“In this riveting biography, Lawrence J. Friedman reveals how Fromm’s writings FRIEDMAN continue to speak to many of the most crucial issues of our time. His ideas about social character have been validated by recent discoveries in the human sciences, and his insights about politics and political organizing anticipate the successful 2008 and 2012 Obama campaigns. Fromm’s work can help us to recover the grand vision of the social sciences as a means to understanding and ameliorating the human condition or, as Fromm would put it, to choosing life over destructiveness.” “Thanks to Friedman’s comprehensive and —Carol Gilligan, author of In a Different Voice: Psychological Theory and Women’s Development subtle portrait, a new generation of readers will be inspired to explore Fromm’s life and “Through this thorough portrait, Love’s Prophet emerges as an exemplar of enjoying work.” THE an examined life to its fullest potential.” —Publishers Weekly —Joshua Rubenstein, Northeast Regional Director, LIVES Amnesty International “This is more than a highly enlightening study of the life and work of a remarkable OF twentieth-century figure. The penetrating review and analysis of the many facets ERICH of Fromm’s writing and activities also illuminate the intellectual ferment and ERICH FROMM was a political activist, political history of the turbulent and often terrifying times during which Fromm FROMM psychologist, psychoanalyst, and philos- Photo by Beth Friedman Darner Photo by Beth Friedman played such a constructive and influential role, with lasting significance.” opher and one of the most important intellectuals of the twentieth century. He —Noam Chomsky, Massachusetts Institute of Technology LOVE’S LAWRENCE J. FRIEDMAN is a professor PROPHET dissected the sadomasochistic appeal in Harvard University’s Mind/Brain/Behavior of brutal dictators while also eloquently “Highly readable . academic biography at its best.”—Kirkus (starred review) Initiative and professor emeritus of Indiana championing love—which, he insisted, was University. The author of eight scholarly nothing if it did not involve joyful contact books and more than fifty articles, he has “Full of interesting material about Fromm’s background, extensive intellectual with others and humanity at large. Admired lectured in eleven countries and was named contacts, political and psychoanalytic activities, and the range of his thinking that all over the world, Fromm continues to International Writer of the Year for 2003 by many readers will not know.” inspire with his message of universal the International Biographical Center. His —Dorothy Ross, Johns Hopkins University brotherhood and quest for lasting peace. works include Identity’s Architect: A Biography Taking full stock of the thinker’s historical of Erik Erikson; Menninger: The Family and the “Author of the definitive biography of psychoanalyst Erik Erikson, Friedman details and global accomplishments, Lawrence Clinic; Gregarious Saints: Self and Community in the cornucopia of ideas that issued from Fromm’s fertile mind as well as the J. Friedman portrays a man of immense American Abolitionism; and The White Savage: fascinating and little known details of his lengthy, controversial, and exceedingly authenticity and spirituality who made life in Racial Fantasies in the Postbellum South. full life.”—Howard Gardner, Harvard Graduate School of Education the twentieth century more humane than it might have been. A native of southwest Germany, ANKE SCHREIBER was Lawrence Friedman’s re- “The leading American expert on all topics psychological, Friedman has again search assistant at Indiana University while published an outstanding biography of one of the nation’s most significant she completed her master’s degree at the figures. This highly accessible work will intrigue and enlighten thousands.” University of Chicago. —Bertram Wyatt-Brown, University of Florida PRINTED IN THE U.S.A. JACKET IMAGE: Photo by Liss Goldring, 1970, © Erich Fromm Estate Columbia University Press | New York COLUMBIA JACKET DESIGN: Milenda Nan Ok Lee cup.columbia.edu THE LIVES OF ERICH FROMM THE LIVES OF ERICH FROMM LOVE’S PROPHET Lawrence J. Friedman with assistance from Anke M. Schreiber COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY PRESS NEW YORK Columbia University Press Publishers Since 1893 New York Chichester, West Sussex cup.columbia.edu Copyright © 2013 Columbia University Press All rights reserved Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Friedman, Lawrence Jacob, 1940– The lives of Erich Fromm: love’s prophet/Lawrence J. Friedman with assistance from Anke M. Schreiber. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-231-16258-6 (cloth : alk. paper)—ISBN 978-0-231-53106-1 (e-book) 1. Fromm, Erich, 1900–1980. 2. Psychoanalysts—Germany—Biography. 