美國 冷戰中的美國  (1900年三月23日～1980年三月18日)

Erich Seligmann Fromm

弗洛姆

閱讀埃裏希·弗羅姆 Erich Fromm在百家争鸣的作品!!!

埃裏希-弗洛姆，世界聞名的德裔美籍心理學家、精神分析學家、哲學家。1900年生於德國法蘭剋福猶太人家庭，1922年獲德國海德堡大學哲學博士學位，是20年代“法蘭剋福學派”重要成員。納粹上臺後，他於1934年赴美，在從事心理咨詢工作的同時，在哥倫比亞大學等學術機構講學，並先後執教於墨西哥國立大學、密歇根州立人學等高校。1980年，弗洛姆病逝於瑞士。

埃裏希·弗羅姆（德語：Erich Fromm，1900年3月23日－1980年3月18日），又譯作弗洛姆，美籍德國猶太人。人本主義哲學家和精神分析心理學家。畢生致力修改弗洛伊德的精神分析學說，以切合西方人在兩次世界大戰後的精神處境。他企圖調和弗洛伊德的精神分析學跟人本主義的學說，其思想可以說是新弗洛依德主義與新馬剋思主義的交匯。弗洛姆被尊為“精神分析社會學”的奠基者之一。

弗洛姆是法蘭剋福學派的成員，後來從德國移居美國後仍然保持與學派的聯繫。 

生平與經歷

弗洛姆1900年生於一個德國法蘭剋福猶太人家庭，為傢中獨子。1918年弗洛姆進入法蘭剋福大學學習兩學期法學。1919年暑假後，弗洛姆進入海德堡大學學習，改學社會學，師承阿爾弗雷德·韋伯（馬剋斯·韋伯的兄弟）、卡爾·雅斯貝斯和海因裏希·李凱爾特。1922年獲哲學博士學位。次年至慕尼黑大學專攻精神分析學，1925年至1930年間，在柏林精神分析學會接受精神分析訓練。1930年，他開始臨床實踐，加入法蘭剋福社會觀察學會。納粹在德國執政後，弗洛姆搬到日內瓦，1934年到紐約哥倫比亞大學工作。離開哥倫比亞大學後，在1943年他幫助組建華盛頓精神病學學校紐約分校。1945年又組建了William Alanson White 精神病學，精神分析和心理學協會。

1950，弗洛姆搬到墨西哥城，在墨西哥國立自治大學出任教授，並在那裏的醫學院建立精神分析部。另一方面，他從1957年到1961年擔任密歇根州立大學心理學教授，又從1962年擔任紐約大學文理學院心理學客座教授。1965年弗洛姆退休，然後在1974年搬到瑞士穆拉爾托。1980年，弗在八十歲生日前五天於傢中去世。弗洛姆一生堅持臨床實踐，出版了一係列著作。

學說內容

弗洛姆的作品以紀錄社會政治以及作為基礎哲學和心理學著名。

弗洛姆於1941年發表他的第一本重大著作《逃避自由》。1947年出版其續集——《為自己的人》。這兩本著作概述了弗洛姆的人的本性理論中人的性格理論。弗洛姆最流行的著作是1956年出版的《愛的藝術》，他在這著作中概括並補充了《逃避自由》和《為自己的人》及其他著作中的人性理論。

弗洛姆從小學習《塔木德經》（猶太教的法典），人生觀受其影響深遠。年輕時他跟隨猶太教祭司J. Horowitz學習《聖經》，後來在海德堡大學修讀社會學博士時跟隨祭司Salman Baruch Rabinkow學習 。在法蘭剋福讀書時又跟隨過Nehemia Nobel和Ludwig Krause。弗洛姆的祖父及其兩個哥哥都是祭司，一個舅公是著名的《塔木德經》學者。然而在1926年，弗洛姆離開正統猶太教，轉嚮以人本主義解釋《聖經》的典範。

