The Social Determinants of Psychoanalytic Therapy: Fromm’s Anti-Authoritarian “Calling Card”

ABSTRACT

This article examines Fromm’s 1935 paper, “The Social Determinants of Psychoanalytic Therapy,” situating it in the context of Fromm’s life and setting forth its contrast between Freud’s “authoritarian, patricentric attitude” and the “humane, philanthropic attitude” of Ferenczi, who was deeply influenced by Groddeck. Despite critiquing Fromm’s tendency to give insufficient attention to the “the individual fate of the person,” such as would be necessary to explain the differences between Freud and Ferenczi, in expounding his concept of the “social character,” the present paper argues that Fromm’s “calling card,” published while Freud was still alive, is “one of the greatest papers in the psychoanalytic literature.”

KEYWORDS:

• Freud
• Ferenczi
• Groddeck
• authoritarian character
• social character

Although it is far from being Fromm’s first publication, or even his first psychoanalytic paper, there is no better place to begin a study of his writings on psychoanalysis than with “The Social Determinants of Psychoanalytic Therapy,” published in 1935 in Max Horkheimer’s Zeitschrift für Sozialforschung but not translated into English until 2000.¹ Here we have what we may designate, to borrow an evocative term introduced by Franco Borgogno (1999) with respect to Ferenczi, as Fromm’s “calling card,” which propels him into his first period that reaches its culmination in Escape from Freedom (1941).

By the time Fromm published this paper, he had moved to the United States and his first marriage, to Frieda Reichmann, eleven years his senior, had dissolved, though they were not divorced until the 1940s, and he had begun his prolonged conflict-ridden affair with Karen Horney, who was not eleven but fifteen years his senior. As is notorious, Reichmann had been Fromm’s analyst in Heidelberg when they began the affair that led to their marriage in 1926, the same year in which they became founding members of the Southwest German Psychoanalytic Working Group, a satellite of the German Psychoanalytic Society in Berlin. Other integral members of this collective, which evolved in 1929 into the Psychoanalytic Institute of Frankfurt, included Heinrich Meng and Karl Landauer. It is an indication of the extent of Fromm’s dependency on Reichmann at this period in his life that he emulated her in subsequently obtaining analysis from Wilhelm Wittenberg in Munich as well as from Hanns Sachs in Berlin, where Reichmann subsidized his analytic training. Between his voluntarily undertaken analysis with Wittenberg and his required training analysis with Sachs, Fromm also had some form of therapeutic contact with Landauer in Frankfurt.

Extremely illuminating information about Fromm’s experience with the German Psychoanalytic Society has been unearthed by Michael Schröter. It has long been known that, after two years as an associate member, Fromm in 1932 had been elected a full member of the German Society, entitling him to membership in the International Psychoanalytical Association (Roazen, 2001, p. 9). What Schröter (2015) has gleaned from a letter of May 19, 1928 from Max Eitingon to Landauer, which he found in the Eitingon papers in the Israel State Archives in Jerusalem, however, is that even before he became an associate member Fromm had lectured “as a guest” at meetings of the German Society first in 1927 and again in 1928, but neither of these presentations – “Healing of a Case of Pulmonary Tuberculosis during Psychoanalytic Treatment” and “Psychology of the Petty Bourgeois” – was well received by the triumvirate of Eitingon, Sachs, and Sándor Radó. These lectures were efforts by Fromm to gain membership in the German Psychoanalytic Society, to which he was entitled to apply by virtue of his affiliation with the Southwest German Working Group and his personal analyses with Reichmann, Landauer, and Wittenberg, as well as his intellectual immersion in the field. Fromm, however, was twice deferred and finally left with no alternative but to go to Berlin for formal training, including his didactic analysis with Sachs, which he appears to have commenced in February 1929. In September 1930 – the same year in which he joined the Frankfurt Institute of Social Research – he gave a formal membership lecture, “On the Belief in the Omnipotence of Thoughts,” leading to his election as an associate member of the German Society in October and at last qualifying him to practice as a psychoanalyst.

