THE LIVES OF ERICH FROMM
LOVES PROPHET
Lawrence J. Friedman
with assistance from Anke M. Schreiber
COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY PRESS
NEW YORK
Columbia University Press
Publishers Since 1893
New York Chichester, West Sussex
cup.columbia.edu
Copyright 2013 Columbia University Press
All rights reserved
E-ISBN 978-0-231-53106-1
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Friedman, Lawrence Jacob, 1940
The lives of Erich Fromm: loves prophet/Lawrence J. Friedman with assistance from Anke M. Schreiber.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-0-231-16258-6 (cloth : alk. paper)ISBN 978-0-231-53106-1
(e-book)
1. Fromm, Erich, 19001980. 2. PsychoanalystsGermanyBiography. 3. PsychoanalystsUnited StatesBiography. I. Schreiber, Anke M. II. Title.
BF109. F76F75, 2013
150.1957092dc23
[B]
2012024631
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COVER PHOTO: Photo by Liss Goldring, 1970, Erich Fromm Estate
COVER DESIGN: Milenda Nan Ok Lee
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In memory of Ronald Takaki and Adam Sarnecki
Love is the only sane and satisfactory answer to the problem of human existence.
ERICH FROMM
The alternatives he [man] is confronted with are either to escape the burden of freedom into new dependencies and submission, or to advance to full realization of positive freedom which is based upon the uniqueness and individuality of man.
ERICH FROMM
Contents
Gerald N. Grob
Gerald N. Grob
HENRY SIGERIST PROFESSOR OF HISTORY EMERITUS, RUTGERS UNIVERSITY
As a student at the City College of New York in the late 1940s, I enrolled in an honors program in the social sciences. We were required to read about forty or fifty books that had shaped society since the Greeks. Among these books was Erich Fromms Escape from Freedom. I was so taken with this book that I followed up by reading The Sane Society, and in subsequent decades I remained an avid reader of his writings. What I found especially impressive was Fromms ability to write in a way that avoided jargon while presenting important and complex ideas in a clear and coherent manner. Lawrence Friedman has that gift, as this very important and eminently scholarly biography attests. It is one of the most exciting books I have read in years.
My attraction to Fromms writings grew out of my background. As a child of parents who came from Eastern Europe, I attended Hebrew school for a number of years, where I was exposed to the Talmud and especially the prophetic tradition within Judaism. Friedmans volume shows us with clarity and an eye for nuance how Fromm exemplified this tradition; he was a critic of society while at the same holding out the hope that a better future was possible. Living at a time when the world seemed threatened by nuclear annihilation, Fromm was unable to limit himself to a life of scholarly writing and contemplation or psychoanalytic practice. During the height of the Cold War, Friedman has discovered that Fromm had caught the attention of President John F. Kennedy and may have helped modify the presidents belligerent rhetoric. Indeed, Kennedy subsequently began to call for coexistence and nuclear disarmament with words, phrases, and logic that resembled Fromms. During these dangerous years, Fromm maintained regular contact with important policy makers such as Adlai Stevenson and William Fulbright and often testified before congressional committees on developments in postwar Germany, his specialty in international relations. As well, Fromm enjoyed contacts with heads of state in several countries. All of this was part of an effort to bridge the gap between high government officials and human rights and peace activists. Indeed, he was a founder and major funder of the National Committee for a Sane Nuclear Policy and then Amnesty International. Based upon the remarkably thorough research for which he is known, Friedmans biography is the first to reveal these important personal and institutional connections.
Fromms early life shaped much of his subsequent thinking. We have a richly textured and closely documented analysis of that early life in all of its complexitiesanother first for this remarkable volume. His anxietyridden father and sometimes depressed mother provoked him to attempt to break free of a dysfunctional household. These experiences ultimately shaped his adult focus on social character. Unlike Freud, who emphasized the role of libidinal energy in shaping individual personality, Fromm increasingly stressed that humans are social beings whose lives are also shaped by social structure and culture. Such views were regarded in orthodox psychoanalytic circles as a form of heresy, even as Freud sometimes found them worth consideringand said as much. Nevertheless, by the mid-to-late 1930s, after Fromm had done much to move his endangered colleagues in the Frankfurt Institute for Social Research out of Nazi Germany and to the safety of the Columbia University campus, Freud and Fromm seemed to part increasingly (never totally) intellectual company. Fromm was moving too fast and too far from the perspectives of Freuds psychoanalytically orthodox associates. During the mid-1950s, he was accused by Herbert Marcusea friend from his years at the Frankfurt Instituteof having purportedly emasculated psychoanalysis by abandoning Freuds essential insights. Friedman explains why Marcuses critique was off the mark. More generally, he portrays the Fromm-Freud relationship in more complex terms than any other scholar, showing important areas of accord at times even as, over the long haul, the theoretical differences grew. It was more a changing conceptual dance than a mutually dismissive relationship. Indeed, the two may have made direct contact in Baden Baden to discuss their theoretical perspectives. Once again, we see the remarkable depth and sophistication of this biography. Coupled with much new evidence, exciting new interpretations abound.
