The Erich Fromm Reader: Readings Selected and Edited by Rainer Funk

by Erich Fromm, Rainer Funk (Editor), Joel Kovel (Foreword by)

Overview

Fromm’s basic idea was to look at the individual as a social being and to look at society as an ensemble of many individuals who have not only common ideas and convictions based on a common practice of life but also a common psychic structure. With his concept of “social character” he created a new interdisciplinary thinking presented in this reader.
 
The Erich Fromm Reader exhibits the true genius of an original thinker in seeing the connections between overlapping knowledge from many different fields. Here interdisciplinarity is not only a lip service but the impact of Erich Fromm’s unique social psychological notion.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781497693494
Publisher:	Open Road Distribution
Publication date:	12/09/2014
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	109
File size:	267 KB

About the Author

Erich Fromm (1900–1980) was a bestselling psychoanalyst and social philosopher whose views about alienation, love, and sanity in society—discussed in his books such as Escape from Freedom, The Art of Loving, The Sane Society, and To Have or To Be?—helped shape the landscape of psychology in the mid-twentieth century. Fromm was born in Frankfurt, Germany, to Jewish parents, and studied at the universities of Frankfurt, Heidelberg (where in 1922 he earned his doctorate in sociology), and Munich. In the 1930s, he was one of the most influential figures at the Frankfurt Institute of Social Research. In 1934, as the Nazis rose to power, he moved to the United States. He practiced psychoanalysis in both New York and Mexico City before moving to Switzerland in 1974, where he continued his work until his death.
 
 

 

Erich Fromm (1900–1980) was a bestselling psychoanalyst and social philosopher whose views about alienation, love, and sanity in society—discussed in his books such as Escape from Freedom, The Art of Loving, The Sane Society, and To Have or To Be?—helped shape the landscape of psychology in the mid-twentieth century. Fromm was born in Frankfurt, Germany, to Jewish parents, and studied at the universities of Frankfurt, Heidelberg (where in 1922 he earned his doctorate in sociology), and Munich. In the 1930s he was one of the most influential figures at the Frankfurt Institute of Social Research. In 1934, as the Nazis rose to power, he moved to the United States. He practiced psychoanalysis in both New York and Mexico City before moving to Switzerland in 1974, where he continued his work until his death.

Read an Excerpt

The Erich Fromm Reader

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By Rainer Funk

OPEN ROAD INTEGRATED MEDIA

Copyright © 1985 Estate of Erich Fromm
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-4976-9349-4

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CHAPTER 1

The Approach to a Psychoanalytic Social Psychology

It is one of the essential accomplishments of psychoanalysis that it has done away with the false distinction between social psychology and individual psychology. On the one hand, Freud emphasized that there is no individual psychology of man isolated from his social environment, because an isolated man does not exist. Freud knew no homo psychologies, no psychological Robinson Crusoe, like the economic man of classical economic theory. On the contrary, one of Freud's most important discoveries was the understanding of the psychological development of the individual's earliest social relations—those with his parents, brothers, and sisters. "It is true," Freud wrote,

... that individual psychology is concerned with the individual man and explores the paths by which he seeks to find satisfaction for his instinctual impulses; but only rarely and under certain exceptional conditions is individual psychology in a position to disregard the relations of this individual to others. In the individual's mental life someone else is invariably involved, as a model, as an object, as a helper, as an opponent; and so from the very first individual psychology, in this extended but entirely justifiable sense of the words, is at the same time social psychology as well.

On the other hand, Freud broke radically with the illusion of a social psychology whose object was "the group." For him, "social instinct" was not the object of psychology any more than isolated man was, since it was not an "original and elemental" instinct; rather, he saw "the beginning of the psyche's formation in a narrower circle, such as the family." He has shown that the psychological phenomena operative in the group are to be understood on the basis of the psychic mechanisms operative in the individual, not on the basis of a "group mind" as such.

