Analytic Social Psychology as Critical Social Theory. A Reconstruction of Erich Fromm’s Early Work
Article from Margin Notes 1
Introduction
Despite the wide neglect that Erich Fromm enjoys in the reception of Frankfurt School critical theory, his early work was a crucial component in the project of interdisciplinary materialism that the Institute for Social Research pursued under Horkheimer’s direction throughout the 1930s. His dialectical synthesis of Marxist historical materialism and psychoanalysis is inseparable from the collective research of the Institute in general and the work of Horkheimer in particular. In this essay I want to reconstruct Fromm’s early work and thereby show that it stands alongside the work of the doyens of the Frankfurt School in terms of both analytical poignancy and critical depth.
The mode of presentation of this essay roughly traces a progression from the abstract to the concrete—that is, I have tried to organize it such that, after the introduction, the content of each section both presupposes and mediates/concretizes that of the preceding section(s). Therefore I begin, in Section 2 with a relatively abstract and general review of Fromm’s project and its place in the architectonic of critical theory, arguing that Fromm’s project was to theorize materialist mediations in both Marxist and psychoanalytic forms for interdisciplinary critical social theory. Following this, in Section 3 I describe three central concepts for this project of mediation—namely ‘cement,’ the psychic structure of society, and ideology—and how they figure into the overall structure of critical theory chez Fromm. This conceptual work then leads, in Section 4, into an account of the family as an institution which psychologically forms individuals into functional capitalist subjects. Section 5 finally comes to the upshot of the unstable nature of the mediations previously described and outlines three different crisis-tendencies that result from them. In my concluding remarks, I reflect on some limitations of Fromm’s theory.
A little bit of biography and literature review is in order before I get to the main body of my argument. Fromm was treated rather unjustly by the other members of the Frankfurt School. Adorno never liked him; Horkheimer made Fromm his muse for a few years then promptly discarded him; Marcuse handled his theoretical disagreement with Fromm with unnecessary belligerence. The received image of the history of the Frankfurt School has been decisively influenced by the rather negative evaluations of Fromm made by Adorno, Horkheimer, and Marcuse. This negative attitude towards Fromm was maintained even through the rise of Habermasian Critical Theory, transforming from a critique of Fromm’s supposed revisionism and sociologism in Adorno and Marcuse into a critique of his alleged one-dimensional functionalism in Dahmer and Honneth, although Honneth has positive things to say about Escape from Freedom. Martin Jay’s The Dialectical Imagination (1973)—the only comprehensive history of the Frankfurt School written while most of its ‘inner circle’ was still alive and available for comment—gives Fromm his due, but in a backhanded way which makes Jay’s sympathy for the real protagonists of his story, namely Adorno and Horkheimer, very clear. Wolfgang Bonß wrote a number of important and enlightening texts on Fromm as a member of the Institute for Social Research in the late 70s and early 80s, but the picture of ‘interdisciplinary materialism’ reconstructed in these texts is somewhat narrowly Horkheimerian, and the reconstruction effort itself is constrained by a methodologically induced modesty. That is to say, these essays are confined mainly to the interpretation and extrapolation of the programmatic texts of the Institute and do not sufficiently interrogate the relation between the declared programs, the published texts supposedly fulfilling said programs, and the research practice of the Institute in general; such a narrow focus on the programmatic texts is unfortunately common to most engagements with early Critical Theory. Moreover, Bonß's commitment to a Habermasian paradigm in social science, while undoubtedly contributing to the clarity and insight of his analysis on many points, created theoretical blindspots and prejudices with regard to other points, notably the question of functionalism. As for texts, I mainly have in mind his introduction to Fromm's *The Working Class in Weimar Germany* (1984), his contributions to the anthology volume *Sozialforschung als Kritik* (1982), and his article "Kritische Theorie als empirische Wissenschaft: Zur Methodologie 'postkonventioneller' Sozialforschung" (1983). After Bonß’s relatively positive appraisal, Honneth brought up Fromm in The Critique of Power (1985) only to immediately dismiss him as a vulgar functionalist, a charge which shall be strongly challenged further down in this paper.Axel Honneth, *The Critique of Power: Reflective Stages in a Critical Social Theory*, trans. Kenneth Baynes (MIT Press, 1993), 23-4. Wiggershaus’s The Frankfurt School (1995) gives some more attention to Fromm and (thankfully) notes the unkindness with which he was treated by the likes of Adorno, Horkheimer, and Pollock, but the rather zoomed-out perspective of this book prevents any in-depth engagement with Fromm as a theoretician. Moving forward another two decades, John Abromeit’s Max Horkheimer and the Foundations of the Frankfurt School (2011) is probably the most just treatment of Fromm’s contributions to the Frankfurt School thus far, but it is (understandably) limited in its analysis by the focus on Horkheimer, with Fromm entering the picture mainly as a junior partner to Horkheimer. Lawrence Friedman’s biography The Lives of Erich Fromm, unfortunately, often misses the mark when it comes to rigorous intellectual biography: the author at one point describes critical theory as an enterprise building on “Hegel’s dialectic materialism.”Lawrence Friedman, *The Lives of Erich Fromm* (Columbia University Press, 2013), 40. Ultimately, the most comprehensive body of secondary literature on Fromm has come from the pen of his secretary-cum-executor Rainer Funk; his book Life Itself Is an Art: The Life and Work of Erich Fromm (2019) is, despite its short length, perhaps the best single overview of Fromm’s lifework as a whole. Kieran Durkin’s The Radical Humanism of Erich Fromm (2014) is also a strong contender for that title, however.Other authors who deserve recognition for their excellent work on Fromm include Joan Braune, Daniel Burston, Neil McLaughlin, Roger Frie, Michael Thompson, and Fromm's former research partner and co-author Michael Maccoby. Use of Fromm’s archive in writing on him has been sporadic; when the archive has been consulted, this has typically been done for basically biographical purposes. While the release of some previously unpublished texts such as “Die männliche Schöpfung” (1933), The Working Class in Weimar Germany (1937/8), and “A Contribution to the Method and Purpose of an Analytical Psychology” (1937) has shed some light on Fromm’s trajectory in this period, a number of other interesting documents have never been analyzed. In my research for this essay I found several documents in the Fromm papers at the New York Public Library that have deepened my understanding of his early work and the nature of his collaboration at the Institut für Sozialforschung. I use a number of these documents in the reconstruction that follows; the translations of these documents are all my own, and I provide the original German text in accompanying footnotes.There are even a few unpublished texts and notes by Horkheimer in the NYPL Fromm papers. Due to the constraints inherent to being an independent scholar I was only able to spend about a day's worth of work going through the Fromm papers and selecting documents to scan for further close reading; undoubtedly there were some fruitful documents which I did not discover.
