5

Clinician and Ethicist

Fromm’s upbeat tone at the conclusion of Escape from Freedom signaled a reawakening of the Jewish prophetic tradition that had been central to his early life and persisted through the 1940s. What Fromm called “positive freedom” in Escape—the affirmation of man’s capacity to lead a loving, reflective, productive, and psychologically extravagant, joyous, and creative life—soon came to be supplanted by references to “ethical” or “socialist” humanism. Under the heading of “humanism,” Fromm elaborated a vague philosophy predicated on dialogue, hope, and human relatedness. Fromm considered his next book, Man for Himself: An Inquiry Into the Psychology of Ethics (1947), as “in many ways a continuation of Escape from Freedom,” in that it outlined “the norms and values leading to the realization of man’s self and his potentialities.” Toward the end of Man for Himself, Fromm described the task of an intellectual proponent of a secular “ethical” or “socialist” humanism in words that characterized his own self-image:

It is the task of the ethical thinker to sustain and strengthen the voice of human conscience, to recognize what is good or what is bad for man, regardless of whether it is good or bad for society at a special period of its evolution. He may be the one who “crieth in the wilderness,” but only if this voice remains alive and uncompromising will the wilderness change into fertile land.¹

For Fromm, “socialist,” or “ethical,” humanism and clinical work reinforced each other. During the 1940s, he distanced himself not only from orthodox Freudian psychoanalysts but from Karen Horney and other revisionist colleagues. Even at the William Alanson White Institute, where he served as the director of clinical training, he rarely discussed his ideas with his colleagues. And although liberal public intellectuals such as Arthur Schlesinger Jr., Paul Tillich, and Robert Lindner incorporated key themes from Escape from Freedom into their own formulations and sought meetings with Fromm, he avoided such invitations. To be sure, he continued to participate in Margaret Mead’s expanding Culture and Personality movement. But he found it less compelling as time transpired. In sum, Fromm was becoming a “self-sustaining” intellectual, eschewing dialogue with and criticism from his scholarly and clinical peers. He became decidedly self-referential, drawing heavily on ideas presented in Escape from Freedom, much as Escape had drawn upon his more original and closely reasoned essays of the 1930s at the Frankfurt Institute. Fromm was essentially transitioning from participation in critical intellectual circles and becoming less resistant to recycling his ideas. He attempted to place himself within a clear philosophical tradition, especially that of Spinoza, but was less than successful. Interestingly, the same decade in which Fromm espoused the idea of productive social character was also the least productive time of his professional career. These were complicated years, with several of Fromm’s “lives” in play.2

The Politics of Clinical Practice

In some measure, despite his increasing independence from his colleagues, Fromm’s developing “socialist” or “ethical” humanism was influenced by his professional affiliations. Horney created the Association for the Advancement of Psychoanalysis (AAP) and its affiliate American Institute for Psychoanalysis (AIP) in April 1941. This had been done in reaction to the orthodox Freudian New York Psychoanalytic Society, which had disqualified Horney as both an instructor and training analyst, owing to ideological and professional differences. She welcomed Fromm as well as Harry Stack Sullivan and Clara Thompson from the old Zodiac circle into her AAP-AIP nexus, and this became the center for neo-Freudianism in America. Though technically an honorary member because he lacked a medical degree, Fromm was appointed as a training analyst and clinical supervisor with teaching privileges in AIP courses.³

Horney soon tried to transform the AIP into a medical organization so that it could affiliate with the New York Medical College. As negotiations proceeded, Stephen Jewett, the head of New York Medical College’s department of psychiatry, insisted that only AIP analysts with medical degrees could become affiliates of his department. Jewett was willing to allow Fromm, a “mere” lay analyst, to remain on the AIP faculty, provided he was unaffiliated with the medical college. Horney, less enamored of Fromm than she was during their relationship, curtailed the flow of AIP students to him, which deprived him of his role of training analyst and clinical supervisor. Initially, he was permitted to offer AIP courses so long as they did not deal with analytic technique. But Horney pressed further, and the AIP eventually completely removed Fromm’s teaching privileges. She had essentially done to Fromm what the New York Psychoanalytic Society had done to her. Regarding herself as the primary alternative to Freudian orthodoxy, Horney cut down her former lover by promoting rigid limitations on lay analysts. Fromm found these restrictions intolerable and resigned from the AAP-AIP in April 1943. Thompson, Sullivan, and several others left in sympathy.4

Sullivan and Thompson watched Horney humiliate Fromm, and when Fromm resigned, they were ready with an alternative: Sullivan’s dream of an interdisciplinary psychiatric-psychoanalytic center under the aegis of the William Alanson White Foundation, which had long supported his research. The Washington School of Psychiatry had been little more than Sullivan’s “holding company” for the Washington-Baltimore Psychoanalytic Society until the rift with Horney. Together with Frieda Janet, David Rioch, and others, Sullivan and Thompson reconfigured Sullivan’s Washington School of Psychiatry by establishing New York and Washington, D.C., branches. Fromm commuted between the two cities and enjoyed working with students from a variety of backgrounds and interdisciplinary interests. The New York branch grew far more rapidly than the Washington branch during the last years of World War II. Augmented in 1946 by the G.I. Bill of Rights (which funded psychoanalytic training for physicians who had served in the military), the New York branch separated from the Washington branch and renamed itself the William Alanson White Institute of Psychiatry.⁵

In 1946, Fromm became the first director of clinical training. Despite a disinclination toward administrative tasks, he served as director until 1950. At White, moreover, Fromm was regarded as a senior training analyst with unrestricted opportunity to teach seminars in clinical psychoanalysis. He sat on important Institute committees and was privy to its inner workings. Even as the M.D. requirement was becoming increasingly mandatory in American psychoanalytic training, Fromm persuaded the faculty at White to offer full psychoanalytic training to those with doctorates in psychology and recommended training for those with doctorates in other disciplines.

He also organized research projects to study the problems of long-term psychoanalysis. Fromm reached out to social workers, nurses, educators, clergy, and other professionals in the community in order to introduce them to psychoanalytic theory and technique and invite them to Institute lectures and course offerings. Believing that anyone could benefit from psychoanalytic therapy, Fromm established a low-cost clinic at White, an innovation for the time, to serve the community. Despite these initiatives, Fromm felt increasingly marginalized at White. Many of his other policy recommendations were rejected by the faculty. He recognized that despite his seniority, Clara Thompson, who held a medical degree, had greater de facto impact on White’s policies and programs. She embraced therapeutic and doctrinal diversity, while Fromm represented a more idiosyncratic approach of his own in teaching and clinical supervision, and she was willing to assume extensive management duties, but Fromm was not. Thus, even as his colleagues at White recognized Fromm as an important intellectual and usually gave him a free hand in clinical endeavors, he felt increasingly isolated and “wounded.” It reached the point where he rarely sought critical comments from his colleagues on his clinical technique and theoretical writings. Characteristic of his diminishing ties to eminent and rigorous scholars, Fromm was becoming increasingly self-referential in his clinical work.6

Clinical Technique

What sort of a therapist and supervisor was Fromm? He greatly enjoyed conducting psychoanalytic therapy and clinical supervision, but he left little evidence of his clinical work. Nevertheless, Fromm found this work not only very satisfying but also central to his thought in other realms. Yet the analyses that he conducted invariably focused on a patient’s social character, often in very concrete manifestations. This made it relatively easy to identify the specific patient in case reports and clinical publications, he pointed out, thereby breaching confidentiality. Privately, Fromm acknowledged to close colleagues like Gertrud Hunziker-Fromm and Michael Maccoby that his writing on clinical work generally was also restricted by what he knew of unethical trysts with female patients (implying that he himself sometimes had such relationships). This misconduct was commonplace among analysts of the day, including students of both Freud and Jung. Fromm probably felt that little was gained by discussing this problematic aspect of clinical work, especially since he might well be implicated and because it might intensify his conflict with orthodox Freudians.

What was Fromm’s approach to clinical practice generally and psychoanalysis in particular? The Marxist writer Harry K. Wells insightfully characterized Fromm as a “physician of the soul”—a modern-day and upbeat Ishmael seeking to draw contemporary man out of crises created by the Ahabs of the world, producing alienation, loneliness, anxiety, and despair. Rejecting the prevailing Freudian notions of cure—freeing the self from instinctual and largely sexual repressions through an objective, surgically analytic manner—Fromm resorted to dream interpretation, free associations, or whatever else might seem to eliminate gently the conformist and authoritarian self and to allow the “real” productive self to emerge. Unlike Freud and his followers, moreover, his clinical manner was warm, convivial, and, as Sandor Ferenczi put it, had “unshakable good will.” In her 1950 classic, Psychoanalysis: Evolution and Development, Clara Thompson characterized Fromm rather specifically: he essentially sought to cultivate in the patient a respect for his “real” or “true” self instead of conforming to society. Moreover, Thompson felt that Fromm sought out patients he could respect and within whom he was able to detect a faint, if deeply repressed, glimmering of their “authentic” selves. In this respect, Thompson suggested that Fromm was an extremely judgmental clinician. The key to “Frommian” therapy was to focus on an example of “authenticity”—to encourage the “healthy” side of the patient to develop through empathy and by weaning the patient from irrational, thoughtless, conforming attitudes. To achieve this, Thompson observed, Fromm insisted that the clinician be fully in touch with his own deeper self. Otherwise, he could not love, respect, and empathize with the patient at the level required to induce change.7

