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(tothineownself) is evidently no longer active.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.
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.
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.
Destructiveness is the outcome of unlived life.
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.
The decisive point is not what is thought but how it is
thought.
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.
It seems that nothing is more difficult for the average
man to bear than the feeling of not being identified with
a larger group.
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.
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.
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.
"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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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?
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.
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
� 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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On Disobedience -
Erich Fromm
All
martyrs of religious faiths, of freedom
and of science have had to disobey those
who wanted to muzzle them in order to
obey their own consciences, the laws of
humanity and of reason. If a man can only
obey and not disobey, he is a slave; if
he can only disobey and not obey, he is a
rebel (not a revolutionary); he acts out
of anger,disappointment, resentment, yet
not in the name of a conviction or a
principle. -- E.Fromm
For centuries kings,
priests, feudal lords, industrial bosses and
parents have insisted that obedience is a virtue
and that disobedience is a vice. In order to
introduce another point of view, let us set
against this position the following statement:
human history began with an act of disobedience,
and it is not unlikely that it will be,
terminated by an act of obedience.
Human history was ushered in by an act of
disobedience according to the Hebrew and Greek
myths. Adam and Eve, living in the Garden of
Eden, were part of nature; they were in harmony
with it, yet did not transcend it. They were in
nature as the fetus is in the womb of the mother.
They were human, and at the same time not yet
human. All this changed when they disobeyed an
order. By breaking the ties with earth and
mother, by cutting the umbilical cord, man
emerged from a pre-human harmony and was able to
take the first step into independence and
freedom. The act of disobedience set Adam and Eve
free and opened their eyes. They recognized each
other as strangers and the world outside them as
strange and even hostile. Their act of
disobedience broke the primary bond with nature
and made them individuals. "Original
sin," far from corrupting man, set him free;
it was the beginning of history. Man had to leave
the Garden of Eden in order to learn to rely on
his own powers and to be come fully human.
The prophets, in their messianic concept,
confirmed the idea that man had been right in
disobeying; that he had not been corrupted by his
"sin," but freed from the fetters of
pre-human harmony. For the prophets, history is
the place where man becomes human; during its
unfolding he develops his powers of reason and of
love until he creates a new harmony between
himself, his fellow man and nature. This new
harmony is described as "the end of
days," that period of history in which there
is peace between man and man, and between man and
nature. It is a "new" paradise created
by man himself, and one which he alone could
create because he was forced to leave the
"old" paradise as a result of his
disobedience.
Just as the Hebrew myth of Adam and Eve, so
the Greek myth of Prometheus sees all of human
civilization based on an act of disobedience.
Prometheus, in stealing the fire from the gods,
lays the foundation for the evolution of man.
There would be no human history were it not for
Prometheus' "crime." He, like Adam and
Eve, is punished for his disobedience. But he
does not repent and ask for forgiveness. On the
contrary, he proudly says: "I would rather
be chained to this rock than be the obedient
servant of the gods. "
Man has continued to evolve by acts of
disobedience. Not only was his spiritual
development possible only because there were men
who dared to say no to the powers that be in the
name of their conscience or their faith, but also
his intellectual development was dependent on the
capacity for being disobedient--disobedient to
authorities who tried to muzzle new thoughts and
to the authority of long-established opinions
which declared a change to be nonsense.
If the capacity for disobedience constituted
the beginning of human history, obedience might
very well, as I have said, cause the end of human
history. I am not speaking symbolically or
poetically. There is the possibility, or even the
probability, that the human race will destroy
civilization and even all life upon earth within
the next five to ten years. There is no
rationality or sense in it. But the fact is that,
while we are living technically in the Atomic
Age, the majority of men--including most of those
who are in power--still live emotionally in the
Stone Age; that while our mathematics,
astronomy,and the natural sciences are of the
twentieth century, most of our ideas about
politics,the state, and society lag far behind
the age of science. If mankind commits suicide it
will be because people will obey those who
command them to push the deadly buttons; because
they will obey the archaic passions of fear,
hate, and greed; because they will obey obsolete
clich�s of State sovereignty and national honor.
The Soviet leaders talk much about revolutions,
and we in the "free world" talk much
about freedom. Yet they and we discourage
disobedience--in the Soviet Union explicitly and
by force, in the free world implicitly and by the
more subtle methods of persuasion.
