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See Also

See Also:

Horney, Karen;

Humanistic psychology;

Personality theory;

Social psychological models: Erich Fromm;

Sullivan, Harry Stack.

Psychology & Behavioral Health

Fromm, Erich

by Everett J. Delahanty Jr.

Born: March 23, 1900, in Frankfurt am Main, Germany

Died: March 18, 1980, in Muralto, Switzerland

Identity: German American psychoanalyst

Type of psychology: Personality; Psychotherapy

Fromm practiced and taught a social psychoanalysis and a socialist humanistic philosophy.

Erich Fromm was born in 1900, the only child of a middle-class, German, Orthodox Jewish family in Frankfurt, Germany. Influenced by the rabbinical tradition of study and by his readings in the Old Testament and in Karl Marx, coauthor with Friedrich Engels of the Manifest der Kommunistischen Partei (1848; The Communist Manifesto, 1850), Fromm became a committed socialist humanist. He received a Ph.D. from Heidelberg in 1922, joining the Frankfurt School for Social Research, which sought to integrate history with the ideas of Marx and with Freudian psychoanalysis under the rubric of critical theory. After training in psychology and psychiatry at Munich, he became a psychoanalyst, graduating from the Berlin Psychoanalytic Institute in 1931. In 1934, Fromm emigrated to America, where he, Karen Horney, Harry Stack Sullivan, and Clara Thompson collaborated in creating a psychoanalytic theory and practice that was oriented to social and cultural factors, arousing the ire of the traditional Freudian psychoanalytical associations.

In 1941, Fromm published his most important work, Escape from Freedom, which presented a historical explanation of social character development, the idea that the needs and pressures of a particular society require a particular adaptation by the members of a society. Because of the historical changes that have occurred since the medieval period, which include the Protestant revolution and capitalism, the Western person has been freed from the shackles and also the security of that preindividualistic period. The contemporary person who does not find productive love and work defends the self from this freedom by creating character traits that favor authoritarianism or submissiveness, leading to the political choice of fascism. The Sane Society (1955) continued this argument and suggested socialistic humanism as a solution to psychological alienation and destructive political options.

Fromm was a prolific and popular writer. Other examples are The Art of Loving (1956), which defined love as active caring for the life and growth of the other, and The Anatomy of Human Destructiveness (1973), which offers Fromm's humanistic psychoanalysis as a preferred mode of explanation to purely instinctual or environmental approaches.

Through his adult life, Fromm studied and practiced a form of Zen Buddhism and worked for the international peace movement, cofounding the National Committee for a Sane Nuclear Policy (SANE) in 1957. He taught at many institutions in the United States and Mexico, influencing other academics in the arts and sciences with his philosophy. In 1974, he and his third wife made their home in Switzerland, where he died in 1980.

Bibliography

1 

Evans, Richard I. Dialogue with Erich Fromm. New York: Praeger, 1981. A personal interview reveals Fromm's important ideas.

2 

Funk, Rainer. Erich Fromm: The Courage to Be Human. New York: Continuum, 2003. A thorough presentation of Fromm's ideas and their early development. Includes a detailed bibliography of Fromm's work and of books written about him.

3 

Landis, Bernard, and Edward S. Tauber, eds. In the Name of Life: Essays in Honor of Erich Fromm. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1971. A festschrift written by younger and distinguished scholars attesting to Fromm's significance.

Citation Types

Type
Format
MLA 9th
Delahanty, Everett J. "Fromm, Erich." Psychology & Behavioral Health, edited by Paul Moglia, Salem Press, 2015. Salem Online, online.salempress.com/articleDetails.do?articleName=PBH_0262.
APA 7th
Delahanty, E. J. (2015). Fromm, Erich. In P. Moglia (Ed.), Psychology & Behavioral Health. Salem Press. online.salempress.com.
CMOS 17th
Delahanty, Everett J. "Fromm, Erich." Edited by Paul Moglia. Psychology & Behavioral Health. Hackensack: Salem Press, 2015. Accessed September 17, 2025. online.salempress.com.