Erich Fromm

German social psychologist and psychoanalyst

Date of Birth	:	23 Mar, 1900
Date of Death	:	18 Mar, 1980
Place of Birth	:	Frankfurt, Germany
Profession	:	German Social Psychologist And Psychoanalyst
Nationality	:	German

Erich Seligmann Fromm was a German-American social psychologist, psychoanalyst, sociologist, humanist philosopher, and democratic socialist. He was a German Jew who fled the Nazi regime and settled in the United States. He was one of the founders of The William Alanson White Institute of Psychiatry, Psychoanalysis and Psychology in New York City and was associated with the Frankfurt School of Critical Theory.

life

Erich Fromm was born on March 23, 1900 in Frankfurt am Main, the only child of Orthodox Jewish parents, Rosa (Kraus) and Naftali Fromm. He began his academic studies in 1918 with two semesters of law at the University of Frankfurt am Main. In the summer semester of 1919, Fromm studied at the University of Heidelberg, where he began studying sociology under Alfred Weber (brother of sociologist Max Weber), psychiatrist-philosopher Karl Jaspers, and Heinrich Rickert. Fromm received his PhD in sociology from Heidelberg in 1922 with a dissertation "On Jewish Law".

From that time became strongly involved in Zionism under the influence of the Religious Zionist Rabbi Nehemiah Anton Nobel. He was very active in the Jewish Studentenverbindungen and other Zionist organizations. But he soon withdrew from Judaism, saying it conflicted with his ideals of a "universal messianism and humanism".

In the mid-1920s, he trained to become a psychoanalyst through Frieda Reichmann's psychoanalytic sanatorium in Heidelberg. They married in 1926, but soon separated and divorced in 1942. He started his own clinical practice in 1927. In 1930 he joined the Frankfurt Institute for Social Research and completed his psychological training.

After the Nazi seizure of power in Germany, Fromm moved first to Geneva and then, in 1934, to Columbia University in New York. Along with Karen Horney and Harry Stack Sullivan, Fromm belongs to a neo-Freudian school of psychoanalytic thought. Horney and Fromm each had a significant influence on the other's thinking, with Horney elucidating aspects of psychoanalysis for Fromm and later interpreting sociology for Horney. Their relationship ended in the late 1930s. After leaving Columbia, Fromm helped establish the New York branch of the Washington School of Psychiatry in 1943 and co-founded the William Alanson White Institute of Psychiatry, Psychoanalysis, and Psychology in 1946. He was on the faculty of Bennington College from 1941 to 1949 and taught courses at the New School for Social Research in New York from 1941 to 1959.

When Fromm moved to Mexico City in 1949, he became a professor at the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM) and established a psychoanalysis department at the medical school there. In the meantime, he taught as a professor of psychology at Michigan State University from 1957 to 1961, and after 1962 as an associate professor of psychology in the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences at New York University. He taught at UNAM until his retirement in 1965. and until 1974 at the Mexican Society of Psychoanalysis (SMP). In 1974 he moved from Mexico City to Muralto, Switzerland, and died at his home in 1980, five days before his eightieth birthday. All the while, Fromm maintained his own clinical practice and published a series of books.

Psychological theory

Beginning with his first seminal work of 1941, Escape from Freedom (known in Britain as The Fear of Freedom), Fromm's writings were notable as much for their social and political commentary as for their philosophical and psychological underpinnings. Indeed, Escape from Freedom is viewed as one of the founding works of political psychology. His second important work, Man for Himself: An Inquiry into the Psychology of Ethics, first published in 1947, continued and enriched the ideas of Escape from Freedom. Taken together, these books outlined Fromm's theory of human character, which was a natural outgrowth of Fromm's theory of human nature. Fromm's most popular book was The Art of Loving, an international bestseller first published in 1956, which recapitulated and complemented the theoretical principles of human nature found in Escape from Freedom and Man for Himself—principles which were revisited in many of Fromm's other major works.

Central to Fromm's world view was his interpretation of the Talmud and Hasidism. He began studying Talmud as a young man under Rabbi J. Horowitz and later under Rabbi Salman Baruch Rabinkow, a Chabad Hasid. While working towards his doctorate in sociology at the University of Heidelberg, Fromm studied the Tanya by the founder of Chabad, Rabbi Shneur Zalman of Liadi. Fromm also studied under Nehemia Nobel and Ludwig Krause while studying in Frankfurt. Fromm's grandfather and two great-grandfathers on his father's side were rabbis, and a great uncle on his mother's side was a noted Talmudic scholar. However, Fromm turned away from orthodox Judaism in 1926, towards secular interpretations of scriptural ideals.

The cornerstone of Fromm's humanistic philosophy is his interpretation of the biblical story of Adam and Eve's exile from the Garden of Eden. Drawing on his knowledge of the Talmud, Fromm pointed out that being able to distinguish between good and evil is generally considered to be a virtue, but that biblical scholars generally consider Adam and Eve to have sinned by disobeying God and eating from the Tree of Knowledge. However, departing from traditional religious orthodoxy on this, Fromm extolled the virtues of humans taking independent action and using reason to establish moral values rather than adhering to authoritarian moral values.

Beyond a simple condemnation of authoritarian value systems, Fromm used the story of Adam and Eve as an allegorical explanation for human biological evolution and existential angst, asserting that when Adam and Eve ate from the Tree of Knowledge, they became aware of themselves as being separate from nature while still being part of it. This is why they felt "naked" and "ashamed": they had evolved into human beings, conscious of themselves, their own mortality, and their powerlessness before the forces of nature and society, and no longer united with the universe as they were in their instinctive, pre-human existence as animals. According to Fromm, the awareness of a disunited human existence is a source of guilt and shame, and the solution to this existential dichotomy is found in the development of one's uniquely human powers of love and reason. However, Fromm distinguished his concept of love from unreflective popular notions as well as Freudian paradoxical love (see the criticism by Marcuse below).

Fromm considered love an interpersonal creative capacity rather than an emotion, and he distinguished this creative capacity from what he considered to be various forms of narcissistic neuroses and sado-masochistic tendencies that are commonly held out as proof of "true love". Indeed, Fromm viewed the experience of "falling in love" as evidence of one's failure to understand the true nature of love, which he believed always had the common elements of care, responsibility, respect, and knowledge. Drawing from his knowledge of the Torah, Fromm pointed to the story of Jonah, who did not wish to save the residents of Nineveh from the consequences of their sin, as demonstrative of his belief that the qualities of care and responsibility are generally absent from most human relationships. Fromm also asserted that few people in modern society had respect for the autonomy of their fellow human beings, much less the objective knowledge of what other people truly wanted and needed.