The Plague of Certitude: Why Fromm Matters Today

ABSTRACT

Today, a plague of certitude is spreading within American psychoanalysis. This socially constructed virus is increasingly dominating our unmoderated list serves, appearing in our journals, and slowly seeping into our institutes. Having transcended the objectivism of traditional Freudian analysis, we seem to be revivifying its spirit. Rigorous claims to truth, superior knowledge, and contempt for those not in agreement abound. The life and work of psychoanalyst and sociologist Erich Fromm is offered as an antidote and model for resistance to this plague. He consistently objected to all forms of authoritarianism, from the Right and the Left. As a radical humanist he viewed us all as responsible selves, not mere vessels for instinctual drives or victims of unbearable circumstances. As Paul Roazan said about Fromm: “It still seems to me remarkable how he was willing to stand up for what he believed in. He should be a model of independence and autonomy for us all.”

KEYWORDS:

• Erich Fromm
• certitude
• Sandor Ferenczi
• courage
• authoritarianism
• binary thinking

Today, a plague of certitude is spreading within American psychoanalysis. This socially constructed virus is increasingly dominating our list serves, appearing in our journals, and slowly seeping into our institutes. Having transcended the objectivism of traditional Freudian analysis, we seem to be revivifying its spirit. Rigorous claims to truth, superior knowledge, and contempt for those not in agreement abound. The assumptions inherent in the relational turn remain neglected or, in extreme cases, erased. Sullivan’s assertion of our common humanity, Kohut’s steadfast belief in the need for empathy, Mitchell’s call for pluralism, Benjamin’s insistence on the development of a third, Aron’s critique of binaries, Stern’s goal of relational freedom, Davies’ insistence on acknowledging our own bad objects, and Hoffman’s belief that the fundamental nature of human experience is ambiguous, among many others, seem increasingly unheeded.

I have recently encountered the plague of certitude in a variety of analytic settings: At the 2022 annual meeting of the International Association of Psychoanalytic Self Psychology, two of the plenary speakers called for the need to develop and focus on our “non-negotiable truths.” At a Diversity Equity and Inclusion training at one of my institutes, a past-president vehemently asserted that we must remember it is always “impact, not intent.” And in a recent list serve debate, an esteemed faculty member of one of my institutes wrote in regard to a psychoanalyst with whom she disagreed: “He is a troll. DO NOT READ HIM!”

As a clinician for whom the relational turn in psychoanalysis opened up space to think and feel more freely, to question, to reveal, to be more myself, I have come to experience a closing down of that freedom. The idea that we as psychoanalysts are now urged to develop non-negotiable truths represents for me a return to the exclusionary practices of orthodox Freudianism that dismissed and vilified “aberrant” thinkers – Jung, Adler, Ferenczi, Alexander, and Fromm, to name but a few. While there are a small number of ethical principles that we bring with us into our practices, such as the prohibition on sexual contact with our patients, I do not consider these to be “non-negotiable truths.” If I encounter a patient who holds racist, antisemitic, or sexist beliefs, I do not bring my non-negotiable truth to bear on the treatment. I wish to understand him in the same way I’d like to work with someone with whom I agree personally. To bring into the clinical encounter the rallying cry from the Me-Too Movement that it is “impact not intent” seems to stand in profound contradiction to the mainstays of our field, empathy and curiosity. If a woman feels physically violated by a man who believes he is only being friendly, her feelings certainly need to be prioritized. But the suggestion or demand that we exclusively endorse impact rather than intent seems to abet what Fonagy terms “psychic equivalence.” By this he means that aspects of personally felt experience are believed to be facts that are inevitable and true. “Impact rather than intent” violates mentalization wherein we attempt to understand the motivations and intentions of others. It conflicts with Benjamin’s aim of mutual recognition and the overcoming of a doer and done to form of relating.

The sort of vilification and denigration of members on our psychoanalytic list serves, exemplified by my colleague’s calling someone with whom she disagreed a troll who should not be read, is perhaps the greatest example of the plague of certitude. What we see over and over again on our unmoderated lists is assertions of moral truths regarding such issues as Israel and Palestine, parasitic whiteness, and the racist or transphobic motivations of others on the list, to name but a few. Dialogue, argument, and persuasion often recede in the face of moral outrage and a form of limbic hijacking wherein successive posts become more extreme and/or emotional. The dictum “DO NOT READ HIM” signals a casting out of heretics, a form of behavior far more suitable to fundamentalist religions than psychoanalytic discourse.