By 1935, therefore, Fromm was in impeccable standing in the world of psychoanalysis. But though he had not yet commenced the overt political battles that would result in his leading the counteroffensive against Ernest Jones’s maligning of Ferenczi and Rank in his biography of Freud and in the publication of Sigmund Freud’s Mission (1959), Fromm had traveled what Schröter (2015) terms a “thorny way” on his training journey, which evinced “certain parallels” (p. 4) with the obstacles encountered by Reichmann, who earlier in the decade had likewise been advised of the insufficiency of her analysis with Wittenberg (who was not a training analyst) and obligated to commute from Heidelberg to Berlin for an approved analysis with Sachs before being recognized as a psychoanalyst in 1927. As Gail A. Hornstein (2000) has written in her biography of Fromm-Reichmann, “Frieda seems to have barely tolerated Sachs,” who was the personification of the unresponsive classical analyst, and she must have considered his “worshipful attitude” toward Freud – symbolized by his placing a bust of Freud on a pedestal so that it faced his patients on the analytic couch – to be “ridiculous” (p. 33). Thus, as Schröter (2015) has argued, although Fromm in “The Social Determinants of Psychoanalytic Therapy” “made reference to Freud’s writings, he (also) in subterranean fashion settled the score with his own training analyst,” and the new direction charted by Fromm in his psychoanalytic writings of the mid-1930s “could to that extent have been owed to a critical reflection on his analytic experiences in Berlin” (p. 6).

Indeed, Fromm’s revolutionary spirit is on full display in “The Social Determinants of Psychoanalytic Therapy,” and we see him here at his most farsighted and visionary, with only the slightest hint of an opacity that becomes a greater cause for concern in his later writings. But if Fromm’s intellectual radicalism received a negative impetus from his struggle with Sachs and the German Psychoanalytic Society, an equally powerful motive on the positive side is not far to seek. Through his connection with Reichmann, Fromm had come into frequent contact with Groddeck – another member of the Southwest German Psychoanalytic Working Group – in Baden-Baden, where he likewise met Ferenczi. According to Grossman and Grossman (1965), Groddeck’s first biographers, who heard the story from Fromm himself, in September 1926, shortly before Ferenczi was to leave for the United States, Fromm was present “when Groddeck delivered a forthright attack on the method of psychoanalytical training,” to which “Ferenczi made no defense” (p. 164). The joint influence of these master spirits, both of whom had died within the past two years, infuses Fromm’s (1935) paper and largely accounts for his capacity to formulate such a lucid and trenchant critique of Freud even while the latter was still alive. Ironically, as Schröter (2015) observes, despite appearing in Horkheimer’s journal, “this essay not only provoked the objection of analytic colleagues such as Fenichel and Landauer, it also marked the beginning of Fromm’s scientific alienation from the Institute of Social Research” (p. 6). According to Theodor Adorno, the text was “sentimental and outright false” and it placed Adorno “in the paradoxical situation of defending Freud” (qtd. p. 6). In crystallizing Fromm’s perspective on psychoanalysis, therefore, “The Social Determinants of Psychoanalytic Therapy” also cast him for the first time in his quintessential role as an independent thinker caught in the crossfire between the loyalists of the Frankfurt School, on the one hand, and of the Freudian movement, on the other.

Although Fromm (1935) praises as “one of Freud’s most magnificent achievements” the creation of a “situation of radical openness and truthfulness” (p. 151) in the analytic relationship, the main thrust of his paper is to show how Freud fell short of this ideal in practice by evincing “the social taboos of the bourgeoisie, hidden behind the idea of tolerance” (p. 154). Despite his occasional willingness to criticize “bourgeois sexual morality” (p. 155), Fromm maintains, Freud expects the patient “to act according to the bourgeois norm,” which “means to fulfill the ideals of the present society and to respect its taboos” (p. 157). To illustrate how Freud “regards, down to the least detail, the capitalistic attitude as the natural healthy one,” Fromm cites his admonition that the patient should be required to “pay for the hours allotted to him by agreement, even when he is prevented by illness or other reasons from coming into analysis” (p. 157). In adopting this stance, Fromm continues, Freud does not take into account “that the analyst gains free time for himself by the patient’s not coming,” and he thereby mistakenly equates “the capitalist character in its most developed form” with a supposedly “natural and human” attitude, such that “all deviations from this norm are regarded as ‘neurotic’” (p. 157). By this specious reasoning, if a person fails to behave “in the socially accepted way,” such as by joining a “radical party” or by entering “upon a marriage not according in age or social class with the bourgeois norm,” or “even if he questions the Freudian theory, this just proves that he has unanalyzed complexes – and resistances to boot if he contradicts this diagnosis of the analyst” (p. 157).

