Erich Fromms career as a psychotherapist, academician, author of influential studies on

individual and social psychology, peace activist and proponent of humanist socialism
spanned five decades and two continents.
Erich Seligmann Fromm was born on 23 March 1900 in Frankfurt/Main as the only child
of Naphtali (1869-1933) and Rosa Fromm, ne Krause (1877-1959). Naphtali Fromm
owned a flourishing wine business in Frankfurts large Jewish community and was one of
the founders of the Hermann Cohen Lodge. Erich Fromms family descended from a long
line of rabbis, and his father hoped he would follow in their path, whereas his mother
wanted him to become a pianist. Neither came to pass. During his formative years, Erich
Fromm was steeped in Judaism: he began reading the Talmud at age thirteen, and he
pursued daily Talmud studies until 1926 when he abandoned orthodoxy. His early
development was influenced by the thinkers he encountered in Frankfurt Jewish circles:
the philosopher Ernst Bloch - whose Spirit of Utopia (1918) he read in high school,
Martin Buber, Franz Rosenzweig, Ernst Simon and Siegfried Kracauer.
In 1918 Fromm enrolled at Frankfurt University as a student of law. After two semesters,
he changed his field of study and transferred to Heidelberg University where he read
psychology, sociology and philosophy, the latter with the existentialist philosopher Karl
Jaspers and the neo-Kantian Heinrich Rickert. Fromm wrote his dissertation Das jdische
Gesetz. Ein Beitrag zur Soziologie des Diasporajudentums [Jewish Law: A Contribution
on the Sociology of Diaspora Judaism, 1925] under the direction of the sociologist Alfred
Weber. During his studies, Fromm remained active in the Frankfurt Jewish community.
He lectured at the Free Jewish Academy, maintained contact with Rosenzweig and Buber
(whose I and Thou [1923] shaped his own focus on inter-personal relationships), and he
met Gershom Sholem, Walter Benjamin and Leo Lwenthal. In 1926 Fromm married the
psychotherapist Frieda Reichmann. They were divorced in 1930.
From 1926 to 1929 Fromm studied psychology and psychiatry in Munich and in
Frankfurt, completing his training at the Berlin Psychoanalytical Institute in 1929/30. In
Berlin, where he opened his own psychoanalytical practice, Fromm met the Marxist
psychologist and cultural critic Wilhelm Reich. It was through Reich and the Belgian
socialist Henrik de Man, author of The Psychology of Marxism (1928), that Fromm
passionately immersed himself in Marxist thought. In 1930 he joined the group of superb
young Marxist scholars assembled by Max Horkheimer at the Frankfurt Institute for
Social Research as the Institutes specialist for psycho-sociological research and thus
became part of what later was to be called Frankfurt School of Critical Theory.
Fromms association with the Institute lasted nine years. Poor health interrupted his work
from 1931 to 1932 when he spent a year in a Davos sanatorium to fight tuberculosis, and
he fell ill again in 1938 and went back to Davos for several months of recuperation.
During his tenure at the Institute, Fromm developed his original method of socio-
psychology, combining Marx and Freud with impulses from Reich, de Man, Horkheimer
and the cross-currents of emerging Critical Theory. In the inaugural volume (1932) of
Horkheimers Zeitschrift fr Sozialforschung [Journal for Social Research] Fromm
published two programmatic articles: ber Methode und Aufgabe einer analytischen
Sozialpsychologie [On the Methods and Goals of Analytical Social Psychology] and
Die psychoanalytische Charakterologie und ihre Bedeutung fr die Sozialpsychologie
[Psychoanalytical Characterology and its Relevance to Social Psychology]. These
innovative studies contain the methodological foundations of his work in the decades to
come. Psychoanalysis, argues Fromm, must augment Dialectical Materialism to elucidate
the effect of material conditions on human consciousness and to analyze ideologies in
terms of their libidinal properties. His theory of the social character (the sum of the
character traits typical of all human beings who live in [a given] society) emerges here
for the first time.
