Long Shadows of Racism and Genocide: Learning from Erich Fromm’s Social Psychoanalysis

ABSTRACT

As a psychoanalyst, Fromm felt compelled to speak to the social and political crises of his time. Fromm’s social psychoanalysis was a radical departure from the Freudian mainstream and has important implications for how psychoanalysis can address social and political forces today. What is less known and often neglected is the way in which Fromm was himself shaped by the traumatic events of racial discrimination and genocide that marked the twentieth century, particularly the rise of Nazism, virulent anti-Semitism and the Holocaust. This article will weave together Fromm’s life-experience, and that of his family, with his development of key ideas relating to the threat of authoritarianism and racial narcissism. To illustrate the relevance of Fromm’s work in the present moment, I consider the reality of systemic racism and the long shadow of genocide. Drawing on my work as practicing psychoanalyst, I address the racial discrimination experienced by Indigenous peoples in Canada. In the process, I examine how the psychoanalysis and the therapeutic setting is embedded in society and inevitably implicated in the structures of systemic racism.

KEYWORDS:

• Social psychoanalysis
• systemic racism
• racial narcissism
• indigenous people
• Holocaust

Given Fromm’s fame as a mid-century public intellectual and social critic, his role as a pioneering psychoanalyst and a founder of the interpersonal school is often overlooked. Indeed, within the psychoanalytic world, Fromm many accomplishments remain neglected. When we look more closely at Fromm’s life and work and beyond his popular, bestselling books of the 1950s and 1960s, we find that Fromm’s psychoanalytic practice was perhaps the one constant in life that spanned different disciplines, continents, cultures and languages. Over the course of his long career, Fromm co-founded psychoanalytic institutes and organizations including, but not limited to, the Southwest German Institute for Psychoanalysis in Frankfurt in 1929, the William Alanson White Institute of Psychiatry, Psychoanalysis and Psychology in New York in 1943, the psychoanalytic section of the medical school of the National Autonomous University of Mexico City in 1951, the Instituto Mexicano de Psicoanálisi in Mexico City in 1956, and the International Federation of Psychoanalytic Societies in 1962.

Beginning in the late 1920s, Fromm initiated a social and cultural turn in psychoanalysis. He was the Director of Psychoanalysis and Social Psychology during the first ten years of the Institute for Social Research (later known as the Frankfurt School) and was one of the only psychoanalysts to write openly and directly about the threat of fascism at the time. Fromm developed a fundamentally interdisciplinary approach to understanding human experience and argued that the person and the therapeutic setting are always and inevitably shaped by social, cultural, economic and political forces. In order to help their patients, he believed that psychoanalysts should be trained in, or at the very least familiar with each of these fields. As such, Fromm maintained that in order for analysts to help their patients, they also needed to addressed society’s pathologies and thus engage in a “social psychoanalysis.”

The purpose of this article is to consider just how radical and important Fromm’s social psychoanalysis was, and how it continues to be relevant today, particularly in helping us to address the shadows of racism and genocide. Fromm’s dual training as a sociologist and a psychoanalyst prepared him to comment on the social crises of his day. In contrast to mainstream psychoanalysts, who retained a chiefly clinical orientation, Fromm felt ethically compelled to speak to the unfolding political and social realities around him. His social psychoanalytic approach grew out of his notion of the social character and formed the basis for his account of the of authoritarianism in Escape from Freedom (Fromm, 1941), and of racial narcissism in The Heart of Man (Fromm, 1964). I will examine both these works briefly before considering how Fromm’s social psychoanalytic approach can help us to understand the discriminatory effects of systemic racism that we see in society today. I will turn to the experience of Indigenous peoples in Canada to illustrate this point.

Psychoanalysis and social character

The trajectory of Fromm’s life (1900–1980) was shaped by the traumas and tragedies of the twentieth century. Fromm was born in and grew up in the city of Frankfurt in an orthodox German Jewish family. As a young man he was alarmed by the nationalist fervor that gripped Germany during the First World War. After the war, Fromm began studying law but soon switched to sociology, receiving his doctorate in 1922, under the supervision of Alfred Weber at the University Heidelberg.

In addition to religion and sociology, Fromm became interested in psychoanalysis, working first with Frieda Fromm-Reichman and then with Wilhelm Wittenberg in Munich. This was followed by a period of supervision with Karl Landauer at the Southwest German Psychoanalytic Study Group in Frankfurt. In order to finish his psychoanalytic training, Fromm moved to Berlin in 1928, where he entered the Berlin Psychoanalytic Institute and completed his training analysis with Hanns Sachs, a personal friend of Freud’s and one of the earliest psychoanalysts.