This essay is reconstructive-reparative in aim, hence neither strictly doxographical nor critical. I have kept my critical comments and textual wrangling to the notes for the most part. The scope of the essay is confined to a relatively narrow period in Fromm’s work ranging about a decade, roughly from the article “Psychoanalysis and Sociology” (1929) to the book Escape from Freedom (1941). Everything written in this period was produced under the sign of the Institute for Social Research, at which Fromm was chair of social psychology from 1931 to 1939. The working environment at the Institute was intensely collaborative, and all the main members of the Institute reviewed one another’s manuscripts and theories extensively before they were finally published. According to Helmut Dubiel, “no single article appeared [in the Institute’s journal] without having been ratified by the entire [inner] Circle [of the Institute, i.e. Horkheimer, Pollock, Löwenthal, Fromm, Marcuse, and Adorno].”Helmut Dubiel, *Theory and Politics: Studies in the Development of Critical Theory*, trans. Benjamin Gragg (MIT Press, 1985), 176 Fromm and Horkheimer in particular enjoyed an especially close working relationship for several years in the 1930s.Gunzelin Schmid Noerr divides Fromm's history with the IfS into three phases, "(1) die Phase der integralen Mitarbeit Fromms im Institut in Frankfurt, Genf und New York von 1929 bis 1935, (2) die seiner Mitarbeiterschaft unter zunehmender Entfremdung 1936 bis 1939 und (3), nach einer Phase des Schweigens, die der schriftlichen Angriffe und Gegen angriffe seit 1946, in deren Zentrum die sogenannte Kulturismus-Revisionismus Debatte mit Marcuse von 1955/56 stand." (Noerr, Gunzelin Schmid, "Warum wir so handeln wollen, wie wir handeln müssen. Erich Fromm und das Institut für Sozialforschung" in [*Fromm Forum*], 24 (2020), 42.) It is the first two phases which this paper is concerned with. A characteristic example of collaboration from their correspondence is quoted in Erich Klein-Landskron, "Max Horkheimer und Erich Fromm" in *Erich Fromm und die Frankfurter Schule*, eds. Michael Kessler and Rainer Funk (Francke Verlag, 1992), 161-163. This being the case, I have decided that it is justified at points to interpret and cite Horkheimer’s work almost as if it had been written by Fromm, or rather as if both Horkheimer and Fromm were both merely mouthpieces of the collective authorship of the entire Institute. Further grounds for my reconstructive approach are to be found in the well-documented practice of self-censorship among the members of the IfS. This practice was even somewhat expanded in Fromm’s case to include partial censorship of criticism directed at Freud, as such criticism both jeopardized his standing in the International Psychoanalytic Association (he was eventually excluded from the IPA in the early 1950s) and was perceived by other members of the IfS as a politically inappropriate attack on a fellow threatened intellectual. What is the nature of the reconstruction I propose? The task is to chart a course which avoids reducing Fromm to either his early religious and traditional-sociological writings or his later existentialism-influenced work. To this end, I have chosen to read Fromm as part of the Institute for Social Research instead of using his biography as the primary framework for reading. This means that I have bracketed some major areas of his life-work, above all else his ethical thought, in the interest of focusing on Fromm’s more strictly theoretical writings.I have a forthcoming essay on the rational kernel(s) of Fromm's work as a whole forthcoming in the Winter 2024/2025 issue of *Parapraxis*.
Materialist Microfoundations
Fromm dedicated a significant portion of his 1932 essay “The Method and Task of an Analytic Social Psychology: Notes on Psychoanalysis and Historical Materialism” to refuting psychologistic interpretations of the materialist conception of history, which claimed that Marx argued all social action is directly psychologically motivated by economic interests. Some of these interpretations were from those opposed to Marxism, like Bertrand Russell, while others were from important “Marxists” themselves, such as the revisionist politician, Frankfurt professor, and future Nazi collaborator Henri de Man. Against these figures, Fromm argues that historical materialism is not at all psychologistic and involves only a handful of very basic psychological presuppositions, namely these: “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.”Erich Fromm, "The Method and Function of an Analytic Social Psychology," in *The Crisis of Psychoanalysis* (Holt, Rinehart, and Winston, 1970), 150; emphasis in original.
Historical materialism is not a psychologistic theory, but a number of important concepts within historical materialism have significant psychological aspects and are distorted if their psychological dimension goes unaccounted for. Fromm claims that psychoanalytic (social) psychology can explain the mediations which contribute to the reproduction of society—such as ideology—and in this way help make historical materialism a more comprehensive social theory. In modern social scientific terminology, these individual and small-scale phenomena out of which large-scale phenomena emerge are called ‘microfoundations.’ In the debates around Analytical Marxism in the 1980s, the search for microfoundations was associated with a commitment to methodological individualism and a skepticism towards functionalism. Fromm’s critical and psychoanalytic approach to social theory provides an interesting contrast, however: his training as both a Weber-influenced sociologist and a psychoanalyst resulted in a strong commitment to methodological individualism, while his subsequent conversion to Marxism resulted in an equally strong commitment to a critical form of functionalism as developed by the IfS.See the account of Fromm's intellectual-historical background in the German *Geisteswissenschaften* in Daniel Burston, *The Legacy of Erich Fromm* (Harvard University Press, 1991), 99ff. The search for microfoundations of historical materialist critical social theory—i.e., explanations of the large-scale phenomena posited by historical materialism on the basis of the individual as conceived by psychoanalysis—was a crucial part of Fromm’s project in the 1930s.
Microfoundations, certainly, but microfoundations of what? Fromm’s goal was not the production of an action theory capable of accounting for all social phenomena through a universal psychoanalytic account of human motivation. Indeed, the psychoanalytic approach rather militates against attempting such a daring generalization, seeing as it has its origins in the understanding and treatment of specifically pathological mental processes. Fromm’s goal was to analyze and establish microfoundations for a number of different institutions, relations, concepts, and so on which we can today group under the heading of social reproduction or, as Althusser would put it, the reproduction of the relations of production. (Fromm did not use the exact term ‘social reproduction,’ but the concept was used—sometimes verbatim, sometimes in so many words—by other members of the IfS (Horkheimer, Marcuse, Wittfogel, etc.) in their analyses of many of the same phenomena that Fromm focused on, such as ideology and the family.) The point is that his analyses, while playing a mediating and concretizing role in the structure of social theory overall, are still somewhat abstract. They lie within the domain of social theory, not purely empirically descriptive sociology.
The psychic relations and traits which contribute to the reproduction of society (and that they thus contribute) are the result of a reciprocal process of adaptation between the individual psyche and social practice, with the former being in a subordinate position to the latter. The individual psyche is constructed on the foundation of unconscious drives and ‘wants’ these drives to be satisfied. Psychoanalysis, in particular the clinical part, describes a number of different “defense mechanisms” by which ‘thoughts’ (inclusive of ‘feelings,’ ‘desires,’ etc.) are worked over and transformed by the mind: repression, sublimation, transference, displacement, etc.. Anyone making use of these psychoanalytic concepts must, however, resist the temptation to reduce them to empty formulae indifferent to the ‘contents.’ The concept of repression, for example, implies that the repressed contents are in some way psychically displeasing or painful. Because repression is the foundation for the other defense mechanisms, anyone who wants to use a concept such as sublimation or displacement must connect the content of that which is sublimated or displaced back to the original pleasure/displeasure matrix of repression.