In addition to “questioning the Freudian theory,” Fromm himself was politically radical and the age difference in his marriage to Reichmann, not to mention his affair with Horney, was not in keeping with the “bourgeois norm.” There may thus be a personal undercurrent to his indictment of Freud for “the unconscious authoritarian, patricentric attitude usually hidden behind ‘tolerance’” (p. 159). Not only does Fromm identify Freud as an authoritarian character, but he observes that this patriarchal constellation manifests itself with special clarity in his “attitude toward his followers, whose only choice is between complete subordination or the prospect of a ruthless fight of their teacher against them, entailing also pecuniary consequences” (p. 158).

Having introduced Freud’s relations to his followers into the discussion, Fromm turns his attention to the conflict “between Freud and his closest circle on the one hand, and ‘oppositional’ analysts on the other” (p. 159). As “typical representatives of this oppositional attitude” (p. 159) he instances Groddeck and Ferenczi and proceeds to honor the memory of these two men whom he had personally known. Although Groddeck “despised science,” refused to express himself in “systematic theoretical form,” and espoused a “reactionary stance in social matters,” Fromm nonetheless credits Groddeck’s “feudal” outlook with liberating him from “the hidden prudery so typical of Freud” and enabling him to adopt an attitude toward patients that “was not soft, but full of humanity and friendliness” (p. 159). For Groddeck, in contrast to Freud, “the patient was at the center, and it was the analyst’s task to serve him” (p. 159). Fromm’s antipathy to Groddeck’s “lack of rational and scientific inclination and rigor” leads him to underestimate his 1923 classic, The Book of the It (Groddeck, 1923), by alleging that Groddeck’s “literary legacy can in no way give an impression of the importance of his personality,” but he counterbalances this by testifying that “his impact was above all a personal one” and that Ferenczi’s intellectual development “can only be understood in light of the strong influence Groddeck exercised on him” (p. 159).

The one paragraph that Fromm devotes to Groddeck serves as a prelude to his far more extended discussion of Ferenczi. With exquisite sensitivity, Fromm teases out how, “during the last years of his life,” Ferenczi “more and more moved away from Freud,” as well as how Freud’s “peculiar character” – that is, his authoritarianism – “let this theoretical difference turn into a personal tragedy” (p. 159) for Ferenczi. Because Ferenczi, unlike Groddeck, was “soft and anxious,” Fromm explains, “he never dared to place himself in open opposition to Freud, and the more he realized that his views on the inadequacies of the Freudian technique had to lead to a personal confrontation with the latter, the more difficult his personal situation became” (p. 159). Ferenczi’s inhibition “made him hide the antagonism among assurances of his loyalty,” so that “it may be scarcely comprehensible, when reading Ferenczi’s works, that the slight nuances in which Ferenczi expressed his deviation from Freud could be the expression of a conflict” (p. 159). Agreeing with Ferenczi that the analyst should show the patient “a certain amount of love,” Fromm argues that it is precisely “the self-evidence of Ferenczi’s demands” and the diffidence with which he expressed his opposition to Freud that demonstrate most vividly “the peculiarity of the Freudian position” (p. 159).