During the 1920s, Berlin exemplified the liberal and democratic outlook of Weimar Germany, but the dramatic political changes that would take hold in 1933 were already underway. Fromm’s academic background in sociology enabled him to comment on the events around him. In 1928 he presented a paper on “Psychoanalysis of the Petty Bourgeoisie,” a topic that would soon find expression in his research on the authoritarian tendencies of German workers. In 1929, Fromm gave a lecture in Frankfurt on “Psychoanalysis and Sociology” (see Fromm, 1930), which seeks to understanding and explain the process of socialization. Fromm’s work brought him to the attention of Max Horkheimer, the director the Institute for Social Research, who invited him to join. Horkheimer recognized Fromm’s psychoanalytic prowess and under the auspices of the Institute Fromm began his project of integrating Marxism and psychoanalysis.

By 1930 Fromm had been certified by the German Psychoanalytic Association (DPG) and he set off on a career of combining social analysis with psychoanalytic practice. However, the threatening political events in Germany shaped the trajectory of his life and work. His study of the character structure of the German working class during the late Weimar Republic (Fromm, 1984) suggested that only a small percentage (15%) of the respondents to the questionnaires he developed demonstrated clear anti-authoritarian beliefs. In other words, workers who were presumed to be solidly against authoritarianism revealed pro-fascist tendencies.

Throughout the 1930s, Fromm’s research sought to show how people are shaped by socio-economic class, religion and political systems. Fromm’s approach is evident in a number of different works from the period, in which he inverts the traditional focus on the individual psyche in order to shed light on the role of social factors in human experience. According to Fromm, societies are structured in such a way that individuals take on the roles their particular society requires of them. He was particularly interested in demonstrating how society produces persons who unconsciously adapt to meet society’s economic needs even though these may conflict with our own emotional well-being.

As he developed his social psychoanalytical approach, Fromm became increasingly critical of orthodox psychoanalysis. Fromm questioned the centrality of the Oedipus complex and the primacy of the patriarchy in Freud’s work. In place of libidinal stages of development, Fromm began to conceive of human development in terms of imagined and actual relations with other people. This line of critique finds its fullest expression in Fromm’s article, Man’s Impulse Structure and its Relation to Culture from 1937. Fromm focuses above all on the limitations that follow from Freud’s emphasis on the drives, which fail to account for the social and cultural factors in the shaping of the person. The point, for Fromm, is that society was always at work in the person, so that the person exists as a fundamentally social being. As Fromm states:

Society and the individual are not “opposite” to each other. Society is nothing but living, concrete individuals, and the individual exists only as a social human being. His individual life practice is necessarily determined by the life practice of his society or class and, in the last analysis, by the manner of production of his society, that is, how this society produces, how it is organized to satisfy the needs of its members … . We shall call this “the socially typical character.” (Fromm, 1937, 2010, p. 58, original emphasis)

This viewpoint comes to fruition in Fromm’s well-known statement from 1949: “It is the function of social character to shape the energies of the members of society in such a way that their behavior is not left to conscious decisions whether or not to follow the social pattern but that people want to act as they have to act” (Fromm, 1949, p. 5, original emphasis).

The further Fromm ventured from Freud, the closer his associations with other like-minded psychoanalysts became. Fromm first met Sullivan in 1934, soon after arriving in the United States. Their relationship blossomed as each discovered how much he could learn from the other. Sullivan became acquainted with Fromm’s study on German workers, his social psychoanalytical perspective and his critique of Freudian psychoanalysis. Fromm, in turn, learned about the ways in which Sullivan conceptualized the self in a nexus of interpersonal relations and was introduced by Sullivan to the culture and personality movement.

In 1936, Sullivan invited Fromm to teach in the newly established Washington School of Psychiatry, which Fromm gladly accepted. Fromm’s psychoanalytic associations in New York consisted of friends and colleagues, including Sullivan, Horney, Thompson, Fromm-Reichman and others. It was through Sullivan that Fromm also met and interacted with like-minded interdisciplinary researchers. Among this number were such well-known anthropologists as Ruth Benedict, Margaret Mead and Edward Sapir. The influence of anthropology on Fromm, Sullivan and Horney led their combined work to become known as “cultural psychoanalysis,” a term that was indelibly associated with the early William Alanson White Institute, founded in 1943 (Frie, 2014).