Wells and Thompson agreed that Fromm’s clinical approach was caring and compassionate. Over the course of the 1940s, Fromm described his approach to therapy in terms of his focus on social character. The psychoanalyst’s task was to encourage the patient to shift out of one or several “unproductive” social character orientations. Fromm postulated but did not really demonstrate how these orientations circumscribed one’s “authenticity” and one’s potential to excel: (1) the “receptive orientation,” where the inner self felt empty and craved replenishment from others; (2) the “exploitive orientation,” which, through manipulation, captured what others had or made; (3) the “hoarding orientation,” which sought to save and secure one’s possessions; (4) and the “marketing orientation,” which experienced the self as no more than a packaged and marketable commodity. It was by simply asserting these four “unproductive” dispositions that Fromm characterized a “productive” self—a “productive social character.” In apparent contrast to the four “unproductive” orientations, the patient on the road to “productivity” became more spontaneous, happy, nurturing, responsible, rational, and loving. Simply put, Fromm regarded effective analytic therapy as the means to reduce fundamentally the patient’s inner emptiness and alter an incorrect orientation toward the world, which in turn enhanced the patient’s love of life.8

As early as 1935, when his analytic practice was small, Fromm rejected Freud’s premise of therapeutic neutrality (i.e., that the psychoanalyst had to be detached and unemotional). Instead, he borrowed from Frieda Fromm-Reichmann, underscoring her empathetic and “humane” clinical manner; the analyst needed to assert his or her unconditional love and acceptance of the patient. Fromm eschewed Freud’s “patricentric attitude” and “bourgeois tolerance” of accepted social practices and determined to provide the analysand full “affirmation of his right to love and happiness.” It is crucial to note that Fromm’s clinical approach represented part of a larger process through which he was constructing a common language and weltanschauung with other public intellectuals of his generation, who sometimes characterized themselves as cosmopolitan and “universalist.” Like Fromm, they amplified the concept of a “family of man” as an alternative to the classifications of superior and inferior mankind inherent in Nazi science.⁹

As Fromm matured into an experienced therapist, he insisted that optimal therapy involved “central relatedness” between analyst and analysand. An effective therapist went “center to center” with the patient and into his “core,” quickly bypassing “peripheral” social matters such as religion and occupation. Whether with neurotics or more troubled patients, effective therapy required reacting “with our human core to the human core of another person.” In this “central relatedness,” the clinician revealed himself not only in his words but in his voice and facial expression. Fromm later referred to this approach as “dancing,” stressing the mutuality and perhaps even the artistry inherent in the therapeutic process and deep understanding of the other. “To see a person,” Fromm once wrote to his friend Clara Urquhart, “means to penetrate him or her in a timeless manner and to be ‘in’ the person.” According to patients and clinical colleagues, this was precisely Fromm’s clinical manner. Gazing warmly at the patient’s face with his piercing blue eyes, he seemed to help the patient come alive and embrace his or her inner core. (To be sure, Fromm’s psychic penetration was so powerful, serious, and sometimes even short on empathy that the analysand sometimes grew defensive.) In experiencing the other, Fromm and his analysand simultaneously experienced themselves—the relatedness that he now called “humanism.” Some years later, Fromm cogently summarized the phenomenon: “The analyst understands the patient only inasmuch as he experiences in himself all that the patient experiences.”10

To some extent, Fromm’s clinical approach of “central relatedness” resembled his captivating sessions with Salman Rabinkow. In Fromm’s characterization of this teacher-student relationship, the spiritual core of each permeated and invigorated the other through a warm, nonjudgmental interchange of mind and soul. Indeed, the magic of Fromm’s rapport with Rabinkow clarified a crucial component of “central relatedness.” The psychoanalyst as a spiritual teacher or mentor was required to move the analysand beyond a shallow, cliché-ridden use of his mental resources and toward “penetrating” and “authentic” thought and understanding. Restoring the capacity for independent reasoning was essential in moving the patient from “lostness” to realistic contact with the world and with his own feelings. Recalling that his work with Rabinkow, Nehemia Nobel, and other Talmudic mentors, and even his friendship with Martin Buber, had focused on text, Fromm considered discussing important classics to stimulate independent thought and more genuine expression of feelings. More often, he would ask his analysand clear, concrete, detailed questions to clear up contradictions or distortions in statements and would invite the patient to join him “in rational thought about the meaning of certain things.” Unlike the traditional analytic technique of free association, which Fromm also utilized, he regarded this quest for more “authentic” and rational thought and personal insight as a teaching technique with far-reaching therapeutic consequences.¹¹

To establish “central relatedness” in the analytic relationship, Fromm began, as early as 1940, to abandon the analytic couch. He recalled how some of his training analysts at the Berlin Psychoanalytic Institute had owned up to napping as they sat behind the couch, listening to the analysand drone on and on. To avoid “this boredom which made the situation so unbearable,” Fromm shifted his analysand to a seated position where he could establish direct eye contact and promote a more lively interpersonal relationship. “Tell me what is in your mind right NOW,” he sometimes insisted, or “What comes to mind when you think of the thing you like least in yourself—the thing you are most ashamed of—most proud of?” If the patient tried to avoid such direct and urgent inquiries, Fromm redirected him with considerable emotion, and sometimes rather judgmentally. Fromm became very candid about himself at certain times, and he expected the patient to be equally frank and open.12

Fromm was intent on a direct relationship even if it compromised his understanding of the transference relationship (i.e., how the patient slowly and unconsciously projected powerful emotional experiences and personages onto the analyst and how the analyst countertransferred his own emotions onto the patient). His main objective in probing the patient’s unconscious inner reality was to uncover whatever the patient was hiding. Indeed, contradicting Freudian clinical orthodoxy, Fromm seemed to discourage intense transferences, believing they enhanced the patient’s feelings of dependency upon the therapist. Some critics have noted, however, that strong transference is unavoidable in a clinical relationship. Others, including some of Fromm’s former analysands and clinical trainees, have argued otherwise. For instance, Michael Maccoby and Militiades Zaphiropoulos have noted that by failing to utilize sufficient professional insights for both the transference and the countertransference, Fromm compounded his analysands’ psychological problems. In this way, he often turned them into admirers of his mannerisms, “warmth,” and ideas. This often caused relationships with his patients and colleagues to be too personal and insufficiently professional and intellectual.¹³

The case of one of Fromm’s closest clinical trainees and analysands is instructive. In both his personal treatment and clinical training of David Schecter at the William Alanson White Institute, Fromm failed to establish the professional limits separating the clinician/teacher from the patient/student, limits that allow the latter to exercise his autonomy rather than develop and remain in a state of dependency. As a result, Schecter, one of the most well versed of Fromm’s clinical associates in the emerging field of psychopharmacology (he advised Fromm on medicating patients), did not use his own clinical and intellectual strengths to seek the psychiatric help through which he may have averted his own suicide.14

Fromm retorted that his active, open, and blunt approach to his patient “first arouses resistances” of all sorts that could be particularly strong and result in transference distortions. He insisted, however, that patient resistance gave him the opportunity to peel away neurotic escape mechanisms and layers of character defense, usually setting “a mental process in action.” Fromm insisted that in the end even the most brittle analysand could tolerate and benefit from direct, active therapeutic inquiry into unvarnished truths. Indeed, the more the patient progressed toward self-understanding, the harder Fromm pressed to complete the task. Although Fromm was trained in Berlin to emulate Freud—to spend five days a week for up to a year with a single patient so as to ease the resistance process gradually, to determine precisely how much self-revelation the patient could tolerate at a given point in time, and to explore all aspects of transference and countertransference—he now opted against that approach.¹⁵

Even before the “central relatedness” between analyst and analysand was fully established, Fromm (like Freud) relied heavily on dream analysis, and he continued to do so over the course of his analytic career. Much of his clinical supervision focused on patients’ dreams: “To understand a dream in a way which is satisfactory … gives me still probably more pleasure than any more theoretical endeavor,” Fromm remarked to David Schecter, “because I love the concrete and the specific and that which one can see.” Indeed, dream analysis was at the core of his 1951 study, The Forgotten Language: The Understanding of Dreams, Fairy Tales, and Myths. Based on lectures Fromm had delivered over the previous decade, he broke decisively with Freud on the fundamentals of dream interpretation, rejecting Freud’s premise that dreams reflected entirely the “irrational and asocial nature of man.” He also eschewed Jung’s view that “dreams are revelations of unconscious wisdom, transcending the individual.” Instead, Fromm postulated that dreams reflected “our irrational strivings as well as our reason and morality.” This book addressed the issues in Freud’s 1900 classic, The Interpretation of Dreams, and is perhaps the most aesthetically compelling exchange Fromm ever had with any of Freud’s texts.¹⁶

For Fromm, dreams represented a symbolic language common to all humankind, and sleep freed them of the constraints of time, space, and social conditioning. A dream wove different threads of the self into a single fabric—past and present, real events and fantasies. Recall of a dream was “like a microscope through which we look at the hidden occurrences in our soul.” While dreams housed the hidden desires and fantasies of the dreamer, they did not reveal how substantial (“quantitative”) each thread of the dream was in the dreamer’s total psyche. Fromm insisted that this “quantitative” aspect of dream interpretation had been bypassed by Freud and his followers—a decided overstatement.17

