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Autobiographical sidelights by Erich Fromm
The family background
"Being the only child of two overly anxious parents did not, of course, have an altogether positive effect on my development, but over the years I've done what I could to repair that damage." (1974b)
"Superficially seen, I can say, my parents were German middle-class Jews. I was an only child; my father was a practising orthodox Jew quite erudite in all matters pertaining to Jewish matters. But that is really on the surface. I actually would say I grew up in the middle ages, by which I don't mean something negative but rather something very positive." (1979d)
The background of tradition
"The whole family story, so to speak, was that of rabbinical ancestors, who sat the whole day and studied the Talmud and were not the slightest bit interested in making money or in trade, or in anything of that kind. My great grand father, for instance, happened to be one of the famous Jewish rabbi of his time; he lived in a small town of Bavaria and made his living by owning a small store and sometimes by travelling a little bit and selling his goods. As the story goes, when a customer came in, interrupting him from the study of the Talmud, he showed some annoyance and asked: "Is there any other store here? Why do you have to come to interrupt me?" (1979d)"
The sense of the world
"I was exposed to the same influences as every other young German during this time. But I had to deal with them in my own way. Not only because one always had an exceptional - not necessarily unpleasant - position as a Jew in Germany but also because I felt quite at home neither in the world I lived in, nor in the old world of traditions." (1977i)
"My sense of the world was that of a premodern man. That attitude was reinforced by studying the Talmud, reading the Bible a lot, and hearing a lot of stories about my ancestors, who had all lived in a world that predated the bourgeois world. - I've remained an alien in the business or burgeois culture, and that explains why I developed such a harshly critical attitude toward bourgeois society and capitalism. I became a socialist." (1974b)
Alfred Weber
"I had only one non-Jewish teacher whom I really admired and who deeply influenced me and that was Alfred Weber, the brother of Max, also a sociologist, but in contrast to Max, a humanist not a nationalist and a man of outstanding courage and integrity." (Letter to Lewis Mumford 1975)
Salman Baruch Rabinkow
"I was Rabinkow's student for about five or six years and, if I remember correctly, I visited him at that time almost daily. The bulk of the time was occupied with studying Talmud, the rest with studying certain philosophical writings of Maimonides, the Rav's Tanya, Weiss's Jewish History, and a discussion of sociological problems. He took great interest and was very helpful in my doctoral dissertation... Rabinkow influenced my life more than any other man, perhaps, and although in different forms and concepts, his ideas have remained alive in me." (1987a)
Sigmund Freud
"Freud opened a new world for me, the world of the unconscious. He taught me - and many millions - that only are small part of ourselves is conscious. He distinguished two kinds of the unconscious: the so-called preconscious - something which could be conscious, but is not at the moment (because one would go insane if one always thought about everything which goes on in one's brain at the same time). Then there is the unconscious - the sense of the repressed which is prevented by some force within me from becoming conscious." (1980e)
"Besides Freud there are, in my opinion, only two most important psychoanalysts, Sándor Ferenczi and a man who was very close to him but of a very different type of personality, Georg Groddeck in Baden-Baden." (1979d)
Georg Groddeck
"When I think of all analysts in Germany I knew, he was, in my opinion, the only one with truth, originality, courage and extraordinary kindness. He penetrated the unconscious of his patient, and yet he never hurt. ... Even if I was never his student in any technical sense, his teaching influenced me more than that of other teachers I had. He was a man of such stature, that the majority of the psychoanalysts in Germany were not capable of appreciating him, and he was too proud a man to make himself pleasant and popular." (Letter to Sylvia Grossman 1957)
Johann Jakob Bachofen
"Bachofen's discovery gave me a key not only for understanding history, not only for understanding so many things in our patriarchal society in which love is made dependent on performance, but also for understanding what I have come to see more and more as the central problem in individual human development: What meaning - in women as well as in men - does our longing for a mother have? What constitutes the bond to the mother?" (1974b)
Karl Marx
"What drew me to him was primarily his philosophy and his vision of socialism, which expressed, in secular forms, the idea of human self-realization, of total humanization, the idea of a human being whose goal is vital self-expression and not the acquisition and accumulation of dead, material things." (1974b)
"Freud and Marx have been the two great desillusioners, although Marx saw deeper because he looked at the forces underneath which needed illusions, while Freud only individually dissolved illusions people had in their own individual relationship to reality ..." (1979d)
Max Horkheimer and the Frankfort School
"At the University of Frankfurt, there was a group of people which published together, under the editorship of Horkheimer, the director of the "Institut für Sozialforschung" a journal in which most earlier works of that group were published; my function was to represent Psychoanalysis in the group as one of the social sciences, which is necessary for the full understanding of society. ... With Horkheimer I was on friendly relationship until our full separation." (1979d)
"Since a few years Dr. Horkheimer has changed his attitude to my work. He accused me of being a conformist and that my theoretical approach was not particularly fruitful any more for the use of psychology in the social sciences. In general, he expressed his opinion at different times that psychology was only of minor importance for social science anyway. This is in strict contradiction to his attitude prior to that time." (Memorandum 1939 for Kurt Rosenfeld)
The new approach to psychoanalysis
"I try to show that drives which motivate social behavior are not, as Freud assumes, sublimations of sexual instincts. Rather, they are the products of social processes, or, more precisely, reactions to certain constellations under which the individual has to satisfy his/her instincts. These drives ... are fundamentally different from natural factors, namely the instincts of hunger, thirst, sexuality. Whereas these are common to all human beings and animals, the former are specifically human products and not biological; they are to be understood in the context of the social way of life." (Letter to Karl August Wittfogel, 1936)
The new psychotherapeutic approach
"As I began to shift my attention more and more to what struck me as truly central in my work, that is, to the relationship of one human being to another and to the specificially human emotions that are rooted not in instinct but rather in man's existence as a human being, I began to see, then I began truly to understand; and the person I was analyzing could understand what it was I was saying, too. He felt: Aha, so that's the way it is." (1974b)
Being a scientist of his own
"I have never had, and have never been able to acquire to this very day, the ability to think about things I cannot make come alive in my imagination. I have no gift for abstract thought. I can think only those thoughts that relate to something I can concretely experience. If that relationship is lacking, my interest fades, and I can't mobilize my abilities." (1974b)
The loving writer
"Love has no purpose, though many people might say: Of course it does! It is love, they say, that enables us to satisfy our sexual needs, marry, have children and live a normal, middle-class life. That is the purpose of love. And that is why love is so rare these days, love without goals, love in which the only thing of importance is the act of loving itself. In this kind of love it is being and not consuming that plays the key role. It is human self-expression, the full play of our human capacities." (1974b)
My beautiful Love, I love you so that it hurts but the hurt is sweet and wonderful. I wish you feel it in your sleep." (One of Fromm's "messages" he wrote in the seventies for his wife Annis if he got up before her)
On politics
"I have been a socialist since my student days forty years ago, but have never been active politically until the last five years, when I have been very active in helping to form an American peace movement, on the left wing of which I find myself." (Letter to Adam Schaff 1962)
"I am an extremely political person, but neither in politics nor anywhere else can I cling to illusions simply because they support my "line." Lies can tie us to a party, but ultimately it is only the truth that can lead to the liberation of man. But too many people are afraid of freedom and prefer illusions to it. ... We cannot split our off our knowledge of ourselves from our knowledge of society. Both belong together. ... I feel that political progress depends on how much of the truth we know, how clearly and boldly we speak it, and how great an impression it makes on other people." (1974b)
Biophilia - the love for life
"The other night I wrote a kind of appeal which is centered around the love of life. It was born out of a mood of despair which made me feel that there is hardly any chance that atomic war will be avoided, and sudden insight in which I felt that the reason why people are so passive toward the dangers of war lies in the fact that the majority just do not love life. I thought that to appeal to their love of life rather than to their love of peace or to their fear of war might have more impact." (Letter to Clara Urquhart 1962)
What man can become
"There is a Hassidic story which occurs to me. The pupil sees the rabbi in a sad mood and asks him: "Master, why are you sad? Are you sad that you have not reached the highest knowledge, that you have not the greatest virtues?" The master said: "No, I am not sad about that. I am sad not to have become myself totally". - That is to say, in every human being ... there is an optimum of what he could become, there are things that he could never become. So many people waste their life by trying to become what they could not be and by neglecting to be what they could become. ... So a person in the first place should have a certain image of what he could and what he could not become, what are the limitations and what are the possibilities." (1979d)
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The Two Voices of Erich Fromm: The Prophetic and the Analytic
by Michael Maccoby
Published in: Society, July/August. This article is adapted from a lecture given at the Erich Fromm International Symposium, Washington, DC, May 6 1994.