Escape from Freedom

Fromm achieved a considerable measure of fame with the publication of his first major work, Escape from Freedom in 1941. Fromm includes an Appendix entitled, “Character and Social Process,” in which he elaborates his psychoanalytic position contra Freud and explicitly allies himself with Sullivan. As Fromm states,

The fundamental approach to human personality is the understanding of the human being’s relationship to the world, to others, to nature, and to him or herself. We believe that the human being is primarily a social being, and not, as Freud assumes, primarily self-sufficient and only secondarily in need of others in order to satisfy his or her instinctual needs. In this sense, we believe that individual psychology is fundamentally social psychology, or in Sullivan’s terms, the psychology of interpersonal relationships. (Fromm, 1941, p. 290, my emphasis)

This is perhaps the best articulation of the emerging interpersonal position that unites Fromm and Sullivan. Fromm’s express aim is to show how the social character of a group “determines the thinking, feeling and acting of individuals who belong to that group.”

Fromm’s critical discussion of Freud in Escape from Freedom articulates many of the points for which interpersonal psychoanalysis has since become known. Fromm covers a range of topics, but in the main, his arguments are aimed at Freud’s neglect of the interpersonal dimension. According to Fromm, Freud’s focus on the drives and on early childhood experience is achieved at the expense of accounting for the wider social context of all life experience. As a result, he argues that Freud’s instinctivistic approach exists in contradiction with the social surround. Fromm also expresses concern about the degree to which Freudian psychoanalysis ends up helping the individual to simply adapt to the needs of society, thus neglecting the ways in which society shapes the individual and inscribes pathology into everyday life.

Escape from Freedom was published just as the United States officially declared war on Germany and Japan. The book spoke to an American readership that was eager for an explanation that of Germany’s enthusiastic embrace of Hitler. Sullivan recognized the immediate value of Escape from Freedom and arranged a series of eight separate reviews written by such well-known scholars as Ruth Benedict. The reviews were published in Psychiatry in 1942. It was a significant achievement for Fromm, but Karl Menninger, a leading member of the Freudian establishment, let his opposition be known. That same year, Menninger (1942, p. 317), wrote a caustic review in the journal, The Nation, in which he sought to ostracize Fromm from mainstream psychoanalysis: “Erich Fromm was in Germany a distinguished sociologist. His book is written as if he considered himself a psychoanalyst.” The rift between Fromm and the Freudians was seemingly complete.

Menninger’s critical appraisal of Fromm overlooked a key fact: the interdisciplinary approach used by Fromm in Escape from Freedom is what gave the book is power. It brought together psychoanalytic insight with social psychology and history. But perhaps above all, Escape from Freedom gave voice to Fromm’s ethical need to speak out, even while others remained silent. Indeed, Escape from Freedom was one of the only psychoanalytic texts to address the reality of fascism at the time.¹

According to Fromm, Hitler and the Nazi party provided Germans with a means of escape by submitting to a larger power in the face of anxiety and economic and societal crises that followed their defeat in World War I. The emotional appeal of Nazi ideology, according to Fromm, lay in “its spirit of blind obedience to a leader and of hatred against racial and political minorities, its craving for conquest and domination, its exaltation of the German people and the ‘Nordic Race’” (Fromm, 1941, p. 182). Fromm’s analysis was shaped by his first-hand experience of the rise of the Nazism. What remained unspoken but indelibly present as Fromm wrote Escape from Freedom was the immense threat faced by his family members who remained in Germany. Throughout the late 1930s and early 1940s, he sought to finds ways to help them escape. Despite all his attempts, many of Fromm’s aunts, uncles and cousins were murdered in the Holocaust.

The fact that most psychoanalysts at the time did not address the malignant political forces of the day should give us all pause. I believe we need to ask ourselves whether we, as members of the psychoanalytic profession, are sufficiently addressing the social crises we see today, whether in our therapeutic practice and in the world around us (Frie, 2017, 2018). In considering this issue, it will be helpful to go back and examine Fromm’s own experiences in the face of the unfolding racial terror of the time.

