Reclaiming the Sane Society IMAGINATION AND PRAXIS: CRITICALITY AND CREATIVITY IN EDUCATION AND EDUCATIONAL RESEARCH VOLUME 2 SERIES EDITORS Tricia M. Kress Robert L. Lake The University of Massachusetts Boston Georgia Southern University 100 Morrissey Blvd, W-1-77D College of Education, Box 8144 Boston, MA 02125, USA Statesboro, GA 30460, USA SCOPE Current educational reform rhetoric around the globe repeatedly invokes the language of 21st century learning and innovative thinking while contrarily re-enforcing, through government policy, high stakes testing and international competition, standardization of education that is exceedingly reminiscent of 19th century Taylorism and scientific management. Yet, as the steam engines of educational “progress” continue down an increasingly narrow, linear, and unified track, it is becoming increasingly apparent that the students in our classrooms are inheriting real world problems of economic instability, ecological damage, social inequality, and human suffering. If young people are to address these social problems, they will need to activate complex, interconnected, empathetic and multiple ways of thinking about the ways in which peoples of the world are interconnected as a global community in the living ecosystem of the world. Seeing the world as simultaneously local, global, political, economic, ecological, cultural and interconnected is far removed from the Enlightenment’s objectivist and mechanistic legacy that presently saturates the status quo of contemporary schooling. If we are to derail this positivist educational train and teach our students to see and be in the world differently, the educational community needs a serious dose of imagination. The goal of this book series is to assist students, practitioners, leaders, and researchers in looking beyond what they take for granted, questioning the normal, and amplifying our multiplicities of knowing, seeing, being and feeling to, ultimately, envision and create possibilities for positive social and educational change. The books featured in this series will explore ways of seeing, knowing, being, and learning that are frequently excluded in this global climate of standardized practices in the field of education. In particular, they will illuminate the ways in which imagination permeates every aspect of life and helps develop personal and political awareness. Featured works will be written in forms that range from academic to artistic, including original research in traditional scholarly format that addresses unconventional topics (e.g., play, gaming, ecopedagogy, aesthetics), as well as works that approach traditional and unconventional topics in unconventional formats (e.g., graphic novels, fiction, narrative forms, and multi-genre texts). Inspired by the work of Maxine Greene, this series will showcase works that “break through the limits of the conventional” and provoke readers to continue arousing themselves and their students to “begin again” (Greene, Releasing the Imagination, 1995, p. 109). EDITORIAL ADVISORY BOARD Peter Appelbaum, Arcadia University, Philadelphia, PA, USA Roslyn Arnold, University of Sydney, AU, Australia Patty Bode, Ohio State University, Columbus, OH, USA Cathrene Connery, Ithaca College, Ithaca, NY, USA Clyde Coreil, New Jersey City University, Jersey City, NJ, USA Michelle Fine, CUNY Graduate Center, New York, NY, USA Sandy Grande, Connecticut College, New London, CT, USA Awad Ibrihim, University of Ottawa, Ottawa, ON, Canada Wendy Kohli, Fairfield University, Fairfield, CT, USA Carl Leggo, University of British Columbia, Vancouver, BC, Canada Pepi Leistyna, University of Massachusetts Boston, MA, USA Donaldo Macedo, University of Massachusetts Boston, MA, USA Martha McKenna, Lesley University, Boston, MA, USA Ernest Morrell, Columbia University, New York, NY, USA Pauline Sameshima, Lakehead University in Thunder Bay, ON, Canada Vera John-Steiner, University of New Mexico, Albuquerque, NM, USA Reclaiming the Sane Society Essays on Erich Fromm’s Thought Edited by Seyed Javad Miri Institute of Humanities and Cultural Studies, Tehran, Iran Robert Lake Georgia Southern University, USA and Tricia M. Kress The University of Massachusetts Boston, USA SENSE PUBLISHERS ROTTERDAM / BOSTON / TAIPEI A C.I.P. record for this book is available from the Library of Congress. ISBN 978-94-6209-605-9 (paperback) ISBN 978-94-6209-606-6 (hardback) ISBN 978-94-6209-607-3 (e-book) Published by: Sense Publishers, P.O. Box 21858, 3001 AW Rotterdam, The Netherlands https://www.sensepublishers.com/ Printed on acid-free paper All rights reserved © 2014 Sense Publishers No part of this work may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, microfilming, recording or