Erich Fromm's contribution to our knowledge of individual and social behavior has neither been fully appreciated nor developed. Fromm's most popular books which expand our understanding of both love and destructiveness have, to a large extent, been assimilated into that body of knowledge which forms the foundation of intellectual thinking in Europe and the United States. Although he introduced many American intellectuals of the 40s and 50s to the relevance of psychoanalysis to understanding 20th century social pathology, typical intellectuals of today think of Fromm, if at all, as a critic of the mass consumer society. A smaller number recognize the contribution he made in Escape from Freedom to understanding the psychic appeal of fascism, an understanding relevant to current events in Russia and the Balkans. But relatively few appreciate his most valuable and original legacy: understanding human character in relation to society.
Why has Fromm's work been so neglected? To start with, his ability to write directly to a large general audience as in The Art of Loving , which was a best seller in the late 50s, made him suspect to the academic Mandarins whose criteria for profundity includes incomprehensibility to the uninitiated. In fact, Fromm provoked defensiveness and even a kind of antipathy from academics he termed alienated and psychoanalysts he criticized as bureaucratic in their technique and poorly educated in the humanities and social sciences. Furthermore, Fromm would not fit himself into a neat intellectual category. Although he fully acknowledged his debt to Freud, he relentlessly criticized the limitations and contradictions in Freud's theories. Although he explored the influence of culture on character development, he strongly differentiated himself from "culturalists" such as Sullivan, Horney and Margaret Mead who described culture in terms of behavior patterns and did not analyze socio-economic factors. Although Fromm agreed with Marx's analysis of social change and shared his messianic view of history, he was also a deeply religious non-theist who drew his concept of human development from the Jewish bible, Zen Buddhism, and Christian mysticism. Although he shared, to a large extent, their critique of capitalism, Fromm was rejected by the psychoanalytic left. His former colleagues at the Frankfort School, particularly Herbert Marcuse, dismissed him as a conformist unwilling to support the radical action necessary to change society.
Inevitably, experts in one or another social science or version of psychotherapy were put off by Fromm's unlikely mix of Freud, Marx and religious mysticism. For example, although Erik Erikson told me he had learned a great deal reading Escape from Freedom, he was not prepared to accede to the demand of The Sane Society to accept communitarian socialism as the prescription for social well being and healthy character development.
My purpose is not to defend Fromm from his critics. Like any major thinker, Fromm's views changed over time and there are, as I shall describe, contradictions in his views and limitations in his approach, especially his psychoanalytic technique. Rather, I shall try to describe and clarify what I hear as the two dominant voices in Fromm's work, the analytic and the prophetic. William James wrote that theory, like music, expresses the composer's personality, and both of these voices came from deep inside of Fromm. I believe that by scoring them separately so to speak, they can be better understood and most important, usefully developed. When Fromm is most convincing, the two voices harmonize. When he is least convincing, the prophetic drowns out the analytic.
My analysis of these two voices is based not only on my reading of Fromm, but also hearing them directly when I worked with him in the 60s.
My Experience with Fromm
In the summer of 1960, when I drove from Cambridge, Massachusetts to Cuernavaca, Mexico with my wife, Sandylee, it was to enter into an eight year apprenticeship to Fromm. That June, I had received a doctorate from Harvard in Social Relations, combining clinical and cognitive psychology with sociology and anthropology. I had decided that my next step should be psychoanalytic training, since psychoanalytic investigation seemed the best way to further my understanding of human motivation. In seeking psychoanalytic education, I considered the Boston Institute where I had helped Ives Hendrick with his research, and I talked with Erik Erikson about working with him at Austen Riggs. Both were encouraging. However, David Riesman, who had been analyzed by Fromm and who I had worked with as a teaching assistant, reported that Fromm was looking for a research assistant in Mexico and suggested that we meet. The reason I decided to study with Fromm was the appeal of both voices, the analytic and the prophetic. Fromm defined the meaning of human development in a way that appealed to me emotionally as well as intellectually. It seemed to me that Fromm's call to create a sane society was urgently required by a world teetering on the edge of nuclear war. World War II and the holocaust was a recent and searing memory. Fromm's analysis of human destructiveness provided some understanding of behavior that seemed incomprehensible and inhuman. I hoped that through my personal psychoanalysis, Fromm would help me to develop not only my capability as a researcher, but also my capacity for love and reason.
I should note here that when I told Grete Bibring of the Boston Psychoanalytic Institute that I was considering training with Fromm, she said "you will probably get along very well together, but he will never analyze the transference." To a large extent, she was correct, for reasons I shall describe.
Before leaving for Mexico, I joined Fromm, David Riesman and others in founding The Committee of Correspondence and writing for its newsletter arguing for arms control and improved relations with the Soviet Union.
Fromm accepted me as an apprentice. He needed someone with training in research design, statistics, and projective testing to work with him on the sociopsychoanalytic study of a Mexican village, and in return for my assistance, he agreed to admit me to the Mexican Psychoanalytic Institute and to be my training analyst. He also made it clear that my personal goals for analysis and my political engagement were important in his decision to work with me. During the next eight years, I was Fromm's research assistant, analysand, supervisee, and collaborator, culminating in 1970 with the publication of our book, Social Character in a Mexican Village.
