The Greatness and Limitations of Erich Fromm’s Humanism

Abstract

Erich Fromm's most important contribution to “the science of man” and psychoanalysis was the development of an existential humanism. This existential bent was based on his view that the human condition developed over the course of human evolution trans-survival needs for meaning that transcended our biological needs for survival. His second important contribution was a brilliant Marx-Freud synthesis, which he used to explore how ideologies can mask economic conditions, and how shared social values that are internalized (social character) are adaptive to socioeconomic conditions. A third contribution was his view of psychoanalysis as a “center-to-center relation” where analysts and patients are able to recognize and share their common humanity as a vehicle for change. Like all major contributors to understanding the human condition, Fromm had strengths and weaknesses. I propose some revisions that address some of the weaknesses while supporting the strengths.

Keywords:

• humanistic psychoanalysis
• social character
• human nature
• center-to-center relation
• existential dichotomies
• social change

Acknowledgment

This essay is based on an article written for a conference organized on the occasion of the publication of Lawrence J. Friedman's (2013) The Lives of Erich Fromm: Love's Prophet that took place on November 15, 2013, at the Washington School of Psychiatry. The title of this essay is a play on Fromm's book, The Greatness and Limitations of Freud's Thought (1980). I thank Robert Duckles, Barbara Lenkerd, Michael Maccoby, and Neil McLaughlin for their helpful comments and suggestions.

Notes

¹ The social character interview is interpretative in nature and asks questions such as, “Is physical punishment important for raising children?” A “yes” or “no” answer is irrelevant when scoring the interview. What is important are follow-up questions, to see if the answer is an opinion subject to change, or a conviction based on strongly held values that become internalized as part of a person's character. Based on a probe, one person might say “parents need to set limits and children need to learn how to obey their parents,” whereas another answer might be “physical punishment only teaches the child to fear and not to be respectful of other people.” The first answer is consistent with an authoritarian personality, whereas the second would be classified as democratic. It only takes a few clear answers of this nature to predict how other questions will be answered. If other answers do not show any strong convictions based on internalized values, it suggests the person will go along with prevailing cultural opinions. The social character interview is an early forerunner of similar, but more sophisticated, instruments such as the Adult Attachment Interview that look at contradictions and inconsistencies in the way individuals construct a narrative in regard to attachment-related experiences in childhood (Main & Goldwyn, 1998).

² Menninger never forgave Fromm for having written Man for Himself (1947), with a title that might have been a deliberate contrast to Menninger's Man Against Himself. When I was a psychiatric resident at Menninger's in the mid-1970s, William Menninger, who was Karl's nephew and director of training, invited a group of us (residents) to attend a series of meetings with his famous uncle. After several of us attended the World Congress of Psychiatry held in Mexico City, in which Karl Menninger and Fromm gave papers on aggression, Karl asked us about our impressions. When we mentioned being impressed by Fromm's presentation, Karl exploded in anger and said we had been taken in by Fromm's popularity and charisma. He went on to say that Fromm was not really a psychoanalyst, and that his understanding of psychoanalysis was superficial. He also brought up that Fromm's book Man for Himself had been a cheap shot directed at him. To his credit, Karl apologized in the same meeting for his explosion, saying it was childish.

In fact, Fromm and Menninger had much in common. Fromm was a loyal revisionist of Freud's work and was closer in spirit to Freud than the other two brilliant contemporary revisionists, Sullivan and Horney (Burston, 1991; Cortina, 1992). Menninger was also a visionary and was committed to many progressive causes. He was an eloquent and indefatigable advocate for reform of prison systems and psychiatric institutions based on punishment and banishment from society, and advocated for treating prisoners and severely ill psychiatric patients with dignity and for providing them with opportunities for growth and renewal. See, for instance, The Crime of Punishment (Menninger, 1968). Menninger's (1963) The Vital Balance has striking similarities to the view expressed by Fromm (1973) in The Anatomy of Human Destructiveness of the antimony between life-loving and destructive passions.