In the face of this plague of certitude how do we respond? Given that what is haunting our psychoanalytic landscape mimics the hostility and claims to absolute truth elsewhere in our society, it strikes me that this is an issue of significant import. Do we join in to enjoy the sense of solidarity, community and moral superiority that certitude provides? Or do we fall silent in fear, despair, and/or indifference? I’d like to suggest a different response to this binary construction, and that is founded in my appreciation and respect for not only the work, but the life, of Erich Fromm. Given that he was a psychoanalyst who continually challenged social conformity and the rise of authoritarianism, I believe he is uniquely suited to turn to.

Optimal marginality

When I first encountered sociologist Neil McLaughlin’s brilliant essay, Optimal Marginality: Innovation and Orthodoxy in Fromm’s Revision of Psychoanalysis, I not only felt that I had encountered a framing of Fromm that made sense of him and his work, but also experienced a label and form of recognition of myself or who I could strive to be. As a sociologist grounded in psychoanalytic thinking and a psychoanalyst who never strayed far from her sociological background, I never have felt fully at home in either discipline. McLaughlin supplied me with a framework and an aspiration: while there is an aloneness in not fully fitting in, there is also a freedom. He tells us:

Optimally marginal intellectuals have access to the creative core of an intellectual tradition, while avoiding organizational, financial, cultural or psychological dependencies that limit innovations. (2001, p. 273)

As is well known, Fromm and his contributions were essentially erased from the history of the Frankfurt School to which he belonged throughout the 1930s. He was reviled by the psychoanalytic establishment in the United States and denied membership in the IPA. And finally, he was seen as a simplistic Freudian revisionist and political reformer by the New Left in favor of the more radical Herbert Marcuse. Throughout all of this, Fromm remained true to his beliefs, relying on both Freud and the early Marx, psychoanalysis and sociology, to address what he believed were the most pressing issues of his day in a manner that was accessible to the widest possible audience. And as such, second only to Freud, Fromm remains the most widely read psychoanalyst in the world.

From the standpoint of our current historical period and its plague of certitude, Fromm seemed to have been remarkably impervious to any form of groupthink. He consistently objected to all forms of authoritarianism, from either the Right or the Left, remaining a vociferous critic of both fascism and communism as it was instantiated in the Soviet Union and China. He was a radical humanist who saw human beings as responsible selves, not mere vessels for instinctual drives or victims of unbearable circumstances. And throughout his life he sought to move away from “that which separates us” toward “relatedness from center to center,” “the experience of union with all men” (1956, p. 44).

Paul Roazan, who has written on “Erich Fromm’s Courage,” asserts that “Fromm in his lifetime was notable for his not being afraid to be alone, even in the face of the worst threats of heresy-hunting” (1994, p. 438). Roazan concludes his essay by noting:

It still seems to me remarkable how he was willing to stand up for what he believed in, as he could tolerate a kind of isolation that surely was not always easy to bear. He should be a model of independence and autonomy for us all. (1994, p. 438)

In what follows, I wish to echo and substantiate Roazan’s claim. I contend that Fromm used his optimal marginality to stand within and without the hegemony of organized psychoanalysis and the prevailing thinking of the Frankfurt School. His insider/outsider status allowed his voice to be heard and inevitably critiqued, but rarely ignored. Given the current plague of certitude haunting our field and our society, we need models of independent and autonomous thinking who can stand up for what they believe in. Not only does Fromm’s work serve such purpose, but the actions he took within his lifetime do as well. I offer Fromm’s unwavering defense of the vilified Ferenczi as an example of his willingness to stand up for what he believed in.