I agreed to Fromm's condition of apprenticeship, that I first learn his theory and work with it, before criticizing it, as he expected I would someday do. He said that he hoped I would be able to express this theory in my own words and expand it, and this has been my goal.
The Two Voices
During the time I was in analysis with him, Fromm's technique changed from one that was extremely influenced by his then recent exploration into Zen Buddhism with D. T. Suzuki to one which emphasized a more systematic investigation into the patient's character and psyche. At times, he experimented with technique using the active methods pioneered by Sandor Ferenczi, including relaxation exercises and suggestion about associating to a theme. He also tried techniques used by Wilhelm Reich to attack character armor. While his shifting of analytic approach complicated his attempts to describe his practice, this does not fully explain his dissatisfaction with the drafts he wrote on technique. I believe that what blocked his writing on technique and also limited his effectiveness as an analyst was the inability to always harmonize the analytic and prophetic voices. This disharmony resulted in a confusion concerning the goals and methods of psychoanalysis.
At its purist, Fromm's analytic voice was exploratory, experimental, and skeptical. It asked for evidence and questioned conclusions drawn too quickly. His prophetic voice was urgent, impatient, and judgmental. It contrasted reality with a demanding ideal of spiritual development. It condemned rather than analyzed evil. At times, Fromm the analyst was transformed into Fromm the rabbi or Zen master who responded to the student's inauthentic behavior not by analysis, but with disgust or the verbal equivalent of cracking him over the head with a stick.
At his most analytic, Fromm conceived of psychoanalysis as a method to help suffering people to liberate themselves from crippling fear and to realize more of their creative potential. In this mode, he emphasized the importance of psychoanalytic diagnosis at the start of treatment, and he was realistic about the patient's prognosis and limitations.
At his most prophetic, Erich Fromm's mission was to bring about a messianic age of peace and human solidarity, and he used psychoanalysis as a spiritual discipline for himself and his disciples. He viewed neurotic symptoms as a partial rejection of oppressive or alienating authority. The psychoanalyst's role was to help give birth to the revolutionary within the neurotic.
Fromm's inconsistent approach to therapy expressed the contradiction between his theory of social character and his ideal of the productive character which became increasingly mystical. I shall return to this point that the disciplines of therapeutic psychoanalysis and spiritual development, while they share elements in common, are essentially different, and that Fromm sometimes confused the two.
Fromm believed that his most original ideas were the theory of social character, the interpretive questionnaire as a method of studying character, and the theory of destructiveness. He described each of these in his analytic voice. In two major studies, one of German workers and employees in 1930 and the other of Mexican villagers in the 1960s, Fromm tested and developed the theory and methods of social character research.
He continually elaborated his theory of destructiveness. The sociopsychoanalytic analysis of sadomasochism and malignant destructiveness was well-tested both clinically and in the social character research. The more controversial and less well studied theory of necrophilia, defined as the love of death, decay and rigid order which he first described in his 1964 book The Heart of Man, expressed the prophetic view of evil and was contrasted to his concept of biophilia, love of life, which at the extreme, expressed being vs. having and the driving force of mystical development.
The Two Voices in Fromm's Approach to Character and Society
To appreciate Fromm's approach to clinical diagnosis, his theory of character must first be understood. While Freud's libido theory with its analogy of forces and cathexes corresponds to a late 19th century view of physics, Fromm's theory of character development is fully consistent with modern evolutionary biology. Humans are distinguished from other animals by a larger neocortex with fewer instincts. Character is the relatively permanent way in which human drives for survival and self-expression are structured in the socialization process. Thus character substitutes for or shapes human instinct. But human survival is not merely a matter of physical survival. Man does not live by bread alone. We are social animals who must relate to others, and we are spiritual animals who must infuse our lives with meaning in order to function. Our brains need to operate in the past, present, and future simultaneously. Without a sense of hope, they turn off. To survive in the early years, we require caring adults. To learn to master the environment, control our fears and passions and live in harmony with others, we need teachers. To give meaning to our lives, we must acquire a sense of identity and rootedness. Religions both sacred and secular (including tribalism and nationalism), with objects of devotion, guiding myths and rituals, serve this function.
We not only must live our lives, but also solve the contradictions stemming from our existence, the animal and human needs, physical survival and emotional sanity. Fromm said that given our contradictory tendencies and awareness of our mortality, the question of why people remain sane is perhaps more difficult to answer than the question of why they become insane.
Character is a solution to those contradictions. It is like a complex computer program that takes the place of what is to a greater extent hard-wired in other animals. Biological research indicates we are closer to other animals than we like to believe, and this, perhaps, is what keeps many of us sane. We imitate and identify with those most like ourselves. We can use the culture, or more precisely the social character as an off-the-shelf solution to the problems of existence. Although other animals also develop cultures to transmit patterns of behavior between the generations, human culture is more complex and varied. With our large neocortex, we are able to learn and change. Although we share almost 99 percent of our genetic material with chimpanzees, the other one percent allows us to choose between either becoming more uniquely and fully human or regressing to tribalism and/or psychopathology. Fromm termed the striving to become more fully human as "progressive," and he believed the great monotheistic humanistic religions and Buddhism, which is non-theist, shared the goal of directing people to a solution of achieving unity with nature through individuation, love of the stranger, and reverence for life. This solution increases our consciousness and strengthens community, while the regressive solutions result in either individual psychopathology (symbiosis, narcissism and destructiveness) or group narcissism and hostility to people outside the tribe.
Speaking in his analytic voice, Fromm describes the social character as the cement that holds society together. It is what adapts humans to their environment in such a way that they want to do what they need to do to keep a particular society functioning. In this sense, some emotionally disturbed persons have failed to develop the social character; their emotions do not support adaptive behavior. Or the social character of some disturbed people might clash with the environment, because it is adapted to a disappearing world. In this situation, the social character is transformed from social cement to social dynamite. Thus, in Escape from Freedom, Fromm describes how the lower-middle class German suffered a sense of powerlessness and meaningless in the 1920's. Hoarding, dutiful, conservative, and hardworking emotional attitudes no longer guaranteed prosperity. The harsh conditions imposed by the Treaty of Versailles after World War I caused runaway inflation that destroyed savings,while money was being made by wild speculation. The humiliation of the Kaiser by the allies was felt as a personal indignity and loss of meaning. The flaunting of a sexual freedom and burlesque of authority in the Wiemar republic aroused indignation and anger which Hitler was able to manipulate in forging an ideology, a new religion, which blended the desire for revenge, the focussing of hatred on the Jews as scapegoats, with inspiring hopes to create a great new civilization.
Analytically speaking, normality and mental health require that the child develop a social character in order to gain the competencies required for survival in a society. This is consistent with C.G. Jung's view was that only through adaptation to a culture could a person begin to achieve individuation.
However, speaking in the prophetic voice, Fromm questioned whether adaptation produced healthy people.