Excursus on Fromm’s Relation to Freud
Before moving forward, it is necessary to describe Fromm’s relationship to Freud during this time. He can be characterized as neither heterodox nor orthodox, maintaining the majority of Freud’s conceptual arsenal while also subtly shifting the emphasis and precise meaning of many terms. In 1936 he began to actually revise some of the fundamentals of Freudian psychoanalysis—above all else the theory of libido—and in 1937 produced an essay expounding these revisions. That essay, posthumously published in the volume Beyond Freud: From Individual to Social Psychology (1992), was rejected for publication in the Zeitschrift für Sozialforschung by Horkheimer. The text is interesting from an intellectual-biographical perspective because it represents a transitional stage between the half-hearted adoption of libido theory in his earlier texts and the embrace of ‘interpersonal’ psychoanalysis which strongly characterizes Escape from Freedom and everything afterwards. The 1937 essay is a main point of reference for my reconstruction, as it brings out the critique of Freud implicit in the earlier essays while largely maintaining the systematic coherence of orthodox psychoanalytic terminology. The replacement for libido theory in the text is a theory of object relations, summarized by Fromm elsewhere as being “the person’s (loving or hating) attitudes towards himself or other people he encounters; in a word, they are his emotions, feelings, and attitudes towards the surrounding world in general.”Fromm, "Psychoanalytic Characterology and Its Relevance for Social Psychology," in *The Crisis of Psychoanalysis*, 166. This view of object relations is greatly broadened in comparison to Freud's narrow and fragmentary treatment of the topic. It is a shame that Fromm did not take up Adorno on his request to collaborate on an essay analyzing the psychology of women under capitalism, wherein he intended to argue that women's social position in capitalism led them to unconsciously identify with commodities---see Wolfgang Bonß, *Dialektische Psychologie* (Springer VS, 2018), 141-2. With this in mind, Fromm’s use of the language of libido theory can be translated into a relational idiom with little being lost in the process.
Sections 3 and 4 below continue the march of concretion and detail two major areas of Fromm’s work: what I have termed the ‘psychic structures of social reproduction’ and the family as a key mediating institution in the reproduction of capitalism.
Psychic Structures of Social Reproduction
Brute force and ‘rational’ or ‘egoistic’ interest are not sufficient to ensure the reproduction of society. Distinctively ‘psychic’ factors enter into the picture as well. Horkheimer already marked out this problem—the relation of ‘the psychic’ to the constitution and reproduction of society—as one of the main areas of investigation for the IfS in his 1931 inaugural address.Horkheimer, "The Present Situation of Social Philosophy and the Tasks of an Institute for Social Research," in *Between Philosophy and Social Science* (MIT Press, 1993), 11. This section will reconstruct Fromm’s psychoanalytic characterology and his account of the ‘psychic structure of society,’ relating both to a conception of social-psychic ‘cement’ which is distinct from ideology. Ideology is assumed to be familiar already and is being analyzed in depth in an essay by Sam Thomas also in this issue. This being the case, it is treated here only very schematically, mainly to differentiate it from the other concepts and establish its relation to psychoanalysis.
“Cement”
I begin with cement. While the metaphor of ‘social cement’ was commonplace in social science even during the heyday of the IfS, the first use of the concept in the corpus of the Frankfurt School comes from Fromm: “[the libidinal strivings of individuals] serve as the ‘cement’, [...] without which the society would not hold together, and which contributes to the production of important social ideologies in every cultural sphere.”Fromm, "Method and Function" in *The Crisis of Psychoanalysis*, 158. Fromm uses the adjective “libidinal” here not to define these strivings as narrowly sexual or concerned with physical pleasure, but to distinguish them from the supposedly objective or ‘rational’ interests which individuals and classes are often ascribed. In an unpublished text from 1934 titled “Die gesellschaftliche Bedeutung der Autorität in der gegenwärtige Familie” (“The Social Meaning of Authority in the Contemporary Family”), Horkheimer—perhaps with Fromm over his shoulder, given that the document ended up in Fromm’s papers—gives a more substantive definition of “cement” and sharply distinguishes it from ideology.The document is technically unsigned but was almost certainly written by Horkheimer. It almost exactly mirrors the content and structure of Horkheimer's "Allgemeiner Teil" essay from *Studien über Autorität und Familie* and therefore likely represents an early, schematic outline of that work. This conclusion is further supported by the text's stylistic similarity to Horkheimer's schematic essay "Bemerkungen über Wissenschaft und Krise" in the first volume of the ZfS, which was an early draft that Horkheimer was unable to finish due to an illness. A number of other documents related to the *Studien* also ended up in Fromm's papers; see J.E. Morain, "The Origins of *Studien über Autorität und Familie*" (Critical Theory Working Group, 2024). He defines ‘cement’ as “neither a purely economic moment, nor something detached from the economic base, but rather the inner content of the cultural, social, and psychic powers which work together to ensure that a determinate level of production and reproduction of economic life of human beings is maintained and accepted.”Erich Fromm Papers b. 7 f. 5 / r. 8; "Die gesellschaftliche Bedeutung..." Section I.2. German original: "weder ein rein oekonomisches Moment, noch etwas von der oekonomischen Basis Losgeloestes, vielmehr Inbegriff der kulturellen, sozialen, seelischen Maechte, die in ihrem Zusammenwirken dafuer sorgen, dass eine bestimmte Stufe der Produktion und Reproduktion des oekonomischen Lebens von den Menschen festgehalten und akzeptiert wird." The subsequent paragraph distinguishing ‘cement’ from ideology is worth quoting in full:
[Delineation of cement from ideology.]{.underline} Ideology is false social consciousness and belongs solely to the restricting moments of a social period. Cement can indeed be a productive element, a productive force, yea, in a certain way even an explosive element, just as [it can be] conservative or limiting. There is cement in social orders in which there is no ideology. [The fact] that it has served specific class interests in all previous history, and its correlate class-character, is only one side [of the matter]. Moreover, it contains mechanisms without which we would be incapable of thinking human history.Ibid, Section I.3. German original: "[Abgrenzung des Kitts von der Ideologie.]{.underline} Ideologie ist falsches, gesellschaftliches Bewusstsein und gehoert eindeutig zu den hemmenden Momenten einer geschichtlichen Periode. Kitt kann sowohl ein produktives Element sein, Produktivkraft, ja, [gewissermaessen] sogar ein sprengendes Element, wie auch konservierend oder fesselnd. Kitt gibt es auch in Gesellschaftsordnung, in denen es keine Ideologie gibt. Dass er in aller bisheriger Geschichte in wesentlichen bestimmten Klasseninteressen gedient hat, also sein jeweiliger Klassencharakter, ist nur seine eine Seite. Darueber hinaus enthaelt er Mechanismen, ohne die wir menschliche Geschichte nicht zu denken vermoegen."
