Revisiting Erich Fromm

Abstract

Erich Fromm (1900-1980), a man of the twentieth century, lived professionally as a psychologist-psychoanalyst-social activist from the World War I and Weimar Republic years in Frankfurt, Heidelberg and Berlin, Germany; through the World War II and early cold war-Communist witch-hunt years in New York City; through the sixties in Mexico City as Director of the Department of Psychoanalysis at the University of Mexico School of Medicine; and the last decade of his life in Switzerland where he taught visiting psychoanalysts and thoughtfully spoke to the freedom of the then West German peoples. He practiced, taught and wrote about psychoanalysis most of these years, developing several social character types interfacing with the culture of the country and the times, all the while trying to differentiate health from pathology in the individual patient and in the society in which he lived. His second major area of thought lay in the conceptual arenas of psychoanalysis-psychology-sociology-political and economic thought and of religious beliefs. He never gave up hope for the individual and for society to progress in the direction of freedom, peace and humanistic thought. Most unusual for a practicing psychoanalyst, he actively carried his ideas into the political and social arenas and in the rigor of two large scale academic research projects. He was a Renaissance man.