弗洛姆對《聖經》中亞當與夏娃被逐出伊甸園的故事的解釋奠定了他的人本主義哲學的基石。弗洛姆指出，辨別善惡通常被視為是一種美德，研究《聖經》的學者卻都認為亞當與夏娃吃知善惡樹的果實犯了罪，因為他們違背了上帝代表父性的一面。他認為人應運用其創造力來建立自己的價值，不是以服從父性權威和依賴母性的關愛來建立道德價值。弗洛姆認為人應當脫離宗教中將上帝當作父親和母親來愛的主流態度，認識到上帝是人類所需要追求的全部事物投射，從而擁有成熟的、愛的能力，而非停留於幼稚的愛。他也認為關於上帝的觀念，在歷史和宗教的形成中，根據精神分析的理論是逐漸演變和成熟的。

除了純粹譴責權威主義的價值體係，弗氏也把亞當與夏娃的故事作為比喻，以解釋人類不安的情緒。亞當與夏娃吃了知識樹的果實，他們意識到當自己仍然是大自然的一部分，自己與大自然已不再是一體。於是他們覺得 “赤裸”和“羞愧”。他們已經進化成人類，意識到自己，意識到道德價值，意識到面對大自然和外部世界的巨大力量帶來的無力感，不再是與自然為一體，衹有動物本能的那個“準人類”。按照弗洛姆，罪惡感和羞愧源於人意識到人和自然、人和人之間存在的割裂性。要解决這種存在的分裂，唯有發揮人類的積極力量和創造性——愛和理性。

弗洛姆認為愛是人與人之間的創造力，而不是感情。他以此創造力把各種經常來當作“真愛”的證明的自戀神經癥和性虐待傾嚮區別開來。弗氏相信愛的本質有四大元素：關懷、責任、尊重和瞭解。認為“愛情”的經驗衹代表一個人未能真正瞭解愛的本質。弗氏利用《聖經》約拿的故事說明在現今人際關係中，關懷和責任的特質已十分少見。故事講述尼尼微城鎮的居民有罪，要承受惡果，約拿卻不願意去拯救他們。弗氏稱現代社會的人缺少對別人的自由的尊重，更不瞭解別人真正的希望和需要。

他認為資本主義社會病態、不義的尺度便是它不符合人性和人的需求，據此他提出了人有五種需求：

• 相屬需求。指個體具有愛人與被愛的需求，希望認識別人，瞭解、關懷別人，並願意對別人承擔責任；
• 超越需求。指個人希望在作為上超越物質條件的限製，在精神上能表現出創造性的人格特質；
• 落實需求。指個人希望與別人、社會及與大自然親密結合，從而獲得安身立命的需求；
• 統合需求。指個人力求自己人格統整，希望在世界上活出意義來的心理傾嚮；
• 定嚮需求。指個人具有努力尋求生活方向從而獲得心安的心理傾嚮。

他討論了資本主義社會中人們應付孤獨感的幾種心理機製，他稱之為性格的動力傾嚮性：

• 接納傾嚮性——這種傾嚮性的人沒有生産或提供愛的能力，他所需要的一切完全尋求別人幫助、依賴別人，是接受者而不是給予者。
• 剝削傾嚮性——這種傾嚮性的人，並不期望接受，而是依其暴力、詭計等，從他人處巧取豪奪，以滿足自己的欲望。
• 貯藏傾嚮性——這種傾嚮性的人把外部世界視為威脅，通過貯存和占有而獲得安全感。
• 市場傾嚮性——這種傾嚮性的人的價值觀是在市場上把自己當作商品，使自己具備適合雇主所需之性格特徵。
• 創造傾嚮性——這種傾嚮性的人充分發揮其潛能，成為創造者，對社會可以作出創造性的奉獻。

上述前四種傾嚮性都是人格的病態表現，針對有心理疾病的人而言，提出應當根據患者的心理需求和性格傾嚮實施治療與拯救；衹有創造傾嚮性是人格常態的、健康的表現，對一般的健康人，應加以積極的引導，促使他們的人格健全地發展。

