, expressed the prophetic view of evil and
was contrasted to his concept of biophilia, love of life,
which at the extreme, expressed being vs. having and the
driving force of mystical development.
The Two Voices in Fromm's Approach to Character and
Society
To appreciate Fromm's
approach to clinical diagnosis, his theory of character
must first be understood. While Freud's libido theory
with its analogy of forces and cathexes corresponds to a
late 19th century view of physics, Fromm's theory of
character development is fully consistent with modern
evolutionary biology. Humans are distinguished from other
animals by a larger neocortex with fewer instincts.
Character is the relatively permanent way in which human
drives for survival and self-expression are structured in
the socialization process. Thus character substitutes for
or shapes human instinct. But human survival is not
merely a matter of physical survival. Man does not live
by bread alone. We are social animals who must relate to
others, and we are spiritual animals who must infuse our
lives with meaning in order to function. Our brains need to
operate in the past, present, and future simultaneously.
Without a sense of hope, they turn off. To survive in the
early years, we require caring adults. To learn to master the
environment, control our fears and passions and live in
harmony with others, we need teachers. To give meaning to
our lives, we must acquire a sense of identity and rootedness. Religions both
sacred and secular (including tribalism and nationalism),
with objects of devotion, guiding myths and rituals,
serve this function.
We not only must live our lives, but also solve the
contradictions stemming from our existence, the animal
and human needs, physical survival and emotional sanity.
Fromm said that given our contradictory tendencies and
awareness of our mortality, the question of why people
remain sane is perhaps more difficult to answer than the
question of why they become insane.
Character is a solution to those contradictions. It is
like a complex computer program that takes the place of
what is to a greater extent hard-wired in other animals.
Biological research indicates we are closer to other
animals than we like to believe, and this, perhaps, is
what keeps many of us sane. We imitate and identify with
those most like ourselves. We can use the culture, or
more precisely the social character as an off-the-shelf
solution to the problems of existence. Although other
animals also develop cultures to transmit patterns of
behavior between the generations, human culture is more
complex and varied. With our large neocortex, we are able
to learn and change. Although we share almost 99 percent
of our genetic material with chimpanzees, the other one percent allows us to
choose between either becoming more uniquely and fully
human or regressing to tribalism and/or psychopathology.
Fromm termed the striving to become more fully human as
"progressive," and he believed the great monotheistic
humanistic religions and Buddhism, which is non-theist,
shared the goal of directing people to a solution of
achieving unity with nature through individuation, love
of the stranger, and reverence for life. This solution
increases our consciousness and strengthens community, while the regressive
solutions result in either individual psychopathology
(symbiosis, narcissism and destructiveness) or group
narcissism and hostility to people outside the tribe.
Speaking in his analytic voice, Fromm describes the
social character as the cement that holds society
together. It is what adapts humans to their environment
in such a way that they want to do what they need to do
to keep a particular society functioning. In this sense,
some emotionally disturbed persons have failed to develop
the social character; their emotions do not support
adaptive behavior. Or the social character of some
disturbed people might clash with the environment,
because it is adapted to a disappearing world. In this
situation, the social character is transformed from
social cement to social dynamite. Thus, in Escape from
Freedom, Fromm describes how the lower-middle class
German suffered a sense of powerlessness and meaningless
in the 1920's. Hoarding, dutiful, conservative, and
hardworking emotional attitudes no longer guaranteed
prosperity. The harsh conditions imposed by the Treaty of
Versailles after World War I caused runaway inflation
that destroyed savings,while money was being made by wild
speculation. The humiliation of the Kaiser by the allies
was felt as a personal indignity and loss of meaning. The
flaunting of a sexual freedom and burlesque of authority
in the Wiemar republic aroused indignation and anger
which Hitler was able to manipulate in forging an
ideology, a new religion, which blended the desire for
revenge, the focussing of hatred on the Jews as
scapegoats, with inspiring hopes to create a great new
civilization.
Analytically speaking, normality and mental health
require that the child develop a social character in
order to gain the competencies required for survival in a
society. This is consistent with C.G. Jung's view was
that only through adaptation to a culture could a person
begin to achieve individuation.
However, speaking in the prophetic voice, Fromm questioned
whether adaptation produced healthy people.