The difference between individual and social psychology is revealed to be a quantitative and not a qualitative one. Individual psychology takes into account all determinants that have affected the lot of the individual, and in this way arrives at a maximally complete picture of the individual's psychic structure. The more we extend the sphere of psychological investigation—that is, the greater the number of men whose common traits permit them to be grouped—the more we must reduce the extent of our examination of the total psychic structure of the individual members of the group.

The greater, therefore, the number of subjects of an investigation in social psychology, the narrower the insight into the total psychic structure of any individual within the group being studied. If this is not recognized, misunderstandings will easily arise in the evaluation of the results of such investigations. One expects to hear something about the psychic structure of the individual member of a group, but the social-psychological investigation can study only the character matrix common to all members of the group and does not take into account the total character structure of a particular individual. The latter can never be the task of social psychology and is possible only if an extensive knowledge of the individual's development is available. If, for example, in a social- psychological investigation it is asserted that a group changes from an aggressive-hostile attitude toward the father figure to a passive-submissive attitude, this assertion means something different from the same statement when made of an individual in an individual-psychological investigation. In the latter case, it means that this change is true of the individual's total attitude; in the former, it means that it represents an average characteristic common to all the members of the group, which does not necessarily play a central role in the character structure of each individual. The value of social-psychological investigation, therefore, cannot lie in the fact that we acquire from it a full insight into the psychic peculiarities of the individual members, but only in the fact that we can establish those common psychic tendencies that play a decisive role in their social development.

The overcoming of the theoretical opposition between individual and social psychology accomplished by psychoanalysis leads to the judgment that the method of a social-psychological investigation can be essentially the same as the method which psychoanalysis applies in the investigation of the individual psyche. It will, therefore, be wise to consider briefly the essential features of this method, since it is of significance in the present study.

Freud proceeds from the view that in the causes producing neuroses—and the same holds for the instinctual structure of the healthy—an inherited sexual constitution and the events that have been experienced form a complementary series:

At one end of the series are the extreme cases of which you could say with conviction: these people, in consequence of the singular development of their libido, would have fallen ill in any case, whatever they had experienced and however carefully their lives had been sheltered. At the other end there are the cases, as to which, on the contrary,, you would have had to judge that they would certainly have escaped falling ill if their lives had not brought them into this or that situation. In the cases lying within the series a greater or lesser amount of predisposition in the sexual constitution is combined with a lesser or greater amount of detrimental experience in their lives. Their sexual constitution would not have led them into a neurosis if they had not had these experiences, and these experiences would not have had a traumatic effect on them if their libido had been otherwise disposed.

For psychoanalysis, the constitutional element in the psychic structure of the healthy or of the ill person is a factor that must be observed in the psychological investigation of individuals, but it remains intangible. What psychoanalysis is concerned with is experience; the investigation of its influence on emotional development is its primary purpose. Psychoanalysis is aware, of course, that the emotional development of the individual is determined more or less by his constitution; this insight is a presupposition of psychoanalysis, but psychoanalysis itself is concerned exclusively with the investigation of the influence of the individual's life situation on his emotional development. In practice this means that for the psychoanalytic method a maximum knowledge of the individual's history—mainly of his early childhood experiences but certainly not limited to them—is an essential prerequisite. It studies the relation between a person's life pattern and the specific aspects of his emotional development. Without extensive information concerning the individual's life pattern, analysis is impossible. General observation reveals, of course, that certain typical expressions of behavior will indicate typical life patterns. One could surmise corresponding patterns by analogy, but all such inferences would contain an element of uncertainty and would have limited scientific validity. The method of individual psychoanalysis is therefore a delicately "historical" method: the understanding of emotional development on the basis of knowledge of the individual's life history.

The method of applying psychoanalysis to groups cannot be different. The common psychic attitudes of the group members are to be understood only on the basis of their common patterns. Just as individual psychoanalytic psychology seeks to understand the individual emotional constellation, so social psychology can acquire an insight into the emotional structure of a group only by an exact knowledge of its life pattern. Social psychology can make assertions only concerning the psychic attitudes common to all; it therefore requires the knowledge of life situations common to all and characteristic for all.