弗洛姆提出了社會潛意識，社會潛意識是一個社會的大多數成員共同存在的被壓抑的領域。他指出，歷史上大多數社會都是少數人統治並剝削多數人，因此必然會想方設法不讓大多數人意識到這種社會的不合理，必須把人們的怨恨情緒壓抑下去。壓抑的機製是每個社會都有的一套决定人 的認識方式的體係，其作用類似於過濾器。除非人們的經驗能夠透過這個過濾器否則就不能成為意識。這種社會過濾器由三種要素組成：一、語言。難以用語言表達 的經驗和現象則難以成為明確的意識；二、邏輯，不合邏輯的經驗被排斥在意識之外，而不同文化有不同的邏輯；三、社會禁忌，指每個社會都排斥某些思想和感 情，使之不被思考、感受和表達。在構成過濾器的三種要素中，社會禁忌是最重要的。社會潛意識和社會性格一樣是聯繫經濟基礎和意識形態的中介環節。對個人方面，是個體為逃避被他人和社會所孤立和排斥而形成的心理機能。

著作

出版年份	英文書名	中文書名		備註
1941	Escape from Freedom	逃避自由
1947	Man for Himself	自我的追尋、 為自己而活	為自己的人
1950	Psychoanalysis and Religion		心理分析與宗教	臺灣無出版
1951	Forgotten language; an introduction to the understanding of dreams, fairy tales, and myths	夢的精神分析	被遺忘的語言
1955	The Sane Society	理性的掙紮	健全的社會
1956	The Art of Loving	愛的藝術	愛的藝術
1959	Sigmund Freud's mission; an analysis of his personality and influence	論佛洛以德、 弗洛伊德的使命	弗洛伊德的使命— 人格與影響力分析
1960	Psychoanalysis and Zen Buddhism	禪與心理分析	心理分析和禪宗
1960	Let Man Prevail – A Socialist Manifesto and Program			無中文譯本
1961	May Man Prevail? An Inquiry into the Facts and Fictions of Foreign Policy		人性會占優勢嗎	無中文譯本
1961	Marx’s Concept of Man. With a Translation of Marx's Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts	馬剋思關於人的概念	馬剋思論人
1962	Beyond the Chains of Illusion: my encounter with Marx and Freud	在幻想鎖鏈的彼岸— 我所理解的馬剋思和弗洛伊德	在幻想鎖鏈的彼岸— 我所理解的馬剋思和弗洛伊德
1963	The Dogma of Christ and Other Essays on Religion, Psychology and Culture	基督教義的心理分析	基督教義分析
1964	The Heart of Man. Its Genius for Good and Evil	人的心	人的心—他的善惡天性、 惡的本性
1965	Socialist Humanism. An International Symposium		社會主義的人道主義	無中文譯本
1966	You Shall Be as Gods. A Radical Interpretation of the Old Testament and Its Tradition		像上帝一樣生存	無中文譯本
1968	The Revolution of Hope. Toward a Humanized Technology	人類新希望	希望的革命— 通嚮人性化的技術
1968	Nature of Man		人的本性	無中文譯本
1970	The Crisis of Psychoanalysis. Essays on Freud, Marx and Social Psychology		心理分析的危機	無中文譯本
1970	Social character in a Mexican village; a sociopsychoanalytic study		一個墨西哥村莊的社會性格— 一項社會心理分析研究	無中文譯本
1973	The Anatomy of Human Destructiveness	人類破壞性的剖析	人的破壞性剖析
1976	To Have or to Be	生命的展現	占有還是生存
1979	Greatness and Limitation of Freud's Thought	超越佛洛伊德	弗洛伊德思想的偉大和局限
1980	The Working Class in Weimar Germany. A Psychological and Sociological Study, edited and introduced			無中文譯本
1981	On Disobedience and Other Essays		論不服從	臺灣無出版
1983	For the Love of Life	生命之愛	生命之愛
1985	The Erich Fromm Reader. Readings Selected and Edited			無中文譯本
1989	The Art of Being		生存的藝術	無中文譯本
1990	The Revision of Psychoanalysis			無中文譯本
1991	The Art of Listening		聽的藝術	無中文譯本
1991	The Pathology of Normalcy. Contributions to a Science of Man			無中文譯本
1992	Beyond Freud: From Individual to Social Psychoanalysis, ed. and with a foreword			無中文譯本
1992	On Being Human			無中文譯本
1994	Love, Sexuality, and Matrarchy. About Gender, ed. and with an introduction			無中文譯本
2010	On Disobedience. Why Freedom Means Saying “No” to Power			無中文譯本

以上部分著作有一種或更多的中文譯本.