Racial terror and exile

Fromm’s decision to leave Germany cannot have been easy, since it meant leaving family members, colleagues and friends, not to mention the language and culture in which he had been raised, behind. His decision was no doubt influenced by the time he spent outside the country in the preceding years. In the summer of 1931, Fromm fell ill with tuberculosis and traveled to Davos, Switzerland, to recuperate. He stayed in Davos on and off for the next three years. In 1933 Fromm additionally spent several weeks visiting Chicago and New York at the invitation of Horney who emigrated in 1932. As a result, Fromm was able to observe the troubling changes in German politics from afar and in May 1934 he left Switzerland for the United States.

Once in New York, Fromm confronted the challenges of the immigrant: integrating into a new culture and professional context. In contrast to many of his German-Jewish colleagues, psychoanalysts and Institute members who similarly immigrated at the time, Fromm’s knowledge of English was already quite developed. Yet in general, we know little about his personal experience of being a newly arrived émigré. Fromm sought to keep details of his personal life separate from his professional scholarship and he never engaged in any kind of public self-analysis. Those who knew him have described Fromm as “intensely private” (Landis, 2009, p. 137) and as “always a private person” (Tauber, 2009, p. 131). At the very least, it is safe to assume that Fromm was not unaffected by the personal and political upheavals. Nor is it clear that he would necessarily have chosen to leave the country, culture or language in which he grew up, were it not for the rise of the Nazis and the threat they posed. Indeed, it is well known that immigration can be a traumatic experience in its own right, and that immigrating for political reasons and under threat of imprisonment or physical harm, can markedly increase the traumatic impact.

In the years that followed, Fromm followed the events in Germany with growing alarm. The Nazi regime’s aggression toward its neighbors was matched by the persecution of its own citizens. Anyone deemed “undesirable” was in peril: Jews, Sinti, Roma, gays and lesbians, the mentally ill and political opponents of all stripes. In 1935 the Nuremberg laws stripped Jews of their citizenship and basic rights. As perilous as life for Jews who remained in Germany had become, the Kristallnacht pogrom proved to be the turning point (see Frie, 2018). On the night of November 9 and into the morning of November 10, 1938, belligerent mobs destroyed nearly 300 synagogues and thousands of Jewish-owned professional properties and residences throughout Germany and Austria. The destruction was greatest in Berlin and Vienna, home to the largest Jewish communities. Approximately 100 were murdered, many committed suicide and the first mass incarceration of Jewish men in concentration camps was carried out. After Kristallnacht, all possibility of Jewish emigration from Germany came to abrupt end. The policy of mass deportation to ghettos and extermination camps further east was set in place in late 1941 and reached its height in the following year.

Accounts of Fromm’s life at the time make little mention of his separation from family and friends.² In 1934, after arriving in New York, Fromm sponsored an affidavit for his estranged wife, Frieda Fromm-Reichmann, enabling her to enter the US from Palestine, where she fled, but was struggling to settle. But many of his family members together with friends and colleagues were unable to find safety in time. When Fromm emigrated, his mother, Rosa Fromm (née Krause), chose to stay behind in Germany, believing, or at least still hoping that the ascent of the Nazis was a momentary madness. Fromm’s father had already died in late 1933, but not before he witnessed the Nazi rise to power. He was from a small family and his brother fled to the United States, while Fromm’s cousin and life-long friend, Gertrud Hunziker-Fromm, had left earlier to study in Switzerland and settled there.

Fromm stayed in close contact with his mother as the circumstances in Germany worsened. After the November Pogrom of 9–10 November, 1938 (Kristallnacht), Rosa recognized the gravity of her situation and Fromm sought to secure her exit. He obtained a monetary loan to pay the high fee required by the Nazis for her to leave Germany and arranged for his mother travel to England. Rosa spent the next 18 months in England along with many other refugees, so-called friendly enemy aliens. But arranging permission for her to enter the United States also proved to be very difficult. The American policy for admitting European Jews had become more stringent, influenced by the steep rise in anti-Semitism during the course of the 1930s.

