Erich Fromm’s social psychoanalysis: Beyond the interpersonal dyad

Abstract

This article addresses the place of society in Erich Fromm's pioneering psychoanalytic work and in the evolution of interpersonal theory and practice. It suggests that there is much to be gained from a re-examination of Fromm's politically progressive perspective. By bridging sociology and psychoanalysis, Fromm developed a new approach known as “social psychoanalysis,” which sought to explain and understand the centrality of society in human experience and the therapeutic process. Fromm moved beyond Freud and found an ally in the American psychiatrist Harry Stack Sullivan. Together, Fromm and Sullivan became the key founders of the Interpersonal School of Psychoanalysis located at the William Alanson White Institute in New York. Despite their commonalities, however, Fromm and Sullivan differed in central areas, particularly on the issue of “adaptation” to society. Sullivan believed that adaptation was a marker of successful personality development and Fromm maintained that society inscribed pathology into the human being. This difference would prove definitive as interpersonal psychoanalysis moved from its radical beginnings to become a dominant school of contemporary psychoanalysis that focused on the interpersonal dyad and the interactions between the analyst and patient.

Key words:

• social psychoanalysis
• society
• culture
• interpersonal

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 Helpful histories of the William Alanson White Institute and its founders can be found in Ortmeyer (1995), Shapiro (2017), and Stern (2017).

2 On this point, see Danto (2005).

3 See Rudnytsky (2019) for an insightful discussion of Fromm’s 1935 article.

4 Fromm’s departure for the USA coincided with the end of the psychoanalytic circle in Germany that had been important to his development. As Fromm later put it, “In contrast to most other analysts who are mostly concerned with the manipulation of theories, Groddeck and Ferenzci were human beings who empathized with the person they wanted to understand and, I would say, who felt in themselves what the so-called patient was telling them; they were persons of great humanity and for them the patient was not an object but a partner” (quoted in Funk, 2000, p. 64). Groddeck spent the last year of his life in Switzerland and died in the summer of 1934. Ferenzci had died of illness a year earlier in May 1933 at his home in Budapest.

5 Not surprisingly, perhaps, Fromm’s critical viewpoint found little sympathy among his Freudian colleagues. When Fromm submitted “Man’s Impulse Structure and its Relation to Culture” for publication to the journal of the Institute for Social Research, it was soundly rejected. Fromm’s evolving understanding of psychoanalysis clashed with the increasingly orthodox Freudian position represented by the Institute. Fromm and Horkheimer had long enjoyed a cordial relationship and Fromm played a role in helping the Institute move from its temporary exile in Geneva to a more permanent home at Columbia University. But growing differences in their interpretations of Marx and Freud, made worse by Fromm’s acrimonious interactions with Theodore Adorno, meant that there was little future for him at the Institute. As a result, after Fromm left in 1939, he was largely written out of the history of the Institute for Social Research, despite his formative early role as Director of Social Psychology and Psychoanalysis.

6 My concern here is less with Sullivan’s ideas per se, which are both valuable and highly applicable in clinical contexts, than with the rationale for Fromm’s critique. For an overview of Sullivan’s work, see Conci, 2012; Cushman, 1995, pp. 169–185; and Greenberg and Mitchell, 1983, pp. 79–115.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Roger Frie

Roger Frie, PhD, PsyD, RPsych, is the 2023–2024 Visiting Scholar in Sociology at the CUNY Graduate Center, New York, USA. He is Professor of Education at Simon Fraser University, Affiliate Professor of Psychiatry at the University of British Columbia, Vancouver, and faculty and supervisor at the William Alanson White Institute of Psychiatry, Psychoanalysis and Psychology, New York. His newest book, to be published in 2024 with Oxford University Press, is Edge of catastrophe: Erich Fromm, Facism and the Holocaust; his most recent edited book, with Pascal Sauvayre, is Culture, Politics and race in the making of interpersonal psychoanalysis: Breaking boundaries. He is author of, among other books, Not in my family: German memory and responsibility after the Holocaust (OUP, 2017).