The preponderance of The Forgotten Language suggests how Fromm analyzed specific dreams. At the onset, Fromm insisted that the clinician had to understand the general psychology of the dreamer and to fathom the background in day-to-day life for each specific patient, even though Fromm rarely detailed the everyday existence of most of his patients. Freud postulated that the analysand had to probe beyond the manifest or surface content of the dream to elements in the repressed and sometimes frightening “latent” dream content that suggested the emotional associations of the dreamer. Just as Erik Erikson did, Fromm rejected the rigidity inherent in Freud’s distinction between the manifest and latent content, focusing instead on the dream’s broad symbolic language. It was crucial to detect changes in recurrent general dream patterns and how these patterns related to the primary themes and directions of the patient’s life. A dream should not initially be approached for its small fragmented parts, Fromm insisted, nor for its manifest and latent qualities, but as a totality. With an understanding of the entirety of the dream, Fromm postulated that the clinician could fathom a patient’s entire unconscious life and, in turn, precisely what was undermining his productiveness and happiness. “What is important is to understand the texture of the dream in which past and present, character and realistic events, are woven together into a design” revealing the basic inner motivation of the dreamer “and the aims he must set himself in his effort to achieve happiness.” Paradoxically, Fromm added, it was sometimes the dreamer’s apprehension of dying that renewed his faith in life and happiness.¹⁸

Fromm often interpreted the specific dreams of his patients in more eclectic and intuitive ways than he said they should be interpreted. In the analytic room, he regarded dreams as “many-sided,” never to be forced into a “Procrustean bed” that yielded a limited kind of meaning. He debunked the sterility of “various psychoanalytic schools, each insisting that it [had] the only true understanding of symbolic language.” Fromm’s propensity to deemphasize theory and to be more intuitive and spontaneous in dream interpretation (even as he eschewed detail on specific patients) helps to explain why, of all his books, The Forgotten Language was theoretically one of the thinnest but simultaneously one of the most emotionally compelling. Fromm urged the general reader to try his hand at mastering symbolic language in order to understand his own dreams even as he cautioned against interpretive reductionism. Not uncharacteristically, he quoted from the Talmud: “Dreams which are not interpreted are like letters which have not been opened.” The book’s appeal did not fall into a void. Since publication, The Forgotten Language has sold some two million copies and has been translated into twenty-two languages.19

How do we assess Fromm’s general effectiveness as a clinician? For the most part, his trainees, especially those at the William Alanson White Institute, remembered him as an inspiring analyst and teacher; his patients were less consistently positive. Both trainees and patients agreed that he pursued “central relatedness” with the analysand in a flexible and nondoctrinaire way. He treated the nuances of clinical technique as artificial and discarded them for a more lively exchange. With an analysand who appeared robust, physically attractive, and relatively relaxed, according to Fromm’s trainees, he pressed rapidly to learn how the patient envisioned his or her “authentic” happy and creative self and what was needed to get there. According to observers, Fromm offered provocative and sometimes even offensive remarks in order to engage the patient. If some analysands became uneasy, most sensed that Fromm was seeking to “awaken” them to their choices, to enable them to become more spontaneous, joyful, exuberant, and productive. Trainees observed that he was very goal oriented and voiced confidence that his analysand would eventually master the lessons of life. Trainees and other observers recalled that Fromm’s prompting involved an intellectual component—critical thought—as well as emotional and intuitive exploration. He expected results on all fronts. Although Fromm’s trainees were impressed by his confidence in his therapeutic approach and trusted his clinical inclinations, they periodically feared for his more psychologically “fragile” patients.²⁰

Fromm’s trainees were certainly impressed by his mentoring skills. And at a time when the disciplines of psychoanalysis, psychiatry, and psychology were uneasy about women and black professionals in their ranks, Fromm reached out to both, providing an endorsement of their clinical capability. Trainees appreciated the fact that he was candid about his Jewish background and acknowledged a strong Talmudic element in his therapeutic approach. Indeed, they recalled that he often referenced the Talmud when he taught dream interpretation and sometimes would even use the Talmud to patch over his differences with Freud.21

Fromm worked to establish a personal rapport with trainees and patients. Where plausible, he preferred to make points through humor and interesting stories rather than with formal clinical language. As Zaphiropoulos later reflected, while humor may be a pleasant way to build interpersonal bridges, it can interfere with a professional, clinical relationship where boundary crossing is usually to be avoided. Fromm also underscored, perhaps excessively, the importance of a clinician being candid with a patient. Open to his trainees about his own likes and dislikes, he inquired about their families, their joys, and their frustrations. When he felt a bit under the weather, he jokingly prodded a physician trainee to prescribe an instant cure.²²

There is not a great deal of information about most of Fromm’s patients. Thus, it is hard to generalize concerning what they thought about his therapeutic effectiveness. Perhaps because Fromm’s analysis of Karen Horney’s daughter, Marianne Eckardt, produced results that she wrote about at some length and recounted to me during interviews, it is easier to comment on his clinical work with her. Before the analysis, Eckardt recounted how she had been a pleasant, conscientious, and even-tempered daughter progressing along a successful career as a psychiatrist. However, she had few close friends, was unhappy, and seemed detached from life.²³

Because of his long affair with her mother, professional ethics mandated that Fromm refuse to take on Eckardt as his patient. To be sure, he had transgressed professional boundaries earlier with Frieda Fromm-Reichmann as well as with Robert and Helen Lynd, and he would do so again with Martha Graham, Elizabeth Taylor, and no few other patients. Perhaps because of Fromm’s personal acquaintance with the Horney family, two years went by in Eckardt’s analysis before she started feeling better about her life. Although Eckardt reclined on Fromm’s analytic couch three times a week, she thought that she had not cultivated much of a transference relationship with him. Fromm seemed too full of himself for her to have one. In time, however, she warmed to Fromm and could tell him how traumatized she had been as a five-year-old when Horney sent her away to Switzerland, illustrating the emotional distance between mother and daughter. Eckardt felt that Fromm eventually helped her to see that a broken relationship with Karen Horney had created “a detached person who did not quite know whether she existed and did not have a sense of the other person.”24

Bypassing the professedly neutral clinical approach with minimal show of emotion—a manner that Freud had required of his followers—Fromm felt that his more direct, blunt, and personal manner had strengthened Eckardt’s fragile sense of selfhood. In 1940, he asked her to sit on a chair rather than lie on the analytic couch so as to make eye contact with him (the first time Fromm seems to have done this with a patient). “The moment we dialogued [and] he came to life for me, I came to life to myself,” Eckardt recalled. She felt alive and hopeful.²⁵

While Eckardt considered Fromm a kind and gifted clinician, Rollo May did not. In May 1940, Fromm agreed to take on May in a therapeutic analysis. May had established a career as a Protestant minister and Adlerian clinician and had published two books. From the start, Fromm was apprehensive that May was drifting toward an existential or “third force” school of psychology but had bypassed a basic understanding of Freud in the process. While the initial months of the analysis went well, Fromm was unable to find a spot for May on his regular appointment schedule. May prodded Fromm to meet more regularly: “I am looking forward very much to continue my work with you.” Fromm then put May on a regular schedule, but the analysis proceeded with considerable coolness. The modest narcissism and quasi-prophetic temperament of both may have impeded their progress. When May contracted tuberculosis, he began missing appointments. Oddly, Fromm lacked sympathy for May and did not mention his own bout with tuberculosis, now in remission. Fromm confided to a friend that May took notes on his analytic techniques and ideas expressed in the therapy sessions, and when he discovered that May used these materials (if somewhat modified) in his books and lectures, he was furious. Fromm broke off the analysis in 1943 and sent May a final bill.²⁶

Fromm and May do not seem to have met again until 1948 or 1949, when May joined the staff at the William Alanson White Institute. Their relationship improved somewhat. Fromm inquired whether May had continued with his analysis elsewhere and asked whether he might want to review his book, The Forgotten Language, in the New York Times. May responded favorably, noting that he was impressed with Fromm’s general approach at staff conferences and in lectures: “here is one whose directness and depth of human communication is as refreshing as a spring in a weary land where no water is, that is, the land of [clinical] techniques and of externalistic methods and conformity.” Like an ancient Hebrew prophet, May felt that Fromm now spoke “with a deep conviction of the ground of meaning in the human life.” Yet May’s new appreciation of Fromm did not supplant the suspicion and mistrust rooted in a very troubled and incomplete analysis. May held up Paul Tillich, not Fromm, as his mentor and Søren Kierkegaard as his spiritual guide. He judged Fromm’s writing to be “superficial” and spoke privately of Fromm as “pompous” and fundamentally immature in ranting at the bureaucratic ways of a society that had nurtured him. For his part, Fromm continued to belittle May’s intellectual and clinical contributions, mentioned the former analysand’s “very angry mood,” and found no humanism or empathy in May’s “humanistic psychology.”27

David Riesman appraised Fromm’s analytic skills more highly than May had. Riesman came from a prominent Jewish family in Philadelphia. His father was known internationally for his work as a medical professor and physician at the University of Pennsylvania. His mother, Eleanor, the dominant figure in the family, graduated at the top of her college class. Elegant and cultivated, she was keenly interested in the European avant-garde, including Freud, Thomas Mann, and Oswald Spengler. Although Riesman graduated with honors in biochemistry at Harvard, attended Harvard Law School, clerked for Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis, practiced as a Boston trial lawyer, taught law at the University of Buffalo, and worked in the New York district attorney’s office, his mother never regarded him as sufficiently creative or “first rate.” He suffered from a sense of inadequacy in what appeared to be a protracted search for a satisfying vocation. In the course of her analysis with Karen Horney, Eleanor Riesman asked whether a therapeutic analysis might help David and improve the communication between mother and son. When Horney met with David briefly, she characterized him as a “very resigned” young man and recommended therapeutic analysis with Fromm.²⁸