The cement concept should therefore be interpreted as designating a functional property of certain psychological (and social, cultural, etc.) relations and traits which enable social reproduction, while ideology is fundamentally conceived as social falseconsciousness, hence as something both distinctively cognitive and limiting.In "Beginnings of the Bourgeois Philosophy of History" (1930), Horkheimer defined the problem of ideology as that of "how the social situation relates to prevailing ideas that come to be recognized as false," also noting that the asserting that a theory is ideological requires an analysis of its social function for support---see Horkheimer, "Beginnings of the Bourgeois Philosophy of History," in *Between Philosophy and Social Science*, 361 and 418, respectively. Horkheimer further specifies that "[e]very human way of acting which hides the true nature of society, built as it is on contrarieties, is ideological," while stipulating that "many illusions [...] are not a form of ideology" in Horkheimer, "Notes on Science and the Crisis," in *Critical Theory*, 7. Horkheimer's early account of ideology has been neatly summarized in Stanisław Czerniak, "Three Interpretations of the 'Ideology' Category. Max Horkheimer's Conception of Ideology," *Dialogue and Universalism* 33, no. 1 (2023). It is still appropriate to say, however, that the Frankfurt School did not have a really *systematic* account of ideology in the 1930s. See Sam Thomas's essay On the Falsity of Prevailing Ideas in this journal issue for further elaboration on and reconstruction of the Frankfurt School's concept of ideology. In the interest of preserving the terminology used by Fromm and Horkheimer, then, “ideology” will here refer exclusively to ideology-qua-false-consciousness. “Cement,” is to be understood as the ‘canalization’ of human drives (“libido”) into activity (hence dispositions, individual psychic structures, etc.) which functionally serves the social process and reproduction of society. It is a property, not a thing, much in the way that the Frankfurt School developed an adjectival concept of ideology.
Psychic Structure
The capitalist’s desire to accumulate, the worker’s consent to exploitation: what are we to make of these? Marx was correct to reduce concrete individuals to mere ‘bearers’ of structurally determined class-roles, but only to a certain extent. It takes a certain kind of individual who has undergone a socially determined process of psychic formation to properly fill these class-roles, execute the duties imputed to them, and, indeed, derive satisfaction from doing so. One of the basic theses of critical theory is that functionalism is not a presupposition of the social process but a result of it. Even ‘rational’ interests must be inculcated.For example, peasants in the Middle Ages would often only engage in wage labor when forced to by conditions of social crisis and widespread poverty, even though many had free time enough to work in periods when wages were higher due to the lower labor supply. They had not been schooled in the 'laws' of supply and demand and were unresponsive to them. Fromm’s analytic social psychology was, at least in part, an attempt to develop concepts suitable for the critical analysis of this process of functionalization from the specific standpoint of social psychology.
Throughout the 1930s, Fromm’s attempt to integrate psychoanalysis and historical materialism largely turned around one specific concept, which he variously called the ‘libidinal structure,’ ‘drive structure,’ and ‘psychic structure’ of society—I will stick to using the phrase ‘psychic structure (of society)’ because it does not imply adherence to libido theory. With regards to historical materialism, Fromm conceived the psychic structure as a more or less distinct ‘level’ which existed between the economic base and cultural-political superstructure and mediated these two formations. The real meaning of the concept is more easily comprehended, however, if one considers it to be more like a ‘dimension’ of both the base and superstructure than an ‘instance’ or ‘level’ unto itself. It is in this sense that I understand the conjunction of Fromm’s claim that “the libidinal structure of a society is the medium through which the economy exerts its influence on man’s intellectual and mental manifestations” with his claim, made in the same paper, that “the realm of human drives is a natural force which [...] is an immediate part of the substructure [i.e. economic base -J.E.M.] of the social process.”Fromm, "Method and Function," in *The Crisis of Psychoanalysis*, 161 and 157. The psychic structure is a “medium” which is simultaneously—and dialectically—constitutive of the things which it mediates, namely the base and superstructure. In the early version of Fromm’s theory, the psychic substance of this medium consists mainly of biologically given psycho-somatic drives and their derivatives, while in the later version it consists of determinate relational orientations that are both historical and specifically psychic (as opposed to psycho-somatic). In both versions, the psychic structure of society has its only ‘support’ in concrete individuals and the institutions they make up; Fromm (and Horkheimer) always rejected the idea of a group-mind or collective unconscious, seeing such concepts as errors which presupposed without mediation the very thing they should have been explaining. Reconstructing Fromm’s somewhat scattered explanations, we can see the the psychic structure as being primarily articulated on three distinct levels: first, as a somewhat amorphous “character matrix” of the psychic traits and orientations which predominate in a given social formation; second, as determinate socially typical character-structures distributed more or less in accordance with the principal forms of social stratification (class, gender, race, etc.); third, as the specific character of concrete individuals that has emerged from their particular life-histories—human living being understood as a fundamentally social process.According to my reconstruction, then, Fromm was correct when he claimed that his later theory of social character was in essence the same as his earlier theory of psychic structure. I must emphasize, however, that the foregoing is a reconstruction of *Fromm's* views. In my opinion, the basically characterological nature of his conception of the psychic structure of society has some limitations when it comes to understanding certain supra-individual and group phenomena.
Analytic social psychology investigates not just how the economic base or infrastructure conditions psychic development, but also how the economy is “psychologically possible” in the first place when considered from the perspective of the mind and its development.Fromm, "Method and Function," in *The Crisis of Psychoanalysis*, 159. I give more attention to this latter problem in the below section on the family, but for now I will just mention one crucial concept for Fromm’s answer to this question: adaptation. In the early 20th century, psychoanalytic theorists developed a distinction between alloplastic and autoplastic adaptation—modification by the organism of its environment and itself, respectively. Marxist psychoanalysts like Fromm and Wilhelm Reich found that the intense social and psychic repression characteristic of class society lead to the predominance of autoplastic adaptation. In other words, the weakness of individuals leads them to consciously and unconsciously adapt their behavior and psyche to be in accord with the demands of society. This means not just that desires necessarily contrathetical to the social order are strongly repressed, but also that desires only ‘accidentally’ opposed to the social order are made more compatible via aim-inhibition, sublimation, and the like.
One thing has to be addressed before proceeding to ideology, namely Horkheimer’s claim that “there is cement in social orders in which there is no ideology.” Fromm and Horkheimer hold out the possibility of a society in which psychic attachment to the social order is not something repressive and distorting but rather fulfilling, even pleasurable insofar as it meaningfully makes use of human potential. Fromm goes so far as to claim that “in a society where services performed for the whole society rather than property are the basis of social esteem, the same narcissistic impulses [which fuel the capitalist drive for acquisition] will find expression as a ‘drive’ to contribute to society in some important way.”Fromm, "Method and Function," in *The Crisis of Psychoanalysis,* 152. Although their references on this point are principally to the mythical matriarchal past described (or imagined) by Johann J. Bachofen, they resonate with the forward-looking utopian visions of Charles Fourier.On this point, see "The Theory of Mother Right and Its Relevance for Social Psychology" (1934) in Fromm,*The Crisis of Psychoanalysis*; "Family Sentiments" by Robert Briffault and "Robert Briffaults Werk über das Mutterrecht" by Fromm in ZfS II ; "Die männliche Schöpfung" in the *Elektronische* *Erich Fromm Gesamtausgabe*; "Authority and the Family" in Horkheimer, *Critical Theory.* Fromm---unlike Horkheimer---also looked towards Margaret Meads ethnographies of non-state societies for examples of "social orders in which there is no ideology." This psychological dimension of utopia was elaborated on by the later Marcuse, as well as thinkers influenced by the Frankfurt School such as Fredric Jameson.Marcuse introduced the theme in *Eros and Civilization* (Beacon Press, 1955), after which it became a hallmark of his thought; Jameson's boldest work on the topic is undoubtedly *An American Utopia* (Verso, 2016).