In “The Social Determinants of Psychoanalytic Therapy,” Fromm proves himself to be at once a masterful analyst of the Freud-Ferenczi relationship and profoundly Ferenczian in his own thinking. Like Ferenczi, Fromm connects the “lack of … unconditional affirmation in the average bourgeois family” with the patient’s longing “for an unconditional acknowledgment of his claims to happiness and well-being” that is “necessary for his recovery” (p. 158). Without using the word “trauma,” he understands that when a person does not receive “unconditional affirmation” in childhood it must leave deep wounds, as a result of which “he needs an environment in which he is certain of the unconditional and unshakable affirmation of his claims to happiness and well-being” (p. 158) in order to heal. If such a vulnerable patient goes to “an analyst of the patricentric character type,” by whom he is treated not with love but rather with a “frequently unconscious” hostility, this “not only makes all therapeutic success impossible but also represents a serious danger to the patient’s psychic health” (p. 159). In contrast to the widespread tendency to minimize the divergences between Freud and Ferenczi, Fromm sees them as antithetical incarnations of a psychoanalytic identity and he takes Ferenczi’s critique of Freud to its radical conclusion: “His difference with Freud is fundamental: the difference between a humane, philanthropic attitude, affirming the analysand’s unqualified right to happiness – and a patricentric-authoritarian, deep down misanthropic, ‘tolerance’” (p. 162).

The brilliance of this paper sets a standard against which Fromm’s subsequent writings on Freud can be measured. But it nonetheless contains a blind spot that impedes Fromm from reaching the full potential of his own thought. Ironically, this involves his famous concept of “social character” and is encapsulated in the avowal that “Freud’s personality and the characteristic features of his theory are ultimately to be understood not from individual but from general social conditions” (p. 163). Although this formulation has the considerable virtue of enabling Fromm to explain how Freud’s outlook is indeed prototypical of the “patricentric-authoritarian” attitudes of bourgeois society, which are likewise an expression of “the capitalist character in its most developed form,” it has the even greater defect of leaving Fromm with no way of explaining how Ferenczi, who belonged to the same social class as Freud, arrived at a “humane, philanthropic” world-view that is diametrically opposed to Freud’s ostensibly benevolent but “deep down misanthropic ‘tolerance.’”

Fromm is aware of the problem, but his solution remains unsatisfactory. After asserting that “from a sociological point of view, Freud’s attitude is the logical one,” whereas “Ferenczi was an outsider” who “was in opposition to the fundamental structure of his class,” Fromm asks us to believe that Ferenczi “was not aware of his opposition” (p. 163). But though Ferenczi may have been cautious about expressing openly his disagreements with Freud, there can be no doubt that he was cognizant of the extent to which they had parted ways. This can be seen not only in his Clinical Diary (Ferenczi, 1985) and in his correspondence with Freud but also in his final sequence of papers from “The Principle of Relaxation and Neocatharsis” (1930) to “Confusion of Tongues” (1933). The fact, as Fromm (1935) says, that “Ferenczi succumbed in this struggle” (p. 163) with Freud is irrelevant both to whether he was aware of his status as “an outsider” psychoanalytically and sociologically and to how his differences from Freud are to be explained. All Fromm can say on the latter point is that “the example of Ferenczi shows … that the Freudian attitude need not be that of all analysts,” and that what he here calls (for what I believe to be the first time in his writings) the “social character structure” is no more than an “average standard” from which “a number of individuals” will differ to a greater or lesser extent for reasons “stemming from the individual fate of the person in question” (p. 163).²

Even in introducing his concept of “social character structure,” therefore, which receives systematic exposition in the appendix to Escape from Freedom, Fromm has no alternative but to have recourse to “the individual fate of the person” to account for how two men who ought to have the same “social character” turn out not merely to show “gradual differences” but to be as “radically different” (p. 163) from each other as are Freud and Ferenczi. The problem is that while Fromm acknowledges in principle the importance of attending to “individual fates,” he does not adequately integrate this realization into his theory. Instead of developing his concept of social character as a further dimension of what we would consider today to be a relational psychoanalytic perspective, Fromm too often leaps over individual experience altogether and goes directly to a collective level of analysis. On the other hand, he acknowledges earlier in “The Social Determinants of Psychoanalytic Therapy” that “it is difficult to prove the existence of a judgmental attitude,” such as we find exhibited by Freud, “since it is essentially unconscious,” but “the most important source for such a proof is a study of the personality in question” (p. 154). By Fromm’s own admission, therefore, what is required to understand Freud – or anyone else, for that matter – is an analytically informed inquiry that attends to both the individual and the social contexts of its subject, but Fromm begs the reader’s indulgence by pleading, “it is not possible to make such an attempt in this paper” (p. 154).