For several years during the early and mid-1940s, Riesman commuted on weekends from the University of Buffalo to Fromm’s office on the Upper West Side near Columbia University for a two-hour session on Saturdays and another two hours on Sundays. Riesman insisted retrospectively that he did not really need to be analyzed but wanted “to please my mother.” Not deeply motivated to wrestle with his sense of inadequacy and his unclear vocational aims, he did not characterize his work with Fromm as a full-blown “analysis”: It was “really conversational—not that he didn’t help me psychologically.” Riesman and his parents were well aware of Fromm’s credentials. For Riesman, it was very important that Fromm’s education, cultivation, and eminence exceeded that of his parents. As Riesman recalled, the fact that Fromm thought well of him from the start “made an enormous difference” to him and to some extent operated as a counterbalance to Riesman’s sense of inadequacy. He considered emulating Fromm by becoming an academic and a researcher.29

The heart of the Fromm-Riesman analytic relationship was a mutually enriching and joyous exchange of ideas that was not unlike Fromm’s work with Rabinkow. Riesman had been deeply interested in the social thought of European refugee scholars and had helped establish a program to resettle them in America. Riesman was fascinated with Fromm’s account as a refugee and with his account of the Frankfurt Institute studies of authoritarianism and the commodification of selfhood under modern capitalism. Above all, Riesman became enchanted with Fromm’s concept of social character, especially Fromm’s marketing character, and how it could be applied cogently in the study of particular cultures. As his The Lonely Crowd evolved into a highly acclaimed exploratory essay, Riesman’s statements of indebtedness to Fromm elevated Fromm’s reputation among American scholars and intellectuals. Fromm’s analysis of Riesman was essentially an exuberant intellectual exchange in what was otherwise a difficult decade for both and made the two close friends and colleagues for life. Clinicians have not considered it a “depth” analytic encounter, but Riesman never belittled its influence in shaping his career and his life.³⁰

An evaluation of Fromm’s success with his analysands in the 1940s suggests that there was a disjuncture between his theoretical outlines for successful therapy and his concrete analytic practice. He was “uneven” as a therapist, helping to enhance the happiness and productivity of those with whom he could cultivate a mutually respectful rapport but often dismissive of others. The examples at hand show Fromm’s adaptability as a clinician. His analysands had to meet the needs of their clinician, perhaps more often than was good for them.³¹

Henny Gurland

Fromm married Henny Gurland, a fellow émigré from Nazi Germany, in July 1944, soon after finalizing the divorce from Frieda and after the demise of his relationships with Karen Horney and Katherine Dunham. The marriage gave him great joy but also considerable distress. To explore it is to understand a good deal about Fromm as he became a prophet of what he called “humanism” and a clinician of “central relatedness.”

Henny Gurland was born in Aachen, Germany, in 1900, shortly after Fromm was born in Frankfurt. Her mother was Catholic, jovial, and affectionate. Her father was a Jewish optician, a tobacconist, and the Aachen town poet. Educated by nuns in a Catholic high school, Henny secured secretarial training and employment in Berlin. Socialist-labor in her political orientation, she became active in youth groups affiliated with the Social Democratic Party. She also became an active Zionist. In 1922, she married Otto Rosenthal, a Jewish entrepreneur, who owned companies involved in the international trade of coal-tar chemicals. Within a year, Henny gave birth to a son, Joseph, but her marriage was troubled from the start, and she and Otto divorced in 1929. Characterizing Henny as unstable and morally unfit, Otto won custody of their son. It is unclear whether there was any substance in these charges.32

After the divorce, Henny became exceedingly active politically and worked as a photographer for Vorwärts, an organ of the German Social Democratic Party. In this capacity, she was a pioneer in the area of stark and natural black-and-white photographs with minimal retouching. As a successful SDP photojournalist and overtly anti-Nazi, her name was placed on an enemies list when Hitler came to power, and she fled to Belgium. She recrossed the German border in 1934 and took Joseph back to Belgium with her, in defiance of a divorce court’s ruling. Two years later, Henny married Rafael Gurland, a Spaniard, an anti-Nazi activist, a Marxist, and a postdoctoral student at the Frankfurt Institute. Rafael had joined the diplomatic service of the Spanish Republic during the country’s civil war and moved with Henny and Joseph to the Spanish embassy in Paris. Henny and Rafael soon drifted apart. He joined the French army to resist a Nazi invasion in 1939 but was captured shortly thereafter and was a German prisoner of war for two years.³³

As the Germans advanced on Paris, with Rafael incarcerated and the marriage shaky, Henny arranged a U.S. visa for herself and Joseph. Lacking exit visas from France, however, she, Joseph, and her friend Walter Benjamin (next to Adorno, perhaps the most brilliant philosopher and social critic at the Frankfurt Institute) set out to cross the French-Spanish border on foot, illegally, in September 1940. They planned to travel across Spain and from there go to Lisbon, from where they would board a ship to New York. Instead, they were caught by Franco’s border guards as they attempted their bruising climb across the French border, which proved injurious to Henny’s health. According to Henny’s daughter-in-law, they were strafed by fire from hostile planes before their capture. This left Henny with metal fragments in her side, which contributed to her exceedingly painful rheumatoid arthritis, which would later make walking difficult. The Spanish guards intended to return them to the pro-Nazi Vichy regime in France for almost certain incarceration. Fearing the worst, Benjamin committed suicide. Although traumatized, Henny passed off his death as heart failure and attended to the burial. Upset over Benjamin’s death, the border guards allowed Henny and Joseph to proceed through Spain to Lisbon. Henny and Joseph arrived in New York at the end of 1940.34

Although Henny and Rafael did not legally dissolve their marriage until 1943, it was over by the time she and seventeen-year-old Joseph took up residence in New York. Short on funds, Henny found a cheap apartment; its furnishings were donated. She was able to earn income from wealthy patrons for her innovative photoportraiture and by weaving fashionable raw wool rugs. In time Henny became close friends with Ruth Staudinger, also a skilled photographer, whose father was president of the New School for Social Research, where Fromm periodically taught. With introductions from Rafael and Walter Benjamin, Henny had also met members of the Frankfurt Institute before it relocated to Morningside Heights. Early in 1941, Ruth Staudinger threw a party for both New School and Frankfurt Institute faculty, and Fromm and Henny Gurland attended. Although they may have met in Germany, both were ready for a serious relationship when they met in New York. Fromm, for whom the intimate presence of a woman was a stabilizing influence, found Henny to fill the void left by Horney and Dunham.³⁵

Erich and Henny began to see each other regularly. He was attracted by her artistic talent and her considerable intelligence. When Henny’s son enrolled at the New York University College of Engineering in February 1941, Fromm generously offered to pay whatever costs Otto would not provide. By late 1941, Fromm intervened more directly by cooperating with the National Refugee Service to support Henny’s application for a regular U.S. visa and ultimately American citizenship. More urgently, when Joseph was classified mistakenly as an “enemy alien,” Fromm worked actively for his reclassification. He regarded the bright young man as a son. By 1943, Henny and Erich considered marriage. Happiness had, in some measure, returned to Henny’s life after two failed and dispiriting relationships and a traumatic and injurious escape from Europe. “I am no longer homesick [for Europe] but happy to be here,” she wrote to her close friend, Izette de Forest.36

At this point, the three lived together. About this time, when Erich and Henny had become engaged, she became easily agitated, and her moods began to change drastically. When Joseph graduated in February 1944 with a bachelor’s degree in chemical engineering, for example, Henny was elated. But soon after, when he was inducted into the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers in a noncombat position that would enhance his research skills, she told de Forest that her periodic struggle with anxiety and depression had returned. Henny confided to de Forest that Rafael’s departure to join the French military in 1939 had evoked a similar downcast mood—and that the problem had plagued her much of her life.³⁷

By July 1944, Henny’s depression and anxiety temporarily lifted, and she married Erich. They rented a comfortable flat off of Central Park. Now in their mid-forties, she baked rolls for their breakfast every morning while he took instruction in sensory awareness training with Henny’s friend Charlotte Selver, a Holocaust émigré who led the sensory awareness movement in New York. Her skills were legion. Selver recalled that Fromm seemed exceedingly rushed and driven during the early years of marriage, lecturing at the New School, the White Institute, and Bennington College while increasing his involvement with clinical supervision and analytic patients. He was also trying to complete Man for Himself. According to Selver, his manner was so blunt and “no-nonsense” that many mutual acquaintances considered him arrogant and impatient. Henny’s assessment was more charitable: “Erich wants to finish his book and he is very impatient and nervous because in New York he has not one hour for himself [and] neither for his poor wife.” Henny enjoyed her photography work, particularly a project shooting scenes of Central Park “in different ‘moods,’” but she sensed that she and Erich needed time together away from New York. Consequently, they decided to spend long weekends in Bennington, Vermont, where on Mondays Erich taught a course at the college. Henny eventually stopped commuting back to the city, remaining in their Bennington apartment. Erich returned to the city on Tuesday mornings, for jammed days of teaching, clinical work, and supervision. On Friday evenings, his suitcase filled with special baked goods and delicatessen delectables to cheer Henny up, Erich returned to Bennington and seemed to make new inroads on his writing agenda. Escape from Freedom was a hard act to follow, but he was determined to complete its sequel by the end of 1946. Fromm’s writing, if in part for financial needs, was also to bring order, control, and some stability into his life. Henny, despite bouts of depression and arthritic pain, was often happy and helped Erich with his book project, revising his manuscript to improve its readability.38

Almost immediately before the move to Bennington, Henny wrote a confidential letter to Izette de Forest on the state of her marriage to Erich:

I am in love with him—and Erich likes very much the family life. His attitude toward Josi [Joseph] is wonderful—he is like a friend and a father. Those small things of daily life are so important and his harmonious way in dealing with difficulties makes me love him even more than I did before—but you know Erich and his good influence and I don’t have to tell you how happy I am with him.