Ideology
For the Frankfurt School, ideology is false consciousness, and the emphasis here is on false, not consciousness. It is not, as in the work of Gramsci and many other Marxists, an ‘intermediate’ level of consciousness between immediate, commonsensical action and philosophy or science, nor is it a synonym of Weltanschauung. This characteristic conception of ideology has consequences for what an approach to the problem of ideology which is both psychoanalytic and critical-theoretical looks like. In this subsection, I outline the nature of such an approach and how it relates to the critique of ideology.
A crucial distinction must be established before the relation of psychoanalytic inquiry to the problem of ideology can be described. It is the distinction between the production and reproduction of ideology which Wilhelm Reich introduced in his 1932 study of the ideology of sexual morals, The Imposition of Sexual Morality.A translation may be found in Wilhelm Reich, *Sex-Pol: Essays 1929-1934*, ed. Lee Baxandall, trans. Anna Bostock (Verso, 2012.) The production of ideology is, we can say, something specifically historical or diachronic, even if the emergence of this or that ideological current cannot be decisively attributed to any specific individual(s). The reproduction of ideology is concerned with the process by which individuals come to ‘spontaneously’ speak, think, and behave ideologically, i.e. a specific process of social reproduction which can be seen synchronically as part of the machinery of a given social formation. Psychoanalytic inquiry is concerned—here at least—mainly with the reproduction of ideology.Fromm himself does not make the distinction and actually claims that psychoanalysis can explain the "production" of ideologies and "how the economic situation is transformed into ideology via man's drives" in Fromm, "Method and Function," in *The Crisis of Psychoanalysis*, 155, as well as 157 and 162. The essay in which he makes these claims was written, however, before the publication of Reich's book, which was later positively reviewed by Fromm in the *Zeitschrift für Sozialforschung* (ZfS II, 119ff). When Fromm uses the phrase "production of ideologies," it is clear that he is referring to the process by which they become endemic in society, not how they emerge out of an individual's mind. A psychoanalytic inquiry into this process would have to analyze both the ‘why’ and ‘how’ of ideology—that is, both what functional role ideologies play at the level of society and how ideologies function at the level of the psyche (conceived, of course, as a complex drive-motivated entity which is mostly unconscious).In terms of analyzing particular ideologies, Fromm spent the most of his energy in the 1930s working on bourgeois-protestant ideology; the texts "Psychoanalytic Characterology and its Reference for Social Psychology" (1932), translated in *The Crisis of Psychoanalysis* and *Escape from Freedom* (1941) are the bookending examples of this decade-long research project. Both of these questions, in the context of psychoanalysis, imply the necessity of going ‘beneath’ the level of ideology conceived as discursive-cognitive and investigating the socially typical (unconscious) psychic traits which form the psychic terrain, as it were, of individual socially important ‘ideologies’ and of ‘ideological’ behavior as such (which cannot always be readily identified with a particular ‘ideology’). Such a methodological distinction between the psychic basis of ideology and ideology as such does not entail an ‘ontological’ distinction between the two or a reduction of one to the other, but it must be kept in mind that the Frommian unconscious is still not so immediately political as the Deleuzo-Guattarian. I say that we must not reduce one to the other, but Fábio De Maria, in De Maria, "Fromm and Horkheimer," *Fromm Forum (English Edition)* 25 (2021), 48---relaying the opinion of Helmut Dahmer in Dahmer, *Libido und Gesellschaft* (Suhrkamp Verlag 1973), 311ff---notes that Fromm seems to reduce ideology to psychology in the very first paragraph of his essay "Über Methode und Aufgabe einer analytischen Psychologie" (1932). In reality, things are not so simple. For reference, the problematic sentence in the original German runs like this: "[Psychoanalyse] hat insbesondere private und kollektive Ideologien als Ausdruck bestimmter, trieblich verankerter Wünsche und Bedürfnisse entlarvt und auch in den 'moralischen' und ideellen Motiven verhüllte und rationalisierte Äußerungen von Trieben entdeckt" (ZfS I, 28). A literal translation, with my emphasis added, would be something like this: "Psychoanalysis has, in particular, unmasked private and collective ideologies as the expression of certain desires and needs *anchored in* [unconscious] drives and discovered hidden and rationalized manifestations of the drives *in* the 'moral' and ideal motives [of these ideologies]." Fromm's 1970 translation of the offending passage, on the other hand, runs like this: "In particular, [psychoanalysis] has unmasked individual and collective ideologies as the expression of specific wishes and needs rooted in the instincts and shown that our 'moral' and idealistic motives are in some measure the disguised and rationalized expression of instinctual drives" (Fromm, *The Crisis of Psychoanalysis*, 135). De Maria therefore relies on an interpretation of this passage which is tendentious even when checked against the original German text and, moreover, contrary to the author's own understanding of it as expressed in the later translation. Even if this singular sentence meant what De Maria claims, it would only thereby represent a contradiction within Fromm's account of ideology, not the principle of it. More generally, De Maria and Dahmer fail to register the importance of collaboration in the working process of the IfS. These authors artificially read Horkheimer and Fromm's texts from the height of their collaboration against one another instead of reading them with an eye to how they mutually reinforce one another.All in all, these disciplinary and methodological factors mean that a psychoanalytic study of ideology is in important respects different from the critique of ideology as such, although both forms of investigation are able to inform one another and contribute to a systematic account of society as a totality in which disciplinary boundaries ultimately dissolve.
The Family as Mediator
In this section I review the complex mediations described by Fromm which make the family a (if not the) decisive influence on the psychic development of individuals and the primary agent of socialization. The family was a central object of research for the IfS in the 1930s, and Fromm was arguably the leading force in this research effort.
From his first essay in the Zeitschrift für Sozialforschung onwards, Fromm makes a decisive break with Freud on the question of the family. Freud’s speculative psychohistory conceived the history of humanity as the eternal return of the Oedipal family, raising the Oedipus complex to the level of an ultimate meaning and reducing society to a mirror of the Oedipal triangle. Fromm, however, rejects this absolute prioritization of the family and conceives it as an institution which is determined by social factors and therefore transmits a ‘meaning’ which is fundamentally social. Thus:
Of course, the first critical influences on the growing child come from the family. But the family itself, all its typical internal emotional relationships and the educational ideals it embodies, are in turn conditioned by the social and class background of the family; in short, they are conditioned by the social structure in which it is rooted. […] The family in the medium through which the society or the social class stamps its specific structure on the child, and hence on the adult. The family is the psychological agency [Agentur; agent in the sense of personal representative -J.E.M.] of society.Fromm, "Method and Function," in *The Crisis of Psychoanalysis*, 142.