If the
society is itself not healthy, then to be normal is to
acquire a "culturally patterned defect," in
effect to be sick. The neurotic who will not adapt may be
healthier than one who is adapted. What does healthy mean for Fromm?
In The Sane Society, he writes that "Mental health, in
the humanistic sense, is characterized by the ability to
love and to create, by
the emergence from the incestuous ties to family and
nature, by a sense of identity based on one's experience
of self as the subject and agent of one's powers, by the
grasp of reality inside and outside of
ourselves‹that is, by the development of objectivity
and reason. The aim of life is to live it intensely, to
be fully born, to be fully awake. To emerge from the
ideas of infantile grandiosity into the conviction of
one's real though limited strength: to be able to accept
the paradox that everyone of us is the most important
thing there is in the universe‹and at the same time
no more important than a fly or a blade of grass."
With this definition, has any society ever produced many
healthy people? Can any society, other than the messianic
vision of the prophet Isaiah, achieve sanity?
The model of a sane society Fromm proposes is
communitarian socialism. He quotes a description of
Boimondeau, a cooperative watch factory in France as an
ideal. According to this account, workers balanced work
and education, collective and individual development. But
when I tried to find out what happened to Boimondeau, I
learned that the factory did not survive in the
competitive marketplace. Like many other promising and
shortlived cooperative enterprises, Boimondeau depended
on an exceptional leader who left. This communitarian
ideal remains theoretical. It is not a convincing
solution.
Marketing Man
Is Fromm correct that modern industrial society forms an
alienated social character? Is the prototypic modern
individual a person who adapts to the market economy by
making him/herself into a saleable commodity, thus
becoming detached from authentic emotions and
convictions? Is the modern person's goal nothing more
elevated than success in the career market and the
pleasure of continual consumption: having vs being? Does
health require us to transform society and transcend the
social character?
I have used Fromm's method of social character
investigation, the interpretive questionnaire, in rural
and urban Mexico, the U.S., U.K, and Sweden. In all of
these societies, there are significant variations in
social character. Overall, the more that people leave
village life and adapt to industrial society, the more
abstract their language becomes, the more detached they
are from direct emotion, and authentic relationships, and
to some degree, dreams and the inner life. I say "to
some degree", because villagers are extremely
conformist and fear even perceiving anything that is new
and different. Just as the urban individual steeped in
book learning loses the peasant's reliance on keen
observation, so the industrial person's detachment and
abstract thinking also allows greater flexibility,
willingness to adapt to the new. Furthermore, rural
people are more likely to fear the stranger and distrust
those who do not share blood ties.
Within industrial society, the factory and construction
workers and engineers I have interviewed market their
skills, not their pleasing personalities. Recently,
advances in production technology require both increased
technical skill and greater cooperation with others at
work, but the latter is a matter of listening to others
and solving problems together, not selling oneself. Bureaucratic middle
managers and professionals are the ones most forced to
market themselves, and their overadaptation can cause
symptoms of depression and self-disgust. These are also the people who are
most likely to be victims of corporate
"downsizing" due to the drive for continual
innovation and productivity caused by frantic global
competition. While the most educated and technically
competent are swept up in this vortex, people in rural
villages and ghettoes of prosperous cities struggle on
the margins of the economy, within a hopeless culture of
escapism and violence
The description by Fromm and other intellectuals of the
50s (e.g. C. Wright Mills & William H. Whyte) of a
complacent, conformist marketing society seems benign in
the light of the last 30 years. They were writing during
a brief historical period when U.S. industry controlled
international markets and companies could afford to be
stable bureaucracies, stocked with middle managers.
Fromm uses the marketing character as a basis for his
prophetic denunciation of modern society, but the question
remains of how healthy any society can be and which
societies allow the greatest opportunity for healthy
development. Children have no alternative but to adapt to
the family which is the major carrier of social
character. Those with healthier families or exceptional
genes may adapt with greater resiliency and independence
as compared to those with less healthy families. What
would it mean to transcend the social character?
The Productive Ideal
Fromm's
model of the healthy individual who transcends and
transforms society is the "productive
character," the individuated person who loves and
creates. Unlike his
other character types - receptive, hoarding, exploitative
and marketing - the productive character lacks clinical
or historical grounding. It is a questionable ideal.
