Lawrence J. Friedman, The Lives of Erich Fromm: Love’s Prophet
Reviewed by Vivian Gornick
For Freud, the all-important loneliness of mankind was inborn; for Fromm it was culturally created. Freud said the conflict of instinctual drives means that human beings are born into a sense of loss and abandonment that can be ameliorated only through psychoanalysis. Fromm said it was enough to understand that the race is born with a sense of connectedness that is destroyed by the social climate. Ironically, though, for each of these thinkers, it was the exercise of the very powers that had brought about our downfall that alone could release human beings from the imprisonment of such separateness. If men and women learned to occupy their own conscious selves, fully and freely, they would find that they were no longer alone: they would have themselves for company. Once one had company one could feel benign toward others.
This, Fromm said, was the only solution to the problem of the alienated individual in relation to the modern world. The only thing that could save humanity from its own soul-destroying loneliness was the individual’s ability to inhabit what came to be known as the “authentic” self. If you achieved authenticity, you would be rewarded with the inner peace necessary to become a free agent who is happy to do unto others as you would have others do unto you.
The fly in the ointment, as Fromm the Marxist saw it, was that we were living in a world where “economic, social and political conditions . . . do not offer a basis for the realization of individuality.” That meant that the struggle to achieve authenticity was continually being so undercut that it became “an unbearable burden.” If a burden is unbearable one will do almost anything to be relieved of it, even if relief demands submission to a set of social conventions that suffocates the spirit. This, however, is a Faustian bargain that creates anxiety. Now, something was needed to dull the anxiety. Capitalism, as Fromm and many other Frankfurt intellectuals said, had just the thing: consumerism. The pursuit of worldly goods—escapist conformism—would etherize the unrealized hunger for a genuine self.
No sooner had the fighting of World War II ended than the Cold War began, and the United States seemed plunged once more into the anxiety that had prevailed while the guns were firing. A manipulated terror of godless Communism, coupled with an even greater one of nuclear war, made the 1950s a decade in which ordinary women and men feared to speak freely or act independently. Injected into this unhealthy atmosphere was a straitjacket demand for conformity to what was rapidly becoming corporate America. In a world that had just fought one of the bloodiest wars in history for the sake of the individual, millions were rushing into the kind of lockstep existence that by definition meant a forfeiture of inner life.
Books written by sociologists, novelists, and psychologists describing this cultural turn of events were suddenly thick on the ground: David Riesman’s The Lonely Crowd(1950), Harry Stack Sullivan’s Interpersonal Theory of Psychiatry (1953), Sloan Wilson’s The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit (1953), and in some ways the most penetrating of all, Richard Yates’s Revolutionary Road, a novel published in 1961 but set in 1955. It was a time, Yates claimed, that embodied “a kind of blind, desperate clinging to safety and security at any price.”
The book, however, that accounted most fully for the ’50s’ near-morbid desire for security at any price, had been written a decade earlier by the émigré psychoanalyst Erich Fromm. Escape from Freedom (1941), rooted in a European intellectual thought that had been heavily influenced by the work of both Karl Marx and Sigmund Freud, brought social psychology to the United States where, in the years ahead, it flourished wildly. The book launched its author on one of the most celebrated careers that any public intellectual, anywhere, has ever achieved.
Erich Fromm was born in 1900 in Frankfurt, Germany, into a lower-middle-class Jewish family that was nominally Orthodox. While Fromm never became religious, very early he fell in love with Judaism’s great book of wisdom, and for years wished only to become a student of the Talmud. At the same time, on the verge of teenaged life, he came under the influence of an employee of his father, who introduced him to the work of Karl Marx. Then came the First World War, which, in later years, Fromm labeled “the most crucial experience of my life.” His newest biographer, historian Lawrence J. Friedman, tells us in The Lives of Erich Fromm: Love’s Prophet that when the war was over the eighteen-year-old Fromm remained “obsessed by . . . the wish to understand the irrationality of human mass behavior.” By Fromm’s own accounting, these three strands of influence—Talmudic ethics, Marxist socialism, and the psychological power of unreason—shaped his intellectual life.
In 1919 he entered the University of Heidelberg where he studied under Max Weber’s brother, Alfred, also a sociologist. Alfred Weber was convinced that while Freud’s discovery of the strength of instinct drives rooted in sexuality was undeniable, more important was the social reality in which the individual life was planted. Weber persuaded the young Fromm that social forces working on the psyche were the keys to what most troubled the human condition.
Nonetheless, Fromm also saw that to understand the workings of the psyche itself was vital. At the age of 22 he became a patient of Frieda Reichmann—a psychoanalyst ten years his senior who later became his first wife—and soon began to study analytic theory himself. He proved so precocious a student that by 1923 he was a practicing psychoanalyst in Berlin. In 1929 he became a lecturer and founding member at the Institute for Psychoanalysis at the University of Frankfurt. In Frankfurt, he quickly discovered that it was only Freud threaded through Marx that ignited his intellectual imagination, and he soon deserted one Frankfurt institute for another: the Institute for Social Research, which eventually gained international fame as the Frankfurt School of Critical Theory.
The Frankfurt School had been founded in 1922 by a wealthy Marxist who wished to see a body of research concentrated on the organized working class. By the end of the decade, however, a neo-Marxist development within the intellectual left was guiding the work of the Institute toward an exploration of the cultural rather than economic consequences of capitalism. It was this movement—led by scholars and critics such as Max Horkheimer, Theodor Adorno, Walter Benjamin, Herbert Marcuse, and Leo Löwenthal—that established the Institute’s originality. When, around 1929, a group of psychoanalysts that included Fromm and Wilhelm Reich was recruited (mainly by Horkheimer), the Institute was given the grounding in neo-Freudian thought that—together with cultural Marxism—became its signature trait.
During those early years at the Frankfurt School, Fromm wrote a multitude of essays that joined the basic principles of psychoanalysis to those of historical materialism, analyzing instinctual drives and needs in relation to the overriding sense of alienation brought on by modern capitalism. These essays were the genesis of Escape from Freedom, the work that identified the existential drama of the human condition: the will at one and the same time to break loose from the constraints of social authority and to submit to them. It was the rise of Nazism—the incredible ease with which Hitler made his way to power first in Germany and then in Austria—that amazed Fromm and made clear to him that humanity at large was almost always drawn to the infantile comfort of having an external authority make all the decisions.
Overnight, it seemed, millions of people, indifferent to the loss of democracy, were happy to capitulate to the rule of the strongman, relieved to feel order restored when they were being told what they could and could not do, no matter the human cost. This was a crisis that, in Fromm’s view, threatened “the greatest achievement of modern culture—individuality and uniqueness of personality.”
Why was this happening? What was it in the human psyche that welcomed what Fromm could only think of as a return to tribalism? The more he thought about it, the more clearly he saw that in all human beings a tug of war persisted between the desire to have freedom and the desire to shun its responsibilities. Friedman calls the latter “conformist escapism.”.. Read more:
Also see: A Final Warning by George Orwell
'In our world their will be no emotions except fear, rage and triumph: the sex instinct will be eradicated we shall abolish the orgasm, there will be no loyalty except to the party.. but always there will be the intoxication of power always at every moment there will be the thrill of victory, the sensation of trampling on an enemy who is helpless…, If you want to imagine the future; imagine a boot stepping on a human face forever. The moral of this story is.. don’t let it happen.' Eric Arthur Blair, (George Orwell), born in Motihari, Bihar, on 25 June 1903, died in London on 21 January 1950
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