If the method of social psychology is basically no different from that of individual psychology, there is, nevertheless, a difference which must be pointed out.

Whereas psychoanalytic research is concerned primarily with neurotic individuals, social-psychological research is concerned with groups of normal people.

The neurotic person is characterized by the fact that he has not succeeded in adjusting himself psychically to his real environment. Through the fixation of certain emotional impulses, of certain psychic mechanisms which at one time were appropriate and adequate, he comes into conflict with reality. The psychic structure of the neurotic is therefore almost entirely unintelligible without the knowledge of his early childhood experiences, for, due to his neurosis—an expression of his lack of adjustment or of the particular range of infantile fixations—even his position as an adult is determined essentially by that childhood situation. Even for the normal person the experiences of early childhood are of decisive significance. His character, in the broadest sense, is determined by them, and without them it is unintelligible in its totality. But because he has adjusted himself psychically to reality in a higher degree than the neurotic, a much greater part of his psychic structure is understandable than in the case of the neurotic. Social psychology is concerned with normal people, upon whose psychic situation reality has an incomparably greater influence than upon the neurotic. Thus it can forgo even the knowledge of the individual childhood experiences of the various members of the group under investigation; from the knowledge of the socially conditioned life pattern in which these people were situated after the early years of childhood, it can acquire an understanding of the psychic attitudes common to them.

Social psychology wishes to investigate how certain psychic attitudes common to members of a group are related to their common life experiences. It is no more an accident in the case of an individual whether this or that libido direction dominates, whether the Oedipus complex finds this or that outlet, than it is an accident if changes in psychic characteristics occur in the psychic situation of a group, either in the same class of people over a period of time or simultaneously among different classes. It is the task of social psychology to indicate why such changes occur and how they are to be understood on the basis of the experience common to the members of the group.

CHAPTER 2

Social Psychology as a Combination of Psychoanalysis and Historical Materialism

The theory of society with which psychoanalysis seems to have both the greatest affinity and also the greatest differences is historical materialism.

They seem to have the most points of contact because they both are materialistic sciences. They do not start from "ideas" but from earthly life and needs. They are particularly close in their appraisal of consciousness, which is seen by both as less the driving force behind human behavior than the reflection of other hidden forces. But when it comes to the nature of the factors that truly condition man's consciousness, there seems to be an irreconcilable opposition between the two theories. Historical materialism sees consciousness as the expression of social existence; psychoanalysis sees it as determined by instinctual drives. Certain questions are unavoidable: Do the two views contradict each other? If not, how are they related? Can the use of the psychoanalytic method enrich historical materialism? If so, how? [...]

Psychoanalysis [...] seeks to know the psychic traits common to the members of a group and to explain these common psychic traits in terms of shared life experiences. These life experiences, however, do not lie in the realm of the personal or the accidental—the larger the group is, the more this holds true—but rather they are identical with the socioeconomic situation of this particular group. Thus analytical social psychology seeks to understand the instinctual apparatus of a group, its libidinous and largely unconscious behavior, in terms of its socioeconomic structure. [...]

Applying the method of psychoanalytic individual psychology to social phenomena, we find that the phenomena of social psychology are to be understood as processes involving the active and passive adaptation of the instinctual apparatus to the socioeconomic situation. In certain fundamental respects, the instinctual apparatus itself is a biological given; but it is highly modifiable. The role of primary formative factors goes to the economic conditions. The family is the essential medium through which the economic situation exerts its formative influence on the individual's psyche. The task of social psychology is to explain the shared, socially relevant, psychic attitudes and ideologies—and their unconscious roots in particular—in terms of the influence of economic conditions on libido strivings.

So far, then, the method of analytic social psychology seems to dovetail with the method of Freudian individual psychology and with the requirements of historical materialism. But new difficulties arise when this method is confused with an erroneous but widespread interpretation of the Marxist theory: the notion that historical materialism is a psychological theory or, more specifically, an economistic psychology. [...]