The family is the active agent through which ‘social contents’ are transmitted and mediated to the individual psyche in formation (i.e., during childhood): “The family is the essential medium through which the economic situation exerts its formative influence on the individual’s psyche.” Fromm, "Method and Function," in *The Crisis of Psychoanalysis*, 148. A variation on this thesis can be found in a set of Fromm's lecture notes from 1931: "Childhood experiences are the medium through which society shapes the individual!" (Erich Fromm Papers b. 18 f. 1 / r. 17; "Psychologie und Soziologie," p. 8). (German original: "Kindheitserlebnisse sind Medium, durch das die Gesellschaft den Einzelnen formt!") The extent of the family's importance for the socialization and psychological development of individuals was at times a matter of contention between Fromm and the others at the IfS (namely Adorno), and obviously continues to be an important theoretical problem to this day. The focus on the family as an agent of socialization in the works published in the ZfS is only one side of the story with Fromm; his articles on criminology published outside the ZfS testify to his knowledge that the State was another important agent of socialization and hegemony. If Fromm did not spend much time talking about education in his writings from this period, it is probably because his acquaintance Siegfried Bernfeld was already working on a psychoanalytic Marxist account of education in works such as *Sisyphos oder die Grenzen der Erziehung* (1928, first edition 1925). See Gallistl, "Erich Fromm's Early Work on Criminal Justice," *Fromm Forum (English Edition)* 24 (2020), 80-100, for an overview of Fromm's criminological writings. The family crucially mediates the production of individuals and therefore also the reproduction of the entirety of society. At every level of mediation, however, the ‘transmission’ (another way of translating Vermittlung) of contents and forms (socially functional traits) can break down: between society and family; between family and individual; and finally within the individual between conflicting psychic tendencies (or ‘agencies,’ ‘Instanzen,’ etc.). These sorts of breakdowns partially account for the difference between cases of ‘unhealthy’ individual mental pathology and the (air-quotes) normal “quasi-neurotic behavior of the masses,” which Fromm describes as “an appropriate reaction to current and real, though harmful and unsuitable, living conditions.”Fromm, "Politics and Psychoanalysis" (1929) in Bronner and Kellner, *Critical Theory and Society: A Reader* (Routledge, 1989), 218; cf. Fromm, *The Crisis of Psychoanalysis*, 145. At this point in time Fromm had, at least publicly, a sort of 'nominalist' concept of mental health according to which successful adaptation to social reality is the mark of mental health and failure to adapt the mark of pathology. He only developed a comprehensive account of his critical theory of mental health beginning in the 1940s. Fromm further dealt with the family in his contribution to Studien über Autorität und Familie. He argued that the family is the first place where individuals are made to submit to irrational authority and acclimated to authoritarian interpersonal and social structures. Authority in the family prefigures the impositional character of society, the appearance of the social in class society as a factical, quasi-natural force external to the individual.Fromm, "Studies on Authority and Family: Sociopsychological Aspects," *Fromm Forum (English Edition)* 24 (2020), 15. It is at this point that I must voice another disagreement with De Maria's critique of Fromm. De Maria has attempted to disassociate Fromm's analysis of authority from Horkheimer's account of reification and the 'anthropology of the bourgeois era' ("Fromm and Horkheimer," 51 et passim). However, he fails to acknowledge the methodological difference between the ontogenetic analysis of the psychology of authority carried out by Fromm and Horkheimer's historico-philosophical analysis of authority and reification in capitalist society. From a psychoanalytic perspective, the ontogenesis of the authority relation in the infantile situation cannot be meaningfully understood on the basis of reification, but neither can reification be understood on the basis of the infantile situation alone from the perspective of a critical theory of society. The introjection of familial—paradigmatically fatherly—authority takes the form of the superego, but the traits of the superego are then projected onto social authority figures.Fromm, "Sociopsychological Aspects," loc. cit. Compare with W.F.Haug's concept of the "Über-Uns" in *Elemente einer Theorie des Ideologischen* (Argument-Verlag, 1993), 61. This reciprocal process of introjection and projection means that the family and society are inseparably connected at the level of the structure of the unconscious (the superego). The analysis of the connection between family and society leads to a restatement of his earlier thesis on the family as the agency of society:
”[Freud] overlooked, however, that apart from the individual differences that exist in each family, families primarily represent certain social meanings and the family’s most important social function lies in their transmission [Vermittlung, mediation], and not in terms of the transmission of opinions and points of view, but rather in the production of the socially desired psychic structure.”Fromm, "Sociopsychological Aspects," 18.
Fromm’s distinction between the content (“opinions and points of view”) and form (“psychic structure”) of the mind is rather too strong; his analysis of authority shows that form and content cannot be so easily disentangled when dealing with the mind—on what side of this distinction does the superego lie? Nonetheless, Fromm is broadly correct in this critique of Freud, which concludes in the claim that “the father is for the child (in terms of time) the first to transmit social authority, however, (in terms of meaning) he does not model authority but rather imitates it.”Fromm, op. cit., 19.
The psychic traits and structures formed in the experience of childhood, above all else the superego, must be reinforced if they are to persist, however. Already in 1931 Fromm had described the way in which the social stratification of class society repeats the “infantile situation” and its authoritarian structure, thus reinforcing the introjection of social authority as superego.Fromm, *The Dogma of Christ and Other Essays on Religion, Psychology, and Culture* (Routledge, 2004), 12. One can find in Fromm's early work brief sketches of a theory of revolution centered around a dialectic of the oppressed class's Anlehnung (attachment, dependence, 'anaclisis') and Auflehnung (revolt; Fromm's sense is something like 'violent detachment') towards the ruling class. In a revolution, the repressed infantile impulse towards Auflehnung is reactivated, reclaimed, and mastered by the oppressed as they transcend the infantile situation imposed by society. Internal anxiety and guilt on the one hand and external force on the other are mutually dependent and reinforcing; the inculcation of the former in the family is both socially necessitated (as individual survival strategy) and functionally harnessed (as socialization from above) by the dominating social order which makes violence and exploitation its foundational principles. The idea of a ‘purely hegemonic’ society is just as incoherent as the idea of a ‘purely coercive’ one in part because the psychic traits which make hegemony socially possible are originally formed in reaction to both social and ‘private,’ familial coercion.
Focusing solely on the ‘negative’ side of authority and the family would paint an inaccurate picture, however. Fromm draws heavily from Freud’s account of the ambivalence of the child’s relation to the father in his analysis of authority and claims that affection is central to authority: the child wishes to be loved by the father, loves the father, and identifies with him. The family is a central influence for how an individual experiences love. The importance of the family for the individual’s experience and conception of love (its association with authority, its limited character, etc.) should be uncontroversial, but this degree of importance is something socially determined; the experience of the family as a private ‘reserve’ is retroactively reinforced by the heartless and repressive social world of capitalism.See the remarks on the family in Fromm, *Beyond Freud: From Individual to Social Psychology* (American Mental Health Foundation Books, 1992). It is not simply the case that childhood family experiences determines ones psychic structure, rather one’s ‘future’ or ‘destiny’ in society also turns out to have ‘determined’ the nature of their childhood and family insofar as the family serves its function vis-a-vis the reproduction of class, a process to which we can add today the reproduction of gender and race.