In 1933 the Frankfurt Institute was shut down by the National Socialists and eventually
relocated in New York under the auspices of Columbia University. At this time Fromm
was already in the United States. He had lectured at the Chicago Institute of
Psychoanalysis in 1933 and remained there until the fall of 1934. He also resumed his
work as a psychoanalyst and opened a practice in New York City, which he maintained
for many years. After 1937, Fromms activities at the Institute decreased. In 1939 he
resigned from his post. As opposed to his former colleagues at the Institute, he had fully
adapted to life in the New World, and his integration in American society provided him
with the insights for his acute analysis of this societys foundations. Fromm was soon
integrated in American academia: 1940/41 he taught at Columbia University, in 1941 he
joined the faculty at Bennington College, where he taught psychoanalysis until 1950. He
was one of the founders of the William Alanson White Institute of Psychiatry,
Psychoanalysis and Psychology, and taught there from 1946 to 1966. In 1944 he married
Henny Gurland.
Escape from Freedom (1941) [published as The Fear of Freedom in London, 1942] was
Fromms breakthrough as a writer. It is commonly held that he deployed his Marxist-
Freudian social and cultural critique here for the first time, but this is not true: the book
rests firmly on his studies published in German. There is, however, a striking contrast
between his earlier and the later texts: whilst the academic studies are austere, stringent
and lean, the later books can be hampered by terminological imprecision, frequent
recapitulation and redundancy. Fromm wanted to address a lay readership, and the
rephrasing of major points was certainly part of his persuasive textual strategy: the result
is a modified Socratic or Talmudic form of hermeneutic argumentation. This said,
Escape from Freedom is a monumental contribution to modern, philosophically and
psychologically informed sociology. In a three-step pattern typical for his subsequent
books, Fromm provides the historical framework for his observation of individual and
collective character changes from the middle ages through modern times (chapters I-III),
a diagnostic analysis of modern individuals and the neurotic tendencies inherent in the
social character (chapters IV-V), and finally a comparison of the characterologies of
people living in different social systems (chapters VI-VII). The book offers many insights
into the complex interplay between individual character traits and the social character as
a whole formed by the given socio-economic apparatus. It culminates in a beautiful
utopian vision of an ideal state populated with free and self-reliant humans.
On the basis of this impressive survey of the human condition in the twentieth century,
Fromms ensuing works set out to explore in depth three distinctly different but
interrelated facets of human existence: a) the human soul, philosophy and the
subconscious with the following texts: Man for Himself (1947); Psychoanalysis and
Religion (1950), The Forgotten Language (1951), Sigmund Freuds Mission (1959), Zen
Buddhism and Psychoanalysis (1960), Marxs Concept of Man (1961), The Heart of Man
(1964), You Shall be as Gods (1966), Greatness and Limitations of Freuds Thought
(1979); b) aspects of political and social life as treated in: The Sane Society (1955) and
May Man Prevail? (1961); and c) the practice of living in these texts: The Art of Loving
(1956), Beyond the Chains of Illusion (1962), The Revolution of Hope (1968), To Have
or to Be? (1976). His magnum opus, The Anatomy of Human Destructiveness (1973),
stands apart as his most incisive investigation of the necrophilous character-orientation
and also through its scholarly methodology.