³ I became acquainted with Fromm's work while a medical student at the Universidad National Autónoma de Mexico in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Fromm founded a psychoanalytic institute in Mexico that was affiliated with the medical school and I had the opportunity to hear some of his lectures. A small group of us were inspired by Fromm, began to read his books, and decided out of curiosity and interest to seek psychoanalytic treatment at the low-cost clinic at the Institute. These experiences, together with the 1968 student movement—which I joined in protest against Mexico's authoritarian government, and which ended with a massacre of 500 students in the Plaza de Tlatelolco on October 2, 1968—made me decide to switch from becoming a medically trained researcher to becoming a psychoanalyst. I went to Menninger's because of its psychoanalytic orientation.

⁴ Neil McLaughlin's scholarly review of Fromm's analysis of who supported Nazism (McLaughlin, 2014) shows that Fromm was wrong in thinking that the main support for Nazism came from the lower middle classes, artisans, and shopkeepers:

Writing with the benefit of over forty years of modern research, Richard Hamilton convincingly argues that there is little empirical evidence for a lower middle-class affinity for Nazism, particularly in urban areas. He describes a linear positive relationship between the social class and the Nazi vote in major German cities. The upper middle class, not the lower middle class, were more likely to vote for the Nazi party, relative to their numbers in Germany at the time. The evidence is not as clear when one considers party membership instead of voting (Kater, 1983); nonetheless, Hamilton has raised serious empirical questions about the conventional wisdom regarding the lower middle-class nature of both the Nazi vote and the party cadre (Hamilton, 1996). … Fromm was right, however, to perceive a link between the 1500s and 1600s and the 1930s. Protestantism is the single best predictor for Nazism, a point blurred by a Marxist-influenced orthodoxy that focuses on the lower middle class. And while Fromm stressed how the uprooting of community led to Nazism, Hamilton's data suggest that rural, not urban, Protestants were the single most important social stratum voting for the Nazi party. (pp. 198–199)

Although this new data invalidates some of the premises of Escape from Freedom, it does not disprove that hyperinflation and destabilizing economic conditions contributed to the rise of Nazism. To this day, fear of hyperinflation haunts the German psyche, which explains popular support for anti-inflationary and economic austerity policies, even as these factors have contributed significantly to economic stagnation in many European Union countries (Krugman, 2012).

⁵ Marcuse was by no means an intellectual slouch. His book Reason and Revolution: Hegel and the Rise of Social Theory (Marcuse, 1941) is considered a classic and was admired by Fromm, who called it “penetrating and brilliant.” Fromm and Marcuse were colleagues and respected each other during the early years of the Frankfurt School, which made Marcuse's attack all the more painful for Fromm.

⁶ Kennedy follows Fromm's article in describing the nuclear arms race as insane (Kennedy calls it “a death wish”) and the single most important threat to mankind. Kennedy also follows Fromm, who calls for the United States to take unilateral steps toward disarmament as a way to break the cycle of mutual suspicion. In his speech, Kennedy announces that the United States would unilaterally stop atmospheric nuclear tests and called for a comprehensive nuclear test ban treaty with the Soviet Union, which the UK would join. Friedman is right to suspect that Kennedy read the Fromm article, perhaps given to him by Adlai Stevenson.

⁷ Social engagement in primates is based on grooming other members of the group and forming coalitions to defend and protect one's position within social hierarchies—the main form of social organization in primates.

⁸ The videotapes illustrate, in ways that a verbal description fails to convey, the importance of these prosocial instincts. You can see some of these videos by going to Michael Tomasello's website at: http://www.eva.mpg.de/psycho/videos/children_clothes.mpg

⁹ Apes raised in captivity can learn to point to request something, but they never point to share an object of interest.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Mauricio Cortina

Mauricio Cortina, M.D., is director of the Attachment and Human Development Center at the Washington School of Psychiatry and a member of the faculty at the Institute of Contemporary Psychotherapy and Psychoanalysis Seminario de Sociopsicoanalisis, Mexico City.