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In this contribution we are offered an analysis of Erich Fromm's relation to the Institut für Sozialforschung. In his capacity as director of the Department of Social Psychology, Fromm played a leading role in the empirical investigatory work carried out at the Institute, apart from being Horkheimer's principal interlocutor in questions connected with the psychoanalytic extension of Historical Materialism. Working within the framework of Horkheimer's envisaged goal of an historical-philosophical theory of the development of the contemporary era that was to draw on the various disciplines, Fromm made his own specific contribution that came to be known by the name of analytic social psychology. Fromm's departure from the Institute marked the terminal point of a whole developmental pathway, and was prompted by differences on substantial points as well as by personal differences. In particular, it was Fromm's revision of psychoanalysis that aroused Horkheimer and Adorno's critical ire. To the extent that Adorno's influence grew within the Institute, Fromm's own suffered as a result. After Adorno's appointment to full membership of the Institute in 1938, Fromm found himself increasingly reduced to a marginal position; and after a short while he accepted the consequences and left. Fromm's departure from the Institute led to a lifelong rift between him and the other members of the Institute, the consequence being that Fromm's contribution to the early versions of the Critical Theory – which he had made as head of the Department of Social Psychology and as director of research – was later deliberately passé sous silence.
Die pädagogischen Konzepte von Erich FROMM und Alice Miller werden verglichen. Dabei wird versucht, das theoretische Wechselverhältnis der radikal humanistischen Erziehungskritik FROMMs und der antipädagogischen Erziehungskritik Millers herauszuarbeiten. Während Miller in therapeutischer und individuumzentrierter Perspektive das Täter-Opfer-Modell vorzieht, versteht FROMM seine Aussagen zur Erziehung im Zusammenhang mit seinem Konzept des Gesellschaftscharakters und präferiert ein materialistisches und psychoanalytisches Modell des Zusammenhangs von Erziehung, Charakter und Gesellschaft. Es wird deutlich gemacht, dass die beiden Ansätze sich gegenseitig ergänzen. Unvereinbarkeiten bestehen allerdings hinsichtlich des Erziehungsbegriffs. Während Miller diesen strikt ablehnt, verbindet FROMM mit ihm befreiende und emanzipatorische Möglichkeiten.
>Drive Structure or Social Relationships<: After his departure from the Institute, Erich Fromm pursued with renewed intensity his sociological revision of psychoanalysis that was to touch off the debate with Herbert Marcuse, his earlier colleague at the Institute, and which came to be known as the culturalism-revisionism controversy. The charge leveled at Fromm was that he had moved away from recognizing the drive structure as the key bearer of the resistance potential in the Critical Theory and had instead thrown the central focus onto social relationships, where it is the Ego as the mediating factor – rather than the Id – that is geared to alienated reality. But while it is true enough that Fromm did shift the emphasis away from the drive structure to social relationships, it should be added that he grouped these social relationships very much under the rubric of >the pathology of normality< and criticized them as bearing the stamp of the underlying economic order. This contribution examines the background to the controversy between Herbert Marcuse and Erich Fromm, and sets out the principal arguments advanced by the contending parties. What emerges, interestingly enough, is that both protagonists never diverged as much in their respective positions as the noisy exchange of blows perhaps suggested. There is little to distinguish both camps in their common humanistic concern for the advancement of human happiness. Undoubtedly Marcuse and Fromm are at one in advancing a radical social critique: but whereas the one critique is premised on the need to inculcate a drive structure capable of withstanding the forces of repressive socialization, the other seeks its inspiration in a critical anthropology that keeps alive the idea of a more humane society – even in the face of the negation of this idea.