Dynamite
In this section I will review Fromm’s early formulations on the psychic factors which contribute to social change, revolution, and crisis. I want to contest in particular Rolf Wiggershaus’s judgment that Fromm’s early formulations about revolution remained at the level of “ungrounded dogmatic assertion.”Rolf Wiggershaus, *The Frankfurt School: Its History, Theories, and Political Significance*. Tr. Michael Robertson (MIT Press, 1995), 120 I begin with what can be called the ‘positive’ side of Fromm’s work on social change—crisis as breakthrough—before engaging with the more ‘negative’ side—crisis as breakdown.
Fromm made some brief but enlightening remarks on the nature of revolutionary collective action in relation to psychological explanation. In the lecture notes for his 1931 course on psychology and sociology, he noted that revolutions are inexplicable from the perspective of ‘rational’ egoistic-utilitarian interest, as “clearly there are millions of people who would rather go hungry for years than uphold this social order.”Erich Fromm Papers b. 18 f. 1 / r. 17; "Psychologie und Soziologie,\" p. 8. German original: "offenbar gibt es Millionen von Menschen, die lieber jahrelang hungern als diese gesellschaftlichen Zustände [aufrechterhalten]." Horkheimer had already made some groping gestures towards this sort of realization in the reflections on revolution contained in *Dämmerung*, a book consisting of aphorisms and brief essays written between 1929 and 1931, e.g. "A Discussion About Revolution;" "Such Is The World;" etc. *Dämmerung* is translated in Horkheimer*, Dawn and Decline: Notes 1929-1931 and 1950-1969*, trans.. Michael Shaw (Seabury Press, 1978). Revolutions fly in the face of economistic, bourgeois explanations of social action, which generally categorize them as irrational outbursts fueled by the foolishness of the masses and the lies of outside agitators. For Fromm, however, people are neither inherently egoistic nor altruistic. Rather, the degree of these sorts of attitudes is determined by dynamic adaptation to the environment and social situation. The revolutionary conjunction of sympathy of the oppressed for their fellow downtrodden and hatred of the oppressed for their dominators is only ever unleashed at a mass scale in certain situations; Fromm considered investigating the problem of exactly which situations are correlate with such psychic upheavals and why to be one of the major tasks of analytic social psychology.
In two early texts, namely The Dogma of Christ and the lecture notes for his 1931 course on psychology and sociology, Fromm seems to suggest that hatred—the class hatred of the oppressed towards their oppressors—is the decisive revolutionary affect, claiming for example that “Psychoanalysis shows [...] that the desire for the ruin of the ruling class can indeed be stronger than the desire for a decent life and security!”Erich Fromm Papers b. 18 f. 1 / r. 17; "Psychologie und Soziologie," p. 8. German original: "Psychoanalyse zeigt, [...] dass sogar der Wunsch nach Sturz der herrschenden Klasse stärker sein kann als der Wunsch nach gutem Leben und Sicherheit!" A few years later in a text titled "Zur psychologischen Struktur der Autorität" Fromm turned his attention to the displacement of "Hass und Aggression" towards authority figures onto socially acceptable targets (Erich Fromm Papers b. 7 f. 6 / r. 9 "Zur psychologischen Struktur..." 7-8). It is notable that these two texts which bring up hatred in relation to the psychological foundations of revolution were written before the Nazi seizure of power, and that the topic all but disappears as time goes on. When he later returned to the "revolutionary character" in his 1963 treatment of the subject, he followed the individual-characterological indications of the 1930s in taking independence, love, critical thinking, etc. to be the most significant traits (Fromm, *The Dogma of Christ*, 128f). While this positive evaluation of hatred can be seen as a necessary corrective to the rosy conceptions of social change found in the revisionist and reformist Marxists of the time, I find that it goes too far. It is my opinion that “the desire for a decent life” is typically a more important motivating factor for revolutionary change than hatred. Moreover, the two factors are not mutually exclusive but would probably be mutually reinforcing in a truly revolutionary situation where, to paraphrase Lenin, the ruling classes are unable to continue ruling and living in the established way and betterment of living conditions therefore necessitates their overthrow.
Fromm also analyzed the ways in which psychic factors contribute to social dysfunction. As has been established, Fromm and the Frankfurt School did not consider functionalism to be a fundamental feature of society, but rather the result of variously adaptative, cooperative, coercive, and manipulative forms of human interaction. The upshot of this is that the functionalization of human drives can break down, and “libidinal energies” can, as Fromm puts it, “cease to be ‘cement,’ and turn into ‘dynamite.’ ”Fromm, "Method and Function," in *The Crisis of Psychoanalysis*, 161. This can happen in a basically ‘revolutionary’ way (see above), or it can happen because the established ‘canalizations’ of human drives “lag” behind the tendential development of society, the necessities of social reproduction, the plans of the ruling class, or some other socially determining factor.See 157 in op. cit. The tendency towards lag is stronger than that towards progress in Fromm’s estimation. This is because the psychic character of mature individuals is relatively fixed, and progressive changes in the socially hegemonic forms of canalizing human drives have to fight against this powerful force of psychic inertia acting in favor of the established order.See also Horkheimer's invocation of "cultural lag" in Horkheimer, "Authority and the Family,".
Between revolutionary progress and inertial archaism, there is one significant ‘ambivalent’ or ‘intermediate’ phenomenon to consider: rebellion. Fromm first drew a distinction between rebellion and revolution early in the 1930s.This distinction was a crucial theme for the IfS in the mid 1930s to early 1940s. It informed their work on antisemitism in general as well as *Einzelstudien* such as Horkheimer's essay "Egoism and Freedom Movements" (1936, translated in *Between Philosophy and Social Science*) and Adorno's study of Wagner, which was written in the 1930s but not published until the 1950s. As noted above, he acknowledged the role of hatred and aggression in the psychic constitution of revolutions early on, but he increasingly paid attention to what could be called the ‘non-aggressive’ aspects of revolution in order to distinguish it from mere rebellion. According to Fromm, rebellion is psychologically distinguished from revolution principally by its attitude towards authority:
We would suggest that this process of defiant revolt [Auflehnung] against heretofore existing authority accompanied by the perpetuation of the authority-structure be called ‘rebellion.’ Fundamentally distinct from this is the destruction of the authoritarian attitude in which the authority-structure itself is destroyed and psychological independence takes the place of psychological dependence. In distinction to ‘rebellion,’ we would designate this process as ‘revolution’ in the psychological sense.Erich Fromm Papers b. 7 f. 6 / r. 9; "Zur psychologischen Struktur der Autorität," 25-6; cf. Fromm " Sociopsychological Aspects," 54. German original: Wir würden vorschlagen, diesen Vorgang der trotzigen Auflehnung gegen bisherige Autorität bei Beibehaltung der Autoritätsstruktur Rebellion zu nennen. Grundsätzlich davon unterschieden ist die Zerstörung der Autoritätseinstellung, wenn die Autoritätsstruktur selbst zerstört wird und anstelle der psychischen Abhängigkeit psychische Selbständigkeit tritt. Zum Unterschied von der Rebellion würden wir diesen Vorgang als Revolution im psychologischen Sinn bezeichnen.