In our study of Mexican villagers, Fromm and I searched
for the productive character, but did not find one. The
closest we came were independent farmers who were more
productive and loving than the average. In my studies of
workers, engineers and managers. I have also found people
who are more active and creative than the average, but
they do not fit Fromm's description of the productive
character. Furthermore, most of the more productive
professionals are not loving. (Einstein is an example of
an extremely productive thinker who was not loving.)
Productiveness in work does not necessarily imply
productiveness in caring about other people.
what about working
because you care, or because you love what you do, or
love someone else?
In Social Character in a Mexican Village, Fromm and I
ended up contrasting productive and unproductive aspects
of the social character. The productive peasant shares
many of the adaptive independent, hoarding,
family-oriented traits of the dominant social character,
but is more
individuated, more innovative and hard working while less
suspicious and fatalistic. The productive peasant is more likely to
relate to children in terms of furthering their
development rather than, as is the more common pattern,
demanding strict obedience. However, this is far from Fromm's ideal of
the productive person whose aim is to live life
intensely, "to be fully born, to be fully
awake." The more productive peasant must still adapt
to a mode of work that requires hoarding traits common to
peasants throughout the world.
In his earlier writing, inasmuch as Fromm describes a
real life productive character, it is an unnamed creative
artist. In later works, examples of productiveness are
Zen masters and Master Eckhart, a medieval Christian
mystic.
In his search for the productive ideal, Fromm's prophetic
voice suppresses his analysis of social character. The artist has been
a romantic model for bourgeois society: the individual
who resists pressures to conform and succeeds in setting
his or her own terms of self expression which are
ultimately accepted and appreciated by society. The
artist shows qualities of craftsmanship, creativity,
independence, and determination. However, many productive artists are not
loving people (e.g. Monet, Picasso), and Fromm does not
describe a single creative artist who fits his ideal.
Furthermore, the very few artists who make a living from
their work today are caught up in a marketing web of art
dealers, changing fashion and intellectualized hype.
i disagree - not sure
why he is so hard on fromm. i suspect there are personal
reasons he isn't telling us. the comment that fromm's
words could sometimes be like a stick on the head suggest
that the author feels resentful, felt abused at times,
criticized, judged etc. remember this is a phd talking.
so we can assume he can't tell us how he really feels
with feeling words. or that he isn't going to.
In terms of social character, the religious masters cited
by Fromm should be viewed within the context of feudal
society. Zen masters are unchallenged authorities who
rule monasteries and dominate the emotional life of their
disciples. Eckhart was head of German Dominicans, and his
vow of celibacy freed him from the demands of family.
Fromm himself was attracted to a semi feudal role as head
of the Mexican Institute of Psychoanalysis during the 50s
and 60s. There he personally analyzed the first
generation of analysts, and was the unchallenged arbiter
of disagreements among members of the society.
These feudal models will not inspire the children of the
information age. To develop the modern social character
in a productive direction, it is first essential to
understand its positive potential.
The Two Voices in Fromm's Approach to Clinical Work
In his analytic voice,
Fromm criticized Freud's patriarchal attitude as limiting
the development of psychoanalysis as a science. He
criticized Freud's use of the couch and the routine of
analysis as bureaucratizing psychoanalysis. In contrast,
Fromm attempted to create what he called a more
"humanistic" face-to-face encounter. Here the
analytic and prophetic voices sometimes harmonized and
sometimes were discordant.
Fromm's psychoanalytic
technique was essentially different from Freud's psychic
archeology. Like Ferenczi, Fromm emphasized the
importance of experience rather than interpretation, and
he believed the analyst must understand the patient by
empathy as well as intellect, with the heart as well as
the head. But unlike Ferenczi, he was not searching for
childhood traumas, but rather present-day passions.
Memory might serve to illuminate a pattern of behavior
from childhood such as betrayal of one's ideals to gain
approval from authorities. Fromm believed that what
blocked development was not our memories but our choices,
our irrational attempts to solve the human condition
through such mechanisms as sadism, regression to the
womb, or narcissistic invulnerability. His goal was not to
heal a psychic wound, but to liberate, so that the
patient could become free to make better choices.
i think both are
needed
Fromm believed that the psychoanalyst should be active
and penetrating, bringing the session to life by
demonstrating his own urgency to understand and grasp
life fully. Here the prophetic voice sometimes
over-whelmed analysis. Fromm became like a religious
master who unmasks illusion and thus expands the limits
of the social filter, dissolving resistances. By
experiencing and confessing to one's unconscious
impulses, the patient would gain the energy and strength
to change his or her life, and to develop human
capabilities for love and reason to the fullest. This is
an unproven theory, and in practice, Fromm's technique
sometimes resulted in a very different outcome.
