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How to Become a Forgotten Intellectual: Intellectual Movements and the Rise and Fall of Erich Fromm
(1998)
Most reputation studies focus on canonized intellectuals, scholars, and artists. With few exceptions, there has been little detailed examination of the sociological dynamics involved in exclusion. Examined here are the ideas and reputation history of the German psychoanalyst and sociologist Erich FROMM, expanding the repu-tation model outlined by Michele Lamont in >How to Become a Dominant French Intellectual: The Case of Jacques Derrida.< The example of Erich FROMM provides support for a modified version of Lamont's model as well as a level analysis framework. FROMM was a prestigious intellectual in sociology, psychoanalysis, and US intellectual life in the 1940s and 1950s, but since has gone out fashion. Similar macro-, organizational, and microfactors explain both FROMM's decline and Derrida's rise to status after 1965. Emphasis is on the importance of symbolic boundaries within and between psychoanalysis, Marxism, and sociology as factors that both create and damage intellectual reputations.
Fromm's important contributions to the modern development of psychoanalytic thought are often ignored and frequently misunderstood. An early proponent of revisions of psychoanalytic theory and therapy similar to recent trends in object relations, self-psychology and interpersonal psychoanalysis, Fromm was a vi-sionary for a Freudian theory built upon orthodoxies of the past but going beyond them. It is argued here that Fromm's unique role in helping create a new version of psychoanalysis for the 21st century was as sociological as it was intellectual. Fromm's contributions were intimately linked to his institutional positioning close to the center but on the relative margins of the discipline. This paper will outline how sociological dynamics shaped Fromm's revision of psychoanalysis. We will con-clude by discussing how Fromm was able to have a more dramatic influence than other Freudian revisionists who were less favourably positioned.
A reading of David Riesman's classic The Lonely Crowd is presented that emphasizes its links with the critical theory of German psychoanalyst & social critic Erich Fromm. The intellectual & personal relationship between Riesman & Fromm brings into focus Riesman's adaptation of the insights of European critical theory as well as the strengths of American social science & social criticism. Riesman's rela-tively neglected theoretical approach has much to offer a sociology concerned with retaining its links to public debate & empirical evidence.
The sociological study of intellectual innovation has long been polarized between romantic notions of the creative marginal intellectual & competing accounts stressing the benefits of national, organizational, & network centrality in the production of knowledge. I offer the concept of >optimal marginality< as an attempt to move beyond this longstanding but increasingly stale debate. The relationship between a certain type of marginality & intellectual creativity is discussed in the context of a case study on innovation within psychoanalysis. German psychoana-lyst Erich Fromm's contributions to the modern revision of Freudian theory is high-lighted to illustrate the conditions under which marginality is likely to lead to innova-tions within theoretical systems & intellectual organizations. What types of margin-ality lead to innovation? Under what conditions does marginality lead to insight, & when does it lead to marginal ideas? Four ideal types are outlined & a research agenda is called for that operationalizes & tests these theoretical ideas in the con-text of comparative sociological analysis of intellectual creativity.