參見

• 宗教心理學
• 社會角色
• 自動化從衆

外部鏈接

• 國際弗洛姆協會
• 弗洛姆檔案
• "Homo Consumens"

Erich Seligmann Fromm (/frɒm/; German: [fʁɔm]; March 23, 1900 – March 18, 1980) was a social psychologist, psychoanalyst, sociologist, humanistic philosopher, and democratic socialist. He was a German Jew who fled the Nazi regime and settled in the US. He was one of the Founders of The William Alanson White Institute of Psychiatry, Psychoanalysis and Psychology in New York City and was associated with the Frankfurt School of critical theory.

Life

Erich Fromm was born on March 23, 1900, at Frankfurt am Main, the only child of Orthodox Jewish parents, Rosa (Krause) and Naphtali Fromm. He started his academic studies in 1918 at the University of Frankfurt am Main with two semesters of jurisprudence. During the summer semester of 1919, Fromm studied at the University of Heidelberg, where he began studying sociology under Alfred Weber (brother of the better known sociologist Max Weber), psychiatrist-philosopher Karl Jaspers, and Heinrich Rickert. Fromm received his PhD in sociology from Heidelberg in 1922. During the mid-1920s, he trained to become a psychoanalyst through Frieda Reichmann's psychoanalytic sanatorium in Heidelberg. They married in 1926, but separated shortly after and divorced in 1942. He began his own clinical practice in 1927. In 1930 he joined the Frankfurt Institute for Social Research and completed his psychoanalytical training.

After the Nazi takeover of power in Germany, Fromm moved first to Geneva and then, in 1934, to Columbia University in New York. Together with Karen Horney and Harry Stack Sullivan, Fromm belongs to a Neo-Freudian school of psychoanalytical thought. Horney and Fromm each had a marked influence on the other's thought, with Horney illuminating some aspects of psychoanalysis for Fromm and the latter elucidating sociology for Horney. Their relationship ended in the late 1930s. After leaving Columbia, Fromm helped form the New York branch of the Washington School of Psychiatry in 1943, and in 1946 co-founded the William Alanson White Institute of Psychiatry, Psychoanalysis, and Psychology. He was on the faculty of Bennington College from 1941 to 1949, and taught courses at the New School for Social Research in New York from 1941 to 1959.

When Fromm moved to Mexico City in 1949, he became a professor at the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM) and established a psychoanalytic section at the medical school there. Meanwhile, he taught as a professor of psychology at Michigan State University from 1957 to 1961 and as an adjunct professor of psychology at the graduate division of Arts and Sciences at New York University after 1962. He taught at UNAM until his retirement, in 1965, and at the Mexican Society of Psychoanalysis (SMP) until 1974. In 1974 he moved from Mexico City to Muralto, Switzerland, and died at his home in 1980, five days before his eightieth birthday. All the while, Fromm maintained his own clinical practice and published a series of books.

Fromm was reportedly an atheist^{[n 2]} but described his position as "nontheistic mysticism".

Psychological theory

Beginning with his first seminal work of 1941, Escape from Freedom (known in Britain as Fear of Freedom), Fromm's writings were notable as much for their social and political commentary as for their philosophical and psychological underpinnings. Indeed, Escape from Freedom is viewed as one of the founding works of political psychology. His second important work, Man for Himself: An Inquiry into the Psychology of Ethics, first published in 1947, continued and enriched the ideas of Escape from Freedom. Taken together, these books outlined Fromm's theory of human character, which was a natural outgrowth of Fromm's theory of human nature. Fromm's most popular book was The Art of Loving, an international bestseller first published in 1956, which recapitulated and complemented the theoretical principles of human nature found in Escape from Freedom and Man for Himself—principles which were revisited in many of Fromm's other major works.

Central to Fromm's world view was his interpretation of the Talmud and Hasidism. He began studying Talmud as a young man under Rabbi J. Horowitz and later under Rabbi Salman Baruch Rabinkow, a Chabad Hasid. While working towards his doctorate in sociology at the University of Heidelberg, Fromm studied the Tanya by the founder of Chabad, Rabbi Shneur Zalman of Liadi. Fromm also studied under Nehemia Nobel and Ludwig Krause while studying in Frankfurt. Fromm's grandfather and two great grandfathers on his father's side were rabbis, and a great uncle on his mother's side was a noted Talmudic scholar. However, Fromm turned away from orthodox Judaism in 1926, towards secular interpretations of scriptural ideals.