Although Fromm's thesis shares Freud's conviction that
the truth will set man free, it moves in a different
direction from Freud's emphasis on psychoanalysis as a
process that patiently uncovers and interprets resistance
in order to regain lost memories. Both Freud and Fromm
define psychoanalysis as the art of making the
unconscious conscious; both recognize that we resist
knowing the truth and that resistances must be overcome.
But their views of resistance are somewhat different. For Fromm,
repression is a constantly recurring process. One resists
perceiving and knowing out of fear of seeing more than
society allows or because the truth would force one to
experience one's irrationality or powerlessness. The
pattern of repression set in childhood is like the
refusal to see that the emperor has no clothes. The
analyst is the fearless master who has gone further and
deeper beyond convention and into his own irrationality.
His attitude models productiveness and mature
spontaneity, free of illusion. In contrast, Freud defines resistance more
narrowly. Repressed, unconscious wishes to maintain
infantile sexual fantasies, and the childhood fear of
being punished (castration) because of one's libidinal
impulses, act as resistances to memory. These repressions
bind energy into neurotic patterns.
For Freud, the key to analyzing and overcoming resistance
is transference. The patient directs or transfers desire
and fear onto the analyst who becomes a substitute for
figures of the past. Resistance will be overcome only if
the "acting out" within analysis is interpreted
and transformed into emotionally charged memory which can
be "worked through" and reintegrated into a
more mature psyche. The working through frees the blocked
energy of repressed wishes and defenses. It allows the
patient to give up infantile objects and desires and
discover better ways to satisfy needs. In this framework,
if the analyst dramatically unmasks truth, this may
strengthen the transferential resistance, either because
the patient denies unbearable feelings or adopts another
defense, such as passive acceptance. Overcoming this
resistance requires patiently analyzing the various forms
it takes.
Fromm proposes a broader concept of transference. The
analyst represents infantile authority: the mother who
solves all of life's problems or the father who is never
satisfied with his son's achievement. Instead of facing
reality independently, the patient continues to transfer
interpersonal struggles and wishes. While this aspect of
transference is not contradictory to Freud's views (in
The Future Of An Illusion, he describes religion in these
terms), Fromm's approach in fact tended to strengthen
this type of transference and with it the patient's
resistance to remembering. He would focus on feelings
about the analyst in the here and now and the function
they served. His urgency of getting to the truth short
circuited the process of working through the
transferential feelings and their origins.
Although Fromm criticized Freud as too much the bourgeois
patriarch and showed how this limited his insights,
Freud's approach to technique can be more democratic than
Fromm's, especially if the Freudian analyst does not
force fit the patient into a formula. To be sure, Freud
advocated rules in the doctor-patient relationship, in
part to protect himself. These are followed
bureaucratically by many analysts. An example is that the
patient lies on a couch and cannot see the analyst. Freud
did not like to be stared at all day. However, Fromm's
piercing blue eyes could and sometimes did freeze the
patient, and his intensity which could make one feel more
alive could also provoke defensive reactions. Freud did
not describe the analyst as guru or model, and his own
self-analysis showed him as all too human. He saw the
analyst as a professional with technical training who, in
addition, should have a radical love of truth, a broad
education in the arts and sciences, and knowledge of his
own unconscious. The goal for analysis was not to become
a productive person, but to be liberated from crippling
neurosis.
Freud cautioned against expecting too much from a
neurotic who has been cured. In his prophetic voice, Fromm suggested
that neurotics are humanly healthier than those with the
dominant social character or socially patterned defect
who have adapted to a sick society and are alienated from
themselves. The Frommian neurosis as described in The
Sane Society, results from incomplete rebellion against
constricting authority and lack of confidence or courage
to follow one's insights, to take one's dreams seriously.
A number of narcissistic patients with grandiose ideals
for themselves and society were attracted to Fromm's
therapy.But the Frommian approach both increased
transference resistances and the patient's sense of guilt
about unworthiness, unproductiveness, and dependency.
