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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.
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.
In light of the recent emphasis on social and cultural factors in psychoanalytic theory and practice, this article will elaborate earlier attempts to bridge psychoanalysis and the study of culture. I begin by considering the disciplinary tension between the fields of psychoanalysis and anthropology and the emergence of a >psychoanalytic anthropology,< which began in the 1920s and lasted through the 1950s. I then turn to the works of Harry Stack Sullivan and Erich Fromm, who developed an approach known as >cultural psychoanalysis.< I suggest that Sullivan and Fromm anticipate today’s sociocultural turn in psychoanalysis and that their work on culture and its role in psychological development and experience continues to be relevant. Rather than embracing a social or cultural determinism, Sullivan and Fromm focus on the interaction between culture and the person, thus creating an >integrationist< approach. Sullivan and Fromm develop a broad conception of culture that encompasses a critique of social and cultural norms and values. I suggest that this is particularly valuable because much current discussion of culture focuses chiefly on diversity and difference, thus overlooking the implicit social and cultural values at work in all human experience. I build on Sullivan and Fromm’s insights to illustrate the significance of early interpersonal psychoanalysis for the sociocultural turn in contemporary psychoanalytic theory and practice.
This article addresses the tension between the defining impact of culture on human experience and the role of the person as agent. Focusing on the sociocultural turn in psychoanalysis, it examines the evolution of the notions of culture and the person, first in the culturalist psychoanalysis of Harry Stack Sullivan and Erich Fromm, and then in the hermeneutic turn of recent psychoanalysis. The article maintains that persons are inescapably shaped by the culture in which they live. At the same time, the manner in which individual psychology is organized and experienced within culture points to the role of agency as an emergent human potential. The article suggests that culture and personal agency are mutually reinforcing and that psychoanalysis must account for both. It develops a hermeneutic perspective as an alternative to postmodernism and concludes by outlining a post-Cartesian approach in psychoanalysis that addresses culture and the person in a non-dualistic fashion.