If the society is itself not healthy, then to be normal is to acquire a "culturally patterned defect," in effect to be sick. The neurotic who will not adapt may be healthier than one who is adapted. What does healthy mean for Fromm?
In The Sane Society, he writes that "Mental health, in the humanistic sense, is characterized by the ability to love and to create, by the emergence from the incestuous ties to family and nature, by a sense of identity based on one's experience of self as the subject and agent of one's powers, by the grasp of reality inside and outside of ourselves that is, by the development of objectivity and reason. The aim of life is to live it intensely, to be fully born, to be fully awake. To emerge from the ideas of infantile grandiosity into the conviction of one's real though limited strength: to be able to accept the paradox that everyone of us is the most important thing there is in the universe and at the same time no more important than a fly or a blade of grass."
With this definition, has any society ever produced many healthy people? Can any society, other than the messianic vision of the prophet Isaiah, achieve sanity?
The model of a sane society Fromm proposes is communitarian socialism. He quotes a description of Boimondeau, a cooperative watch factory in France as an ideal. According to this account, workers balanced work and education, collective and individual development. But when I tried to find out what happened to Boimondeau, I learned that the factory did not survive in the competitive marketplace. Like many other promising and shortlived cooperative enterprises, Boimondeau depended on an exceptional leader who left. This communitarian ideal remains theoretical. It is not a convincing solution.
Marketing Man
Is Fromm correct that modern industrial society forms an alienated social character? Is the prototypic modern individual a person who adapts to the market economy by making him/herself into a saleable commodity, thus becoming detached from authentic emotions and convictions? Is the modern person's goal nothing more elevated than success in the career market and the pleasure of continual consumption: having vs being? Does health require us to transform society and transcend the social character?
I have used Fromm's method of social character investigation, the interpretive questionnaire, in rural and urban Mexico, the U.S., U.K, and Sweden. In all of these societies, there are significant variations in social character. Overall, the more that people leave village life and adapt to industrial society, the more abstract their language becomes, the more detached they are from direct emotion, and authentic relationships, and to some degree, dreams and the inner life. I say "to some degree", because villagers are extremely conformist and fear even perceiving anything that is new and different. Just as the urban individual steeped in book learning loses the peasant's reliance on keen observation, so the industrial person's detachment and abstract thinking also allows greater flexibility, willingness to adapt to the new. Furthermore, rural people are more likely to fear the stranger and distrust those who do not share blood ties.
Within industrial society, the factory and construction workers and engineers I have interviewed market their skills, not their pleasing personalities. Recently, advances in production technology require both increased technical skill and greater cooperation with others at work, but the latter is a matter of listening to others and solving problems together, not selling oneself. Bureaucratic middle managers and professionals are the ones most forced to market themselves, and their overadaptation can cause symptoms of depression and self-disgust. These are also the people who are most likely to be victims of corporate "downsizing" due to the drive for continual innovation and productivity caused by frantic global competition. While the most educated and technically competent are swept up in this vortex, people in rural villages and ghettoes of prosperous cities struggle on the margins of the economy, within a hopeless culture of escapism and violence
The description by Fromm and other intellectuals of the 50s (e.g. C. Wright Mills & William H. Whyte) of a complacent, conformist marketing society seems benign in the light of the last 30 years. They were writing during a brief historical period when U.S. industry controlled international markets and companies could afford to be stable bureaucracies, stocked with middle managers.
Fromm uses the marketing character as a basis for his prophetic denunciation of modern society, but the question remains of how healthy any society can be and which societies allow the greatest opportunity for healthy development. Children have no alternative but to adapt to the family which is the major carrier of social character. Those with healthier families or exceptional genes may adapt with greater resiliency and independence as compared to those with less healthy families. What would it mean to transcend the social character?
The Productive Ideal
Fromm's model of the healthy individual who transcends and transforms society is the "productive character," the individuated person who loves and creates. Unlike his other character types - receptive, hoarding, exploitative and marketing - the productive character lacks clinical or historical grounding. It is a questionable ideal.
In our study of Mexican villagers, Fromm and I searched for the productive character, but did not find one. The closest we came were independent farmers who were more productive and loving than the average. In my studies of workers, engineers and managers. I have also found people who are more active and creative than the average, but they do not fit Fromm's description of the productive character. Furthermore, most of the more productive professionals are not loving. (Einstein is an example of an extremely productive thinker who was not loving.) Productiveness in work does not necessarily imply productiveness in caring about other people.
In Social Character in a Mexican Village, Fromm and I ended up contrasting productive and unproductive aspects of the social character. The productive peasant shares many of the adaptive independent, hoarding, family-oriented traits of the dominant social character, but is more individuated, more innovative and hard working while less suspicious and fatalistic. The productive peasant is more likely to relate to children in terms of furthering their development rather than, as is the more common pattern, demanding strict obedience. However, this is far from Fromm's ideal of the productive person whose aim is to live life intensely, "to be fully born, to be fully awake." The more productive peasant must still adapt to a mode of work that requires hoarding traits common to peasants throughout the world.
In his earlier writing, inasmuch as Fromm describes a real life productive character, it is an unnamed creative artist. In later works, examples of productiveness are Zen masters and Master Eckhart, a medieval Christian mystic.
In his search for the productive ideal, Fromm's prophetic voice suppresses his analysis of social character. The artist has been a romantic model for bourgeois society: the individual who resists pressures to conform and succeeds in setting his or her own terms of self expression which are ultimately accepted and appreciated by society. The artist shows qualities of craftsmanship, creativity, independence, and determination. However, many productive artists are not loving people (e.g. Monet, Picasso), and Fromm does not describe a single creative artist who fits his ideal. Furthermore, the very few artists who make a living from their work today are caught up in a marketing web of art dealers, changing fashion and intellectualized hype.
In terms of social character, the religious masters cited by Fromm should be viewed within the context of feudal society. Zen masters are unchallenged authorities who rule monasteries and dominate the emotional life of their disciples. Eckhart was head of German Dominicans, and his vow of celibacy freed him from the demands of family. Fromm himself was attracted to a semi feudal role as head of the Mexican Institute of Psychoanalysis during the 50s and 60s. There he personally analyzed the first generation of analysts, and was the unchallenged arbiter of disagreements among members of the society.
These feudal models will not inspire the children of the information age. To develop the modern social character in a productive direction, it is first essential to understand its positive potential.
The Two Voices in Fromm's Approach to Clinical Work
In his analytic voice, Fromm criticized Freud's patriarchal attitude as limiting the development of psychoanalysis as a science. He criticized Freud's use of the couch and the routine of analysis as bureaucratizing psychoanalysis. In contrast, Fromm attempted to create what he called a more "humanistic" face-to-face encounter. Here the analytic and prophetic voices sometimes harmonized and sometimes were discordant.