Fromm’s defense of Ferenczi

It is often argued that the work of Sandor Ferenczi was recuperated due to the publication of his Clinical Diary in French in 1985 and in English in 1988. This understanding is undoubtedly true but also may serve to obfuscate the remarkable role Erich Fromm played in his effort to rehabilitate Ferenczi’s contribution starting in 1935. As is well known, Ernest Jones defamed Ferenczi from the moment of his death through his writing of Freud’s biography in the 1950s. In the obituary he wrote, Jones referenced Ferenczi’s “unmistakable signs of mental regression,” and went on to allege in his Freud biography that Ferenczi “developed psychotic manifestations that revealed themselves in, among other ways, a turning away from Freud and his doctrines” (quoted in Bonomi, 1998, pp. 201, 202). This allegation became established truth within the psychoanalytic establishment as it made complete sense that only mental illness could account for a disciple of Freud’s “turning away from Freud and his doctrines.” To be a psychoanalyst in good standing during the time that Jones was writing, was to engage in lock-step thinking and to believe every word of the great leader, in much the same way as one needed to be a good communist following Joseph Stalin. While dissidents certainly were not murdered nor sent to Siberia, they could be excluded from both formal and informal networks within psychoanalytic institutes and organizations. Such exclusion could affect one’s reputation and ultimately, one’s livelihood.

Erich Fromm stood apart from this authoritarian regime beginning early in his career. Five years after graduating from the Berlin Psychoanalytic Institute, Fromm published in German “The Social Determinants of Psychoanalytic Therapy” (Die gesellschaftliche Bedingtheit der psychoanalytischen Therapie) which was only translated into English in 2000 in the International Forum of Psychoanalysis. Two years after Ferenczi’s death, Fromm spent pages of his article explicating and venerating Ferenczi’s work, quoting long passages from papers Ferenczi had delivered at the 1927 and 1929 International Psychoanalytic Congresses. Fromm uses Ferenczi to demonstrate the conformity ingredient in Freud’s demand for rigid adherence to his views.

For someone not very familiar with the analytic literature it may be scarcely comprehensible, when reading Ferenczi’s works, that the slight nuances in which Ferenczi expressed his deviation from Freud could be the expression of a conflict. It also seems strange that something like the requirement of showing the patient a certain amount of love—which sounds almost self-evident—should have been the motive for an oppositional view. But precisely the self-evidence of Ferenczi’s demands and the slightness of the differences that were expressed in the discussion show particularly clearly the peculiarity of the Freudian position. (2000, p. 159)

Fromm asserted that the “example of Ferenczi shows, however, that the Freudian attitude need not be that of all analysts … His difference with Freud is fundamental: the difference between a humane, philanthropic attitude, affirming the analysand’s unqualified right to happiness – and a patricentric-authoritarian, deep down misanthropic, ‘tolerance’” (2000, pp. 163, 162).

But Fromm’s defense and celebration of Ferenczi went much further than this published homage to his theoretical and clinical contributions in 1935. Jones’ final volume of his Freud biography appeared in 1957. In this he went further than he had in his obituary by asserting that toward the end of his life, Ferenczi, who had suffered from “latent psychotic trends,” experienced “violent paranoic and even homicidal outbursts” (1957, pp. 188, 190). Once again, Jones claimed that his serious mental illness was responsible for Ferenczi questioning orthodox Freudian belief.

After Jones’ final volume began receiving positive reviews, Fromm decided to conduct an inquiry into the actual cause of Ferenczi’s death in order to have empirical evidence to challenge Jones. He interviewed people who were present in Ferenczi’s last days – his patients Izette de Forest, Clara Thompson, Elizabeth Severn and Alice Lowell, his sister and step-daughter, and his disciple, Michael Balint. As is now well known, Ferenczi died from a severe case of pernicious anemia complicated by funicular myelitis that causes degeneration of the spinal cord.

Armed with this information, Fromm then made a dramatic move. Rather than publishing his findings in a psychoanalytic journal, he chose to do so in Saturday Review, a highly influential, mass circulation magazine edited by Norman Cousins. Knowing how his findings would be received among the psychoanalytic establishment, he turned to the public to escape what he described in his very first paragraph as “fanaticism usually to be found only in religious and political bureaucracies” (1958, p. 11). He then goes on to critique Jones’ adherence to the psychoanalytic “party line”:

Jones’s ‘re-writing’ of history introduces into science a method which we so far have been accustomed to find only in Stalinist ‘history.’ The Stalinists call those who defected and rebelled ‘traitors’ and ‘spies’ of capitalism. Dr. Jones does the same in psychiatric lingo, by claiming that Rank and Ferenczi, the two men who were most closely linked with Freud and who later deviated from him in some respects, had been psychotic for many years. The implication is that only their insanity explains their crime of defecting from Freud and, in the case of Ferenczi, that his complaints about Freud’s harsh and intolerant treatment of him are, ipso facto, evidence of psychosis. (1958, p. 11)