The cornerstone of Fromm's humanistic philosophy is his interpretation of the biblical story of Adam and Eve's exile from the Garden of Eden. Drawing on his knowledge of the Talmud, Fromm pointed out that being able to distinguish between good and evil is generally considered to be a virtue, but that biblical scholars generally consider Adam and Eve to have sinned by disobeying God and eating from the Tree of Knowledge. However, departing from traditional religious orthodoxy on this, Fromm extolled the virtues of humans taking independent action and using reason to establish moral values rather than adhering to authoritarian moral values.

Beyond a simple condemnation of authoritarian value systems, Fromm used the story of Adam and Eve as an allegorical explanation for human biological evolution and existential angst, asserting that when Adam and Eve ate from the Tree of Knowledge, they became aware of themselves as being separate from nature while still being part of it. This is why they felt "naked" and "ashamed": they had evolved into human beings, conscious of themselves, their own mortality, and their powerlessness before the forces of nature and society, and no longer united with the universe as they were in their instinctive, pre-human existence as animals. According to Fromm, the awareness of a disunited human existence is a source of guilt and shame, and the solution to this existential dichotomy is found in the development of one's uniquely human powers of love and reason. However, Fromm distinguished his concept of love from unreflective popular notions as well as Freudian paradoxical love (see the criticism by Marcuse below).

Fromm considered love an interpersonal creative capacity rather than an emotion, and he distinguished this creative capacity from what he considered to be various forms of narcissistic neuroses and sado-masochistic tendencies that are commonly held out as proof of "true love". Indeed, Fromm viewed the experience of "falling in love" as evidence of one's failure to understand the true nature of love, which he believed always had the common elements of care, responsibility, respect, and knowledge. Drawing from his knowledge of the Torah, Fromm pointed to the story of Jonah, who did not wish to save the residents of Nineveh from the consequences of their sin, as demonstrative of his belief that the qualities of care and responsibility are generally absent from most human relationships. Fromm also asserted that few people in modern society had respect for the autonomy of their fellow human beings, much less the objective knowledge of what other people truly wanted and needed.

Fromm believed that freedom was an aspect of human nature that we either embrace or escape. He observed that embracing our freedom of will was healthy, whereas escaping freedom through the use of escape mechanisms was the root of psychological conflicts. Fromm outlined three of the most common escape mechanisms:

• Automaton conformity: changing one's ideal self to conform to a perception of society's preferred type of personality, losing one's true self in the process; Automaton conformity displaces the burden of choice from self to society;
• Authoritarianism: giving control of oneself to another. By submitting one's freedom to someone else, this act removes the freedom of choice almost entirely.
• Destructiveness: any process which attempts to eliminate others or the world as a whole, all to escape freedom. Fromm said that "the destruction of the world is the last, almost desperate attempt to save myself from being crushed by it".

The word biophilia was frequently used by Fromm as a description of a productive psychological orientation and "state of being". For example, in an addendum to his book The Heart of Man: Its Genius For Good and Evil, Fromm wrote as part of his humanist credo:

"I believe that the man choosing progress can find a new unity through the development of all his human forces, which are produced in three orientations. These can be presented separately or together: biophilia, love for humanity and nature, and independence and freedom."

Erich Fromm postulated eight basic needs:

Need	Description
Transcendence	Being thrown into the world without their consent, humans have to transcend their nature by destroying or creating people or things. Humans can destroy through malignant aggression, or killing for reasons other than survival, but they can also create and care about their creations.
Rootedness	Rootedness is the need to establish roots and to feel at home again in the world. Productively, rootedness enables us to grow beyond the security of our mother and establish ties with the outside world. With the nonproductive strategy, we become fixated and afraid to move beyond the security and safety of our mother or a mother substitute.
Sense of Identity	The drive for a sense of identity is expressed nonproductively as conformity to a group and productively as individuality.
Frame of orientation	Understanding the world and our place in it.
Excitation and Stimulation	Actively striving for a goal rather than simply responding.
Unity	A sense of oneness between one person and the "natural and human world outside."
Effectiveness	The need to feel accomplished.