Fromm's psychoanalytic technique was essentially different from Freud's psychic archeology. Like Ferenczi, Fromm emphasized the importance of experience rather than interpretation, and he believed the analyst must understand the patient by empathy as well as intellect, with the heart as well as the head. But unlike Ferenczi, he was not searching for childhood traumas, but rather present-day passions. Memory might serve to illuminate a pattern of behavior from childhood such as betrayal of one's ideals to gain approval from authorities. Fromm believed that what blocked development was not our memories but our choices, our irrational attempts to solve the human condition through such mechanisms as sadism, regression to the womb, or narcissistic invulnerability. His goal was not to heal a psychic wound, but to liberate, so that the patient could become free to make better choices.
Fromm believed that the psychoanalyst should be active and penetrating, bringing the session to life by demonstrating his own urgency to understand and grasp life fully. Here the prophetic voice sometimes over-whelmed analysis. Fromm became like a religious master who unmasks illusion and thus expands the limits of the social filter, dissolving resistances. By experiencing and confessing to one's unconscious impulses, the patient would gain the energy and strength to change his or her life, and to develop human capabilities for love and reason to the fullest. This is an unproven theory, and in practice, Fromm's technique sometimes resulted in a very different outcome.
Although Fromm's thesis shares Freud's conviction that the truth will set man free, it moves in a different direction from Freud's emphasis on psychoanalysis as a process that patiently uncovers and interprets resistance in order to regain lost memories. Both Freud and Fromm define psychoanalysis as the art of making the unconscious conscious; both recognize that we resist knowing the truth and that resistances must be overcome. But their views of resistance are somewhat different. For Fromm, repression is a constantly recurring process. One resists perceiving and knowing out of fear of seeing more than society allows or because the truth would force one to experience one's irrationality or powerlessness. The pattern of repression set in childhood is like the refusal to see that the emperor has no clothes. The analyst is the fearless master who has gone further and deeper beyond convention and into his own irrationality. His attitude models productiveness and mature spontaneity, free of illusion. In contrast, Freud defines resistance more narrowly. Repressed, unconscious wishes to maintain infantile sexual fantasies, and the childhood fear of being punished (castration) because of one's libidinal impulses, act as resistances to memory. These repressions bind energy into neurotic patterns.
For Freud, the key to analyzing and overcoming resistance is transference. The patient directs or transfers desire and fear onto the analyst who becomes a substitute for figures of the past. Resistance will be overcome only if the "acting out" within analysis is interpreted and transformed into emotionally charged memory which can be "worked through" and reintegrated into a more mature psyche. The working through frees the blocked energy of repressed wishes and defenses. It allows the patient to give up infantile objects and desires and discover better ways to satisfy needs. In this framework, if the analyst dramatically unmasks truth, this may strengthen the transferential resistance, either because the patient denies unbearable feelings or adopts another defense, such as passive acceptance. Overcoming this resistance requires patiently analyzing the various forms it takes.
Fromm proposes a broader concept of transference. The analyst represents infantile authority: the mother who solves all of life's problems or the father who is never satisfied with his son's achievement. Instead of facing reality independently, the patient continues to transfer interpersonal struggles and wishes. While this aspect of transference is not contradictory to Freud's views (in The Future Of An Illusion, he describes religion in these terms), Fromm's approach in fact tended to strengthen this type of transference and with it the patient's resistance to remembering. He would focus on feelings about the analyst in the here and now and the function they served. His urgency of getting to the truth short circuited the process of working through the transferential feelings and their origins.
Although Fromm criticized Freud as too much the bourgeois patriarch and showed how this limited his insights, Freud's approach to technique can be more democratic than Fromm's, especially if the Freudian analyst does not force fit the patient into a formula. To be sure, Freud advocated rules in the doctor-patient relationship, in part to protect himself. These are followed bureaucratically by many analysts. An example is that the patient lies on a couch and cannot see the analyst. Freud did not like to be stared at all day. However, Fromm's piercing blue eyes could and sometimes did freeze the patient, and his intensity which could make one feel more alive could also provoke defensive reactions. Freud did not describe the analyst as guru or model, and his own self-analysis showed him as all too human. He saw the analyst as a professional with technical training who, in addition, should have a radical love of truth, a broad education in the arts and sciences, and knowledge of his own unconscious. The goal for analysis was not to become a productive person, but to be liberated from crippling neurosis.
Freud cautioned against expecting too much from a neurotic who has been cured. In his prophetic voice, Fromm suggested that neurotics are humanly healthier than those with the dominant social character or socially patterned defect who have adapted to a sick society and are alienated from themselves. The Frommian neurosis as described in The Sane Society, results from incomplete rebellion against constricting authority and lack of confidence or courage to follow one's insights, to take one's dreams seriously.
A number of narcissistic patients with grandiose ideals for themselves and society were attracted to Fromm's therapy.But the Frommian approach both increased transference resistances and the patient's sense of guilt about unworthiness, unproductiveness, and dependency. Patients compared themselves to the "productive" analyst, and instead of remembering and experiencing childlike drives, humiliations, rages, and fears as a means to mastering them and losing the need for narcissistic solutions, they attempted to resolve conflicts by becoming ideal persons, like the master. In so doing, patients fearing disapproval by the master, again submitted to authority and repressed sexual or angry impulses directed against the parent. Frommian disciples identified with the master and self-righteously directed anger and contempt at others who were not good Frommians. This became a pattern among Fromm's disciples at the Mexican Institute.
Thus, Fromm's humanistic voice which sought to correct the more impersonal, obsessional and dogmatic approach of the early Freudians was never fully heard. The analyst-religious master's prescription for productive development blocked patients from discovering their own avenues for development.
The Productive Ideal and Religious Conversion
In his later works, the models of productiveness became more and more religious, closer to Zen enlightenment or the ideal of non-deistic cosmic unity than to the psychoanalytic aim of lifting infantile repressions and expanding the realm of ego in place of id. William James' observations, in The Varieties of Religious Experience (1902), can help us to view Fromm from the perspective of religious thinking. James writes that both Buddhism and Christianity are religions of deliverance which preach that "man must die to an unreal life before he can be born into the real life." He also proposes that the full significance of these religions appeals to a particular type of person who may develop an approach to life similar to Fromm's productive ideal.
James described and contrasted three personality types. The "healthy minded" are those with a "harmonious" personality. They tend to be upbeat and adapted to society. James used the term "healthy" in a rather ironic way. The healthy minded avoid or repress unpleasant perceptions. They have little tolerance for the second type, the "morbid minded" who always see the downside of life. Acutely sensitive to painful realities, the morbid minded must struggle with depression and despair. A third type, which is closer to the morbid-minded, suffer from a "discordant" personality. They struggle with two selves, ideal and actual. Like Saint Augustine and other religious figures, they search restlessly for "the truth" until through self-analysis and religious discipline, they are reborn with "a new zest which adds itself like a gift to life, and takes the form either of lyrical enchantment or of appeal to earnestness and heroism." The result of being reborn is similar to Fromm's ideal.