After reviewing his findings based upon his interviews, Fromm concludes by stating:

I have given such a detailed description of the fantastic constructions of Dr. Jones, partly in order to defend the memory of gifted and devoted men who cannot defend themselves any more, and partly to show in a concrete example the party-line spirit to be found in certain quarters of the psychoanalytic movement. (1958, p. 55)

This a remarkable example of a psychoanalyst standing up for what he believes in. It is also important in that Fromm links psychoanalytic orthodoxy, the unquestioning stance that Jones’ reviewers displayed, and the groupthink evidenced in psychoanalysts’ willingness to assassinate the character of Sandor Ferenczi, to Stalinism.

Stalinism from below?

In the Soviet Union, “party-line thinking,” extreme conformity, and the willingness to shun, exile, and execute those who did not conform were enforced by the person of Joseph Stalin, who in Orwell’s fictionalized account becomes “Big Brother.” This is a form of totalitarianism imposed from above. Freedom of expression, an openness to new ideas and innovations are strictly prohibited. And enemies are clearly defined and made the object of scorn, hatred, and frequently, sanctioned acts of violence. However, recently some authors have begun to see what could be taken as a form of Stalinism, party-line thinking, from below. Chief among them is Pulitzer Prize winning historian, Anne Applebaum. In her 2021 article, “The New Puritans,” she notes that she wrote a book about the Sovietization of Central Europe in the 1940s and found that:

much of the political conformism of the early Communist period was the result not of violence or direct state coercion, but rather of intense peer pressure … [P]eople felt obliged to repeat slogans that they didn’t believe, or to perform acts of public obeisance to a political party they privately scorned …

But you don’t even need Stalinism to create that kind of atmosphere … In America, of course, we don’t have that kind of state coercion. There are currently no laws that shape what academics or journalists can say; there is no government censor, no ruling-party censor. But fear of the internet mob, the office mob, or the peer-group mob is producing some similar outcomes. (Applebaum, 2021)

I believe that in many ways, Applebaum is referring, in part, to what I am calling a plague of certitude that does not emanate from above but is present in social media, workplaces, and among peers. There is no supreme leader, politburo, or political party enforcing how people are to think and act. Rather, social media users, fellow employees, university students, and friendship groups are policing the thinking and speech of each other.

With the steady decline of religious belief, the breakdown of the family, and a growing mistrust of government that began in the 1960s, there is an increasing absence of civic morality, a commonality of values, a shared way of seeing the world in the US. With the market taking over virtually every aspect of life, in many ways, we are left on our own to compete against one another. There are winners and losers, and those of us who live in major American cities see those “losers” every day, in the people we pass lying on our sidewalks and in the tents that line our streets. We can’t go there and we don’t know what to do so our anxieties rise. Enveloped in this moral void, we seek some sort of support and a path to not only help those who are losing in this rigged economy but also aid in our own moral survival.

In Escape from Freedom, Erich Fromm quoted approvingly of Balzac: “But learn one thing, impress it upon your mind which is still so malleable: man has a horror of aloneness. And of all kinds of aloneness, moral aloneness is the most terrible” (1941/1994, p. 18). Fromm conceptualizes the “moral world” as the terrain wherein we relate to ideas, values, symbols, and “social patterns” that provide us with feelings of communion and belonging. This kind of“relatedness to the world can assume many forms: the monk in his cell who believes in God and the political prisoner kept in isolation who feels one with his fellow fighters are not alone morally. Neither is the English gentleman who wears his dinner jacket in the most exotic surroundings nor the petty bourgeois who, though being deeply isolated from his fellow men, feels one with his nation or its symbols. The kind of relatedness to the world may be noble or trivial, but even being related to the basest kind of pattern is immensely preferable to being alone. Religion and nationalism, as well as any custom and any belief however absurd and degrading, if it only connects the individual with others, are refuges from what man most dreads: isolation” (1941/1994, p. 18).