3. Psychoanalysts—United States—Biography. I. Schreiber, Anke M. II. Title. BF109. F76F75, 2013 150.19’57092—dc23 [B] 2012024631 Columbia University Press books are printed on permanent and durable acid-free paper. This book is printed on paper with recycled content. Printed in the United States of America c 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 cover photo: Photo by Liss Goldring, 1970, © Erich Fromm Estate cover design: Milenda Nan Ok Lee References to websites (URLs) were accurate at the time of writing. Neither the author nor Columbia University Press is responsible for URLs that may have expired or changed since the manuscript was prepared. In memory of Ronald Takaki and Adam Sarnecki Love is the only sane and satisfactory answer to the problem of human existence. —ERICH FROMM The alternatives he [man] is confronted with are either to escape the burden of freedom into new dependencies and submission, or to ad vance to full realization of positive freedom which is based upon the uniqueness and individuality of man. —ERICH FROMM Contents Foreword xi Gerald N. Grob Acknowledgments xv Prologue: Writing Lives xix PART I Germany 1 1 The Unsteady Apprentice 3 2 Frankfurt Scholar 28 PART II The Americas 63 3 The Americanization of a European Intellectual 65 4 Escape from Freedom 97 5 Clinician and Ethicist 119 x CONTENTS 6 To Love and to Mentor 156 7 Politics and Prose 184 PART III Global Citizenship 213 8 Prophecies for a Troubled World 215 9 A Third Way 238 10 “Life Is Extravagance”: Almost 253 11 Hope and Stasis 268 12 Love and Death 292 A Bibliographical Note 339 Notes 345 Index 395 Illustrations foll0w page 211. Foreword Gerald N. Grob henry sigerist professor of history emeritus, rutgers university As a student at the City College of New York in the late 1940s, I enrolled in an honors program in the social sciences. We were required to read about forty or fi fty books that had shaped society since the Greeks. Among these books was Erich Fromm’s Escape from Freedom . I was so taken with this book that I followed up by reading The Sane Society , and in subsequent decades I remained an avid reader of his writings. What I found especially impressive was Fromm’s ability to write in a way that avoided jargon while presenting important and complex ideas in a clear and coherent manner. Lawrence Friedman has that gift, as this very important and eminently scholarly biography attests. It is one of the most exciting books I have read in years. My attraction to Fromm’s writings grew out of my background. As a child of parents who came from Eastern Europe, I attended Hebrew school for a number of years, where I was exposed to the Talmud and especially the prophetic tradition within Judaism. Friedman’s volume shows us with clar- ity and an eye for nuance how Fromm exemplifi ed this tradition; he was a critic of society while at the same holding out the hope that a better future was possible. Living at a time when the world seemed threatened by nuclear annihilation, Fromm was unable to limit himself to a life of scholarly writ- ing and contemplation or psychoanalytic practice. During the height of the Cold War, Friedman has discovered that Fromm had caught the attention of President John F. Kennedy and may have helped modify the president’s belligerent rhetoric. Indeed, Kennedy subsequently began to call for coexis- tence and nuclear disarmament with words, phrases, and logic that resem- bled Fromm’s. During these dangerous years, Fromm maintained regular contact with important policy makers such as Adlai Stevenson and William Fulbright and often testifi ed before congressional committees on develop- ments in postwar Germany, his specialty in international relations. As well, xii FOREWORD Fromm enjoyed contacts with heads of state in several countries. All of this was part of an eff ort to bridge the gap between high government offi cials and human rights and peace activists. Indeed, he was a founder and major funder of the National Committee for a Sane Nuclear Policy and then Am- nesty International. Based upon the remarkably thorough research for which he is known, Friedman’s biography is the fi rst to reveal these impor- tant personal and institutional connections. Fromm’s early life shaped much of his subsequent thinking. We have a richly textured and closely documented analysis of that early life in all of its complexities—another fi rst for this remarkable volume. His anxiety- ridden father and sometimes depressed mother provoked him to attempt to break free of a dysfunctional household. These experiences ultimately shaped his adult focus on “social character.” Unlike Freud, who empha- sized the role of libidinal energy in shaping individual personality, Fromm increasingly stressed that humans are social beings whose lives are also shaped by social structure and culture. Such views were regarded in ortho- dox psychoanalytic circles as a form of heresy, even as Freud sometimes found them worth considering—and said as much. Nevertheless, by the mid-to-late 1930s, after Fromm had done much to move his endangered colleagues in the Frankfurt Institute for Social Research out of Nazi Ger- many and to the safety of the Columbia University campus, Freud and Fromm seemed to part increasingly (never totally) intellectual company.