After Fromm payed another hefty fee to the US authorities, Rosa was finally able to join him in New York in 1941. Rosa lived until 1959 but other family members were not as fortunate. Rosa had four siblings and several cousins. She had grown up in Berlin, and most of the Krause family still lived there. Among her relatives, many members of the younger generation left for countries as far and wide as Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, Russia, the United States, England and Switzerland (see Funk, 2005). Those who remained in Germany, because they were unable to pay the large fee or were simply too old or frail to make the journey, faced persecution and deportation. Rosa’s brother, Martin Krause and his wife, and Rosa’s sister, Sophie Engländer and her husband were deported; none survived. A similar fate awaited Rosa’s cousin, Gertrud Brandt, her husband and their youngest son, who were sent to the ghetto of Ostrow-Lubelski and then a concentration camp. Gertrud’s three other children experienced persecution, imprisonment and murder. Heinz Brandt, one of her Gertrud’s sons, endured not only many years of political imprisonment by the Nazis for his left-wing views, he subsequently survived multiple concentration camps during the Holocaust. He became an important postwar political figure in Germany and lifelong friend and confident of his cousin Erich (Heinz’s story is unfortunately beyond the scope of his essay and I discuss it elsewhere; Frie, 2024). Rosa’s cousin, Therese Zehetner and her husband died in Frankfurt in 1940. Had they lived longer they too would have been deported.

The Holocaust also engulfed other important people in Fromm’s life such as Karl Landauer. He had been a close colleague and friend of Fromm and Fromm-Reichman and a co-founder of the Frankfurt Psychoanalytic Institute. In 1933, Landauer and his family fled for Sweden and then made their way to the Netherlands, where they believed they had found safety. Landauer worked as a training analyst as they tried to establish some semblance of normal life, but it was short lived. The German invasion of the Netherlands in May 1940 imperiled the lives of every Dutch Jew and Jewish refugee. In 1943 Landauer and his family were arrested and a year later deported to the concentration camp of Bergen-Belzen. Landauer died there in January 1945.

It is hard to overlook this tragic dimension in Fromm’s life when considering his work in the late 1930s and early 1940s. The unpublished correspondence of Fromm’s family members reveals that news was continually shared between South America, the United States and Europe (see Frie, 2024). Fromm came to play a central role in this letter exchange because he was one of the few family members to have an established income at the time. Fromm helped his relatives in whatever way he could, but draconian emigration policies and the prohibitive cost of exit visas severely limited what he was able to do. Staying connected was essential and the value of the letters that reached those who remained in Germany was beyond measure. Letter writing was one of the few means available to sustain those in need and perhaps also a balm to assuage the powerlessness experienced by those, like Fromm, who escaped Germany but could do little more than look on. From the safety of New York, Fromm sent money, attempted to secure exist visas and wrote words of encouragement, all the while watching the steady escalation of the hateful Nazi ideology.

We can only imagine how Fromm managed daily life while being a witness to the terrible fate that befell his family members. There are few direct clues. Fromm had a correspondence with Juliane Favez, the administrator at the Institute for Social Research in Geneva, who was helping Fromm to arrange an exit visa for a cousin that was imprisoned in a concentration camp. In a letter addressed to Favez and dated April 25, 1940, Fromm gives us a sense of how the perilous events were closing in on him: “My life is always the same, working pretty much and trying not to be overwhelmed by what is going on in the world. If we were to speak over the phone now our conversations would not be so different from what they were then, excepting that things have become still worse.”³

At the time, Fromm could not know how much worse the situation would become. Rainer Funk, who was Fromm’s last personal assistant, has revealed that there was one letter amongst Fromm’s belongings that he kept with him throughout his life. It was from his Aunt Sophie, written in Berlin on August 29th, 1942, on the eve of her deportation to Theresienstadt. Sophie addressed the letter to her daughter in Chile, who then shared it with her cousin, Erich. The letter (my translation) reads in part:

We will probably go there [Theresienstadt] in the next while, but do not know the exact date yet. We are glad that we will see others there again. Father Breslauer’s friend, Dr. Alexander, is there too. Likewise, Aunt Flora and countless friends and acquaintances. Aunt Hulda leaves her apartment the day after tomorrow. It is supposed to be good for us old people there, especially with the climate and the surroundings.

Regrettably, regrettably, Martin and Johanna are not there [but in the Warsaw Ghetto.] We haven’t heard from them in weeks and I am terribly worried as Uncle Martin was still weakened by his bile disease. Just stay healthy and don’t worry about us. I always repeat it in every letter, because I do not know which one will reach you: we have had many good and beautiful things in life, wonderful children and grandchildren, in whom we have the greatest joy. That is worth so much; when you’re old, you really know what that means.

At the end of the letter, the last Sophie would ever send, she asks her daughter to “send my dearest greetings to Tante Rosinchen [Fromm’s mother] and to Erich.”⁴ After leaving for Theresienstadt, Sophie and her husband were never heard from again.

