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The Indispensability of Erich Fromm The Indispensability of Erich Fromm: The Rehabilitation of a "Forgotten" Psychoanalyst Erich Fromm Lecture – International Psychoanalytic University Berlin, October 13, 2016 Peter L. Rudnytsky "Some human beings affect you so deeply that your life is forever changed." – Gérard D. Khoury, "A Crucial Encounter" "Every line of serious work that I have written since 1936 has been written, directly or indirectly, against totalitarianism and for democratic socialism, as I understand it. ... It is simply a question of which side one takes and what approach one follows." – George Orwell, "Why I Write" his unjustly tarnished reputation, whose dedi- 1 cated participants include Marco Bacciaga- luppi and Ferenc Erős and that owes every- It always begins for me with an act of reading. thing to Rainer Funk, Fromm’s literary execu- Winnicott’s Playing and Reality (1971), tor and supremely faithful custodian of his Ferenczi’s Clinical Diary (Dupont, 1985), legacy. Groddeck’s Book of the It (1923), Nina Col- tart’s "Slouching towards Bethlehem" (1986), The more I immersed myself in Fromm, the or – to go back to the beginning – Ernest more I was struck by how much my long- Jones’s (1953-1957) biography of Freud and, standing concerns have overlapped with his even before that, Norman O. Brown’s Life and how much I would have benefited had I Against Death (1959): all these have been, for heeded his writings sooner. Shortly before me, life-changing experiences, the most pas- beginning this odyssey, I had published an sionate love affairs in my lifelong romance essay (Rudnytsky, 2014) comparing Freud to with psychoanalysis. To this list must now be the character of God in Milton’s Paradise Lost added Erich Fromm’s Escape from Freedom in which I depicted them both as patriarchal (1941). I confess that I had never read Es- fathers who impose a double bind on their fol- cape from Freedom, and my knowledge of lowers that forces them to choose between Fromm’s work was largely confined to a the equally unpalatable alternatives of obedi- sense of general agreement with his perspec- ence and subordination, on the one hand, and tive on Freud, until two years ago when, rebellion and rejection, on the other. No spurred on by Adrienne Harris’s review (2014) sooner had I read Escape from Freedom, of Lawrence Friedman’s (2013) biography of where Fromm sets forth his concept of the au- Fromm in the Journal of the American Psy- thoritarian character, than I realized that here choanalytic Association, I moved Escape from was the vital missing piece to my puzzle, the Freedom to the top of my "must-read" list. The capstone to my edifice, which I had failed to result was the intellectual equivalent of falling insert when I had the chance. I then went in love, the familiar feeling that here was back to Sigmund Freud’s Mission (1959b) and something for which I had been searching saw that Fromm had actually a chapter in that without realizing it, after which I would never book titled "Freud’s Authoritarianism," so it look at psychoanalysis – or at life – in the was simply due to my not having sufficiently same way again. appreciated his importance that I had ne- glected to make use of him in my essay on Although Fromm was new to me when I be- Milton.1 latedly discovered him in 2014, to engage se- riously with an author is inevitably to enter into the tradition of the reception of his work that 1 I have since drawn on Fromm’s ideas in a paper has preceded one’s own encounter. Even as I examining the Freud-Ferenczi relationship (Rudny- hope to have something original to say about tsky, 2015b), as well as in a paper (Rudnytsky, Fromm, I realize that my contribution is part of 2015a) that considers his reliance on Burckhart’s a collective project of restoring the luster to thesis concerning Renaissance individualism in Es- cape from Freedom. 1 Similarly, although I cited Fromm in a chapter indeed become "forgotten" insofar as he was on Little Hans in Reading Psychoanalysis not only "hated within the Freudian establish- (Rudnytsky, 2002, p. 40), it was only on re- ment with a special passion" for being "a reading his essay (1968b) on Freud’s case unique combination of a Freudian revisionist, history that I realized how closely my critique Marxist social thinker, and popular writer" but of Freud for his underrating of environmental he has also remained "far more marginal to factors as well as his patriarchal bias had contemporary Freudian thought" (1998b, p. been anticipated by Fromm and that I ought to 116) than have the other two leading repre- have acknowledged more explicitly the extent sentatives of neo-Freudianism, Karen Horney to which I was following in his footsteps. By and Harry Stack Sullivan. To Fromm belongs the same token, my sole mention of Fromm in the distinction of having been attacked on all Rescuing Psychoanalysis from Freud and sides, including by his former colleagues