With the publication of Escape from Freedom, Fromm became a celebrity in American
intellectual life. He was chosen (as C.G. Jung had been in 1937) Terry Lecturer at Yale
University in 1948/49, and later had appointments at Michigan State University and New
York University. The failing health of Henny Gurland-Fromm prompted a move to
Mexico City in 1950, where Fromm was appointed professor of psychoanalysis at the
National Autonomous University, a position he held until his retirement in 1965. During
the 1950s and 1960s Fromm commuted regularly to the United States. After his wifes
death in 1952, he married Annis Freeman in 1953. The couple moved to Guernavaca in
1956, where they resided until 1969. In Man for Himself, his central work (Rainer
Funk), Fromm provides the ethical foundations of his characterology. The sequel,
Psychoanalysis and Religion, propounds humanistic ethics. For the ethical and religious
studies, the influence of Aristotle, the medieval mystic Master Eckhart, Benedictus de
Spinoza (particularly his Ethica Nicomachea), and later Zen Buddhism became of prime
importance. His two studies of Freud present a critical revision of Freudianism. The
perceptive Sigmund Freuds Mission led to Fromms tacit expulsion from the
International Psychoanalytic Association, a blow sorely felt, and to open hostility from
orthodox Freudian colleagues and associations. Marxs Concept of Man, published at the
peak of the Cold War, is a courageous attempt to acquaint a readership blinded by
propaganda and clich with the ideas of Marx. The text is a cornerstone of Fromms opus
and leads up to Beyond the Chains of Illusion, a highly personal synthesis of Freud and
Marx. The Heart of Man develops in detail the dichotomies (biophilous versus
necrophilous orientations) of his characterology.
During the 1950s and 1960s, Fromm became actively involved in American politics. The
Sane Society can be read as a programmatic platform for his own activism and is one of
his best books: it delivers in its pathology of normalcy a bleak diagnosis of American
capitalism still valid today. Fromm was a prominent figure in the peace movement and in
Eugene McCarthys campaign for the Democratic nomination in the 1968 presidential
election. At the same time, he worked feverishly on the completion of The Revolution of
Hope. McCarthy lost the nomination to Hubert Humphrey, who subsequently was
defeated by Richard Nixon. Fromm, who had overtaxed his strength, fell seriously ill and,
after his recuperation, moved in 1969 with his wife to Locarno. The couple spent the
summer months of the next five years in Switzerland and resided in fall and winter in
Mexico until they permanently settled in the Swiss town of Muralto (at Lago Maggiore)
in 1974. Fromms gradual retreat from North America signaled his realization that in the
United States the time was not ripe for peace, equality and social justice.
Fromms popular books are spin-offs from his theoretical studies on characterology. With
The Art of Loving, a practical application of his productive character orientation, he
became a household name in the Western world. Both Beyond the Chains of Illusion and
The Revolution of Hope (the latter indebted to Ernst Blochs The Principle of Hope
[1959]), a passionate plea for the humanization of technological society, were widely
read. The latecomer To Have or to Be? recapitulates many of Fromms earlier theories
and develops a program to curb rampant production and consumerism in the
industrialized world: steps toward a sane society beneficial for humans. The books
cogent social diagnosis stands in contrast to the ethical remedies it pits somewhat
helplessly against the economic realities of late capitalism.
In the final years of his life, Fromm suffered from ill-health, but he remained an active
presence at symposia on humanism and a public champion of his philosophical positions.
The writing of his theory of human aggression, The Anatomy of Human Destructiveness,
and particularly the completion of To Have or to Be? had severely aggravated his heart
condition. When the city of Dortmund awarded him the Nelly Sachs Prize for outstanding
contributions to cultural life in 1979, poor health prevented him from attending the
ceremony. Erich Fromm died on 18 March 1980 in Muralto of heart failure. The city of
Frankfurt had intended to honor him on the occasion of his eightieth birthday with the
Goethe Medal. His widow accepted the distinction posthumously. In the years after
Fromms death, interest in his works waned. More recently, however, a gradual
renaissance of his theories has proven them as relevant as ever. Founded in 1985, the
Internationale Erich-Fromm-Gesellschaft (International Erich Fromm Society) is
dedicated to further research of his work, and to Fromms hope for a sane global
community of humans.
1

Gerhard P. Knapp, University of Utah
First published 29 November 2004
1
Gerhard P. Knapp, University of Utah, "Fromm, Erich" in The Literary Encyclopedia [online database] Profile first
published 29/11/2004 [cited 9 Dec. 2005]; available from World Wide Web @
http://www.litencyc.com/php/speople.php?rec=true&UID=1643