Much of Fromm’s energy during this period was directed toward developing Escape from Freedom. The book had a long gestation period and Fromm finished it only after Kristallnacht, as the fearsome persecution of Jews in Germany was compounded by a significant rise in anti-Semitism in the United States. In fact, Escape from Freedom was published the year that the murderous campaigns of the Holocaust were set into action. When we read the book today, it can be hard to remember that it was written before the deportations of Germany’s Jews to concentration camps and ghettos, before the town and villages of Eastern Europe were turned into killing fields. We inevitably encounter Fromm’s book, and others like it, through the prism of what we know today about the Holocaust. Seem from this perspective, Fromm’s arguments may fall short of our wish to make sense of the unfathomable toll of genocide. But the shadow of the unfolding catastrophe is present throughout the book, even when it is not explicitly spelled out. Despite the many works he wrote after 1941, Escape from Freedom remains arguably Fromm’s most essential work, laying the foundation for the development of his later ideas and giving full expression to his psychoanalytic thinking. But perhaps more than anything else, Escape from Freedom reveals the intersection of the personal and political in Fromm’s life.

Looking back, I think it is noteworthy that Fromm confronted the Nazi past and the political realities in which he lived, when so many other psychoanalysts remained silent. Escape from Freedom is relevant in other ways too. Fromm’s account of the appeal of authoritarianism, especially in times of uncertainty, helps to explain the current attraction of right-wing populism. Fromm’s firsthand knowledge of the rise of Nazism strengthened his belief in the need for moral awareness and political activism. It also helps to explain the optimistic note on which Fromm ends his book, when he suggests that democracy will be victorious over “the forces of nihilism” if it can imbue people with “the faith in life and in truth and in freedom” (Fromm, 1941, p. 238). Unfortunately, as recent social and political events suggest, it remains an open question whether democratic institutions can actually provide a sufficient bulwark against the resurgence of authoritarianism, anti-Semitism and racism we face today.

Racial narcissism

In the aftermath of the Holocaust, the specter of racism and human destructiveness held Fromm’s attention. In 1964, at the height of the civil rights movement in the United States, Fromm published The Heart of Man, which addressed the racial terror inflicted on African Americans and drew direct links to the treatment of Jewish citizens in Nazi Germany. Fromm speaks to the insidious nature of racism when he writes:

The narcissistic conviction of the superiority of whites over blacks … demonstrates that there is no restraint to the sense of self-superiority or of the inferiority of another group. However, the satisfaction of a group requires also a certain degree of confirmation in reality. As long as the whites … have the power to demonstrate their superiority over the blacks through social, economic, and political acts of discrimination, their narcissistic beliefs have some element of reality and thus bolster up the entire narcissistic thought-system. The same held true for the Nazis. (Fromm, 1964, pp. 82–83)

Fromm was describing, in effect, the system of white supremacy in the United States, enforced through racial laws and racial terror. As Fromm suggests, a similar racial structure was present in Nazi Germany, allowing the Nazi regime to create what he called a “narcissistic though-system.”

In a manner reminiscent of Escape from Freedom, Fromm argued that the social and economic anxieties experienced by many whites created a fertile ground for their racism: “Economically and culturally deprived” whites who have no “realistic hope of changing” their situation; have “only one satisfaction … being superior to another racial group that is singled out as inferior.” According to Fromm, members of this group felt that “‘even though I am poor and uncultured I am somebody important because I belong to the most admirable group in the world – I am white;’ or, ‘I am Aryan’” (Fromm, 1964, p. 76). Turning to the nature of narcissism itself, Fromm suggests that racial narcissism of the group and the malignant narcissism of individuals is directly related. They are both “crudely solipsistic as well as xenophobic” (Fromm, 1964, p. 74). As Fromm explains, “the group narcissism of the ‘whites’ or the ‘Aryans’ is as malignant as the extreme narcissism of a single person can be” (Fromm, 1964, p. 77).

Fromm’s observations in Escape from Freedom and The Heart of Man help us to understand the social and psychological dynamics of racism and xenophobia at the time. But they also have a powerful contemporary resonance. In the United States, a base of overwhelmingly white, largely working-class voters elected Donald Trump to power and continues to campaign for his return. During the Trump presidency, the long-simmering racial divisions in the United States became more visible as acts of racial violence against Black, Indigenous and People of Colour (BIPOC) increased exponentially.