in Other Essays in Re-Vision is in the introduc- the Frankfurt School; and in finding himself tion where I name him as one of the "noblest "caught in no man’s land," as McLaughlin spirits of psychoanalysis" (Rudnytsky, 2011, (1998a) has elucidated, the trajectory of p. xxiii), but only recently did I learn that the ti- Fromm’s reputation makes him the antithesis tle of my book had been foreshadowed by not only of Jacques Derrida, the Pied Piper of Fromm (1992c) in the posthumously pub- deconstruction, who so successfully courted lished volume The Revision of Psychoanaly- the centers of American intellectual power sis. and prestige beginning in the late 1960s, but likewise of Orwell, who "was also famous and Finally, in my research for Mutual Analysis relatively marginal to the academy," but who, (Rudnytsky, 2017), I was led first to Fromm’s paradoxically, "gained support from intellectu- (1958) refutation of Jones’s impugning of the als who had little in common with his demo- sanity of Rank and Ferenczi in his biography cratic socialism," whereas "Fromm’s strongest of Freud, and from there to the pertinent cor- enemies were often intellectuals who essen- respondence in the Fromm Archives in Tü- tially shared his basic socialist political per- bingen, which was made available to me in spective" (p. 227). digital form with characteristic generosity by Funk. From this correspondence I could see Although I have borrowed McLaughlin’s des- that Fromm had been in contact not only with ignation of Fromm as "forgotten," I refer to him those who had known Ferenczi in his final not as a "forgotten intellectual" but rather as a years – especially Clara Thompson and Izette "forgotten psychoanalyst." It is not to dispute de Forest, both of whom became Fromm’s Kieran Durkin’s (2014) thesis that "‘radical analysands after having been in analysis with humanism" constitutes the unifying principle Ferenczi in Budapest – but also with those of Fromm’s thought, "irrespective of the differ- who had known Rank, including Jessie Taft, ences that obtain between periods" (p. 3), to Fay B. Karpf, and Harry Bone, as well as with claim that Fromm’s sense of himself as a psy- Carl and Sylva Grossman, who had known choanalyst was at the core of his professional Groddeck in Baden-Baden. The Grossmans identity and stamped the successive iterations (1965) later published the first biography of of his humanist project. Indeed, it was above Groddeck, while Karpf (1953) and Taft (1958) all Fromm’s identity as a psychoanalyst that were the authors of the first books on Rank, made him a lightning rod for criticism and as was de Forest (1954) on Ferenczi. I sud- caused the decline of his reputation. It is not denly had the epiphany that Rank, Ferenczi, by coincidence that Max Horkheimer, on be- and Groddeck were the same figures I had half of the supposed radicals of the Frankfurt brought together in Reading Psychoanalysis School, and the psychoanalytically orthodox and celebrated for having inaugurated the "re- Karl Menninger should have come together lational turn" in psychoanalysis in their land- from opposite sides of the ideological spec- mark works of 1923 and 1924. It was uncanny trum to denigrate Fromm’s credentials as a to realize that, as early as the 1950s, Fromm psychoanalyst. Even though Fromm "consid- had been the foremost advocate for the iden- ered himself a psychoanalyst," Menninger tical triad of first-generation analysts to whom wrote in a review of Escape from Freedom, he I had independently gravitated nearly a half- was in reality a "distinguished sociologist" who century later. with a "curious presumptuousness" had mere- ly exercised his right to apply "psychoanalytic It might seem perverse to claim that the repu- theory to sociological problems" (quoted in tation of a writer whose books sold literally McLaughlin, 1998b, pp. 123-124), just as millions of copies and who became one of Horkheimer described Fromm in a 1949 letter America’s most famous public intellectuals to the publishers of the Philosophical Review might be in need of rehabilitation. And yet, as as "the head of one of the ‘revisionist’ schools Neil McLaughlin (1998a; 1998b) has docu- of psychoanalysis" who had "tried to ‘sociolo- mented in two seminal articles, Fromm has 2 gize’ deep psychology, thereby ... making it his paper "The Social Determination of Psy- more superficial" (quoted in Funk, 1999a, p. choanalytic Therapy," published in 1935 in 101). Horkheimer’s Zeitschrift für Sozialforschung and not translated into English until 2000.2 In contrast to Sullivan and Horney, who died Here we have what we may designate as in 1949 and 1952 respectively, moreover, Fromm’s starting point and springboard, Fromm was not only a leading neo-Freudian which propels him into his first period that "revisionist." He was also the most acute ana- reaches its culmination in Escape from Free- lyst of psychoanalytic politics in the heyday of dom.
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