Fromm had this type of discordant personality; he told me that he continually struggled with irrational impulses. Like Augustine's wrestling with his sins and temptations, Fromm used analysis of both himself and his disciples to increase awareness of the split between ideal and actual selves, to experience regressive drives and to frustrate rather than repress them, while at the same time strengthening productive needs.
Like Saint Augustine, Fromm came to believe that health as defined by the productive character is not gained merely by insight or even experiencing what has been repressed. This definition of health requires spiritual development achieved through a courageous practice of life that frustrates greed and overcomes egoism through meditation and service.
Fromm was deeply religious but did not believe in God. Yet, one can argue that his concept of the cosmos, like that of Spinoza, is a non-anthropomorphic view of God, consistent with Jewish tradition. (When I said this to him, he did not object but said that the only absolutely essential commandment for a Jew was that which forbids all idolatry.) In You Shall Be As Gods, he describes the Bible as evolving the concept of God from a tribal deity to the unknowable God of Moses and the prophets. This God who cannot be made into an idol of any kind first establishes the law and then demands that the people transform themselves according to a messianic vision of harmony and justice. Fromm was attracted to Buddhism, because it did not require belief in God but was based on a rational analysis of overcoming pain and suffering by living a good life. Yet, the appeal of the Jewish tradition, especially chasidism with its animation and joyful music continually called him back. (He often hummed chasidic music, interspersed with Beethoven and other German classics.)
Perhaps, the most important aspect of religion for Fromm personally was the hope it offered. He was not a Christian, because he did not find hope in a life to come. Hope was to be found in two ways. One was the coming of the messianic age, which according to Jewish tradition could happen anytime the world was ready. The other source of hope was a mystical unity with the cosmos, a transcendence of life that would overcome the fear of death.
If one does not believe in an afterlife or reincarnation, there are two main ways to grapple with the fear of death. One is regression to the "oceanic feeling" of infantile pre-conscious unity with the mother. This is the appeal of alcohol and drugs. The other is to overcome one's egoism and experience the mystical sense of fully awakened, life loving unity with nature. In this regard, Fromm practiced Zen meditation, and, in his 70s, he showed me how he also "practiced" dying, by lying on the floor and pretending to give up the ghost while feeling this oneness.
The source of Fromm's prophetic voice was his search for hope, not only for himself but for humanity. In his 50s, when he wrote The Sane Society, hope sprang mainly from his messianic drive to save the world, and this was also the reason why he so admired Karl Marx. In this context, the productive orientation is that of the messianic revolutionary.
In his late years, although Fromm did not lose his messianic hope, he became increasingly disappointed with the revolutionaries of the 60s, the failure of Eugene McCarthy to lead a movement with him in the U.S. and the decline of Marxist humanism in Eastern Europe. In his final work, To Have Or to Be?, his hope shifted, and the model of the productive person became less the messianic revolutionary and more the biophilic mystic.
The Analytic Voice
For Fromm to write a book on technique that truly harmonized the two voices, he would have had to describe a systematic approach to understanding a patient. He would have had to critique Freud's papers on technique in the careful way he analyzed Freud's theory of aggression in The Anatomy of Human Destructiveness. If he had attempted this, he might have recognized what was valuable in Freud's strategy, and he might have developed a more differentiated approach to therapy and analysis. Even then, I believe he would still have had difficulty in resolving the contradiction between his discussion of analysis as a more democratic, humanistic encounter and his attitude of the omniscient master. In my experience, Fromm was penetrating and compassionate but not particularly empathic. Indeed, while his writings on humanistic analysis leave the impression that a loving, productive analyst will be able to know patients from the inside by empathizing or listening to them in a way a Zen master listens to all of nature, his practice was to use the interview and sometimes projective tests as x-rays of the psyche.
When Fromm focussed on concrete cases as a teacher, he was closer to Freud, minus libido theory, than to either Ferenczi or Zen Buddhism. He was at his most analytic when he interpreted social character from an interview or questionnaire and when he described psychoanalytic diagnosis. I refer to notes from a seminar on diagnosis he gave in 1963 to our class at the Mexican Institute.
The analyst should determine first, the symptoms, goals and pathology of the patient. What is the type and the degree of pathology, e.g. regressive symbiosis, narcissism, and/or destructiveness? Fromm advised that most conflicts presented by the patient are screens. The analyst cannot help the patient decide whether or not to get divorced or leave a job. These hide the deeper conflicts, which Fromm sometimes called the secret plot. An example is Ibsen's Peer Gynt: the modern alienated man who claims he wants to be free and express himself but really wants to satisfy all his greedy impulses and then complains that he has no self, that he is nothing and nobody.
The prognosis is better if the patient's goal is to achieve health in terms of increased capability for freedom and loving relationships, rather than getting help to solve a specific problem which may be merely a symptom of the failure to maintain the cover story.
Second, the analyst should determine the strength of the resistance. He suggested a test of telling the patient something which appears repressed, indicated by a slip of the tongue, a contradiction, or a dream. If there is a positive reaction, the prognosis is better. If there is anger or the patient doesn't hear, the prognosis is very bad. Fromm considered a sense of humor the best indication of a positive prognosis. Lack of it was an indication of "grave narcissism". Humor is the emotional side of reason, the emotional sense of reality. Fromm himself had a keen sense of humor with a taste for the sardonic. He loved good jokes.
Third, the capacity for insight is another indication of good or bad prognosis. The analyst should make small tests, such as "You complain about your wife. Perhaps you are afraid of her." It is a bad sign if the patient either denies an interpretation too quickly or submissively agrees to everything the analyst suggests.
Fourth, what is the degree of vital energy? Is the patient capable of waking up? A person can be quite crazy, yet have the vitality essential for transformation.
At this time, Fromm was no longer claiming that neurotics were healthier than normal people. However, he did maintain that some patients with a severe psychopathology had a better prognosis than those with milder pathology. The key diagnostic factor was the patient's creative potential or ability to struggle against the pathology.
Fifth, has the patient shown responsibility and activity during his or her life? Fromm contrasted obsessive responsibility with the ability to respond to challenges. If the patient always escapes with a magical, irresponsible flight, analysis is not impossible, but extremely difficult.
Sixth, is there a sense of integrity? This refers to the difference between a neurotic and psychopathic personality. Does the patient accept a truth once experienced? Or is there a quality of bad faith, wiggling away from inconvenient truths, a bad sign for prognosis.