Fromm's thesis of the "escape from freedom" is epitomized in the following passage. The "individualized man" referenced by Fromm is man bereft of the "primary ties" of belonging (i.e. nature, family, etc.), also expressed as "freedom from":

There is only one possible, productive solution for the relationship of individualized man with the world: his active solidarity with all men and his spontaneous activity, love and work, which unite him again with the world, not by primary ties but as a free and independent individual.... However, if the economic, social and political conditions... do not offer a basis for the realization of individuality in the sense just mentioned, while at the same time people have lost those ties which gave them security, this lag makes freedom an unbearable burden. It then becomes identical with doubt, with a kind of life which lacks meaning and direction. Powerful tendencies arise to escape from this kind of freedom into submission or some kind of relationship to man and the world which promises relief from uncertainty, even if it deprives the individual of his freedom.

— Erich Fromm, Escape from Freedom [N.Y.: Rinehart, 1941], pp. 36–7. The point is repeated on pp. 31, 256–7.)

Five basic orientations

In his book Man for Himself Fromm spoke of "orientation of character". He differentiates his theory of character from that of Freud by focusing on two ways an individual relates to the world. Freud analyzed character in terms of libido organization, whereas Fromm says that in the process of living, we relate to the world by: 1) acquiring and assimilating things—"Assimilation", and 2) reacting to people—"Socialization". Fromm asserted that these two ways of relating to the world were not instinctive, but an individual's response to the peculiar circumstances of his or her life; he also believed that people are never exclusively one type of orientation. These two ways of relating to life's circumstances lead to basic character-orientations.

Fromm lists four types of nonproductive character orientation, which he called receptive, exploitative, hoarding, and marketing, and one positive character orientation, which he called productive. Receptive and exploitative orientations are basically how an individual may relate to other people and are socialization attributes of character. A hoarding orientation is an acquiring and assimilating materials/valuables character trait. The marketing orientation arises in response to the human situation in the modern era. The current needs of the market determine value. It is a relativistic ethic. In contrast, the productive orientation is an objective ethic. Despite the existential struggles of humanity, each human has the potential for love, reason and productive work in life. Fromm writes, "It is the paradox of human existence that man must simultaneously seek for closeness and for independence; for oneness with others and at the same time for the preservation of his uniqueness and particularity....the answer to this paradox – and to the moral problems of man – is productiveness."

Fromm's influence on other notable psychologists

Fromm's four non-productive orientations were subject to validation through a psychometric test, The Person Relatedness Test by Elias H. Porter, PhD in collaboration with Carl Rogers, PhD at the University of Chicago's Counseling Center between 1953 and 1955. Fromm's four non-productive orientations also served as basis for the LIFO test, first published in 1967 by Stuart Atkins, Alan Katcher, PhD, and Elias Porter, PhD and the Strength Deployment Inventory, first published in 1971 by Elias H. Porter, PhD. Fromm also influenced his student Sally L. Smith who went on to become the founder of the Lab School of Washington and the Baltimore Lab School.

Critique of Freud

Fromm examined the life and work of Sigmund Freud at length. Fromm identified a discrepancy between early and later Freudian theory: namely that, prior to World War I, Freud had described human drives as a tension between desire and repression, but after the end of the war, began framing human drives as a struggle between biologically universal Life and Death (Eros and Thanatos) instincts. Fromm charged Freud and his followers with never acknowledging the contradictions between the two theories.

Fromm also criticized Freud's dualistic thinking. According to Fromm, Freudian descriptions of human consciousness as struggles between two poles were narrow and limiting. Fromm also condemned Freud as a misogynist unable to think outside the patriarchal milieu of early 20th century Vienna. However, in spite of these criticisms, Fromm nonetheless expressed a great respect for Freud and his accomplishments. Fromm contended that Freud was one of the "architects of the modern age", alongside Albert Einstein and Karl Marx, but emphasized that he considered Marx both far more historically important than Freud and a finer thinker.