This was not the overly blunt, pressured, and sometimes caustic man whom many others met. Indeed, Erich seemed to have a stabilizing effect on Henny, easing her agitation and helping to blunt some of her mood shifts. He loved her deeply and was particularly taken by her intuitive qualities along with her “searching and penetrating mind which … so greatly contributed to my own development.”³⁹

Still, Erich felt that he needed professional advice about her. Sometime during this interval, he arranged, with Henny’s consent, to have the prominent psychiatrist and scholar Carl Binger conduct a full assessment of Henny. Binger concluded that she was schizophrenic, even though current clinicians might classify her moods as symptomatic of a bipolar disorder. Erich had sensed by the mid-1940s that something was terribly wrong with Henny, disposing him to treat her all the more with gentle good cheer and kind sensitivity. He was gratified that she had found some support in the Bennington artistic community, but that was not enough. He financed the construction of a large house with all the comforts Henny had lacked during her difficult life, supplementing his own income with a loan from Riesman. Surrounded by two scenic and meticulously landscaped acres, the house had a soft, contemporary look, with four bedrooms, two and a half bathrooms, a formal dining room, large living room, family room, study with built-in bookcases, kitchen with all the latest appliances, and circular driveway entrance to a two-car garage. Both in their mid-forties, they did not intend to have children, and by this time Joseph lived on his own, prompting the question of why they built such a large and elegant house. It seemed at cross-purposes with their antipathy to consumerism.40

Fromm had a wonderful way with clinical and other older students, as his friendly and supportive relationship with Joseph suggested. Younger children held little attraction for him. On one occasion, Fromm almost let a baby he was holding slide off his lap because he was so engrossed with the story he was telling. Lewis Webster Jones, the president of Bennington College, actively solicited him to teach. He offered to pay Fromm $2,500 under an endowed professorship for teaching one day each week (the 2012 equivalent of roughly $30,000). His course, “Human Nature and Character Structure,” was very popular. Fromm’s lectures provided the basis for much of Man for Himself and at least some of The Forgotten Language. The class prompted Fromm to expand his reading list and to convey more of his appreciable background in social psychology and psychoanalysis to his students. No few students noted his prophetic as well as his congenial and scholarly manner. In 1948, the senior class paid Fromm an honor almost never accorded to a regular member of the faculty—the graduating students chose him for their commencement speaker. Frances Davis, a member of that senior class, who became the psychologist David Rappaport’s secretary at the Austen Riggs Center, wrote to Fromm a few months after graduation: “My work with you will always have the greatest meaning for me—as it did for most of us who were in your class.” The enthusiastic response of students prompted Fromm, by the end of 1948, to agree to create a second course at Bennington on the dynamics of interpersonal relations (“Education in the Art of Living”). Yet Fromm sometimes wondered whether such conviviality with his Bennington students may have had its downside. He asked President Jones whether his great popularity among them may have made them less engaged with the substantive course materials. Jones replied that this was nonsense: Fromm’s students mastered far more than their required assignments. He had cultivated a love in most of them for rigorous reasoning and the life of the mind. When not teaching, Fromm spent weekends with Henny to cheer her up. Though he used these weekends to make progress on his writing, Erich spent much of his time taking care of Henny and grew increasingly vigilant as her condition deteriorated.⁴¹

Certainly by the summer of 1948, as Erich and Henny moved into their elegant Bennington house, she suffered from elevated blood pressure, cardiac problems, and very acute arthritic pain that seemed to exacerbate her swings into depression. Initially, doctors speculated that lead poisoning was the culprit, but eventually they understood that the acuteness of her pain derived from the injuries sustained during her escape from France. Various medications were administered to no particular effect; she preferred homeopathic treatments and eschewed most medicines. By the fall of 1948, Erich found that he was attending to Henny practically around the clock; she was usually bedridden and deeply depressed. His cousin, Gertrud Hunziker-Fromm, felt that Henny’s depression was often more debilitating than her pain. Erich cancelled lectures and professional opportunities and could barely honor his teaching and clinical training obligations. There was little time to attend to correspondence, and for the first time he missed publishing deadlines. The formulator of the concept of a productive social character did not feel that he himself was being very productive.42

To be sure, there were short intervals where Henny seemed to rally. She felt well enough to attend Joseph’s marriage to Doris Hurwitch, whom Erich and Henny adored. As a wedding gift, they gave the newlyweds a honeymoon trip to Cuba. These hopeful intervals gave Erich a sense that he might get back to serious writing and return to the lecture circuit. Indeed, during the winter of 1948–1949, he was able to deliver a series of lectures at Yale on psychoanalysis and religion. He showed the texts of each of these lectures to Henny and was delighted when she offered penetrating suggestions to help him revise them into a short book. However, in June Erich recounted to Henny’s sister-in-law:

Henny has been rather ill, sometimes with severe pain, so she has not been able to sleep for many nights. For three-quarters of a year she has almost always been in bed unable to do anything, not even write letters. I have not been able to write. Apart from my [clinical] practice and other professional duties, I have been busy with Henny’s illness.⁴³

With uncharacteristic despondency, Erich somehow summoned the energy to teach a preponderance of his classes at Bennington and the New School, to supervise (if erratically) at the White Institute, and to maintain a reduced psychoanalytic practice. Because medical care was better in New York than Bennington, he moved Henny back to their apartment off Central Park and commuted alone to Vermont for his Monday class. Joseph was in Boston completing graduate work in metallurgical engineering at MIT, and he and Doris helped Fromm out when they could and tried to cheer Henny up. When professional obligations took Erich to Providence and nearby Boston, he always stayed with them. David Riesman was also encouraging, ordering artistic photographs from Henny, hoping to motivate her to get back to work. Erich usually reported that she could not complete an assignment. Nevertheless, Henny made the most of her condition. She would invite her friends to join her for breakfast, and though she was in bed, they all enjoyed themselves on these occasions.44

By the middle of 1949, Henny’s physicians recommended a trip to Mexico, specifically to the radioactive springs near Mexico City. Erich took her there twice over the next six months. The climate and warm mineral waters modestly and temporarily soothed Henny’s pain while slightly easing her depression. Indeed, Mexico appeared to be Erich’s last hope to restore her happiness. If Henny’s dire condition could be reversed, he knew that it would ease his own burdens and remedy the joyless and comparatively unproductive aspect of his life. In Man for Himself (1947), Fromm had written about the essential qualities of a happy, spontaneous, and productive life, but he was well aware that he was not living it. Similar to the optimistic conclusion of Escape from Freedom, Man for Himself projected a vision of an idealized reality wholly removed from his own.

Even before he migrated to America in 1934, Fromm had been fascinated by Mexico, especially Taxco, a charming town inhabited by talented craftspeople and artists, and during the summer of 1936, he had rented a house there with Karen Horney. Fromm returned for a month with Horney the following summer. During this interval, he visited San José Purrua, near Mexico City. Both Fromm and Horney began to consider Mexico an ideal place for long-term residence. On trips to Mexico City, Fromm had cultivated a close friendship with the émigré Marxist intellectual and activist Otto Rühle, whom he had known in Germany and who now consulted with the Mexican Ministry of Education. He had spent the summer of 1940 there learning from Rühle’s work on comparative fascism as he worked on completing Escape from Freedom.⁴⁵

Fromm’s inability to write for publication and to find time to keep up with his clinical and teaching commitments because of Henny’s need for round-the-clock care and general unresponsiveness to medication made him perhaps even more eager than Henny to travel to Mexico. He picked up Spanish rapidly and continued to find Mexican art and culture to his liking. Freed of his hectic daily schedule in New York and distant from the always distasteful aspersions of orthodox American psychoanalysts, Fromm concluded that permanent residence in Mexico City proximate to the healing springs of San José Purrua might enhance both his life and Henny’s.46

In June 1950, the couple made the move to Mexico City and spent much of their time in San José Purrua at the recommendation of her New York physicians. But Henny’s health stayed precarious. The sources of the arthritic pain and the underlying depression remained mysterious to attending Mexican physicians. Fromm continued caring for her almost full time, as he had before the move, and he worried that she seemed to despair of life itself. He cancelled all appointments requiring travel to the United States, wrote little, and worried a good deal.⁴⁷

Henny’s arthritic pain did not abate, even modestly, despite visits to the mineral springs. Rather, her depression moved to a new level, even as Joseph and Doris visited with Henny’s first grandchild. Fromm watched her more closely than ever at this point and was loathe to leave her alone, even for brief periods. In June 1952, he found Henny dead on the floor of their bathroom, just hours after she told him, “Now I am quite sure I shall be entirely well in a short time.” Joseph publicly blamed the death on heart failure, and Doris corroborated that story after initially stating that Henny had slit her wrists to end her life. The disparate stories and Erich’s constant vigilance during the last years and especially the last days of her life would indicate that suicide is the more probable explanation. “I could not help Henny,” he told Henny’s friend, Charlotte Selver, who was sure from context that Erich was speaking of Henny’s suicide.⁴⁸