Fromm advised using the first hour to ask why the patient had come and to ask for a history, noting what was said, what was left out, and the feelings associated with events. He suggested asking for two or three dreams, especially dreams that are repeated and three memories of infancy (a technique first suggested by A. Adler). In the second hour, he advised testing resistance and insight, then writing out a summary of the diagnosis and a prediction of how long treatment should take.< P> In the middle 60s, Fromm began to send me his own patients for Rorschach tests which he believed helped significantly in providing a better diagnosis, including both psychopathology and the strength of biophilic tendencies. In the later 60s, Fromm emphasized the need for the analyst to understand patients within their particular cultural context. Our intensive study of Mexican social character revealed the importance of culture, class, and mode of production on the formation of emotional attitudes. (e.g. the role of the mother in Mexican culture). Fromm came to believe that 50 percent of an individual's behavior resulted from social character, 25 percent from constitutional or genetic factors and only 25 percent from early experiences. This implied different expectations and approaches with different social character types. For example, middle class Mexican patients tended to be in awe of authority and needed encouragement to express critical views, while patients from the same class in the U.S. are skeptical about authority in general. In Mexico, the analyst needs first to overcome the fear of authority, while in the U.S., it may be necessary to demonstrate that rational authority can exist.
Fromm was impressed by the evidence of psychological well being from the orphanage, "Our Little Brothers and Sisters" (Nuestros Pequeños Hermanos), founded by Father William Wasson in 1955 in Cuernavaca. In a study I directed with a group of Mexican analysts, we found that orphans who had suffered extreme psychic trauma became productive, remarkably happy children after an average of two years in an environment which balanced security, taking responsibility, sharing, and educational opportunity. Father Wasson guaranteed that the children would never have to leave their new family. (Incidentally, he made a rule that he would take all siblings from a family, but would not accept a child if the mother was living, since in that case, the Mexican child would never fully join the new family. This was not the case for the father.) He preached that dwelling on one's misfortunes made one forever a self-pitying victim. Children were encouraged to take advantage of their opportunities for learning and to help each other. Everyone shared in the work, including farming. For Fromm, the positive results achieved at the orphanage reinforced his view that a good community can transform emotionally damaged people. He contrasted the orphanage to psychotherapies which by focussing on childhood hurts and traumas, strengthened narcissistic self preoccupation and resulted in a chronic feeling of resentment and entitlement.
In our discussions together during the late 60s as we wrote Social Character in a Mexican Village, we agreed that severe emotional disorders were not cured solely by analysis. This is especially true if the patient comes from a culture of poverty and hopelessness. Without a sense of possibility, the patient lacks the self confidence and hope to face crippling feelings and impulses. Even for some patients from more advantaged backgrounds, a strategy of psychoanalysis should focus on understanding and encouraging the patient to strengthen creative potentials before probing for pathology.
Fromm's Contribution
Fromm's contribution to psychoanalysis and social science remains to be developed further. He provides us with theory and methods to understand health and illness as concepts that do not refer to the individual alone, but also to the relationships of the individual to others and to social institutions. "I am myself and my circumstances," Fromm would quote Ortega y Gasset. "And if I do not save my circumstances, I cannot save myself."
To take Fromm seriously, to enter into a dialogue with him is to accept the challenge of taking responsibility of who I want to be as opposed to what I want to have. But it also means examining his assumptions about human nature, what it is possible for people to achieve, and what are the best ways to achieve our goals.
Both Fromm's sane society and psychoanalytic technique are founded on questionable assumptions about human nature. Isaiah Berlin in The Crooked Timber of Humanity has criticized utopian philosophers from Plato to Marx for believing that 'virtue is knowledge', that to know what is truly good for oneself and others is enough to cause rational behavior. Berlin points out that good values such as equality and freedom, or Christian love and republican vigilance against oppression, may be incompatible. Furthermore, different groups have different ways of structuring human needs. He writes "Perhaps, the best that one can do is to try to promote some kind of equilibrium, necessarily unstable, between the different aspirations of differing groups of human beings - at the very least to prevent them from attempting to exterminate each other, and, so far as possible, to prevent them from hurting each other - and to promote the maximum practical degree of sympathy and understanding, never likely to be complete, between them." Berlin goes on to say that "Immanuel Kant, a man very remote from irrationalism, once observed that 'Out of the crooked timber of humanity no straight thing was ever made.' And for that reason no perfect solution is, not merely in practice, but in principle, possible in human affairs, and any determined effort to produce it is likely to lead to suffering, disillusionment and failure."
Speaking in his prophetic voice, Fromm underestimated the need for individuals to adapt to a society before attempting to transform it. The work of Jean Piaget describes the stages of moral development and the social interaction essential to achieve them. It is through institutions such as family and schools, and organizations (political, legal and economic) that we create health, wealth, and good relationships. In an increasingly complex, technology based society, improving these institutions and organizations requires expert knowledge combined with pragmatic idealism and supportive colleagues. It can be slow and arduous work. There will always be conflicts of different interests that must be negotiated. There is no dramatic cultural transformation that will dissolve psychopathology, create harmony, and make a society sane.
This is not a program to inspire the young who carry banners in parades. Nor will it sell many books. I was once interviewed by a French journalist who said, "Dr Maccoby, If I understand you correctly, you are saying that with great dedication and courage, one can succeed in taking small steps to improve the world. That view will appeal to no one, neither those on the left or the right." Yet, in practice, productive hope is generated when people work together to protect civilization and to push forward the envelope of their culture, even a little bit. They are the responsible parents, dedicated teachers, community volunteers, union organizers, idealistic researchers and environmental activists. Perhaps there are no sane societies, but there are saner societies or sane enough societies that allow individuals to join together to develop themselves and their culture.
To conclude these observations on Fromm's two voices, there are perhaps relatively few discordant personalities, in James' sense, who like Fromm are drawn to religious conversion and mystical unity. But there are many of the would-be healthy minded who feel confused about life, who are not sick but who seek happiness in the wrong places and yearn for deeper understanding of themselves. The liberation of women, economic and emotional, from male domination makes it essential that people learn to love, otherwise the family is likely to disintegrate. For the children of the post modern world, especially those who have already achieved the material goals of the 18th century Enlightenment, Fromm can be a guide who integrates the humanistic lessons of religion, literature, and philosophy with the discoveries of psychoanalysis. Even when he speaks in his analytic voice, the prophetic demands are not silent. He directs us to learn the language of the unconscious and at the same time evaluate our actions and institutions in terms of whether or not they stimulate us to wake up and act according to reason, whether or not they move us and our culture toward community rather than tribalism. Even if one does not believe it is possible to create utopia, it is possible for many of us to develop our productive capabilities of love and reason. By engaging in a serious dialogue with Erich Fromm, we expand our awareness of the choices, sharpen our concepts and deepen our sense of meaning.
As a student of Fromm, I believe the task remains of integrating the analytic and the prophetic voices, the understanding of what is and what can be with a compelling vision of what ought to be in order to create a better life and a more humane world.
READING SUGGESTED BY THE AUTHOR
Fromm, Erich, Escape from Freedom. New York: Rinehart: 1941.
The Sane Society. New York: Rinehart, 1955.
You Shall Be As Gods. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1966.
The Anatomy of Human Destructiveness. New York: Harper and Row, 1970.