I contend that what we see today in the plague of certitude is in part an attempt to connect to and be a part of a moral universe that provides certainty amidst chaos and disintegration. Being a part of a movement or community for racial and gender justice allows one to not feel alone in what author George Packer has named “The Unwinding,” the dissolution of the things that used to hold us together over the last forty years, and that has left us “alone on a landscape without solid structures” (2013, p. 4). While this is an understandable and even noble pursuit, it becomes problematic when being against others overtakes being a part of a moral community; when having a belief about an injustice becomes an inarguable truth.

When we entertain a call for “non-negotiable truths,” castigate other psychoanalysts as trolls, racists, transphobes, and antisemites, we are following a party-line from below, a form of conformity enforced over and over again by groupthink, a desire to be part of a community of the politically advanced and morally superior. In the worst cases, notably on the list serves of some of our most esteemed national, psychoanalytic organizations, dialogue and persuasion have been rendered anachronistic forms of communication. They have been replaced by performative and melodramatic outrage and demonization. Following the principle that it is “impact not intent,” anyone deemed to have engaged in uttering a word or engaging in an act that is felt or believed to be racist or transphobic by others is unworthy of conversation, of being won over. “Blasphemy,” if you will, resides outside the system of rational discourse and as such cannot be argued. Eradicating heretics seemingly is the point, but not in the literal sense of assassination or sending off to a forced labor camp, as is the case with authoritarianism that emanates from above. Today social media and list serve ostracism amounts to exile to the cyber gulag, an online no-man’s-land where one is too frightened, intimidated, or demoralized to post.

Neoliberalism has eroded traditional institutions of solidarity and community such as family, organized religion, fraternal organizations, and trade unions. Covid sent us home to face our patients online or by phone, day after day, in a form of solitary confinement. Psychoanalytic institutes increasingly exist exclusively online, offering little chance of meeting in-person, hanging-out, running into colleagues and candidates. We increasingly turn to online forums to belong, to feel as though we have a professional or relational home.

In a world beset by unparalleled catastrophe, from the hurricanes, drought, and wildfires caused by climate change, to the massive gun violence erupting across the nation, to the terrifying fear that democracy may end in our lifetimes, what/who can we turn to? Our patients’ anxiety, depression, and acting-out are difficult to hold when we too are subject to many of the same fears and uncertainties to which they are reacting. What can hold us if not some form of community, a sense that we belong somewhere?

Unfortunately, many of the current attempts at creating moral community are turning to the codification of rigid belief systems that rest on fundamentally binary thinking: persecutor and persecuted, parasitic whiteness that preys upon the universally oppressed people of color, trans and trans-exclusionary feminists, Zionists and antisemites. In a profession where we are trained to honor the individuality of our patients, to not make assumptions about them, to be curious, empathic, and eager to understand their motivations and feelings, we seem to be falling short.

The need for optimally marginal heretics

Lew Aron was a lifelong critic of binary thinking. In 2013 he argued that binary thought was “a way of managing anxiety,” in the same way as we think about splitting (2013, p. 40). Drawing on both Bion and Ogden, he argued for:

binocular vision to indicate that in psychoanalysis, truth refers to being able to perceive from multiple perspectives simultaneously. This simultaneity of perception from across multiple angles facilitates the move beyond binary oppositions. (2013, p. 41)

In the same volume, he and coauthor, Karen Starr, point out that analysts who had survived the Holocaust frequently denied their own trauma and enacted it in their theorizing and clinical work. “In order to protect themselves from experiencing their own vulnerability – their sense of safety had, after all, been shattered – they split off and projected all _that was vulnerable onto others.” These analysts thus created an entrenched binary distinction between analyst and patient, the former being “invulnerable, rational, and masterful,” and the latter being dependent and neurotic (2013, p. 125).

Does this binary opposition of the past described by Aron and Starr have any resonance in our current plague of certitude? Are all the socially constructed vulnerabilities, pain and suffering assigned to people of color, not only erasing their actual, individual experiences, but perhaps also denying the vulnerability of those who exclusively see themselves as “privileged?” Given that all of us in the United States are facing the real possibility of the end of our democracy, the unbearable consequences of climate change, and the stunning rise of weekly if not daily mass shootings, is it not possible to consider that our vulnerability is being projected to some degree onto others? Is the reason that we have become so certain, so righteous, so unwilling to calmly argue and try to persuade those with whom we disagree, have anything to do with our own anxieties, our own feelings that we are operating in a moral vacuum? By projecting all feelings of victimization onto the other, the “privileged?” remain empowered, in control, and good, morally and politically enlightened. They can maintain that sense of empowerment and goodness by calling out their fellow, privileged colleagues for their racism and transphobia. But in the end, I would argue we are left with a demoralized and diminished psychoanalytic public sphere that changes nothing. I fear a sort of silent majority is being created in these spaces wherein the majority of analysts are too fearful of being attacked to post or speak or say what they think in print.

