Erich Fromm (1900-1980)
The unconscious forces that shape our societies

Erich Fromm: Life and personality

Erich Fromm (1900-1980) was a German social psychologist and philosopher who had enormous popular success from the 1950s all the way to the end of his life in 1980. As I mentioned before, I believe that we can understand a lot about how particular philosophers’ theories came about by studying their lives. Similarly to Aristotle and Bertrand Russell (of whom we talked before), Erich Fromm’s life also holds important clues to his later philosophy and social theory.

Born into an orthodox Jewish family in Germany right at the beginning of the 20th century, Fromm experienced all the perverse hatred and violence of the human psyche directly in his own life. In 1934, Fromm was forced to leave Nazi Germany and went first to Switzerland and later to New York, where he started a career as a university professor that brought him to various institutes and universities in the US and Mexico, and finally back to Switzerland, where he also died.

Much of his later work was focused on understanding exactly how such phenomena as the Nazi state could come about and how perfectly sane people could, in a short period of time, be turned into a raging horde of savage killers.

He was not alone in analysing and trying to explain the fundamental trauma of the Nazi state and the destruction it brought about. Hannah Arendt, for example, another Jewish survivor of the Nazi years, in her The Origins of Totalitarianism, also tried to explain how totalitarian states come about and how they can gain the acceptance of the masses. And Victor Klemperer analysed the language of the Nazi state in his diaries that were later published as Lingua Tertii Imperii, or, in the English translation, as The Language of the Third Reich.

These are great and wonderful books and it is at our own peril that we have almost forgotten about them today. Our own world is not charmed and magically safe from totalitarianism, and if we want to avoid a repetition of those times, we should learn to be more vigilant and to recognise the early warning signs of a totalitarian society. And such books can give us the means to do just that.

But Erich Fromm was first a doctor and a psychologist, and as such it wasn’t the political structure of totalitarian states or their language that interested him, but the psychological conditions that can cause normal, everyday people to behave in aggressive or self-harming ways. He saw that one cannot explain a society like Nazi Germany’s (or our own) by only looking at the individuals. As Marx also believed, Fromm was convinced that society itself can promote the conditions that turn human beings into either balanced or damaged individuals and that, if a healing process does not take place, these damaged individuals will react with aggression and destructiveness to their surroundings. In a way, Erich Fromm tried to psychoanalyse not individuals but whole societies, and so it is not surprising that his work references prominently two of the most influential thinkers of the past two centuries: Sigmund Freud, father of psychoanalysis, and Karl Marx, philosopher of the interplay between economy and society.

Like Russell and Aristotle, Fromm also is difficult to put into our conveniently labelled intellectual boxes. He was religiously brought up, and he was inspired by many religions throughout his life: by Judaism as well as the Christian message. He was also interested in the oriental religions and in Buddhism — but at the same time, he rejected religion for himself because he thought that religion was a source of division among humans. Fromm was a Marxist humanist who rejected the totalitarianism of the Soviet Union. In 1966, he was named Humanist of the Year by the American Humanist Association, yet he thought of himself as an adherent of what he called “nontheistic mysticism”. And, finally, he was a hugely popular author who today is almost entirely forgotten and who never got much recognition in academic circles for his theoretical work.

In the coming two months, we will look at his theory in detail, and we will also talk about other critics of modern society, including Marx himself and the currently popular thinker Alain de Botton.

Erich Fromm’s Marxism

Erich Fromm wrote a great number of books, but most revolve around similar topics and are often based on the same core ideas. Two books that we will discuss in this series of posts are “The Art of Loving” (1956) and “To Have Or To Be?” (1976).