Henny’s death caused Fromm not only intense emotional distress but prompted him to consider leaving Mexico, where she was buried. Karen Horney, who regularly visited the Cuernavaca–Mexico City area, had also died in 1952, adding to Fromm’s generally gloomy perspective on life. To be sure, Fromm had several short sexual encounters between the middle of 1952 and early 1953, hoping in vain that they might move him “out of that spirit of being depressed.” During the last few years of Henny’s life, he had corresponded regularly with Charlotte Selver, who had been apprehensive about what Henny’s illness was doing to Fromm and urged him to speak about his deep sadness. Judging from the letters, she was only modestly successful. However, she proved a good friend during a difficult time, and it is almost certain from the correspondence at hand that she became one of the lovers that helped him through his depression.49

Man for Himself

Owing to his exceedingly busy clinical and teaching schedules and his constant attention to Henny, Erich was extremely disappointed with his literary productivity in the decade after Escape from Freedom. Indeed, the books he wrote, centering on ethics, religion, and symbolic language, were simply revisions of public lectures. He shifted the lectures into chapters by amplifying the logic of his own thoughts and by citing classic thinkers. Unlike the Weimar worker study and a good portion of his writing before Escape, these publications were not sustained by survey research or any systematically collected body of evidence, though his explication of character theory was extraordinarily significant and insightful.

Fromm also lacked a sustained focus in his writing. As he was completing Man for Himself for example, he considered joining Ashley Montagu in publishing a popular volume containing selections from Freud’s writings. Permission to print the selections would have to come from the executors of Freud’s literary estate, however, and neither Fromm nor Montagu pursued those permissions diligently. The project never materialized. In 1948 and 1949, Fromm was invited to a few meetings concerning a UNESCO research project on the sources of political and social tensions in four countries. The project leaders wanted him to test his evolving concept of “social character” on one of those countries: Australia. Fromm considered it as a potential pilot project and a prelude to an investigation of “more complicated cultures like the United States.” He proposed to conduct field work on the Australian “national character” by focusing on variables in his population sample such as “authoritarianism versus independence, suggestibility versus critical abilities, destructiveness and xenophobia versus love and affection.” Ultimately, UNESCO lacked the money to support him. Fromm sought funds from Charles Dollard at the Carnegie Foundation and from Melbourne University, but he never fashioned a comprehensive proposal that might have secured their assistance.^50_

This is not to say that the books Fromm wrote during this interval were without merit. Man for Himself: An Inquiry Into the Psychology of Ethics (1947) and Psychoanalysis and Religion (1950) amplified the lectures that he offered during the 1940s, especially at Bennington College. They were less scholarly, less precise, and less probing than the articles he had written when he worked at the Frankfurt Institute. They were assuredly less evocative than Escape from Freedom and less focused on the threat of authoritarianism. But they elaborated at some length on Fromm’s concept of “social character” and, more peripherally, on his “humanist” credo. Indeed, the themes of these two small books overlapped, and both were situated on the borderline between ethics and religion. They were intended to advance a comprehensive philosophy of life, and both spoke in important if polemical ways to Western postwar society. Predictably, Fromm’s narrative in these volumes carried a more prophetic tone than had Escape from Freedom.

To some extent, Man for Himself was a response to a 1938 classic on suicide by the eminent psychiatrist and psychoanalyst Karl Menninger. Titled Man Against Himself Menninger’s argument was that suicide occurred when the human capacities for life and love were overbalanced by self-destructive drives. Soon to review Escape from Freedom tersely for its departure from psychoanalytic orthodoxy, Menninger elaborated on Freud’s dual-drive theory (the life wish versus the death wish), describing in his book the forces that moved man from a delicate balance between the two and toward suicide. Fromm had rejected Freudian drive theory entirely by this point in time and therefore opposed the very premises of Menninger’s book. A person was intrinsically good, Fromm maintained, and had an abundant capacity to advocate for himself. Essentially, Man for Himself elaborated a saying of Rabbi Hillel that Fromm had often discussed with Rabinkow: “If I am not for myself, who will be for me?” In trusting one’s own creative resources, one could develop happiness, spontaneity, and productivity in one’s life. Only when ethical norms were based on external authority and revelation did they stifle the human spirit, turn a person into a joyless automaton estranged from his “true essence,” and make suicide a possibility. Unlike Menninger and Freud, Fromm held himself out as an “ethical thinker” and a voice of the “human conscience” who wrote to underscore “what is good or what is bad for man.”51

Man for Himself was therefore a conceptual alternative to orthodox Freudianism and was grounded in what Fromm regarded as universal ethics. “Ethical” man (i.e., the person who embodied Fromm’s and the Jewish view of a “God” on earth) more than “psychological” man (i.e., a person who strived for productivity and personal happiness) was central to Fromm’s view of leadership.

Man for Himself was completed as the Cold War unfolded, and Fromm observed competing social trends. One trend celebrated human capacity, dignity, and democracy, and the other underscored human depravity and sin and purportedly required authoritarian intervention (not unlike the Soviet incursions throughout Eastern Europe). As heirs of both negative and authoritarian Luther on the one hand and the more democratic and hopeful Jefferson on the other, Fromm asserted, quite problematically, “we consciously believe in man’s power and dignity, but—often unconsciously—we also believe in man’s—and particularly our own—powerlessness and badness and explain it by pointing to ‘human nature.’” Whereas Freud had embraced these two opposing premises in his dual-drive theory, Fromm’s “humanistic” ethics purported to assist man to draw upon his own inner resources for happiness and contentment—to advance the hopeful and caring traditions of the Renaissance and the Enlightenment. From a “humanist” perspective, Fromm insisted that the ethical imperative of the day was for man “to be himself and to be for himself.”52

More than Escape, Fromm’s Man for Himself displayed the unqualified hopefulness that would be a characteristic theme in the decades ahead. Man needed to be productive, what Aristotle characterized as “flourishing.” He needed to work not simply to survive materially but to draw upon his talents to create and innovate—to liberate his spirit. Writing more from the “life” and temperament of a prophet of hope than from his “life” as a sober and cautious social critic during his Frankfurt Institute years, Fromm postulated that society needed to be organized in ways that assured its citizens of sufficient food and shelter. They must not be subjected to material scarcity so that they could instead focus on creativity. To be productive was to “give birth to one’s own potentialities” without restricting the productivity of others. Where man’s productivity was fundamentally blocked, he channeled his energy in ways that were destructive to him and to others. As recent history purportedly attested, both self and society were thereby endangered.⁵³

Central to Man for Himself, Fromm postulated with minimal elaboration that one would not be productive without being rational and reflective. For self-knowledge and identity, one needed confidence in one’s capacity to observe, judge, and reason. When one understood oneself, one could love and value oneself. Succinctly, with confidence in the durability of one’s rational capacity, unique identity as an individual, and inner resources, a person was able to appreciate and understand these same qualities in others and to feel genuine empathy and love for the other. Reduced to its essence, the productive life was rational, spontaneous, creative, and loving, if not exuberant. This idea would form the basis for The Art of Loving (1956), Fromm’s bestseller. “Happiness is the indication that man has found the answer to the problem of human existence: the productive realization of his potentialities and thus, simultaneously, being one with the world and preserving the integrity of his self.”54

Fromm rightly suspected that Reinhold Niebuhr, a brilliant formulator of the Neo-Orthodox theological perspective and perhaps the most important of all of the twentieth century’s theologians, would be critical of his notion to liberate the resources of the individual self. In fact, Niebuhr wrote a long and thoughtful review of Man for Himself in which he declared that Fromm had gone much too far in his antiauthoritarianism. Above all, Niebuhr faulted Fromm for overemphasizing self-love and the necessity of each individual to cultivate his unique productive powers. Fromm had missed the importance of duty, Niebuhr insisted, dismissing duty as no more than the “internalization” of external authority. People wanted more from life than “merely to follow their desires.” They had a sense of duty to people and causes outside themselves, which enriched all of human existence. To be sure, Niebuhr acknowledged, people did not always obey this sense of duty: “its counsels are colored by the pressures and prejudices of our world. But unless we assume a perfect inner unity of personality there is something like the sense of duty.” For Niebuhr, Fromm was quite wrong in invariably equating duty with authoritarianism. The sense of duty evoked a giving of the self to others in empathetic fellowship. By giving to others, adherence to duty led to an appreciation of the capacities of the self. Indeed, Niebuhr also maintained that “Christian faith regards the sense of being judged from beyond the self as a necessary part of true self-knowledge.” Religious and ethical obligation was not to be equated with the internalization of authoritarianism: “an insecure and impoverished self is not made secure by the admonition [i.e., Fromm’s] to be concerned for itself; for an excessive concern for its security is the cause of impoverishment.” Finally, Niebuhr criticized Fromm for failing to appreciate man’s need “to exceed his bounds, to obscure the contingent character of his existence.” This need was served by compliance with what man perceived as divine law: “Man’s sin is not disobedience to a divine fiat but the idolatry of making himself his own end.”55

Niebuhr may have been exaggerating the limits of Fromm’s ethical “humanism.” After all, Fromm conceded that once man drew on his own resources, he became capable of enhancing humane values in society at large, and that in turn increased the potential for individual productivity. Nevertheless, Niebuhr’s critique of Fromm’s “humanistic” ethics was telling. He underscored that the prod of an external deity and of a sense of duty evoked by forces beyond the self could sometimes make man push beyond his own limitations—to come to be more productive, loving, and caring. For Niebuhr, calls to duty and cries for man to exceed his bounds (sometimes in emulation of God) could enhance the capacities of the self in a way authoritarianism could not.

