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This article addresses the place of society in Erich Fromm's pioneering psychoanalytic work and in the evolution of interpersonal theory and practice. It suggests that there is much to be gained from a re-examination of Fromm's politically progressive perspective. By bridging sociology and psychoanalysis, Fromm developed a new approach known as >social psychoanalysis,< which sought to explain and understand the centrality of society in human experience and the therapeutic process. Fromm moved beyond Freud and found an ally in the American psychiatrist Harry Stack Sullivan. Together, Fromm and Sullivan became the key founders of the Interpersonal School of Psychoanalysis located at the William Alanson White Institute in New York. Despite their commonalities, however, Fromm and Sullivan differed in central areas, particularly on the issue of “adaptation” to society. Sullivan believed that adaptation was a marker of successful personality development and Fromm maintained that society inscribed pathology into the human being. This difference would prove definitive as interpersonal psychoanalysis moved from its radical beginnings to become a dominant school of contemporary psychoanalysis that focused on the interpersonal dyad and the interactions between the analyst and patient.
As a psychoanalyst, Fromm felt compelled to speak to the social and political crises of his time. Fromm’s social psychoanalysis was a radical departure from the Freudian mainstream and has important implications for how psychoanalysis can address social and political forces today. What is less known and often neglected is the way in which Fromm was himself shaped by the traumatic events of racial discrimination and genocide that marked the twentieth century, particularly the rise of Nazism, virulent anti-Semitism and the Holocaust. This article will weave together Fromm’s life-experience, and that of his family, with his development of key ideas relating to the threat of authoritarianism and racial narcissism. To illustrate the relevance of Fromm’s work in the present moment, I consider the reality of systemic racism and the long shadow of genocide. Drawing on my work as practicing psychoanalyst, I address the racial discrimination experienced by Indigenous peoples in Canada. In the process, I examine how the psychoanalysis and the therapeutic setting is embedded in society and inevitably implicated in the structures of systemic racism.
Humanity is in crisis, and has been accelerating toward its own destruction. This is evident in: apathy toward climate change and the extinction of several species; the repetitive cycle of genocide and war; and the prevalence of nationalism, fascism, and xenophobia. As a citizen of the United States, I apply Erich Fromm's concepts of mature love, capitalism, alienation, the necrophilic character orientation, and insanity to the ailments plaguing the US, including: (1) white supremacy; (2) the systemic oppression of Black and Brown people; (3) legislation against women and LGBTQ and people; and (4) anti-maskers and science deniers. I also provide a critique of the noxious effects of capitalism. Fromm's ideas suggest these problems are a reflection of our collective failure to overcome our separateness through mature love, and are a byproduct of destructive, compensatory defenses that further our alienation and deadness. Fromm describes humanity as being in its psychological nascence, and defines being fully born as being a complete, integrated individual who is capable of self-love and of loving all other living beings. To correct our current trajectory, we need only apply Fromm's work in order to not compulsively repeat our tragic history in a tumultuous struggle to be born.
Obituary for Adolf Lissauer
(2024)
Where Does the Way Lead to?
(2024)
Rabbi Nobel as Youth Leader
(2024)
Should We Hate Hitler?
(2024)
This article reviews Fromm’s view of human nature that is the basis for his existential humanism. Fromm’s core idea was that the combination of minimal instinctual endowment, enormous expansion of our neocortex, and being born in a helpless state created a set of existential contradictions or dichotomies. The main contradiction or dichotomy is being part of nature yet transcending it by being aware of our mortality. Not being able to go back to the previous “harmony” with nature, humans must develop their capacity for reason, symbolic capacities, imagination and human solidarity or regress to symbiotic and incestuous ties. I make two main arguments. I show that instead of losing our instincts, humans retain three social instincts that we share with other social species, namely attachment instincts (and forming attachment bonds), affiliation to groups (group instinct) and sexual instincts. I show how these three instincts have been significantly transformed in relation to our great ape relatives making us a more flexible, adaptive, cooperative and ultrasocial species. Second I describe a new evolutionary paradigm in which genes and culture coevolve and influence each other, also known as the dual inheritance model. The main effect of this dual inheritance is that cultures, like genes, transmit information and knowledge from one generation to the next. The cumulative effect of cultural knowledge transmitted through thousands of generations is that we develop new modes of production, new technologies, art forms, and new cultural rituals and practices. To which we must adapt. This new view of what made us human puts Fromm’s view of human nature and his radical humanism on a stronger sociobiological foundation. I close by making the argument that our group instinct is both our greatest strength and greatest weakness, making us a species with a >genius for good and evil<.