Publikation der Internationalen Erich-Fromm-Gesellschaft e.V. Publication of the International Erich Fromm Society Copyright © beim Autor / by the author The Exclusion of Erich Fromm from the IPA Paul Roazen “The Exclusion of Erich Fromm from the IPA,“ in: Contemporary Psychoanalysis, New York (Wil- liam Alanson White Psychoanalytic Society), Vol. 37 (2001), pp. 5-42. Copyright © 2001 by Professor Dr. Paul Roazen, 2009 by the Estate of Paul Roazen. The subject of psychoanalytic lineage has re- England published under the title The Fear of cently acquired a new respectability among his- Freedom) became for years a central text in the torians in the field; although privately analysts education of social scientists. Works of Fromm’s have known and acknowledged how critical it is like Man For Himself, Psychoanalysis and Relig- who has gone where and to whom for training, ion, The Forgotten Language, and also The Sane it is only relatively rarely that public attention Society5 formed an essential part of my genera- has been focused on the unusually powerful im- tion’s general education. (Fromm’s most horta- pact which such training analyses can have. The tory last writings, and his specifically political special suggestive role of analytic training ex- ones, fall I think into a different category as far periences was long ago pointed out in the as the general influence that he had; still, the course of controversial in-fighting by such differ- book Fromm co-authored with Michael Mac- ently oriented pioneers as Edward Glover1 and coby, Social Character in a Mexican Village, de- Jacques Lacan, but it has been unusual to find serves more attention.6 Fromm’s The Art of Lov- the institution of training analysis itself publicly ing has meanwhile sold millions of copies, and challenged. It remains too little known that his- To Have Or To Be? succeeded in selling a mil- torically the requirement that all analysts be lion copies in Germany alone; The Anatomy of themselves analyzed for purposes of training Human Destructiveness was also a notable only officially got going under the auspices of achievement.7) the International Psychoanalytic Association Ernest Jones’s biography of Freud was also (IPA) in 1925, after Freud was ill with cancer formative of the psychoanalytic education of my and had implicitly to concede his inability per- time, as was Fromm’s short and relatively ne- sonally to control the future of his movement.2 glected retort to Jones: Sigmund Freud’s Mis- At the same time, however, that analytic sion: An Analysis of His Personality and Influ- lineage (family tree matters3) deserve to get full ence8. The fact that such distinguished literary attention, it can be too easy to forget the role critics as Lionel Trilling and Steven Marcus faith- that books themselves play, especially for intel- fully edited Jones’s biography into a one- lectuals, in spreading ideas One might think it a volume edition is only the tip of the iceberg of truism that people not only go for treatment but the specific means by which orthodox psycho- respond powerfully to what they come across in analytic thinking worked its way into being print. Many of us were first attracted to psycho- credulously accepted within the culture at large. analysis by reading the writings of Erich Fromm Jones’s multiple distortions are so built into his (1900-80), and this includes even such stalwart heavily documented narrative that they con- defenders of recent orthodoxy as the historian tinue to slide by even many of the most consci- Peter Gay. Erich Fromm’s powerful papers from entious researchers. the early 1930s were once relatively unknown, Let me give just one example from Sigmund but a book of his like Escape From Freedom4 (in Freud’s Mission of the persuasivenss of Fromm’s page 1 of 22 Roazen, P., 2001 The Exclusion of Erich Fromm from the IPA Publikation der Internationalen Erich-Fromm-Gesellschaft e.V. Publication of the International Erich Fromm Society Copyright © beim Autor / by the author reasoning. In the following passage Fromm was thought once known as „neo-Freudianism“ writing about the „secret“ Committee, made up (Fromm did not like having the term applied to of Karl Abraham, Jones, Otto Rank, Sandor Fer- himself) has been considered as a „failure“ enczi, Hanns Sachs, and Max Eitingon, which within intellectual history11. Even while he was was designed before World War I to safeguard alive Fromm saw how peculiar and wayward a the psychoanalytic „cause“ after the so-called direction the history of ideas seemed to be mov- defection of Carl G. Jung: ing in, as his rightful standing seemed to sink Who were these first most loyal disciples, ever since the late 1960s. When the term „psy- the wearers of the six rings? They were urban in- cho-history,“ thanks largely to the initiative of tellectuals, with a deep yearning to be commit- the