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Abstract
During his years as a member of the Frankfurt School, Erich Fromm developed a strong interest in the idea that there were distinctive male and female character orientations. Drawing on the positive evaluation of matriarchy made in the nineteenth century by the Swiss anthropologist J. J. Bachofen, Fromm argued that a “matricentric” psychic structure was more conducive to socialism than the patricentric structure which had predominated in capitalism. His interest in maternalism and his opposition to patriarchy played an important part in his rejection of Freud's theory of drives and in the development of a humanistic ethics in which love plays a central part. The idea of a gendered humanism is central to Fromm's social thought, although there is a danger that the over‐emphasis of sex‐based character differences unintentionally re‐opens the danger of the kind of sexual stereotyping which he resolutely opposed.
Notes
Nottingham Trent University, Department of Economics and Politics, Burton Street, Nottingham NG1 4BU, UK. Email: [email protected]
I would like to thank Stamatoula Panagakou for organising a panel on the Frankfurt School at the Third Annual Conference of the Society for European Philosophy at Middlesex University in September 2000 at which I presented a paper on Fromm's work in the 1930s. Thanks also to Mark Neocleous, whose critical intervention at the Conference on Fromm and Marcuse's attribution of distinctively feminine qualities prompted me to produce this paper, and to Tony Burns and Ian Fraser, whose comments on an earlier draft were invaluable.
Johann Jacob Bachofen, Myth, Religion and Mother Right: Selected Writings, translated by Ralph Manheim (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1992)—there is a useful introduction by Joseph Campbell. Mother Right was originally published in German in 1861 and republished in 1926.
August Bebel, Women Under Socialism, translated by Daniel de Leon (New York: Schocken Books, 1971) [originally 1879]; Friedrich Engels, The Origin of the Family, Private Property, and the State (New York: Pathfinder, 1972) [originally 1884]. Engels' contribution owed more to the work of the American anthropologist Lewis Henry Morgan, whose Ancient Society was published in 1877. Morgan's work among the Iroquois supplied independent confirmation of the existence of matrilineal society and was far more influential than Bachofen's. They corresponded but never met.
See Gerda Lerner, The Creation of Patriarchy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986), 28–31.
Robert Briffault, The Mothers: The Matriarchal Theory of Social Origins (New York: Macmillan, 1931). Fromm's review appeared in the first edition of volume three of the Zeitschrift in 1934 and it is published in the original German in volume one of Erich Fromm, Gesamtausgabe, 79–84.
First published in English in Erich Fromm, The Crisis of Psychoanalysis: Essays on Freud, Marx, and Social Psychology (New York: Holt/Rinehart/Winston, 1970), 84–109.
This is now published in a collection edited by Rainer Funk including the two articles from the Zeitschrift—Erich Fromm, Love, Sexuality and Matriarchy: About Gender (New York: Fromm International Publishing, 1997). All following references will be to this edition. Funk, who found the manuscript of “The Male Creation” among Fromm's papers in the New York Public Library, estimates 1933 as the date of writing.
In a late interview Marcuse asserted that “the real reason for Fromm's departure from the Institute was his castration of Freudian theory, especially the revision of the Freudian concept of instinctual drives.” See “Theory and Politics: A Discussion with Herbert Marcuse, Jurgen Habermas, Heinz Lubasz, and Tillman Spenglar,”Telos38 (1978–9): 127. In this discussion Habermas suggests that Marcuse's disagreement with Fromm over his revision of Freud had led to an underestimation of Fromm's contribution to Critical Theory's early period, and Marcuse concedes the point “without reservation.”
The exchange took place in the journal Dissent in 1955. For a brilliant analysis of the Marcuse–Fromm dispute see John Rickert, “The Fromm–Marcuse Debate Revisited,”Theory and Society 15(3) (1986): 351–99.
Fromm, Love, Sexuality and Matriarchy, 77–8.
Ibid., 83.
Ibid., 84.
Ibid., 79.
Ibid., 80.
Bachofen, Myth, Religion and Mother Right, 79.
Ibid., 80–1.
Ibid., 91.
Ibid., 109–10.
Engels provides a useful account of the response within anthropology to Bachofen's work in the Preface to the fourth edition of The Origin of the Family, Private Property, and the State, 27–38.
Fromm, Love, Sexuality and Matriarchy, 31.
Ibid., 27.
Ibid., 26.
Ibid., 22.
J. J. Bachofen, “Introduction to Mother Right,” in Myth, Religion and Mother Right: Selected Writings of J. J. Bachofen (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, Mythos edition, 1992), 102–3 on mother‐based religion and 109 on the advance to patriarchy.