But I do not mean to say that all disobedience
is a virtue and all obedience a vice. Such a view
would ignore the dialectical relationship between
obedience and disobedience. Whenever the
principles which are obeyed and those which are
disobeyed are irreconcilable, an act of obedience
to one principle is necessarily an act of
disobedience to its counterpart, and vice versa.
Antigone is the classic example oft his
dichotomy. By obeying the inhuman laws of the
State, Antigone necessarily would disobey the
laws of humanity. By obeying the latter, she must
disobey the former. All martyrs of religious
faiths, of freedom and of science have had to
disobey those who wanted to muzzle them in order
to obey their own consciences, the laws of
humanity and of reason. If a man can only obey
and not disobey, he is a slave; if he can only
disobey and not obey, he is a rebel (not a
revolutionary); he acts out of
anger,disappointment, resentment, yet not in the
name of a conviction or a principle.
However, in order to prevent a confusion of
terms an important qualification must be made.
Obedience to a person, institution or power
(heteronomous obedience) is submission; it
implies the abdication of my autonomy and the
acceptance of a foreign will or judgment in place
of my own. Obedience to my own reason or
conviction (autonomous obedience) is not an act
of submission but one of affirmation. My
conviction and my judgment, if authentically
mine, are part of me. If I follow them rather
than the judgment of others, I am being myself;
hence the word obey can be applied only in a
metaphorical sense and with a meaning which is
fundamentally different from the one in the case
of "heteronomous obedience."
But this distinction still needs two further
qualifications, one with regard to the concept of
conscience and the other with regard to the
concept of authority. The word conscience is used
to express two phenomena which are quite distinct
from each other. One is the "authoritarian
conscience" which is the internalized voice
of an authority whom we are eager to please and
afraid of displeasing.This authoritarian
conscience is what most people experience when
they obey their conscience. It is alsothe
conscience which Freud speaks of, and which he
called "Super-Ego." This Super-Ego
represents the internalized commands and
prohibitions of father, accepted by the son out
of fear. Different from the authoritarian
conscience is the"humanistic
conscience"; this is the voice present in
every human being and independent from external
sanctions and rewards. Humanistic conscience is
based on the fact that as human beings we have an
intuitive knowledge of what is human and inhuman,
what is conducive of life and what is destructive
of life. This conscience serves our functioning
as human beings. It is the voice which calls us
back to ourselves, to our humanity.
Authoritarian conscience (Super-Ego) is still
obedience to a power outside of myself, even
though this power has been internalized.
Consciously I believe that I am following my
conscience; in effect, however, I have swallowed
the principles of power; just because of the
illusion that humanistic conscience and Super-Ego
are identical, internalized authority is so much
more effective than the authority which is
clearly experienced as not being part of me.
Obedience to the "authoritarian
conscience," like all obedience to outside
thoughts and power, tends to
debilitate"humanistic conscience," the
ability to be and to judge oneself. The
statement, on the other hand, that obedience to
another person is ipso facto submission needs
also to be qualified by distinguishing
"irrational" from "rational"
authority. An example of rational authority is to
be found in the relationship between student and
teacher; one of irrational authority in the
relationship between slave and master. Both
relationships are based on the fact that the
authority of the person in command is accepted.
Dynamically, however, they are of a different
nature. The interests of the teacher and the
student, in the ideal case, lie in the same
direction. The teacher is satisfied if he
succeeds in furthering the student; if he has
failed to do so, the failure is his and the
student's. The slave owner, on the other hand,
wants to exploit the slave as much as possible.
The more he gets out of him the more satisfied he
is. At the same time, the slave tries to defend
as best he can his claims for a minimum of
happiness. The interests of slave and master are
antagonistic, because what is advantageous to the
one is detrimental to the other. The superiority
of the one over the other has a different
function in each case; in the first it is the
condition for the furtherance of the person
subjected to the authority, and in the second it
is the condition for his exploitation. Another
distinction runs parallel to this: rational
authority is rational because the authority,
whether it is held by a teacher or a captain of a
ship giving orders in an emergency, acts in the
name of reason which, being universal, I can
accept without submitting. Irrational authority
has to use force or suggestion, because no one
would let himself be exploited if he were free to
prevent it.
Why is man so prone to obey and why is it so
difficult for him to disobey? As long as I am
obedient to the power of the State, the Church,
or public opinion, I feel safe and protected. In
fact it makes little difference what power it is
that I am obedient to. It is always an
institution, or men, who use force in one form or
another and who fraudulently claim omniscience
and omnipotence. My obedience makes me part of
the power I worship, and hence I feel strong. I
can make no error, since it decides for me; I
cannot be alone, because it watches over me; I
cannot commit a sin, because it does not let me
do so, and even if I do sin, the punishment is
only the way of returning to the almighty power.