The idea that the "acquisitive drive" is the basic or only motive of human behavior is the brainchild of bourgeois liberalism, used as a psychological argument against the possibility of the realization of socialism. Marx's petit bourgeois interpreters interpreted his theory as an economistic psychology. In reality, historical materialism is far from being a psychological theory; its psychological presuppositions are few and may be briefly listed: Men make their own history; needs motivate men's actions and feelings (hunger and love); these needs increase in the course of historical development, thereby spurring increased economic activity.

In connection with psychology, the economic factor plays a role in historical materialism only to the extent that human needs—primarily the need for self-preservation—are largely satisfied through the production of goods; in short, needs are the lever that stimulates production. Marx and Engels certainly stressed that the drive toward self-preservation took priority over all other needs, but they did not go into any detail about the quality of various drives and needs. However, they never maintained that the "acquisitive drive," the passion for acquisition as an aim in itself, was the only or essential need. To proclaim it a universal human drive would be naively to absolutize a psychic trait that has taken on uncommon force in capitalist society. [...]

When the materialistic view of history talks about economic causes [...] it is not talking about economics as a subjective psychological motive but as an objective influence on man's activity in life. All man's activity, the satisfying of all his needs, depends on the specific nature of natural economic conditions around; and it is these conditions that determine how man shall live his life. For Marx, man's consciousness is to be explained in terms of his existence in society, in terms of his real, earthly life that is conditioned by the state of his productive capabilities. [...]

Psychoanalysis can enrich the overall conception of historical materialism on one specific point. It can provide a more comprehensive knowledge of one of the factors that is operative in the social process: the nature of man himself. It locates man's instinctual apparatus among the natural factors that modify the social process, although there are also limits to this modifiability. Man's instinctual apparatus is one of the "natural" conditions that forms part of the substructure (Unterbau) of the social process. But we are not talking about the instinctual apparatus "in general" or in some pristine biological form, since it is only manifest in some specific form that has been modified through the social process. The human psyche—or the libidinal forces as its root—is part of the substructure; but it is not the whole substructure, as a psychologistic interpretation would have it. The human psyche always remains a psyche that has been modified by the social process. Historical materialism calls for a psychology—i.e., a science of man's psychic structure—and psychoanalysis is the first discipline to provide a psychology that historical materialism can really use.

(Continues...)

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Excerpted from The Erich Fromm Reader by Rainer Funk. Copyright © 1985 Estate of Erich Fromm. Excerpted by permission of OPEN ROAD INTEGRATED MEDIA.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

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Table of Contents

Contents

Introduction by Rainer Funk,
Part I: Studying the Social Unconscious,
1. The Approach to a Psychoanalytic Social Psychology,
2. Social Psychology as a Combination of Psychoanalysis and Historical Materialism,
3. The Dynamic Concept of Character,
4. The Social Character and Its Functions,
Part II: The Discovery of Different Social Characters,
5. The Authoritarian Character,
6. The Marketing Orientation,
7. The Necrophilous Character,
Part III: The Study of Mother Right and Its Significance for Social Psychology,
8. The Significance of the Theory of Mother Right for Today,
9. The Theory of Mother Right and Social Psychology,
Part IV: A New View of Society,
10. The Social Unconscious,
11. The Sick Society: On the Pathology of Normalcy,
12. Steps to a New Society,
Part V: Another View of Human Nature,
13. On the Search for the Nature of Man,
14. Freedom and the Growth of the Self,
15. The Art of Loving,
16. Self-Love, Selfishness, Selflessness,
Part VI: Faith in Humanity,
17. The Humanistic Credo,
18. Authoritarian versus Humanistic Religion,
19. Religious Experience and the Concept of God,
20. De-Repression and Enlightenment: Psychoanalysis and Zen Buddhism,
Acknowledgments,
Index,