Ibid., 110, cf. Fromm, Love, Sexuality and Matriarchy, 24–5.
Bachofen, Myth, Religion and Mother Right, 118–9.
Fromm, Love, Sexuality and Matriarchy, 44.
Ibid., 29.
Ibid., 40–1.
Ibid., 44–5.
Ibid., 38–40.
Ibid., 41.
Erich Fromm, Escape From Freedom (New York: Henry Holt, 1994), ch. 3.
Fromm, Love, Sexuality and Matriarchy, 43.
Ibid., 35.
Ibid., 51.
Ibid., 48. Horney's article on distrust between the sexes was published posthumously in Karen Horney, Feminine Psychology, ed. H. Kelman (New York: W. W. Norton, 1967). Her article, “Culture and Aggression: Some Thoughts and Doubts about Freud's Death Drive and Destruction Drive” was published posthumously in the American Journal of Psychoanalysis 20 (1960): 130–8. Horney and Fromm had an intimate relationship in the United States during his tenure with the Institute for Social Theory.
Fromm, Love, Sexuality and Matriarchy, 51.
Ibid., 54–6. In 1966 Fromm published a radical interpretation of the Old Testament which argued for a liberating sub‐text to the story of the Fall, whereby the serpent is correct in saying that if they eat the forbidden fruit they will know the difference between good and evil and “shall be as Gods.” Only in disobedience does humanity create itself. See Erich Fromm, You Shall Be as Gods (New York: Henry Holt, 1991), 88–9 and 64.
Fromm, Love, Sexuality and Matriarchy, 66–72.
Ibid., 112.
Ibid., 97.
Ibid., 115.
Ibid., 38.
Ibid., 47–8.
Erich Fromm, The Forgotten Language: An Introduction to the Understanding of Dreams, Fairy Tales and Myths (New York: Grove Press, 1957), 196–231.
Ibid., 202.
Ibid., 218.
Ibid., 213.
Ibid., 221.
Ibid., 222.
Ibid., 228–31.
Fromm, Escape From Freedom, 8. In a footnote Fromm associated his own approach with that of Karen Horney and Harry Stack Sullivan, and the three became linked—somewhat misleadingly—as the “culturalist” school.
In Fromm, Love, Sexuality and Matriarchy, 163 and 170; the article first appeared in the journal Psychiatry in 1939.
Ibid., 165.
Ibid., 169.
Ibid., 189.
Ibid., 194–5.
Erich Fromm, Man for Himself: An Inquiry into the Psychology of Ethics (New York: Henry Holt, 1990), particularly ch. 4, part 5. For a more succinct discussion of human essence see Erich Fromm, The Heart of Man: Its Genius for Good and Evil (New York: Harper and Row, 1964), ch. 6.
On Fromm's ethics see Rainer Funk, Erich Fromm: The Courage to Be Human (New York: Continuum, 1982), ch. 5; Lawrence Wilde, “Against Idolatry: The Humanistic Ethics of Erich Fromm,” in Marxism's Ethical Thinkers (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 2001); and Lawrence Wilde, “In Search of Solidarity: The Ethical Politics of Erich Fromm,”Contemporary Politics 6(1) (2000): 37–44.
Erich Fromm, The Sane Society (London: Routledge, 1991), 45.
Ibid., 47.
Ibid., 47; the criticism of Freud's attribution of conscience exclusively to the paternal side is repeated in Erich Fromm, To Have or To Be? (New York: Continuum, 2002), 192.
Erich Fromm, The Art of Loving (London: Thorsons, 1995), 29. Marcuse comes up with a similar list of positive female qualities which may be used as a force for liberation—see his interview with Bryan Magee (1978) in Brian Magee, Men of Ideas: Some Creators of Contemporary Philosophy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1982), 53.
Fromm, Man for Himself, part 3. Later in the book he comments that if a woman does not fulfil her potential to be a mother she will experience a frustration which can be remedied only by “increased realisation of her powers in other realms of her life” (219), but this is not central to his argument on the human essence.
Carol Gilligan, In a Different Voice: Psychological Theory and Women's Development (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1982) and The Birth of Pleasure: A New Map of Love (London: Chatto & Windus, 2002).
Luce Irigaray, The Sex Which is Not One (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1985), 29 and 122. Recently Irigaray has dropped her caution and has drawn a clear comparison of gender qualities—see Luce Irigaray, Democracy Between Two (New York: Routledge, 2001), 15, cf. 150–1. I deal with the similarities between the views of Fromm and Irigaray in chapter 4 of my forthcoming book, Erich Fromm and the Quest for Solidarity (New York: Palgrave, 2004).
Fromm, To Have or To Be?, 145–6.
Ibid., 191–3.