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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.
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.
Psychoanalysis in the shadow of fascism and genocide: Erich Fromm and the interpersonal tradition
(2022)
Exploramos la vida de Erich Fromm durante los años 30, su confrontación con el Nacional Socialismo y las experiencias de su familia en el Holocausto. Relevamos el impacto de este periodo en sus escritos, especialmente El Miedo a la Libertad (Escape from Freedom). La situación política del momento, en la cual el antisemitismo se hubo incrementado y las minorías estaban siendo perseguidas hace especialmente importante el examen de la experiencia y exilio de Fromm. El autor se apoya en la historia de su propia familia alemana y en el descubrimiento del pasado nacionalsocialista de su propio abuelo para examinar la importancia del análisis de Fromm de las tendencias autoritarias en Alemania a principios de la década del 30.
Erich Fromm’s life during the 1930s, his confrontation with Nazism and his family’s experience of the Holocaust is explored. The impact of this period on his writing, especially Escape from Freedom is considered. The current political situation, in which anti-Semitism has increased and minorities are persecuted makes the examination of Fromm’s experience of persecution and exile especially relevant. The author uses his own German family history and his discovery of his grandfather’s Nazi past to examine the importance of Fromm’s analysis of authoritarian tendencies in Germany in the early 1930s.