Patients compared themselves to the
"productive" analyst, and instead of
remembering and experiencing childlike drives,
humiliations, rages, and fears as a means to mastering
them and losing the need for narcissistic solutions, they
attempted to resolve conflicts by becoming ideal persons,
like the master. In so doing, patients fearing
disapproval by the master, again submitted to authority
and repressed sexual or angry impulses directed against
the parent. Frommian disciples identified with the master
and self-righteously directed anger and contempt at
others who were not good Frommians. This became a pattern among Fromm's
disciples at the Mexican Institute.
Thus, Fromm's humanistic voice which sought to correct
the more impersonal, obsessional and dogmatic approach of
the early Freudians was never fully heard. The
analyst-religious master's prescription for productive
development blocked patients from discovering their own
avenues for development.
The Productive Ideal and Religious Conversion
In his later works, the
models of productiveness became more and more religious,
closer to Zen enlightenment or the ideal of non-deistic
cosmic unity than to the psychoanalytic aim of lifting
infantile repressions and expanding the realm of ego in
place of id. William James' observations, in The
Varieties of Religious Experience (1902), can help us to
view Fromm from the perspective of religious thinking.
James writes that both Buddhism and Christianity are
religions of deliverance which preach that "man must
die to an unreal life before he can be born into the real
life." He also proposes that the full significance
of these religions appeals to a particular type of person
who may develop an approach to life similar to Fromm's
productive ideal.
James described and contrasted three personality types.
The "healthy minded" are those with a
"harmonious" personality. They tend to be
upbeat and adapted to society. James used the term
"healthy" in a rather ironic way. The healthy
minded avoid or repress unpleasant perceptions. They have
little tolerance for the second type, the "morbid
minded" who always see the downside of life. Acutely
sensitive to painful realities, the morbid minded must
struggle with depression and despair. A third type, which
is closer to the morbid-minded, suffer from a
"discordant" personality. They struggle with
two selves, ideal and actual. Like Saint Augustine and
other religious figures, they search restlessly for
"the truth" until through self-analysis and
religious discipline, they are reborn with "a new
zest which adds itself like a gift to life, and takes the
form either of lyrical enchantment or of appeal to
earnestness and heroism." The result of being reborn
is similar to Fromm's ideal.
Fromm had this type of discordant personality; he told me
that he continually struggled with irrational impulses.
Like Augustine's wrestling with his sins and temptations,
Fromm used analysis of both himself and his disciples to
increase awareness of the split between ideal and actual
selves, to experience regressive drives and to frustrate
rather than repress them, while at the same time
strengthening productive needs.
Like Saint Augustine, Fromm came to believe that health
as defined by the productive character is not gained
merely by insight or even experiencing what has been
repressed. This definition of health requires spiritual
development achieved through a courageous practice of
life that frustrates greed and overcomes egoism through
meditation and service.
Fromm was deeply religious but did not believe in God.
Yet, one can argue that his concept of the cosmos, like
that of Spinoza, is a non-anthropomorphic view of God,
consistent with Jewish tradition. (When I said this to
him, he did not object but said that the only absolutely
essential commandment for a Jew was that which forbids
all idolatry.) In You Shall Be As Gods, he describes the
Bible as evolving the concept of God from a tribal deity
to the unknowable God of Moses and the prophets. This God
who cannot be made into an idol of any kind first
establishes the law and then demands that the people
transform themselves according to a messianic vision of
harmony and justice. Fromm was attracted to Buddhism,
because it did not require belief in God but was based on
a rational analysis of overcoming pain and suffering by
living a good life. Yet, the appeal of the Jewish
tradition, especially chasidism with its animation and
joyful music continually called him back. (He often
hummed chasidic music, interspersed with Beethoven and
other German classics.)
Perhaps, the most important aspect of religion for Fromm
personally was the hope it offered. He was not a
Christian, because he did not find hope in a life to
come. Hope was to be found in two ways. One was the
coming of the messianic age, which according to Jewish
tradition could happen anytime the world was ready. The
other source of hope was a mystical unity with the
cosmos, a transcendence of life that would overcome the
fear of death.
