Erich Fromm was born in Frankfurt, Germany, into an Orthodox Jewish family. A grandfather and two great grandfathers had been rabbis; an uncle was a Talmudic scholar.
Fromm studied at universities in Frankfurt and Munich before receiving his PhD in sociology from the University of Heidelberg in 1922. Though he lacked any formal medical training, Fromm soon began studying at the Psychoanalytic Institute in Berlin, under Hans Sachs and Theodor Reik. In 1926, he married Frieda Reichman, a psychoanalyst who later made important contributions to the study of schizophrenia. About this time, no doubt influenced by his studies and by the First War, Fromm abandoned the practice of Judaism, though its influences would not be absent from his thought.
The Fromms moved to Frankfurt, where he was among the founders of the Frankfurt Psychoanalytic Institute. Max Horkheimer invited him to join the Institute for Social Research. During this period, Fromm worked on a study on the character structure of German workers, published posthumously as The WorkingClass in Weimar Germany. The Fromms divorced after 4 years of marriage.
In 1934, Fromm followed other members of the Frankfurt School to the New School of Social Research in New York. He would teach there, at Columbia, Yale, and Bennington, among other American institutions, until 1950. Early in this period, he was befriended by and came to influence Margaret Mead.
Fromm’s first major book, Escape From Freedom, appeared in 1941. Showing the range of influences on Fromm’s thought, its critique of the limits of Freudian psychobiology led to his expulsion from the New York Psychoanalytic Institute in 1944. Along with Harry Stack Sullivan and others, he then helped found the William Alanson White Institute; Fromm served as its clinical director from 1946 to 1950.
By then an American citizen, Fromm took up a post at the National Autonomous University in Mexico City. He taught there until 1965. He founded and until 1976 directed the Mexican Institute of Psychoanalysis but still remained active in American politics and intellectual life.
In 1976, Fromm, along with his third wife, moved from Mexico to Switzerland, where he later died.
Fromm’s work was an extended meditation upon the social-psychological consequences of human existential separation. For Fromm, biological constraints, so important in the lives of other animals, has largely given way to social influences upon human life. Following Jakob Burkhardt, Fromm contended that individuals began to free themselves from the social regularities of feudal life during the Renaissance. The conventions of religious and economic life furthered this process, as Max Weber suggested.
These developments posed, however, a serious psychological problem. Without the psychological supports of an ostensibly preordained social order, freedom begat anxiety, what Fromm called “the inability of the individual to stand alone and live.”
The ambiguities and ambivalences inherent in this situation led many to escape freedom in psychologically and sociologically unproductive ways. One unproductive response, exemplified in Nazism, involved a masochistic submission to one’s social superiors and a sadistic exertion of authority over one’s inferiors. Another unproductive response, exemplified in liberal democracies, involved a combination of alienated labor and consumerist social competition, yielding a conformity greater than required by the extant means of social coercion.
In contrast, a productive response would seek what Fromm termed “union with integrity.” Such union fulfilled a human need for social engagement while simultaneously providing the conditions necessary for human beings to be not only free from social coercion but also free or able to respond to social life in ways that promoted broadly spiritual growth. This notion of productivity underlay Fromm’s explorations of the psychological preconditions of ethics, the art of loving, and his politics.
- Fromm, E. (1941). Escape from freedom. New York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston.
- Fromm, E. (1947). Man for himself: An inquiry into the psychology of ethics. New York: Rinehart.
- Fromm, E. (1950). Psychoanalysis and religion. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.
- Fromm, E. (1955). The sane society. New York: Reinhardt.
- Fromm, E. (1956). The art of loving. New York: Harper & Row.
- Fromm, E. (1959). Sigmund Freud’s mission: An analysis of his personality and influence. New York: Harper & Row.
- Fromm, E. (1984). The working class in Weimar Germany. (B. Weinberger, Trans.). Cambridge: Harvard University Press.