work of Erik H. Erikson, had first started to ted to an ideal, to a leader, to a movement, and take hold in the late 1950s and early 1960s, yet without having any religious or political or Fromm justifiably felt somehow left out of the philosophical ideal or convictions; there was whole story. (Freud’s own most speculative neither a socialist, Zionist, Catholic nor Ortho- works might appeal to political philosophers, dox Jew among them. (Eitingon may have had but not to most practicing social scientists.) mild Zionist sympathies.) Their religion was the Fromm could not understand how Erikson could Movement. The growing circle of analysts came proceed in ignoring Fromm’s own pioneering from the same background; the vast majority work in this area – after all Fromm’s The Dogma were and are middle-class intellectuals, with no of Christ12 (a text among those the Nazis religious, political or philosophical interests or banned) had originally come out as long ago as commitments. The great popularity of psycho- in 1930. analysis in the West, and particularly in the We now know that Erikson had explicitly United States, since the beginning of the thirties discussed Fromm’s Escape From Freedom at a has undoubtedly the same social basis. Here is a meeting of the San Francisco Psychoanalytic So- middle class for whom life has lost meaning. ciety in March 1943, well before Erikson’s own They have no political or religious ideals, yet Childhood and Society saw the light of day in they are in search of a meaning, of an idea to 195013. Erikson always proceeded more than devote themselves to, of an explanation of life warily about ever even citing Fromm – Erikson’s which does not require faith or sacrifices, and own enduring concerns about his biological le- which satisfies this need to feel part of a move- gitimacy helped feed his insecurities as a psycho- ment. All these needs were fulfilled by the analyst. And so Erikson could be fearful of risk- Movement.9 ing the fate of Fromm’s having been excluded as a psychoanalyst, even more than the conse- These words seem to me still strikingly valid. En- quences of Erikson’s favorably mentioning -- in tirely aside from any of Fromm’s other clinical his last works -- the otherwise dread name of and theoretical contributions, one essay of his Jung; Erikson publicly idealized Freud at the (which originally appeared in the old Saturday same time Erikson was moving away from or- Review of Literature) played a notable role, de- thodox thinking in an original direction.14 spite an effort to rebut it by an orthodox ana- (Fromm would remain intransigently unforgiv- lyst, in helping to start the „rehabilitation“ of ing about Jung’s work, and in good part this the historical reputations of both Ferenczi and was related to Jung’s politics in the 1930s that Rank.10 In fact I think that the recent renaissance we will be touching on.) in Ferenczi’s clinical reputation is the one great Yet Erikson had himself played a subtle part success story in the psychoanalytic historiogra- in assisting in the process of Fromm’s being phy with which I have been associated over the stigmatized as a professional alien; Fromm last forty years. seems to have been virtually alone in pointing Yet bureaucratic struggles, as we shall see, out, in reading Erikson’s Young Man Luther, the were to limit Fromm’s own historical place. By significance of the passage where Erikson refers now he can be accurately described as a „forgot- to „sociological treatises of our time by authors ten intellectual,“ and the whole school of from Weber to Fromm“15. The word „sociologi- page 2 of 22 Roazen, P., 2001 The Exclusion of Erich Fromm from the IPA Publikation der Internationalen Erich-Fromm-Gesellschaft e.V. Publication of the International Erich Fromm Society Copyright © beim Autor / by the author cal“ was clearly meant to distance Erikson from the criticisms of his former allies at the Frankfurt Fromm, and the very designation of being a so- Institute for Social Research; Herbert Marcuse’s ciologist (rather than an analyst) Erikson had ill-founded charges against Fromm and other feared being used about himself by his own ana- „revisionists“ like Horney and Harry Stack Sulli- lyst, Anna Freud. (This was part of a tradition in van were to gain notoriety starting in the mid- which on Dec. 19, 1934, Jones had written to 1950s.) Anna Freud: „Like [Franz] Alexander and many others she [Karen Horney] seems to be replacing Fromm’s organizational problems within psy- Psychoanalysis by a pseudo-sociology.“) Karl choanalysis, which wound up in him being fi- Menninger’s harsh 1942 critique of Fromm’s Es- nally excluded from the IPA in the early 1950s, cape From Freedom helped establish the party really got their start with the coming to power line which Erikson was dutifully following; for of the Nazis in Germany in early 1933.