As we already noted before, Fromm draws on some of the ideas of Marxism, and so it will be useful to briefly clarify what this means, particularly since Marx is too often misunderstood and just seen as someone promoting a “communist” way of life as this historically played out in the Soviet Union and other such “socialist” states. But nothing could be further from the truth. The Soviet Union had a similar relation to Marxism as the Catholic church has traditionally had to the teachings of Jesus — which is to say, a very remote one. For the most part, both institutions abused the names of their spiritual fathers in order to establish power and exploitation structures that were contrary to the original teachings that these institutions claimed to uphold.

The main idea of Marx is that what we perceive as the order of society (as we see it all around us) is really the result of a particular economic order. The way people work, the way they amuse themselves, even our music, literature and philosophy — all these are as they are because, as a society, we have organised our economy in a particular way. Change the economy and all these other phenomena will change along with it.

And also the other way round: Society can only change and become better if we change the way goods are produced and the way the means of production are owned and controlled. Yoga classes and a kale diet, the Marxist thinks, will do little to change society as long as big corporations own our entertainment (for example, Sony Music and their crazy copyright claim on Bach here), as long as mass production requires us to be almost identical human beings without individual personalities and as long as we are governed by companies that can control, commercialise and stifle public discourse (like Facebook and Twitter).

For a Marxist, all outward phenomena in a society, including its beliefs, religion and culture, are really determined deep down by its economic order; and Fromm makes this insight one of the starting points for his own exploration.

Psychoanalysis of society

Psychoanalysis, the other theory that Erich Fromm takes as a starting point, goes back to Sigmund Freund (1856-1939). It is a treatment for psychological conditions that is based on the idea that a person’s behaviour is really the result of particular unconscious forces, like beliefs, thoughts, feelings, desires and memories, but also experiences that one has made in childhood and throughout life.

A person, in this view, can only change and become better if they understand and come to terms with these unconscious forces. As long as these influences do not become conscious and are not clearly seen by the subject, they will have an irresistible influence on a person’s behaviour. All outward phenomena (the way a person behaves and appears to others) are really determined deep down by the unconscious. A betterment of the person, their healing and their way towards a better life can only begin after these unconscious influences have been brought to light and dealt with.

From this extremely simplified comparison between the two, you can already see that Marxism and Freud’s psychoanalysis have a very similar central idea: what we see is the result of some deep down, hidden processes that create the visible phenomena. In Marx’s case, it is economic structure. In Freud’s, the individual unconscious. But both (and Fromm) believe that in order to change the visible phenomena, we need to address the deeper reasons (economic structures, unconscious forces) first. Any attempt to just change the phenomena on the surface will fail if we don’t address these real causes.

Fromm uses these two frameworks to diagnose society and propose ways to improve (or “heal”) it. In order to heal people individually, we need to understand and address the unconscious forces that drive their behaviour. But also, in order to heal society, we need to understand and address its underlying economic forces. In this way, psychoanalysis and Marxism are, for Fromm, two similar approaches that work on different levels: one on individual people, the other on societies.

Recommended reading

The Art of Loving is the main book of Erich Fromm on the theory and practice of love. It is not a philosophical book, but primarily an invitation to think about what it means to love others and how we go about it in our everyday lives. It is a very practical book, in a sense, that has, for many people, transformed the way they see love.

To Have or To Be is Fromm’s second fundamental book. In it, he discusses two different ways of behaving and living one’s life: the way of having and the way of being. This will be the main book that we will be discussing throughout the next two months, and again, it is a life-changing book!

Here is another of Fromm’s more influential works, The Anatomy of Human Destructiveness. Similar in scope to To Have or To Be, but more focused on the psychoanalytical basis in Fromm’s analysis of what is wrong with modern society.

Alain De Botton’s “Status Anxiety” was a big hit when it was first published in 2004. In it, he analyses how different societies create and confer status to their members, and he diagnoses how this in our society becomes a source of anxiety and unhappiness:

And, finally, Fromm’s Escape from Freedom:

Last but not least, my own book on Erich Fromm. If you liked this post, you will love the book:

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Title image by Müller-May / Rainer Funk, CC BY-SA 3.0 de, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=43921778

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