Confronted with this upsurge in racial violence and hatred, psychoanalytic institutes in the North America began to shake off their long-standing hesitancy to speak openly about race and racism. This has had importance consequences. In North America, the overwhelming majority of psychoanalysts are white. The absence of diversity in the psychoanalytic profession, in contrast to society as a whole, together with the lack of direct experience with racism, revealed significant blind-spots. In the discussions that followed, African American psychoanalysts reported many instances of being told by white psychoanalytic colleagues and supervisors that the question of race and racism was not relevant (cf. Stoute, 2021). The discussions that followed helped majority white psychoanalysts begin to confront their own conscious and unconscious racial biases and think about what needs to change. The process of addressing the dark shadow of racism in psychoanalysis, as in society as a whole, has not been easy (Wilkerson, 2020).

So long as we associate racism with the acts of individual persons, societal and structure discrimination remains difficult to understand and address. By focusing not just on individuals, but on the way in which societies and groups are themselves discriminatory, I believe Fromm helped to set the ground work for the development of what is today referred to as “systemic racism.” The concept of systemic racism sheds light on the systems and structures of a society that discriminate against a minority racial group, often to the benefit of the racial majority. Systemic racism shows just how intractable racial discrimination in society really is.

Fromm helps us understand systemic racism by inverting the relationship between the individual psyche and society. For Fromm, the intrapsychic realm is not only secondary to the interpersonal dimension, the interpersonal dimension is itself subordinate to the wider sociocultural context of all experience. In other words, society is always at work in human relationships, and the individual person exists as a fundamentally social being. How might this fundamental insight help us to understand what it is like for the psychoanalyst to practice in a systemically racist context?

I want to offer some concluding observations on how systemic racism shapes not just the patient who is discriminated against, but also the psychoanalyst and way in which we understand and practice psychoanalysis. To do this, I will draw from my experience as a practicing psychoanalyst in Canada, a country that is often recognized for its embrace of multiculturalism. This popular image of Canada, though grounded in fact (Taylor, 1993), masks the dark history of Indigenous genocide, as well as the continuing injustice experienced by Indigenous people today.

Psychoanalysis and systemic racism

As Fromm reminds us over and over again, the practice of psychoanalysis never exists in a vacuum. The social forces that shape us as individuals also and inevitably shape the therapeutic process. In a systemically racist society which benefits members of the majority, the discriminatory process of social shaping can be difficult to for members of the white majority like myself to recognize. However, if we accept that the therapeutic setting cannot be separated from the systemically racist society in which it takes place, then it follows that the language and theories we use to explain the therapeutic process are similarly embedded in discriminatory social structures. One of the clearest examples of what I am describing can be found in the use of the terms “primitive” and “primitivity,” which were popularized by Freud in Totem and Taboo (1913).

Freud’s idea of the primitive mind was adopted from social evolutionary paradigm of the late nineteenth century. This paradigm identified universal evolutionary stages to classify different societies as being in a state of savagery, barbarism, or civilization. Freud’s anthropology takes as its starting point the mental world of savages, which is linked to that of children and neurotics. By contrast, and in line with the social evolutionists, rationality is presented as the marker of mature European civilization. Thus, written into the heart of psychoanalysis was an inherently racist and colonial viewpoint that contrasted the superior rational and white European mind with the savage and primitive nonwhite other.

This same social evolutionary outlook formed the rationale used by the Canadian government in the nineteenth century to justify the forced assimilation of Indigenous children in so-called Indian Residential Schools. For almost one hundred and fifty years, Indigenous children were taken from their families and sent to schools run by Catholic and Protestant churches, where they were subjected to extreme sexual and physical abuse, starvation and electrocution (Fontaine, 2016). The last of these schools closed only in 1996. Indigenous children died in huge numbers, often being hastily buried in unmarked graves. In 2021, up to a thousand bodies of Indigenous children were found. Many more discoveries are expected in the years to come. The effects of these violently racist policies are still apparent in Canadian society today, in the form of systemic racism. Many First Nations across Canada have no access to drinkable water, lack adequate housing and healthcare, and receive subpar education. Substance abuse and suicide are widespread, especially among younger generations. Indigenous youth today make up 8% of Canada’s youth population, yet account for almost 50% of all admissions to youth correctional services (Frie, 2020).