In order to disobey, one must have the courage to
be alone, to err and to sin. But courage is not
enough. The capacity for courage depends on a
person's state of development. Only if a person
has emerged from mother's lap and father's
commands, only if he has emerged as a fully
developed individual and thus has acquired the
capacity to think and feel for himself, only then
can he have the courage to say "no" to
power, to disobey. A person can become free
through acts of disobedience by learning to say
no to power. But not only is the capacity for
disobedience the condition for freedom; freedom
is also the condition for disobedience. If I am
afraid of freedom, I cannot dare to say
"no," I cannot have the courage to be
disobedient. Indeed, freedom and the capacity for
disobedience are inseparable; hence any social,
political, and religious system which proclaims
freedom, yet stamps out disobedience, cannot
speak the truth.
There is another reason why it is so difficult
to dare to disobey, to say "no" to
power. During most of human history obedience has
been identified with virtue and disobedience with
sin. The reason is simple: thus far throughout
most of history a minority has ruled over the
majority. This rule was made necessary by the
fact that there was only enough of the good
things of life for the few, and only the crumbs
remained for the many. If the few wanted to enjoy
the good things and, beyond that, to have the
many serve them and work for them, one condition
was necessary: the many had to learn obedience.
To be sure, obedience can be established by sheer
force. But this method has many disadvantages. It
constitutes a constant threat that one day the
many might have the means to overthrow the few by
force; further more there are many kinds of work
which cannot be done properly if nothing but fear
is behind the obedience. Hence the obedience
which is only rooted in the fear of force must be
transformed into one rooted in man's heart. Man
must want and even need to obey, instead of only
fearing to disobey. If this is to be achieved,
power must assume the qualities of the All Good,
of the All Wise; it must become All Knowing. If
this happens, power can proclaim that
disobedience is sin and obedience virtue; and
once this has been proclaimed, the many can
accept obedience because it is good and detest
disobedience because it is bad, rather than to
detest themselves for being cowards. From Luther
to the nineteenth century one was concerned with
overt and explicit authorities. Luther, the pope,
the princes, wanted to uphold it; the middle
class, the workers, the philosophers, tried to
uproot it. The fight against authority in the
State as well as in the family was often the very
basis for the development of an independent and
daring person. The fight against authority was
inseparable from the intellectual mood which
characterized the philosophers of the
enlightenment and the scientists. This
"critical mood" was one of faith in
reason, and at the same time of doubt in
everything which is said or thought, inasmuch as
it is based on tradition, superstition, custom,
power. The principles sapere aude and de omnibus
est dubitandum--" dare to be wise" and
"of all one must doubt"--were
characteristic of the attitude which permitted
and furthered the capacity to say "no."
The case of Adolf Eichmann is symbolic of our
situation and has a significance far beyond the
one which his accusers in the courtroom in
Jerusalem were concerned with. Eichmann is a
symbol of the organization man, of the alienated
bureaucrat for whom men, women and children have
become numbers. He is a symbol of all of us. We
can see ourselves in Eichmann. But the most
frightening thing about him is that after the
entire story was told in terms of his own
admissions, he was able in perfect good faith to
plead his innocence. It is clear that if he were
once more in the same situation he would do it
again. And so would we-and so do we. The
organization man has lost the capacity to
disobey, he is not even aware of the fact that he
obeys. At this point in history the capacity to
doubt, to criticize and to disobey may be all
that stands between a future for mankind and the
end of civilization.
THE
PRICE OF DISOBEDIENCE
In
one version of the story, Prometheus steals fire
from the Gods and is punished by being chained to
a rock and having his liver eaten out every day
by an eagle.
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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"!
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Text of Maccoby Article From
maccoby.com/Articles/TwoVoices.shtml
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.
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.
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.
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.< P>
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 Peque�os 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. Buy it Now
The Sane Society. New York: Rinehart, 1955.
Buy it Now
You Shall Be As Gods. New York: Holt, Rinehart and
Winston, 1966.
Buy it Now
The Anatomy of Human Destructiveness. Buy it Now New
York: Harper and Row, 1970.
To Have Or To Be? New York: Harper and Row, 1976. Buy it
Now
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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