Niebuhr was responding to more than an imprecision in Fromm’s developing concept of a “productive social character,” the “nucleus of the character structure which is shared by most members of the same culture.” While individuals could still differ in character, social character shaped individual desires to act in ways consistent with social expectations. The productive character was one of several types of social character, not the behavioral entity itself. The social character was what made acting in conformity with social rules and restrictions not only gratifying but beyond conscious decision making. For example, modern industrial society had turned man “into a person who was eager to spend most of his energy for the purpose of work, who acquired discipline, particularly orderliness and punctuality.” As such, to draw psychological sustenance from sources other than the self was not antithetical to individual freedom. Indeed, Fromm periodically acknowledged that the concept of a free and productive individual was in some sense an external text that people might follow even as they augmented their own productive resources. Had Fromm made this point more stridently and consistently, the strength of Niebuhr’s critique might have been diluted.⁵⁶

In some measure, Man for Himself clarified what Fromm meant by psychological productivity in his elaboration of the four nonproductive character types, the adjuncts to his concept of social character. Whereas the productive character type created or augmented the self and humankind, the nonproductive character took, kept, or sold resources—goods, services, even selfhood. Nonproductive man feared an empty self and tried constantly to keep it filled. He was so preoccupied with self-depletion and replenishment that joy, creativity, exuberance, and ethical propriety were beyond his grasp. He was unresponsive to both an internal and an externally rooted sense of duty and could give no thought to transcending the boundaries of the self. Therefore, while there was cogency in Niebuhr’s misgivings about Fromm—the assertion that ethical propriety derived from the resources of the self exclusive of external sources—Fromm had a qualified retort. He insisted that only a productive character was capable of ethical conduct. Yet, if this qualification might have given Niebuhr pause, it could hardly eradicate the distinction between Fromm’s upbeat hopefulness in human potentiality and Niebuhr’s underlying skepticism.

In delineating the first three of his four nonproductive character types, Fromm drew heavily on what Freud and Karl Abraham had designated as the oral receptive, the oral sadistic, and the anal personalities. Whereas Freud and Abraham classified these as pregenital types of libido organization, Fromm regarded them as ways in which man related to the world through his concrete social situation. In Fromm’s “receptive orientation” (Freud’s oral receptive), a person considered the “source of all good” to be outside himself. Outside resources provided all important material things, love, knowledge, and pleasure. One needed what Karen Horney called magic helpers to furnish these resources, and one became quite anxious when the helper withdrew or recanted on what had been forthcoming. So long as a person with a receptive character had a continuous expectation of being “fed,” he was optimistic and friendly. But he became anxious and distressed when the “source of supply” was threatened. He often felt “a genuine warmth and a wish to help others,” but only because he assumed that by procuring their favor, he perpetuated their gifts. He was devoted and sensitive when continuously supplied but also submissive to the supplier and parasitical.57

Where Freud and Abraham referred to an oral sadistic stage, Fromm, consistent with his social character typology, described an “exploitive orientation.” Like the receptive personality, the exploitive person felt that he could produce nothing himself. While the receptive person expected to receive what he needed as “gifts,” the exploitive person took resources or ideas away from others by force or cunning: “They use and exploit anybody and anything from whom or from which they can squeeze something.” The receptive person could be optimistic and confident, but an exploitive person was always suspicious and envious, desiring what he might take away from others. He regularly overrated what others had or produced and underrated his own resources. The receptive person was captivating, able to assert himself and seductive, but also egocentric.58

Freud’s and Abraham’s anal-retentive personality became Fromm’s “hoarding orientation.” Whereas the receptive and exploitive orientations sought to acquire from the outside world, the hoarding self had little faith in such external acquisitions. Instead, he protected all his resources, hoarding and saving as much as possible. He assumed that he had only a fixed quantity of energy, mental capacity, and possessions and was determined to order and protect them so that they would never be depleted. He did not give love but tried to acquire it by possessing the beloved. The hoarder meticulously ordered his time and resources and cherished his memories of a past golden age. He assumed things were diminished or exhausted by use—that he could not replenish them; “death and destruction have more reality than life and growth.” Creating protective walls between himself and others, his sense of justice was limited to saying: “Mine is mine and yours is yours.”⁵⁹

A person who received, exploited, or hoarded had grave doubts about his capacity to produce or create. In all three cases, this person lacked faith in his own talents or powers of creation or replenishment and was plagued by a fear of inner psychological emptiness. The constant quest for the self to run as close to “full” as possible made for anxiety, dread, and joylessness. Through these three negative referents, all heavily derived from the Freudian developmental model but shorn of libidinal drives, Fromm came to equate productivity with joy, ebullience, spontaneity, creativity, and happiness. He was building a philosophy or credo of the good life by admonishing people to have faith in their capacity to lead themselves to happiness.

Fromm’s marketing personality was the only character type not based on Freud and Abraham’s typology. Unlike the receptive, exploitive, and hoarding orientations, which Fromm assumed had always existed, he described the marketing orientation as an adaptation to the modern capitalist marketplace, representing “the experience of oneself as a commodity and of one’s value as exchange value.” One’s personality could be marketed or packaged to fit current fashion and demand to maximize its attractiveness in the same way products and skills were marketed. If a specific employment area specified being “cheerful,” “ambitious,” “reliable,” or any other trait or to belong to particular churches or social clubs, a marketing-oriented person presented himself accordingly. His own attributes were experienced as commodities alienated from his self. Like Ibsen’s Peer Gynt, the marketing self was made up of a number of layers with “no core to be found.” Identity did not derive from his own capacities and needs but how he packaged himself so that others had a favorable opinion of him and that would enhance his marketability. The marketing personality had no inner essence. The “very changeability of attitudes is the only permanent quality of such orientation.” He was willing to play any role and display whatever personality traits assured success. Mass-media advertisements and the glamorized qualities of cultural heroes helped him become attuned to current personality features that employers or purchasers sought: “Some roles would not fit in with the peculiarities of the person; therefore, we must do away with them—not with the roles but with the peculiarities. The marketing personality must be free, free of all individuality.”60

Psychologically, Fromm held that the marketing character was not “alive” and was hardly human. He was Arthur Miller’s Willie Loman, who tried to base a sales career upon his personality and, lacking inner resources, had no recourse but suicide when he became unmarketable. Fromm’s marketing personality bore some resemblance to the quality of “automaton conformity” developed in Escape from Freedom, though by underscoring a bleak inner emptiness, it was more devastating. The marketing character also became a point of departure for William Whyte’s The Organization Man (1956), where success in the large corporate organization attended those who molded their personalities and habits to fit corporate needs and habits. The concept of marketing character was also a forerunner of Erving Goffman’s The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life (1959), which argued that a person changed according to how he imagined that others perceived him. The concept even anticipated what Herbert Marcuse would label “one-dimensional man.” Even though Fromm advanced his “marketing character” typology without nuance or clinical support, the concept made Man for Himself a forerunner to the very substantial critical literature of the 1950s and 1960s on the culture and psychology of conformity.

Whereas Escape from Freedom ended on an upbeat note, Man for Himself did not. In the latter, Fromm acknowledged that everyone was a mix of productive and unproductive character structures but felt that the unproductive self was increasingly ascendant and that his humanist ethics were in retreat:

Our moral problem is man’s indifference to himself. It lies in the fact that we have lost the sense of the significance and uniqueness of the individual, that we have made ourselves into instruments for purposes outside ourselves, that we experience and treat ourselves as commodities, and that our powers have become alienated from ourselves.61

Fromm’s frequent discussions of the marketing character over the course of the 1940s had to factor into the pessimism with which he ended Man for Himself. Whether he thought in terms of Freud’s categories of the oral receptive, the oral sadistic, and the anal personality or his first three character types (receptive, exploitative, and hoarding), he was exposing an anxious, unhappy, and unproductive self—but also a self that had the capacity for transformation. This potentiality helped Fromm to maintain his modestly upbeat, hopeful tone throughout the rest of the volume.

By 1947, as Fromm ended Man for Himself, one dangerous authoritarian regime—Hitler’s—had been defeated—and the brutalities of Stalin’s had been exposed. Yet, in America especially, the forces of the marketplace and consumer culture seemed to be expanding. The signs of psychological vacuity or emptiness that Fromm, Riesman, Whyte, and other social critics exposed or would expose were already evident. For Fromm, the danger of “automaton conformity” in the societies that opposed Hitler seemed to be easing into an even more psychologically precarious marketing character. If he remained more upbeat than most of his colleagues, Fromm was also increasingly apprehensive of the future.