If one does not believe in an afterlife or reincarnation,
there are two main ways to grapple with the fear of
death. One is regression to the "oceanic
feeling" of infantile pre-conscious unity with the
mother. This is the appeal of alcohol and drugs. The
other is to overcome one's egoism and experience the
mystical sense of fully awakened, life loving unity with
nature. In this regard, Fromm practiced Zen meditation,
and, in his 70s, he showed me how he also
"practiced" dying, by lying on the floor and
pretending to give up the ghost while feeling this
oneness.
The source of Fromm's prophetic voice was his search for
hope, not only for himself but for humanity. In his 50s,
when he wrote The Sane Society, hope sprang mainly from
his messianic drive to save the world, and this was also
the reason why he so admired Karl Marx. In this context,
the productive orientation is that of the messianic
revolutionary.
In his late years, although Fromm did not lose his
messianic hope, he became increasingly disappointed with
the revolutionaries of the 60s, the failure of Eugene
McCarthy to lead a movement with him in the U.S. and the
decline of Marxist humanism in Eastern Europe. In his
final work, To Have Or to Be?, his hope shifted, and the
model of the productive person became less the messianic
revolutionary and more the biophilic mystic.
The Analytic Voice
For Fromm to write a book
on technique that truly harmonized the two voices, he
would have had to describe a systematic approach to
understanding a patient. He would have had to critique
Freud's papers on technique in the careful way he
analyzed Freud's theory of aggression in The Anatomy of
Human Destructiveness. If he had attempted this, he might
have recognized what was valuable in Freud's strategy,
and he might have developed a more differentiated
approach to therapy and analysis. Even then, I believe he
would still have had difficulty in resolving the
contradiction between his discussion of analysis as a
more democratic, humanistic encounter and his attitude of
the omniscient master. In my experience, Fromm was
penetrating and compassionate but not particularly
empathic. Indeed, while his writings on humanistic
analysis leave the impression that a loving, productive
analyst will be able to know patients from the inside by
empathizing or listening to them in a way a Zen master
listens to all of nature, his practice was to use the
interview and sometimes projective tests as x-rays of the
psyche.
When Fromm focussed on
concrete cases as a teacher, he was closer to Freud,
minus libido theory, than to either Ferenczi or Zen
Buddhism. He was at his most analytic when he interpreted
social character from an interview or questionnaire and
when he described psychoanalytic diagnosis. I refer to
notes from a seminar on diagnosis he gave in 1963 to our
class at the Mexican Institute.
The analyst should determine first, the symptoms, goals
and pathology of the patient. What is the type and the
degree of pathology, e.g. regressive symbiosis,
narcissism, and/or destructiveness? Fromm advised that
most conflicts presented by the patient are screens. The
analyst cannot help the patient decide whether or not to
get divorced or leave a job. These hide the deeper
conflicts, which Fromm sometimes called the secret plot.
An example is Ibsen's Peer Gynt: the modern alienated man
who claims he wants to be free and express himself but
really wants to satisfy all his greedy impulses and then
complains that he has no self, that he is nothing and
nobody.
The prognosis is better if the patient's goal is to
achieve health in terms of increased capability for
freedom and loving relationships, rather than getting
help to solve a specific problem which may be merely a
symptom of the failure to maintain the cover story.
Second, the analyst should determine the strength of the
resistance. He suggested a test of telling the patient
something which appears repressed, indicated by a slip of
the tongue, a contradiction, or a dream. If there is a
positive reaction, the prognosis is better. If there is
anger or the patient doesn't hear, the prognosis is very
bad. Fromm
considered a sense of humor the best indication of a
positive prognosis.
Lack of it was an indication of "grave
narcissism". Humor is the emotional side of reason,
the emotional sense of reality. Fromm himself had a keen
sense of humor with a taste for the sardonic. He loved
good jokes.
Third, the capacity for insight is another indication of
good or bad prognosis. The analyst should make small
tests, such as "You complain about your wife.
Perhaps you are afraid of her." It is a bad sign if
the patient either denies an interpretation too quickly
or submissively agrees to everything the analyst
suggests.
Fourth, what is the degree of vital energy? Is the
patient capable of waking up? A person can be quite
crazy, yet have the vitality essential for
transformation.
At this time, Fromm was no longer claiming that neurotics
were healthier than normal people. However, he did
maintain that some patients with a severe psychopathology
had a better prognosis than those with milder pathology.
The key diagnostic factor was the patient's creative
potential or ability to struggle against the pathology.
