Erich Fromm

• 1. Introduction

  ›

  Erich Fromm was born on the 23rd of March 1900 in Frankfurt am Main, the only child of Rosa and Naphtali Fromm, and he would spend the next eight decades asking a question that unsettled everyone who heard it: why do people choose their own chains? That question, deceptively simple, led Fromm from the study of Jewish law at Heidelberg to the psychoanalytic couches of Weimar Germany, from the faculty of Columbia University to the medical schools of Mexico City, and from the fringes of the Frankfurt School to the bestseller lists of the postwar world. He trained as a psychoanalyst, wrote sociology, practiced clinical therapy, marched against nuclear weapons, and backed Eugene McCarthy's presidential run. He called himself a democratic socialist and described his religious position as "nontheistic mysticism." The Art of Loving, his most widely read book, became an international bestseller in 1956, and it argued something most readers did not expect: that falling in love is not love at all, but evidence of a failure to understand it. What was Fromm actually saying about freedom, about love, about the forces that make human beings hand their autonomy to tyrants? And how did a rabbi's grandson from Frankfurt become one of the most widely read social thinkers of the twentieth century? Those are the questions this documentary sets out to answer.

• 2. Roots and Formation

  ›

  Fromm began his academic life in 1918 studying jurisprudence at the University of Frankfurt am Main, but within a year he had moved on to Heidelberg, where he studied sociology under Alfred Weber, the brother of sociologist Max Weber, alongside the psychiatrist-philosopher Karl Jaspers and Heinrich Rickert. His 1922 doctorate, titled Das judische Gesetz, examined the sociology of the Jewish diaspora, and it was only the first sign that Fromm would never be content inside a single discipline. His family background saturated his thinking from the start. His grandfather and two great-grandfathers on his father's side were rabbis, and a great uncle on his mother's side was a noted Talmudic scholar. As a young man he studied Talmud under Rabbi J. Horowitz and later under Rabbi Salman Baruch Rabinkow, a Chabad Hasid. During his doctorate he read the Tanya, the foundational text of Chabad written by Rabbi Shneur Zalman of Liadi. The early pull toward Zionism, partly inspired by the religious Zionist rabbi Nehemia Anton Nobel, did not last long. Fromm stepped away from it, saying it conflicted with what he called his ideal of a "universalist Messianism and Humanism." In the mid-1920s, he trained as a psychoanalyst at Frieda Reichmann's psychoanalytic sanatorium in Heidelberg. The two married in 1926, separated shortly after, and eventually divorced in 1942. Fromm opened his own clinical practice in 1927 and joined the Frankfurt Institute for Social Research in 1930, the same year he completed his psychoanalytic training. The departure from orthodox Judaism came in 1926, the same year he married Reichmann, and it marked a turn toward secular interpretations of the scriptural ideals that would continue to shape his entire intellectual program.

• 3. Exile and New Worlds

  ›

  After the Nazi takeover, Fromm moved first to Geneva, then in 1934 arrived at Columbia University in New York. He joined the company of Karen Horney and Harry Stack Sullivan as part of what would become known as the Neo-Freudian school of psychoanalytic thought. The relationship between Fromm and Horney proved mutually generative: Horney illuminated aspects of psychoanalysis for him, while he clarified sociological thinking for her, though the relationship ended in the late 1930s. By 1941, Fromm was on the faculty of Bennington College, a position he held until 1949, and from 1941 to 1959 he also taught at the New School for Social Research in New York. In 1943 he helped form the New York branch of the Washington School of Psychiatry, and in 1946 he co-founded the William Alanson White Institute of Psychiatry, Psychoanalysis, and Psychology. The move to Mexico City in 1949 opened another chapter entirely. He became a professor at the National Autonomous University of Mexico, known as UNAM, and built a psychoanalytic section into its medical school. He simultaneously taught psychology at Michigan State University from 1957 to 1961 and as an adjunct professor at the graduate division of Arts and Sciences at New York University from 1962 onward. He continued at UNAM until his retirement in 1965 and at the Mexican Society of Psychoanalysis until 1974. That final move, from Mexico City to Muralto in Switzerland in 1974, brought him to the place where he died in 1980, five days before what would have been his eightieth birthday.

• 4. The Problem of Freedom

  ›

  Escape from Freedom, Fromm's first major work, appeared in 1941 and is now regarded as one of the founding works of political psychology. Its central argument was both precise and disturbing: freedom, the thing people say they want most, can become an unbearable burden. Fromm grounded this in a reading of the Adam and Eve story that broke from religious orthodoxy. Where traditional interpretation treated the eating of the fruit as sin, Fromm read it as the moment of human self-awareness, the point at which human beings became conscious of themselves as separate from nature while still belonging to it. That separation, he argued, is the source of existential guilt and shame. The feeling of nakedness Adam and Eve describe is, in Fromm's reading, the sensation of being conscious of one's own mortality and powerlessness. He identified three mechanisms by which people escape the weight of freedom rather than embrace it. The first he called automaton conformity: reshaping the self to match what society seems to prefer, displacing the burden of choice from the individual onto the group. The second was authoritarianism, surrendering one's will to another person or system so that the freedom of choice is almost entirely removed. The third was destructiveness, which Fromm described in a precise formulation: "the destruction of the world is the last, almost desperate attempt to save myself from being crushed by it." He was not describing pathology in the clinical sense alone. He was describing the ordinary human tendency to prefer a certain kind of submission over an uncertain kind of liberty. His 1955 book The Sane Society extended this argument into a full critique of both Western capitalism and Soviet communism, which he saw as twin engines of the alienation his theory predicted.

