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The current political climate is marked by polarization, which presents new difficulties for psychoanalysis. Erich Fromm, as a Freudian theorist and clinician, is uniquely positioned to address these issues. Fromm is a politically radical thinker who can help psychoanalysis think about society and social injustice beyond the clinical context while avoiding the dangers of excessively orthodox left-wing thinking that risks taking the field away from its core mission. Fromm can help psychoanalysis avoid what we are calling the >Peterson problem,< which is partly the result of provocative and extreme ideas in institutions and psychoanalytic publications that create reputational problems for the field. The >Peterson problem< brings new attention to the political bias of left-liberal authoritarians inside the profession, who focus on changing society rather than healing individuals and neglect audiences outside the liberal university and highly educated classes and thus create space for polarizing figures like psychologist Jordan Peterson to fill the gap. Peterson’s fame and influence serves as a lightning rod for the wider critique of left leaning political and cultural currents in psychoanalysis. Fromm can act as a role model as well as provide the intellectual resources for responding to these challenges.
Mainstream social science has been blindsided by the rise of Trumpism and broader growth of authoritarian populism. We make the case that Frommian work is desperately needed inside the core of contemporary social science theorizing by examining social character theory up against and alongside the concept of habitus developed by French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu. Both Fromm and Bourdieu were concerned with the human costs of social change and economic development, Fromm with his writings on advanced capitalism in The Sane Society (1955a) and on Mexican village life in Social Character in a Mexican Village (with Michael Maccoby, 1970b), and Bourdieu with his extended studies of peasants in Algeria during the French colonial war of the 1950s and early 1960s. We will compare and contrast the theory of social character developed in the Mexican study with Bourdieu's concept of habitus, and discuss what Fromm's ideas can add to Bourdieu-influenced critical social science.