Fifth, has the patient shown responsibility and activity
during his or her life? Fromm contrasted obsessive
responsibility with the ability to respond to challenges.
If the patient always escapes with a magical,
irresponsible flight, analysis is not impossible, but
extremely difficult.
Sixth, is there a sense of integrity? This refers to the
difference between a neurotic and psychopathic
personality. Does the patient accept a truth once
experienced? Or is
there a quality of bad faith, wiggling away from
inconvenient truths, a bad sign for prognosis.
Fromm advised using the first hour to ask why the patient
had come and to ask for a history, noting what was said,
what was left out, and the feelings associated with
events. He suggested asking for two or three dreams,
especially dreams that are repeated and three memories of
infancy (a technique first suggested by A. Adler). In the
second hour, he advised testing resistance and insight,
then writing out a summary of the diagnosis and a
prediction of how long treatment should take.
very
methodic. not empathetic. not building a relationship
with "patient"
In the middle 60s, Fromm
began to send me his own patients for Rorschach tests
which he believed helped significantly in providing a
better diagnosis, including both psychopathology and the
strength of biophilic tendencies. In the later 60s, Fromm
emphasized the need for the analyst to understand
patients within their particular cultural context. Our
intensive study of Mexican social character revealed the
importance of culture, class, and mode of production on
the formation of emotional attitudes. (e.g. the role of
the mother in Mexican culture). Fromm came to believe
that 50 percent of an individual's behavior resulted from
social character, 25 percent from constitutional or
genetic factors and only 25 percent from early
experiences. This implied different expectations and
approaches with different social character types. For
example, middle class Mexican patients tended to be in
awe of authority and needed encouragement to express
critical views, while patients from the same class in the
U.S. are skeptical about authority in general. In Mexico,
the analyst needs first to overcome the fear of
authority, while in the U.S., it may be necessary to
demonstrate that rational authority can exist.
Fromm was impressed by the evidence of psychological well
being from the orphanage, "Our Little Brothers and
Sisters" (Nuestros Pequeños Hermanos), founded by
Father William Wasson in 1955 in Cuernavaca. In a study I
directed with a group of Mexican analysts, we found that
orphans who had suffered extreme psychic trauma became
productive, remarkably happy children after an average of
two years in an environment which balanced security,
taking responsibility, sharing, and educational
opportunity. Father Wasson guaranteed that the children
would never have to leave their new family.
(Incidentally, he made a rule that he would take all
siblings from a family, but would not accept a child if
the mother was living, since in that case, the Mexican
child would never fully join the new family. This was not
the case for the father.) He preached that dwelling on
one's misfortunes made one forever a self-pitying victim.
Children were encouraged to take advantage of their
opportunities for learning and to help each other.
Everyone shared in the work, including farming. For Fromm, the
positive results achieved at the orphanage reinforced his
view that a good community can transform emotionally
damaged people. He contrasted the
orphanage to psychotherapies which by focussing on
childhood hurts and traumas, strengthened narcissistic
self preoccupation and resulted in a chronic feeling of
resentment and entitlement.
In our discussions together during the late 60s as we
wrote Social Character in a Mexican Village, we agreed
that severe emotional disorders were not cured solely by
analysis. This is especially true if the patient comes
from a culture of poverty and hopelessness. Without a sense of
possibility, the patient lacks the self confidence and
hope to face crippling feelings and impulses. Even for some patients from more
advantaged backgrounds, a strategy of psychoanalysis should
focus on understanding and encouraging the patient to
strengthen creative potentials before probing for
pathology.
Fromm's Contribution
Fromm's contribution to
psychoanalysis and social science remains to be developed
further. He provides us with theory and methods to
understand health and illness as concepts that do not
refer to the individual alone, but also to the
relationships of the individual to others and to social
institutions. "I am myself and my
circumstances," Fromm would quote Ortega y Gasset.
"And if I do not save my circumstances, I cannot
save myself."
To take Fromm seriously, to enter into a dialogue with
him is to accept the challenge of taking responsibility of
who I want to be as opposed to what I want to have. But it also means examining his
assumptions about human nature, what it is possible for
people to achieve, and what are the best ways to achieve
our goals.