Save for Niebuhr, responses to Man for Himself were decidedly positive. Abraham Maslow made extended marginal comments in his copy of the book. Indeed, Maslow used Fromm’s volume to develop his own “humanistic psychology” based on man’s purported “hierarchy of needs.” Several reviewers credited Fromm for explaining that a growing disposition in American culture toward psychological interpretation of human motivation should never replace efforts to understand and facilitate human ethics. This was not an insignificant reading of Man for Himself, as it showed how his volume anticipated Philip Rieff’s brilliant characterization of “therapeutic man”—an “order hopper” who was unbound by ethical creeds or the requirements of analytic logic and clarity.⁶²

Psychoanalysis and Religion

Psychoanalysis and Religion (1950), the third book Fromm completed in this decade and which he characterized as a continuation of Man For Himself, was based on a modest elaboration of a series of lectures he presented at Yale during the winter of 1948–1949. Although the 1947 volume presented Fromm’s psychology of ethics and Psychoanalysis and Religion addressed the psychology of religion, he acknowledged that the two topics were “closely interrelated and therefore there is some overlapping.” Like Man for Himself, Psychoanalysis and Religion sold 1.5 million copies and has been translated into twenty-two languages.63

This acknowledgment of overlapping was an understatement. Although Fromm displayed a respectable understanding of Eastern as well as Western religions in Psychoanalysis and Religion, he judged them through the conceptual structure of Man for Himself. If “humanistic ethics” was a contradiction in terms, for Fromm it encouraged man to trust himself, cultivate his own resources, and become productive. So too, “humanistic religion,” for all its ambiguity, encouraged man to cherish his own inner resources and productivity (even if not in quite the same way as humanistic ethics). Authoritarianism was the antithesis of both “humane ethics” and “humane” religious experience. If Fromm had elected to repeat the scholarly proclivities evident in his 1930s essays, he might have integrated Psychoanalysis and Religion into Man for Himself and produced a more substantive book than either alone. Instead, he transformed his reasoning process and sources for one book into the theoretical outlines of another. To be sure, Fromm’s strikingly innovative contrast between productive social character and marketing character made Man for Himself more than a middlebrow polemic on the psychology of ethics, but Psychoanalysis and Religion lacked any conceptual innovation. Fromm wrote not as the hardheaded intellectual and scholar but as a prophetic commentator on the human condition, one with a doctrinal position not wholly different from that of Rollo May and far from that of the more eminent Abraham Maslow.

Fromm began Psychoanalysis and Religion with the same tone of despair with which he concluded Man for Himself. Despite man’s vast scientific and technological achievement in the modern era, he has not learned to emancipate himself intellectually, emotionally, or spiritually: “Ours is a life not of brotherliness, happiness, contentment but of spiritual chaos and bewilderment dangerously close to a state of madness … in which the contact with inner reality is lost and thought is split from effect.” In this unhappiness and spiritual impoverishment (which in some way reflected Fromm’s own life at the time), man was more attracted to authoritarian religion than to humanism. Calvinism and other authoritarian religions demanded submission to a power transcending the individual. In exchange for man’s abandonment of his own agency and independence, authoritarian religion soothed his sense of loneliness and his apprehensions over his limitations: “he gains the feeling of being protected by an awe-inspiring power of which, as it were, he becomes a part.” Submission to external religious authority, however, promoted further unhappiness and guilt while constraining man’s productive powers. The alternative—Fromm’s vaguely presented delineation of a religious experience, with or without a deity—was a far better remedy for the discontented soul. By focusing on the development of man’s inner resources, it promised self-realization, joy, love, and creative productivity. In contrast to authoritarian religion, this so-called humanistic religion made God “a symbol of man’s own powers which he [tried] to realize in his life … not a symbol of force and domination, having power over man.”64

From a psychological and philosophical standpoint, the humanist ethics of Man for Himself was essentially the so-called humanist religion of Psychoanalysis and Religion. To justify a separate book, Fromm pressed hard to draw a distinction. He insisted that there were three discernable psychological aspects of religious experience that “went beyond the purely ethical.” (1) One was “the wondering, the marveling, the becoming aware of life and of one’s own existence, and of the puzzling problem of one’s relatedness to the world.” The life process for the individual and for humanity at large became a question, not an answer. Indeed, answers in “humanistic” religious experience simply yield new questions about the nature of existence that kept one in perpetual wonderment and curiosity. (2) There was also what Paul Tillich described as an “ultimate concern” in the meaning of life and the self-realization of man (though it was strongly related to wonderment). “Ultimate concern” caused man to focus on “the welfare of the soul and the realization of the self” so that all else became secondary. “Ultimate concern” could coexist with a concept of God, but it did not have to, since the focus was on man. (3) Finally, “humanistic” religious experience prompted “an attitude of oneness not only in oneself, not only with one’s fellow men, but with all life and, beyond that, with the universe.” In some ways, this perspective approximated that of Ralph Waldo Emerson and even William James.65

Fromm sought to illustrate what was unique in humanistic religious experience by comparing it to what he regarded as successful psychoanalytic therapy. The psychoanalyst helped awaken the analysand’s sense of wonder and questioning so that he could find answers of his own; so did humanistic religious experience. Unless the patient was spiritually awakened, he would simply blame others for his troubles, regardless of how the analyst characterized the source of these troubles: “If the psychoanalysis is effective it is not because the patient accepts new theories about the reasons of his unhappiness but because he acquires a capacity for being genuinely bewildered; he marvels at the discovery of a part of himself whose existence he had never suspected.” In other words, the successful patient acquired an element of religious experience. The psychoanalytic process of “breaking through the confines of one’s organized self—the ego—and of getting in touch with the excluded and disassociated part of oneself, the unconscious” was akin to the religious experience of “breaking down individuation and feeling one with the All.” Thus the psychoanalyst was a “physician of the soul” or facilitator who helped the patient experience truth, love, freedom, and responsibility and to hear the voice of his own conscience. Like all humanistic religions, psychoanalysis therefore focused man on his soul and “his powers of love and reason.” Man did the rest.⁶⁶

More in Psychoanalysis and Religion than in Man for Himself, Fromm delineated his own version of psychoanalysis and paired it with “humanistic” religious and ethical experience. All such experience, however vaguely presented, was intended to deepen man’s happiness, his freedom, and his capacity to love. The problem was that by the late 1940s psychoanalytic theory varied widely, and orthodox analysts regarded Fromm disparagingly as a neo-Freudian.

Besides comparing his vague and only partially defined concept of humanistic religion to psychoanalysis, Fromm presented several abbreviated illustrations. He found in each humanistic religion the same cultivation of the internal resources of the self that he described for humanistic ethics. For example, early Buddhism implored man to “become aware of the powers in him.” As a great teacher, Buddha (the “awakened one”) called upon man to live in a manner that developed his powers of reason and of love for all humanity, and in this way man would be free of irrational passion. The Buddhist concept of Nirvana (a “fully awakened” state of mind) rejected helplessness and submission and represented “the highest powers man possesses” to know himself and humankind. In fact, Fromm was attracted to Zen Buddhism precisely because it “proposes that no knowledge is of any value unless it grows out of ourselves” rather than from external authorities. Indeed, he befriended D. T. Suzuki, one of Zen’s primary practitioners.67

Other examples of humanistic religion came easily to Fromm. Spinoza had long been one of Fromm’s favorite religious thinkers because he postulated that as God was identical to the totality of the universe, God could not change anything. To be sure, man was dependent on and could not control the totality of forces outside himself. Yet, within himself and with the blessing of God, man had vast powers of love and reason that he could count on to maximize his freedom, joy, and inner strength. For Spinoza, these represented virtue, while sadness and inner constriction signified sin. Having studied the Hasidic movement, Fromm insisted that its motto from the verse of Psalms (“Serve God in joy”) was not altogether dissimilar from the teaching of Spinoza. Emphasizing feeling rather than intellect, the Hasidim elevated joy and emotional expansiveness over contrition and unhappiness. Indeed, since God promised to put an end to suffering, Hasidism insisted that man had the right to force God to fulfill that promise. For Fromm, early Christianity represented still another example of “humanistic religion, best signaled by the spirit and text of Jesus’ teachings that nothing could more clearly express the humane spirituality of Jesus than his precept that ‘the kingdom of God is within you.’”⁶⁸

Although Fromm also cited many examples of authoritarian religion and authoritarian passages in both the Old and New Testament, he deliberately concentrated on manifestations of religious humanism as an offer of hope for the emergence of happiness and joy in a world where the self was being packaged, estranged, repressed, and anxious. Essentially, Buddhism, Spinoza, Hasidism, and Christ all taught that “God is not a symbol of power over man but of man’s own powers.” Indeed, “God is the image of man’s higher self, a symbol of what man potentially is or ought to become,” while authoritarian religion treated God as “the sole possessor of what was originally man’s: of his reason and his love.” This was straight out of Feuerbach—the notion that God was simply man’s projection of himself.⁶⁹

One concludes a reading of Psychoanalysis and Religion by recognizing that it was completed by a very different Fromm than the discerning and cautious scholar of the 1930s. By the late 1940s, he asserted and reiterated his ideas but rarely demonstrated them with much logic or evidence. Fromm himself had become a prophet of sorts for a productive human spirit, and, ironically, this occurred during the least productive time of his life. Though his emotionally powerful—if unqualified—assertions appealed less to scholars, he was entering a new phase of his career. Tapping into what became a vast interest of the reading public, Fromm was evolving into a bestselling author and, in some way, an icon of popular culture, especially in the United States. His humanist ideals would soon become widely known. In short order, as well, influential public officials would come to befriend him. While his American audience especially started to grow, Fromm also began to train and inspire the first generation of Mexican psychoanalysts along the lines of his humanism, both ethical and religious. The 1950s would be his decade of greatest influence as he assumed new lives.70