Fromm further stipulates that a psychological “revolution” at the level of society as a whole can only come about as the practice of a class which has overcome its oppression, achieved control over the social process, and instituted a rationally planned social order.Ibid. Fromm was, of course, referring to the proletariat. This plan-based 'control' also provisionally extends to nature, potentially even including a fundamental change in attitude towards the "relative helplessness of human beings in the face of their biologically conditioned fate" and the "old Buddhist trio: aging-sickness-death" ("Zur psychologischen Struktur..." 27). The idea is sometimes expressed by Fromm with the word *Beherrschung* (domination, mastery), while in other instances he uses the less aggressive word *Bewältigung* (coping, management). The latter is more in the spirit of the project of Fromm and the Frankfurt School as a whole.Rebellion, on the other hand, can be summarized as a change in object without a change in the way of relating to objects; the rebel’s defiance towards authority is itself authoritarian. In society, rebellion takes on the appearance of revolution but enacts reaction. The phenomenon of psychological rebelliousness can be considered both a symptom and exacerbating cause of general social (-psychological) crisis, as seen in both the era of the Protestant Reformation and bourgeois revolutions and the then-contemporary era of fascism.
Thus, Fromm’s work counsels us to always keep the ambivalent potential of crisis in mind. Beyond the dichotomy of love and hate, the specific articulation of hatred—as class hatred, xenophobia, or something else—is one of the most important psychic factors in determining the direction of a social upheaval.
Concluding Remarks
What I most hope is that my reconstruction of Fromm’s contributions to Critical Theory helps to substantiate early Critical Theory as an admittedly incomplete but nonetheless systematic and thorough social theory. This is part of the broader project of the Critical Theory Working Group to recover the full extent of Critical Theory from the distorted reception which has prevailed for the last several decades. I also hope that this reconstruction has illustrated some considerable similarities between early Critical Theory and other critical forms of Marxism, such as those of Gramsci, Althusser, and Deleuze and Guattari, all of whom were important reference points for this essay.
I have not been able to capture every dimension of Fromm’s work in this essay. Insofar as I have confronted the problem of the relation of society and nature in his thought during the writing of this essay, I have placed the accent on society and de-emphasized his avowed conception of psychoanalysis as a ‘natural science.’ My intent in doing so was to show that the real content of his work militates against such an understanding of psychoanalysis in particular and the social and human sciences in general.
One consideration I was not able to incorporate into the main body of the essay is that of the need for historical reflexivity in Critical Theory. Fromm’s work contributed to the Frankfurt School’s reflexivity—i.e., its account of its own possibility and actuality—through his analysis of socio-psychological crisis and his theory of matricentricity. The former is simple enough: a group of intellectuals from bourgeois backgrounds joining together to criticize bourgeois society in the name of socialism presupposes some problem in the reproduction of the bourgeoisie at the individual level. Conversely, Fromm claimed that “the psychic basis of the Marxist social programme was predominantly the matricentric complex,” and that Marxism was the “rational, scientific expression if ideas that could only be expressed in fantasy under earlier economic conditions: Mother Earth gives all her children what they need, without regard for merits.”Fromm, "The Theory of Mother Right and its Relevance for Social Psychology," (1934) in *The Crisis of Psychoanalysis*, 134. In other words, Marxism (or Critical Theory) represented the conscious elaboration of the repressed utopian impulse that under the oppressive conditions of class society could previously only be expressed in unconscious fantasy or its artistic sublimation (as well as occasionally in interpersonal love). Fromm’s use of the Bachofenian theory of matriarchy and matricentricity to ground this utopian impulse is emblematic of the characteristic mixture of classical German philosophies such as idealism and romanticism with Marxist materialism that the Frankfurt School developed.
It is worth briefly reflecting on some limitations of Fromm’s early work; there are three that main ones I would like to mention. As discussed above, Fromm had an ambivalent stance towards Freud’s metapsychology of drives. This led to a lack of clarity and precision when he turned to analyzing the most fundamental elements of the psyche, as he only began to develop an alternative metapsychology based in object relations at the very end of his time as a member of the IfS. The theory outlined in the 1937 essay would itself be revised again by the time Fromm published Escape from Freedom in 1941. Escape ended up being the text that properly initiated his mature theory, which was decisively influenced by Harry Stack Sullivan’s ideas and the renewed appreciation for religion that Fromm developed in the US.
Fromm’s lack of direct attention to issues of gender and race/ethnicity is also disappointing, although unexceptional within the context of the IfS in the 1930s. His approach to gender was conditioned by his reception of Bachofen throughout his entire career. While this immunized him to certain misogynistic strands of thought often found in early psychoanalysis and German intellectual culture more broadly, it was in influence which was not entirely productive of analysis of contemporary relations of gender and sexuality.I do not mean to say that Fromm never said anything worthwhile about gender. One of his most interesting early essays, "Die männliche Schöpfung," is an adventurous psychoanalytic feminist analysis of the Book of Genesis and the Babylonian Enuma Elish which uses the ideas of Bachofen (and Groddeck, probably by way of his then-paramour Karen Horney) to critique these texts as patriarchal fantasies motivated by womb envy. He even goes so far as to designate the patriarchal fantasy of man being capable of both siring (*Zeugen*) and birthing (*Gebären*) as "das Urbild alles idealistischen, sich über die natürlichen Bedingungen und Gegebenheiten hinwegsetzenden Denkens," implicitly positing an inseparable link between materialism and feminism thereby (E-GA XI-206). Moreover, Fromm took over the paternalistic homophobia of early psychoanalysis that judged queer people as having failed to fully mature into genital heterosexuality.I refer to the remarks on homosexuality in Fromm, *The Art of Loving* (Harper & Brothers, 1956). Fromm also more tentatively connected homosexuality with sado-masochism and authoritarianism in his essay for the volume *Studien über Autorität und Familie* (Dietrich zu Klampen Verlag, 1963); see Institut für Sozialforschung, *Studien*, 125f. Race appears as an even greater blindspot for Fromm than gender. Even after moving to the United States, he never really addressed the mechanics, history, and psychic impact of racialization in his analytic social psychology. He also largely neglected to analyze a form of prejudice which undoubtedly hit closer to home, namely anti-semitism.However, Roger Frie has recently published a book that compellingly argues for the impact of the Third Reich and the Holocaust on Fromm's life and thought; see Frie, *Edge of Apocalypse: Erich Fromm, Fascism, and the Holocaust* (Oxford University Press, 2024). In accordance with the theoretical position of the IfS at the time, his early social-psychological analyses of fascism and nazism focus more on the family, the dynamics of authority, and the class structure of Germany than anti-semitism and racism.
The third weakness is the complete absence of a theory of groups or group dynamics. This absence is, like the previous limitation, common to the Frankfurt School in general; exceptions are found in Horkheimer’s abortive theory of rackets, related strands of thought from the period of Dialectic of Enlightenment, and Benjamin’s analysis of ‘the crowd.’ Fromm’s analysis of the family—and this also goes for Horkheimer and Adorno’s work on the topic—generally does not lend any autonomy to family as a group-formation. What is present in the family is mainly society and the individual. Again, Fromm’s hesitance to simply accept Freud’s theories was a double-edged sword, as the focus on the influence of social factors in the development of authority and the superego in the family tended to eclipse the important group dynamics which Freud had discovered in his almost a-social theory of the oedipus complex and “family romance.”
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