There is so much to admire in “The Social Determinants of Psychoanalytic Therapy” that the limitations in Fromm’s initial deployment of the concept of social character are no more than minor blemishes on what I regard as one of the greatest papers in the psychoanalytic literature. But this defect serves as a barometer that allows us to gauge the extent to which Fromm is living up to his full potential. Whenever Fromm integrates his social level of analysis with a respect for the uniqueness of individual experience he is magnificent, but when he subsumes the individual entirely into the social, he falls flat. We see him at his best in Man for Himself (1947), where he concludes by affirming that “our moral problem … lies in the fact that we have lost the sense of the significance and uniqueness of the individual” (p. 248), or in Escape from Freedom (1941) where Fromm emphasizes that “the genuine growth of the self” means “the unfolding of a nucleus that is peculiar for this one person and only for him,” whereas “the development of the automaton … is not an organic growth” (p. 290).

Without having read Winnicott, Fromm here soars on extended wings as an object relations psychoanalyst. By the same token, although Ferenczi has disappeared from the pages of Escape from Freedom, we can nonetheless sense his presence when Fromm upholds the view that “every neurosis” is “essentially an adaptation to such external conditions (particularly those of early childhood) as are in themselves irrational and, generally speaking, unfavorable to the growth and development of the child” (pp. 30–31). This Fromm, who affirms the uniqueness of the individual and the effects of traumas in “early childhood” while bringing to bear his own unsurpassed dissection of larger social formations and uncompromising defense of humanism against the perennial perils of authoritarianism – this is the true Fromm, whose vicissitudes can be charted in his subsequent writings on Freud and psychoanalysis.

Acknowledgments

The essay included here is excerpted from “The Indispensability of Erich Fromm: The Rehabilitation of a ‘Forgotten’ Psychoanalyst,” Fromm Forum, 20(2016): 5–23, which also appears as chapter two of Formulated Experiences.

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No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

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Peter L. Rudnytsky

Peter L. Rudnytsky, Ph.D., LCSW, is Professor of English at the University of Florida and Head of the Department of Academic and Professional Affairs as well as Chair of the Committee on Confidentiality of the American Psychoanalytic Association. He is Editor of the History of Psychoanalysis series for Routledge and Coeditor of the Psychoanalytic Horizons series for Bloomsbury. His most recent books are Formulated Experiences: Hidden Realities and Emergent Meanings from Shakespeare to Fromm (Routledge, 2019) and Mutual Analysis: Ferenczi, Severn, and the Origins of Trauma Theory (Routledge, 2022).

Notes

¹ For a complete listing on Fromm’s publications, see the online bibliography available at the Erich Fromm Institute Tübingen (EFIT) (https://fromm-online.org/en/werke-von-erich-fromm/originalschriften-1918–1969/). Important earlier papers include “The Method and Function of an Analytic Social Psychology” (1932a) and “Psychoanalytic Characterology and Its Relevance for Social Psychology” (1932b), both also published in the Zeitschrift für Sozialforschung and available in English versions approved by Fromm in The Crisis of Psychoanalysis (1970).

² See the review of the history of this concept by Rainer Funk (1998), who traces its roots to Fromm’s doctoral dissertation under Alfred Weber at Heidelberg and notes the occurrence of the phrase “socially typical character” (p. 221) in a paper of 1937. As Funk concedes, everything that makes any particular “person different from, and unique among, other persons living under the same circumstances (his or her special and often traumatic childhood experiences) is … of secondary interest” from Fromm’s standpoint.