What would Erich Fromm say about North Korea? A preliminary application of humanist psychoanalysis

Abstract

This paper considers the possibility of applying the sociologically oriented humanist psychoanalysis of Erich Fromm to the evaluation of the political character of the North Korean state and society, with particular attention given to Fromm's concepts of the matricentric complex and patricentric complex, as well as to his analysis of fascism and Stalinism. The author explains that if humanist psychoanalysis is consistently applied, North Korea can be understood as a transitional postcolonial Stalinist state with a patricentric social order that exploits the matricentric complex for mass control.

Keywords:

• fascism
• Erich Fromm
• North Korea
• psychoanalysis
• Stalinism

Acknowledgements

The author thanks Dr. Charles K. Armstrong, Dr. Bruce Cumings, and Dr. Sung Chull Kim for responding to inquiries about North Korea; Dr. Petteri Pietikäinen for discussion on humanist psychoanalysis and analytic psychology; Dr. Kevin B. Anderson, Dr. George Boeree, Dr. Mauricio Cortina, Dr. Rainer Funk, Dr. Victor Daniels, Dr. Douglas Kellner, Dr. Gerhard P. Knapp, Dr. Neil McLaughlin, and Dr. Lawrence Wilde for helpful replies to questions on Erich Fromm and the possibility of applying his psychoanalytic concepts to North Korea; and Ms. Yoon Jeong Kim for assistance with Korean-language works consulted. Arguments and conclusions in the paper are those of the author, and any theoretical or factual errors should be so attributed.

Notes

¹When Kim Il Sung used Juche in his December 1955 speech, the word simply meant “subject,” as in central issue or central matter, and emphasized the “Korean revolution” over revolutions in other countries. Juche sasang, the second word meaning “idea,” “ideology,” or “thought,” was introduced in December 1962. The transliteration “Jooche” appeared for the first time in Documents of the Fourth Congress of the Workers' Party of Korea (see Kim et al., 1961, pp. 103, 310, 365), and, later, in a 1964 edition of Kim's 1955 Juche speech. By 1965, North Korea was publicly defining Juche as “independent stand” and “spirit of self-reliance” in the political context of the Sino-Soviet split.

²North Korean students were apparently re-enrolled at a subsequent date. The Associated Press reported in 1990 that North Korea recalled around 2000 students and engineers from Eastern Europe and sought to bring back about 500 students from the Soviet Union (Seattle Times 1990).

³The other terms Fromm uses are “conservative, hierarchical system,” “conservative, industrial class society,” “managerial bureaucratic system,” “industrial state mangerialism,” “reactionary state managerialism,” “reactionary welfare state,” “totalitarian mangerialism,” and “totalitarian state managerialism” (see Fromm 1961, pp. 34, 41, 42, 43, 76, 84, 88).

⁴For example, citing the problem of insufficiently trained party cadres, Kim, in his concluding speech to the Plenum of the Central Committee of the WPK on 4 April 1955, quoted the words of Mao Zedong as to how the matter could be resolved (see Kim, 1964, p. 9).