Yearbook / Jahrbuch (1990-1995)
Schriften der Internationalen Erich-Fromm-Gesellschaft e.V.
w04/1993c
>Links between Work, Character, and Education<: The transformational processes presently occurring in the techno-economic bases of industrial life are, inevitably enough, accompanied by changes in social character. Though the significance of work for character formation has declined as other influences have moved to centerstage, >work< still remains an important dimension by which human beings define and anchor themselves in the world. Indeed, this >anchoring through work< allows the characterological status quo in the present to be read off. This essay takes the Frommian concept of social character as its departure point, asking what work experiences lead to what character structures and also what work ethic results from these characterological features. An analysis is given of the social-characterological conditions necessarily imported by workers into their job situations, simply in order to break even in an evolving industrial labor process marked by structural unemployment. More stringent vocational requirements, plus an increased release from the coercion of having to work for one's daily bread, pose a real danger for one's psychic balance and make flexibility an imperative. If the identity crisis brought on by the deprivation of work is to be mastered, new vocational outlets must be developed that are removed from financial remuneration and accountability – as an alternative to work in the traditional sense. At the same time, jobs and wages need to be uncoupled and a society-wide minimum income guaranteed. These transformational processes are giving rise to a >post-industrial character structure< principally characterized, in its productive variants, by flexibility andsocial competence; moreover, its behavior patterns are loosened up by quality-orientated, diversified job (or other vocational) requirements capable of appealing to the whole person.
w02/1991d
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.
w01/1990i
>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.