Both Fromm's sane society and psychoanalytic technique
are founded on questionable assumptions about human
nature. Isaiah Berlin in The Crooked Timber of Humanity has
criticized utopian philosophers from Plato to Marx for
believing that 'virtue is knowledge', that to know what
is truly good for oneself and others is enough to cause
rational behavior. Berlin points out that good values
such as equality and freedom, or Christian love and
republican vigilance against oppression, may be
incompatible. Furthermore, different groups have
different ways of structuring human needs. He writes
"Perhaps, the best that one can do is to try to
promote some kind of equilibrium, necessarily unstable,
between the different aspirations of differing groups of
human beings - at the very least to prevent them from
attempting to exterminate each other, and, so far as
possible, to prevent them from hurting each other - and
to promote the maximum practical degree of sympathy and
understanding, never likely to be complete, between
them." Berlin
goes on to say that "Immanuel Kant, a man very
remote from irrationalism, once observed that 'Out of the
crooked timber of humanity no straight thing was ever
made.' And for that reason no perfect solution is, not
merely in practice, but in principle, possible in human
affairs, and any determined effort to produce it is
likely to lead to suffering, disillusionment and
failure."
Speaking in his prophetic voice, Fromm
underestimated the need for individuals to adapt to a
society before attempting to transform it. The work of Jean Piaget describes
the stages of moral development and the social
interaction essential to achieve them. It is through
institutions such as family and schools, and
organizations (political, legal and economic) that we
create health, wealth, and good relationships. In an
increasingly complex, technology based society, improving
these institutions and organizations requires expert
knowledge combined with pragmatic idealism and supportive
colleagues. It can be slow and arduous work. There will
always be conflicts of different interests that must be
negotiated. There is no dramatic cultural transformation
that will dissolve psychopathology, create harmony, and
make a society sane.
This is not a program to inspire the young who carry
banners in parades. Nor will it sell many books. I was
once interviewed by a French journalist who said,
"Dr Maccoby, If I understand you correctly, you are
saying that with great dedication and courage, one can
succeed in taking small steps to improve the world. That
view will appeal to no one, neither those on the left or
the right." Yet, in practice, productive hope is
generated when people work together to protect
civilization and to push forward the envelope of their
culture, even a little bit. They are the responsible
parents, dedicated teachers, community volunteers, union
organizers, idealistic researchers and environmental
activists. Perhaps there are no sane societies, but there
are saner societies or sane enough societies that allow
individuals to join together to develop themselves and
their culture.
To conclude these observations on Fromm's two voices,
there are perhaps relatively few discordant
personalities, in James' sense, who like Fromm are drawn
to religious conversion and mystical unity. But there are
many of the would-be healthy minded who feel confused
about life, who are not sick but who seek happiness in
the wrong places and yearn for deeper understanding of
themselves. The liberation of women, economic and
emotional, from male domination makes it essential that
people learn to love, otherwise the family is likely to
disintegrate. For the
children of the post modern world, especially those who
have already achieved the material goals of the 18th
century Enlightenment, Fromm can be a guide who
integrates the humanistic lessons of religion,
literature, and philosophy with the discoveries of
psychoanalysis. Even when he speaks in his analytic
voice, the prophetic demands are not silent. He directs
us to learn the language of the unconscious and at the
same time evaluate our actions and institutions in terms of whether or not they
stimulate us to wake up and act according to reason,
whether or not they move us and our culture toward
community rather than tribalism. Even if one does not
believe it is possible to create utopia, it is possible
for many of us to develop our productive capabilities of
love and reason. By engaging in a serious dialogue with
Erich Fromm, we expand our awareness of the choices,
sharpen our concepts and deepen our sense of meaning.
As a student of Fromm, I believe the task remains of
integrating the analytic and the prophetic voices, the
understanding of what is and what can be with a
compelling vision of what ought to be in order to create
a better life and a more humane world.
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READING SUGGESTED BY THE AUTHOR
Fromm, Erich, Escape from Freedom. New York: Rinehart:
1941.
The Sane Society. New York: Rinehart, 1955.
You Shall Be As Gods. New York: Holt, Rinehart and
Winston, 1966.
The Anatomy of Human Destructiveness. New York: Harper
and Row, 1970.
To Have Or To Be? New York: Harper and Row, 1976.
Fromm, Erich, and Michael Maccoby, Social Character in a
Mexican Village. Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: 1970.
Maccoby, Michael, The Gamesman. New York: Simon and
Schuster, 1976.
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