What might it mean for me, a majority white psychoanalyst in Canada to practice in a society with this track record of severe racial discrimination? How might I work with or be of help to Indigenous patients? To begin, the direct link between my patients’ individual suffering and the racial violence that First Nations endure in Canadian society must to be recognized and not reduced to an outcome of libidinal drives. As a majority white Canadian, I am also a participant and beneficiary of the racist society that is the cause of my patients’ suffering. I am offered societal privileges that are not shared by Indigenous people of Canada, privileges that I take for granted and may not be aware of by virtue of my identity. Unless I can recognize my own subject position, no matter how uncomfortable it may make me feel, I simply continue to exacerbate the existing societal dynamics. There is no easy resolution. Even when I acknowledge my social position and the benefits I accrue by virtue of my identity, the inequities created and sustained by systemic racism in Canadian remain. They reappear, week after week, shaping my patients’ experience and determining what I am able to see and hear. It requires us to be aware of and be willing to speak to the realities of living in a systemically racist society on an ongoing basis.

Recognizing discriminatory societal dynamics and their daily effects on our clinical work with patients also requires us to think critically about the theories we use to understand and explain the therapeutic process. And here we return to the very language that remains embedded in psychoanalysis. The terms “primitive” or “primitivity” are not race neutral concepts (Frosh, 2013). The psychoanalytic idea of mature subjectivity in the cultural evolutionary scale set out by Freud in Totem and Taboo harks straight back to the racist outlook used by colonial powers to commit violence against Indigenous people. As the psychoanalyst, Celia Brickman, reminds us, the “norm of mature subjectivity was … a rationalism whose unstated color was white” (Brickman, 2003, p. 72). This is not just a history lesson. Nor am I suggesting that the psychoanalyst who uses this terminology is necessarily racist. But at the very least, it behooves us to recognize that the discriminatory societal dynamics that have shaped our patients’ lives are also inherent in language and understanding we use.

Conversations about race can often be difficult. Being asked to accept our own implication in systemic racism can lead to powerful counterreactions. Psychoanalysts and psychotherapists are especially susceptible to presumptions of innocence. We like to believe that our psychological and educational awareness makes us less susceptible to racial discrimination. But as Fromm helps us to understand, the process of socialization shapes us all, both consciously and unconsciously. Racism is inherent in the very structures of the societies that makes us who we are, be it as individuals or as practicing psychoanalysts. The belief that we can create a race neutral consulting room is surely a comforting illusion, and does little to actually address the ongoing reality of racial discrimination in our daily human interactions, or in the social practices we take for granted.

If we are going to have a meaningful dialogue about race and racism, we need to accept our own limitations and be unsettled by them. We need to find ways to listen to, respect and work to open ourselves to the perspective of the other person. As I have sought to show, Fromm’s social psychoanalysis shines a light on how we are all, psychoanalysts and patients alike, shaped by social and political forces. Psychoanalytic engagement with racism is often assumed to be a recent phenomenon. Fromm’s work suggests otherwise. I believe he has much to teach us – if we are willing to listen.

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Roger Frie

Roger Frie, Ph.D., Psy.D., R. Psych., is Professor of Education, Simon Fraser University and Affiliate Professor of Psychiatry, University of British Columbia in Vancouver, Canada, and Faculty and Supervisor at the William Alanson White Institute of Psychiatry, Psychoanalysis and Psychology in New York. He is a psychologist and psychoanalyst in private practice and a historian and philosopher by training. He has published many interdisciplinary books in the areas of psychoanalysis, history and social theory.

Notes

¹ Wilhelm Reich’s The Mass Psychology of Fascism was published in German in 1933, but it did not appear in English until 1946. In contrast to Fromm, who was concerned with the social forces that shape individuals and groups, Reich used a more traditional psychoanalytic lens to explain fascism as a consequence of sexual repression at the level of family and community.

² I will return to the unpublished Fromm family correspondence below. Funk’s German language essay (2005) is the only existing research I know of that directly addresses the letters of Fromm and his family members during the Holocaust. A general account of the family’s tragic fate in the Holocaust can be found in Friedman (2013, pp. 70–76.)

³ Quoted with permission from Rainer Funk, Director of the Erich Fromm Archive in Tübingen, Germany, where the letters are housed.

⁴ Quoted with permission of Rainer Funk, Director of the Fromm Archive in Tuebingen, Germany. The translation is my own and it forms part of a new book (Frie, 2024), that examines the Fromm family Holocaust letters in the context of Fromm’s life and work. See also Funk, 2019, pp. 91–92.