Political ideas and activities

Fromm's best known work, Escape from Freedom, focuses on the human urge to seek a source of authority and control upon reaching a freedom that was thought to be an individual's true desire. Fromm's critique of the modern political order and capitalist system led him to seek insights from medieval feudalism. In Escape from Freedom, he found value in the lack of individual freedom, rigid structure, and obligations required on the members of medieval society:

What characterizes medieval in contrast to modern society is its lack of individual freedom…But altogether a person was not free in the modern sense, neither was he alone and isolated. In having a distinct, unchangeable, and unquestionable place in the social world from the moment of birth, man was rooted in a structuralized whole, and thus life had a meaning which left no place, and no need for doubt…There was comparatively little competition. One was born into a certain economic position which guaranteed a livelihood determined by tradition, just as it carried economic obligations to those higher in the social hierarchy.

The culmination of Fromm's social and political philosophy was his book The Sane Society, published in 1955, which argued in favor of a humanistic and democratic socialism. Building primarily upon the early works of Karl Marx, Fromm sought to re-emphasise the ideal of freedom, missing from most Soviet Marxism and more frequently found in the writings of libertarian socialists and liberal theoreticians. Fromm's brand of socialism rejected both Western capitalism and Soviet communism, which he saw as dehumanizing, and which resulted in the virtually universal modern phenomenon of alienation. He became one of the founders of socialist humanism, promoting the early writings of Marx and his humanist messages to the US and Western European public.

In the early 1960s, Fromm published two books dealing with Marxist thought (Marx's Concept of Man and Beyond the Chains of Illusion: My Encounter with Marx and Freud). In 1965, working to stimulate the Western and Eastern cooperation between Marxist humanists, Fromm published a series of articles entitled Socialist Humanism: An International Symposium. In 1966, the American Humanist Association named him Humanist of the Year.

For a period, Fromm was also active in U.S. politics. He joined the Socialist Party of America in the mid-1950s, and did his best to help them provide an alternative viewpoint to McCarthyist trends in some US political thought. This alternative viewpoint was best expressed in his 1961 paper May Man Prevail? An Inquiry into the Facts and Fictions of Foreign Policy. However, as a co-founder of SANE, Fromm's strongest political activism was in the international peace movement, fighting against the nuclear arms race and U.S. involvement in the Vietnam War. After supporting Senator Eugene McCarthy's losing bid for the Democratic presidential nomination, Fromm more or less retreated from the American political scene, although he did write a paper in 1974 entitled Remarks on the Policy of Détente for a hearing held by the U.S. Senate Committee on Foreign Relations. Fromm was awarded Nelly Sachs Prize in 1979.

Criticism

In Eros and Civilization, Herbert Marcuse is critical of Fromm: In the beginning, he was a radical theorist, but later he turned to conformity. Marcuse also noted that Fromm, as well as his close colleagues Sullivan and Karen Horney, removed Freud's libido theory and other radical concepts, which thus reduced psychoanalysis to a set of idealist ethics, which only embrace the status quo. Fromm's response, in both The Sane Society and in The Anatomy of Human Destructiveness, argues that Freud indeed deserves substantial credit for recognizing the central importance of the unconscious, but also that he tended to rectify his own concepts that depicted the self as the passive outcome of instinct and social control, with minimal volition or variability. Fromm argues that later scholars such as Marcuse accepted these concepts as dogma, whereas social psychology requires a more dynamic theoretical and empirical approach. In reference to Fromm's leftist political activism as a public intellectual, Noam Chomsky said "I liked Fromm's attitudes but thought his work was pretty superficial".

Notes

References

Bibliography

Early work in German

See also

• American philosophy
• Ernst Simmel
• Group narcissism
• List of American philosophers
• Psychoanalytic sociology
• Psychohistory

External links

•  Publications by and about Erich Fromm in the catalogue Helveticat of the Swiss National Library
• erich-fromm.de – Erich Fromm Archives; Literary Estate
• International Erich Fromm Society
• Rainer Funk "Life and Work of Erich Fromm", Logos, 6:3, Summer 2007
• International Foundation Erich Fromm (Italian)
• hrc.utexas.edu, 1958 Mike Wallace interview
• , 1958 Mike Wallace interview (Russian) DOI:10.5281/zenodo.10672
• FBI file on Erich Fromm
• Erich Fromm, Mechanisms of Escape from Freedom (1942)
• Erich Fromm at Encyclopædia Britannica
• Erich Fromm online