As I have been writing this paper, I simultaneous have been following multiple days of ad hominem attacks on the list serve of what used to be the most venerable and conservative organization of psychoanalysis in the United States – the American Psychoanalytic Association. After witnessing unending denunciations of fellow members as being racists and antisemites, the President of the American actually had to intervene, an action I have never witnessed previously. He simply stated: “It has felt snarky, petty, incurious and unkind. No good comes of this; no one is persuaded to change their views, and no one feels that there has been a true meeting of minds … To play this out in front of hundreds strikes me as unfortunate, and doesn’t reflect well on our Association” (Sulkowicz, APsaA MEM list serve 11/3/22).

Today we see a form of unquestioning groupthink among many psychoanalysts who are supporting positions that stand in contrast to the fundamentals of our field: that we can know the realities of a person by the color of their skin; that we feel confident to unquestioningly affirm a young person’s decision to become another sex; that we can ruthlessly denounce fellow analysts who hold differing views, and that we can be certain about our own motivations and those of the others with whom we agree.

In writing on Erich Fromm’s courage, Paul Roazen notes that:

Too many in psychoanalysis have been willing to have twisted thoughts, and unclarified positions, in order to avoid the dangers of heresy … Analysts are after all dependent on colleagues for referrals, and the unconscious ways people can be intimidated into conformity ought never to be underestimated. (1994, p. 9)

Fromm stands among us as one of our most distinguished heretics. His optimal marginality consistently allowed him to resist conformity. When the psychoanalytic establishment in the person of Karl Menninger denounced him, (in his review of Escape From Freedom, Menninger wrote that Fromm “considered himself” a psychoanalyst, but his lack of medical and psychoanalytic credentials disqualified him from serious consideration), Fromm went on to publish Man For Himself, the title of which was an implicit gibe at Menninger’s 1938 Man Against Himself. When he was denied membership in the IPA and then in any American institute due to his being a lay analyst, he formed the William Alanson White Institute along with Harry Stack Sullivan and Clara Thompson in 1943, and then 13 years later, formed the Mexican Psychoanalytic Society. Ultimately, he dealt with his exclusion from the IPA by forming the International Federation of Psychoanalytic Societies in 1962, which is “committed to the concept of pluralism in psychoanalytic theory and practice as well as the interdisciplinary exchange in matters of micro- and macro-social interest.”

But in the end, more important than any of his actions are his words. Fromm used his writing – founded in his lifelong radical humanism and democratic socialism – to stand up against all form of orthodoxy and groupthink. In book after book, he articulated a vision of hope based in his vision of human beings as agents, subjects who had the capacity to overcome their suffering, their circumstances. In his desire to move away from “that which separates us” to what unites us, he has been reviled by the New Left and the post-modernists. His beliefs in our common humanity, our capacity for self-governance, authenticity, and the art of loving make him seem insensitive to the realities of power relations, naïve, and insufficiently radical. In this age of certitude and conformity, of outrage and groupthink, that’s precisely why I think he serves as a model. We may not agree with all he has to say, but we need to listen to him and to all our optimally marginal heretics more than ever.

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Ilene Philipson

Ilene Philipson, Ph.D., Psy.D., holds doctorates in sociology, clinical psychology, and psychoanalysis. She is a training and supervising analyst at the Institute of Contemporary Psychoanalysis in Los Angeles, a faculty member at the San Francisco Center for Psychoanalysis, and is in the private practice of psychotherapy and psychoanalysis in Oakland, California. In addition to On The Shoulders of Women: The Feminization of Psychotherapy (Guilford), her books include Married to The Job (Simon & Schuster); Ethel Rosenberg: Beyond the Myths (Rutgers University Press); and Women, Class, and the Feminist Imagination (Ed.) (Temple University Press).