Cometh the Hour, Cometh the Man--Again: Erich Fromm
I'm working feverishly to get an essay done before month's end for a project at Cambridge University on the sex abuse crisis in the Catholic Church, about which last year I published Everything Hidden Shall Be Revealed: Ridding the Church of Abuses of Sex and Power, which drew extensively on psychoanalytic thought.
For my current project I'm going beyond what I wrote last year thanks to a re-immersion in thought of Erich Fromm, to whom I will return again on this blog, but some of whose books I wanted to draw to your attention even now. I think he's perhaps more relevant than at any time since the 1940s when he made his breakout into the anglophone world.
March 2020 passed--for obvious reasons--without much attention being given to the fact that it marked both the 120th anniversary of the birth, and the 40th anniversary of the death, of Erich Fromm (23 March 1900–18 March 1980). He was wildly popular for much of his life, his books regularly selling millions of copies and being read or quoted by popes and presidents and policy-makers, inter alia. If anyone demonstrated the sociopolitical uses of psychoanalytic thought, well beyond the consulting room, it was and is Fromm.
Today what he may lack in popularity he more than makes up for in ongoing relevance, not least to the politics of these United States but also, as I will soon suggest elsewhere, the politics of the Catholic Church. In some ways we need to return to his thought now more than ever for his insights into the problems of power, authority, freedom, and submission remain perennially relevant.
I bought his Escape from Freedom in the mid-1990s in a cramped used bookstore down the street from my psychoanalyst in Ottawa, where I was an undergraduate student in psychology at the time. That book, Fromm's first of many runaway best-sellers when it came out in 1941, has never left me, and within the past couple of years has come to inform my thinking more and more, aided in part by some similar themes in Adam Phillips.
Like most of Fromm's books, Escape from Freedom was written in a rather loose, breezy, and, if you will, "popular" style, which goes some way to explaining why, as his most perceptive biographer Lawrence Friedman has shown, he was largely ignored at least by North American academics.
But, says Friedman--who has been reading and writing about Fromm since the late 1950s--the 1941 book was and is “the deepest and most important of Fromm’s books.”
I would not dissent from that, but only put in a bid to claim that his posthumously published 1981 book On Disobedience: Why Freedom Means Saying “No” to Power is a crucial, and more concrete, "second volume" if you will to the 1941 book. It is a very short book, but what it lacks in length it makes up for in more concrete and pointed insights, it seems to me, than those found in Escape from Freedom.
In addition to these two books, I have for the first time just finished Fromm's The Anatomy of Human Destructiveness. It is an extremely wide-ranging book, but its sections on sadism and masochism are especially valuable. I will return to this S&M theme in the coming days with some further thoughts on Fromm and also on an outstanding collection, Essential Papers on Masochism, ed. Margaret Ann Fitzpatrick Hanly (NYU Press, 1995).
For my current project I'm going beyond what I wrote last year thanks to a re-immersion in thought of Erich Fromm, to whom I will return again on this blog, but some of whose books I wanted to draw to your attention even now. I think he's perhaps more relevant than at any time since the 1940s when he made his breakout into the anglophone world.
March 2020 passed--for obvious reasons--without much attention being given to the fact that it marked both the 120th anniversary of the birth, and the 40th anniversary of the death, of Erich Fromm (23 March 1900–18 March 1980). He was wildly popular for much of his life, his books regularly selling millions of copies and being read or quoted by popes and presidents and policy-makers, inter alia. If anyone demonstrated the sociopolitical uses of psychoanalytic thought, well beyond the consulting room, it was and is Fromm.
Today what he may lack in popularity he more than makes up for in ongoing relevance, not least to the politics of these United States but also, as I will soon suggest elsewhere, the politics of the Catholic Church. In some ways we need to return to his thought now more than ever for his insights into the problems of power, authority, freedom, and submission remain perennially relevant.
I bought his Escape from Freedom in the mid-1990s in a cramped used bookstore down the street from my psychoanalyst in Ottawa, where I was an undergraduate student in psychology at the time. That book, Fromm's first of many runaway best-sellers when it came out in 1941, has never left me, and within the past couple of years has come to inform my thinking more and more, aided in part by some similar themes in Adam Phillips.
Like most of Fromm's books, Escape from Freedom was written in a rather loose, breezy, and, if you will, "popular" style, which goes some way to explaining why, as his most perceptive biographer Lawrence Friedman has shown, he was largely ignored at least by North American academics.
But, says Friedman--who has been reading and writing about Fromm since the late 1950s--the 1941 book was and is “the deepest and most important of Fromm’s books.”
I would not dissent from that, but only put in a bid to claim that his posthumously published 1981 book On Disobedience: Why Freedom Means Saying “No” to Power is a crucial, and more concrete, "second volume" if you will to the 1941 book. It is a very short book, but what it lacks in length it makes up for in more concrete and pointed insights, it seems to me, than those found in Escape from Freedom.
In addition to these two books, I have for the first time just finished Fromm's The Anatomy of Human Destructiveness. It is an extremely wide-ranging book, but its sections on sadism and masochism are especially valuable. I will return to this S&M theme in the coming days with some further thoughts on Fromm and also on an outstanding collection, Essential Papers on Masochism, ed. Margaret Ann Fitzpatrick Hanly (NYU Press, 1995).
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