• 5. Love as Discipline

  ›

  The Art of Loving, published in 1956, became the book most people associate with Fromm, but its argument was far less sentimental than its title suggests. Fromm defined love not as an emotion but as an interpersonal creative capacity, a skill that requires practice, knowledge, and effort. Falling in love, in his view, was not evidence of that capacity but of its absence. He drew a firm line between genuine love and what he considered narcissistic neuroses and sado-masochistic tendencies that are commonly mistaken for deep feeling. For Fromm, love always carried four essential elements: care, responsibility, respect, and knowledge. He illustrated the absence of care and responsibility by pointing to the biblical figure of Jonah, who refused to warn the residents of Nineveh about the consequences of their behavior. The Book of Jonah, in Fromm's reading, was a parable about the failure to take others seriously as people who matter. Fromm was equally direct about respect: he argued that few people in modern society genuinely respected the autonomy of those around them, let alone possessed the objective knowledge of what other people truly wanted and needed. The theoretical foundations beneath this argument reached back to Escape from Freedom and Man for Himself, his 1947 book on the psychology of ethics. Fromm treated love and reason together as the human capacities that solve the existential problem his earlier work had named: the awareness of being separate, mortal, and alone. The word he used for a healthy relationship to life was biophilia, a love of living things and of existence itself, which he described in The Heart of Man as one of three orientations essential to human progress alongside love for humanity and independence.

• 6. Character and Its Discontents

  ›

  In Man for Himself, Fromm drew a distinction between his theory of character and Freud's. Freud had organized character around the libido; Fromm reorganized it around two modes of relating to the world: assimilating things and responding to people. He listed four non-productive character orientations: receptive, exploitative, hoarding, and marketing. The marketing orientation was his sharpest diagnosis of modernity, a character type shaped by the logic of the market, where value is relative and the person becomes a commodity to be sold. Against all four he placed the productive orientation, which he described as the capacity for love, reason, and meaningful work. His framework had practical consequences beyond the consulting room. The Person Relatedness Test, developed by Elias H. Porter in collaboration with Carl Rogers at the University of Chicago's Counseling Center between 1953 and 1955, used Fromm's four non-productive orientations as its basis. Those same orientations underpinned the LIFO test, first published in 1967 by Stuart Atkins, Alan Katcher, and Elias Porter, and the Strength Deployment Inventory, published in 1971 by Elias H. Porter. One of Fromm's students, Sally Liberman Smith, went on to found the Lab School of Washington and the Baltimore Lab School. Fromm also identified a set of basic human needs beyond the biological: transcendence, rootedness, a sense of identity, a frame of orientation, excitation and stimulation, unity, and effectiveness. He was constructing a psychology of what people actually require to live well, not merely to function.

• 7. Against Freud, Alongside Marx

  ›

  Fromm's relationship with Freud was one of genuine admiration and sustained argument. He counted Freud alongside Albert Einstein and Karl Marx as one of the "architects of the modern age," but he also placed Marx both far above Freud in historical importance and as a finer thinker. His critique of Freud focused on two specific failures. The first was internal contradiction: before World War I, Freud had framed human drives as a tension between desire and repression; after the war, he recast them as a conflict between universal Life and Death instincts, Eros and Thanatos. Fromm charged Freud and his followers with never acknowledging this shift as the contradiction it was. The second charge was misogyny: Fromm argued that Freud could not think outside the patriarchal world of early twentieth century Vienna. Herbert Marcuse, writing in Eros and Civilization, turned a version of this critique back on Fromm himself, arguing that Fromm had started as a radical theorist and ended in conformity, and that by removing Freud's libido theory and other challenging concepts, Fromm and colleagues like Horney and Sullivan had reduced psychoanalysis to idealist ethics that merely supported the status quo. Fromm replied in The Sane Society and in The Anatomy of Human Destructiveness, agreeing that Freud deserved credit for placing the unconscious at the center of human life, but arguing that Freud had reified his own concepts and left the self as a passive product of instinct and social control, with very little room for will or variation. Later scholars like Marcuse, Fromm wrote, had treated these frozen concepts as dogma rather than as starting points for a more dynamic social psychology. On the political side, Fromm became one of the founders of socialist humanism, promoting Marx's early humanist writings to audiences in the United States and Western Europe. He engaged with Christian-Marxist dialogue groups in 1960s Communist Czechoslovakia, organized by Milan Machovec and others. The American Humanist Association named him Humanist of the Year in 1966.

• 8. Peace Work and Later Years

  ›

  Fromm's political activism reached its peak not in electoral politics but in the peace movement. As a co-founder of SANE, the organization that opposed nuclear weapons, he was more consequential there than in the Socialist Party of America, which he joined in the mid-1950s to offer a counterpoint to McCarthyism. His 1961 paper May Man Prevail? addressed what he saw as the fictions underlying American foreign policy. After supporting Eugene McCarthy's campaign for the Democratic presidential nomination, Fromm largely withdrew from American political life, though he wrote a paper on detente policy for a U.S. Senate Committee on Foreign Relations hearing in 1974. The Nelly Sachs Prize came to him in 1979, the year before he died. His output across all these decades was vast: from his 1922 German dissertation through works published posthumously well into the 1990s, Fromm kept writing on psychoanalysis, religion, ethics, Marx, the nature of destructiveness, and the possibilities of love. To Have or To Be?, published in 1976, posed a question about two fundamentally different orientations toward life that he had traced across all his major work. The move to Muralto, Switzerland in 1974 gave him his final six years, and the question he posed in that last period, whether human beings can choose being over having, remains an open one.