otherwise, without written permission from the Publisher, with the exception of any material supplied specifically for the purpose of being entered and executed on a computer system, for exclusive use by the purchaser of the work. TABLE OF CONTENTS Preface vii Robert Lake and Tricia M. Kress Foreword: Fromm’s Social Psychological Approach and Its Relevance for Today ix Rainer Funk PART I: THE SOCIAL PSYCHOLOGY OF ERICH FROMM 1. On the Psychology and Libertarian Socialism of Erich Fromm: Towards an Empirically Based Psychological Retrofit 3 Rodolfo Leyva 2. Fromm’s Dialectic of Freedom and the Praxis of Being 17 Vicki Dagostino and Robert Lake 3. Humanism and Sociological Imagination in a Frommesque Style 31 Seyed Javad Miri 4. Normative Humanism as Redemptive Critique: Knowledge and Judgment in Fromm’s Social Theory 37 Michael J. Thompson 5. Erich Fromm’s Socialist Program and Prophetic Messianism, In Two Parts 59 Nick Braune and Joan Braune PART II: FROMM AND RELIGION 6. On Marx and Religion 95 Erich Fromm 7. What is Spirituality?: Insights from Religious Studies and Humanistic Psychology 101 Richard Curtis 8. Erich Fromm’s Social Psychological Theory of Religion: Toward the X-experience and the City of Being 117 Rudolf Siebert v TABLE OF CONTENTS 9. Erich Fromm and Thomas Merton: Biophilia, Necrophilia, and Messianism 137 Joan Braune 10. Fromm’s Notion of the Prophet and the Priest: Ancient Antagonisms, Modern Manifestations 147 Dustin J. Byrd PART III: APPLYING AND EXTENDING FROMM’S THEORY 11. The Relevance of Fromm’s Concept of the Distorted Personality 163 Gregory R. Smulewicz-Zucker 12. Neoliberalism as Social Necrophilia: Erich Fromm and the Politics of Hopelessness in Greece 187 Panayota Gounari 13. Hope—Faith—FortitudeÆ Praxis: Retheorizing U.S. Schooling with Erich Fromm 203 Tricia M. Kress and Patricia M. Patrissy 14. Revisiting Beyond the Chains of Illusion: My Encounter with Marx and Freud: Reflections on Fromm’s Theory and Practice within the Psychotherapeutic Encounter 215 Irene Rosenberg Javors Notes on Contributors 221 vi ROBERT LAKE & TRICIA M. KRESS PREFACE Erich Fromm (1900-1980) was born in Frankfurt Germany and in his formative years, studied traditional Jewish ethics and the newly formed disciplines of sociology and psychoanalysis. After completing his Ph.D. in sociology in 1922 he studied further to become a psychoanalyst. In 1930 he was invited to become a faculty member at the Institute for Social Research at the Goethe University in Frankfurt, Germany, also known as The Frankfurt School for Social Research, and the institution that is now widely held as the birthplace of critical theory. With the rise of Hitler, Fromm was forced to immigrate to America in 1934. The institute itself sought refuge in New York and was housed at Columbia University in 1935. By 1937, Fromm’s humanistic readings of Marx and his rejection of Freud’s biologically deterministic drive theories alienated him from the core of scholars at the institute. More specifically, Fromm emphasized the role of social processes in personality formation and eschewed a hardline, depersonalized view of class struggle that cut across prevailing Marxist dogma. These views would eventually result in public disenfranchisement and denunciation from former colleagues such as Theodore Adorno and Herbert Marcuse who went on to become immensely popular with the New Left in Western thought. Yet Fromm’s books went on to sell by the millions. One book alone, The Art of Loving (1956), has sold over 25,000,000 copies. Because he wrote about human relationships in a popular style that was more accessible to a wide range of readers, his work has been mistakenly stereotyped as “self-help” or “pop-psychology,” but as the essays in this book attest, this is simply not the case. In fact, Fromm’s work is particularly relevant in light of present, increasingly complex and often insane prevailing global conditions caused by greed, religious and political dogma, dehumanization and standardization. In many ways Fromm’s work is at least fifty years ahead of his time and brings to mind a metaphor that comes from the largest and oldest trees on the planet, the sequoia. These trees produce seeds in a cone that do not proliferate at the moment of maturity but are retained until the most advantageous environment for germination arises. This occurs after a fire when all the competing growth on the forest floor has been consumed in the heat. At that moment, the heat opens and releases the seeds of the sequoia. Present global geo-political conditions are indeed “heating up” considerably, but this heat can also create the environment for the dissemination of Fromm’s work. For example if you read Fromm’s (1968) work the Revolution of Hope,