To Have Or To Be? New York: Harper and Row, 1976
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The Art of Loving
Is love an art? Then it requires knowledge and effort. Or is love a pleasant sensation, which to experience is a matter of chance, something one "falls into" if one is lucky? This little book is based on the former premise, while undoubtedly the majority of people today believe in the latter.
Not that people think that love is not important. They are starved for it; they watch endless numbers of films about happy and unhappy love stories, they listen to hundreds of trashy songs about love -- yet hardly anyone thinks that there is anything that needs to be learned about love.
This peculiar attitude is based on several premises which either singly or combined tend to uphold it. Most people see the problem of love primarily as that of being loved rather than that of loving, of one's capacity to love. Hence the problem to them is how to be loved, how to be lovable. In pursuit of this aim they follow several paths. One, which is especially used by men, is to be successful, to be as powerful and rich as the social margin of one's position permits. An-other, used especially by women, is to make oneself attractive, by cultivating one's body, dress, etc. Other ways of making, oneself attractive, used both by men and women, are to develop pleasant manners, interesting conversation, to be helpful, modest, inoffensive. Many of the ways to make oneself lovable are the same as those used to make oneself successful, "to win friends and influence people." As a matter of fact, what most people in our culture mean by being lovable is essentially a mixture between being popular and having sex appeal.
A second premise behind the attitude that there is nothing to be learned about love is the assumption that the problem of love is the problem of an object, not the problem of a faculty. People think that to love is simple, but that to find the right object to love--or to be loved by--is difficult. This attitude has several reasons rooted in the development of modem society. One reason is the great change which occurred in the twentieth century with respect to the choice of a "love object."
In the Victorian age, as in many traditional cultures, love was mostly not a spontaneous personal experience which then might lead to marriage. On the contrary, marriage was contracted by convention--either by the respective families, or by a marriage broker, or without the help of such intermediaries; it was concluded on the basis of social considerations, and love was supposed to develop once the marriage had been concluded. In the last few generations the concept of romantic love has become almost universal in the Western world. In the United States, while considerations of a conventional nature are not entirely absent, to a vast extent people are in search of "romantic love," of the personal experience of love which then should lead to marriage. This new concept of freedom in love must have greatly enhanced the importance of the object as against the importance of the function.
Closely related to this factor is another feature characteristic of contemporary culture. Our whole culture is based on the appetite for buying, on the idea of a mutually favorable exchange. Modem man's happiness consists in the thrill of looking at the shop windows, and in buying all that he can afford to buy, either for cash or on installments. He (or she) looks at people in a similar way. For the man an attractive girl--and for the woman an attractive man--are the prizes they are after. "Attractive" usually means a nice package of qualities which are popular and sought after on the personality market. What specifically makes a person attractive depends on the fashion of the time, physically as well as mentally. During the twenties, a drinking and smoking girl, tough and sexy, was attractive; today the fashion demands more domesticity and coyness. At the end of the nineteenth and the beginning of this century, a man had to be aggressive and ambitious--today he has to be social and tolerant--in order to be an attractive "package."
At any rate, the sense of falling in love develops usually only with regard to such human commodities as are within reach of one's own possibilities for exchange. I am out for a bargain; the object should be desirable from the standpoint of its social value, and at the same time should want me, considering my overt and hidden as-sets and potentialities. Two persons thus fall in love when they feel they have found the best object available on the market, considering the limitations of their own exchange values. Often, as in buying real estate, the hidden potentialities which can be developed play a considerable role in this bargain. In a culture in which the marketing orientation prevails, and in which material success is the outstanding value, there is little reason to be surprised that human love relations follow the same pattern of exchange which governs the commodity and the labor market.
The third error leading to the assumption that there is nothing to be learned about love lies in the confusion between the initial experience of "falling" in love, and the permanent state of being in love, or as we might better say, of " standing" in love. If two people who have been strangers, as all of us are, suddenly let the wall between them break down, and feel close, feel one, this moment of oneness is one of the most exhilarating, most exciting experiences in life. It is all the more wonderful and miraculous for persons who have been shut off, isolated, without love. This miracle of sudden intimacy is often facilitated if it is combined with, or initiated by, sexual attraction and consummation. However, this type of love is by its very nature not lasting.
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The Humanistic Science of Man
by Erich Fromm
1. Preliminary Considerations
Our present epoch is characterized by the discrepancy that exists between our scientific and technical knowledge on the one hand, and the little knowledge we as yet have about man, on the other.
This is not just a theoretical discrepancy, but a most important practical one as well: if man cannot know more about himself, and use this knowledge for the better organization of his life, he will be destroyed by the very products of his scientific knowledge. But isn't this need for man to gain a better knowledge of himself not anready being met by the thousands of investigators in the fields of psychology, social psychology, psychoanalysis, human relations, etc.? The answer to this question is vital with regard to the foundation of a new "institute for the science of man." If one feels that the aims of a science of man are being adequately covered by the existing social sciences, then indeed one should be strengthening the existing framwork and not be founding new institutes.
Those participating in the discussions about the new Institute very clearly hold that the existing social sciences do not provide what is needed.
These are some of the reasons for this conviction:
(1) The social sciences of today (with a number of notable exceptions), impressed by the success and prestige of the natural sciences, try to apply the methods of the natural sciences to the furthering of man. Not only do they not ask themselves whether the method valid for the study of things is also valid for the study of man, but they even fail to question whether this concept of the scientific method is not naive and outdated. They believe that only a method which counts and weighs can be called scientific, forgetting that the most advanced natural sciences today, such as theoretical physics, operate with bold hypotheses based on imaginative inferences. Even intuition, according to Einstein, should not be despised. The result of this imitation of a badly understood scienific method is that the method of "facts and figures" determines the problems one studies. Researchers choose insignificant problems because the answers can be put into figures and mathematical formulae, instead of choosing significant problems and developing new methods suitable to the study of these problems.
The result is that there are thousands of research projects, most of which do not touch on the fundamental questions of man. The thinking applied in these projects is not rigorous but rather of a naive, practical-technical nature, and it is no wonder that the advanced natural sciences rather than the social sciences attract the best brains of the nation.
(2) Closely related to the problem of a misunderstood scientific method is the relativism with which the social sciences are imbued. While we still pay lip service to the great humanistic tradition, most social scientists have adopted an attitude of complete relativism, an attitude in which values are considered a matter of taste but of no objective validity. Because it is a difficult task to probe the objective validity of values, social science has chosen the easier path of throwing them out altogether. In doing so, it has neglected the fact that our whole world is endangered by the increasing loss of a sense of values, which has led to an increasing incapacity to use constructively the fruits of our thoughts and efforts in the natural sciences.
(3) Another aspect of this relativism is the loss of a concept of man as a definite entity underlying the various manifestations of man as they appear in various cultures. One studies man as if he were a blank sheet of paper on which every culture writes its own text, rather than as a being that is not only biologically but also psychologoically a definable entity. If we do not regain this concept of man as an underlying reality, how can we expect to make fruitful use of the growing geographical and social unity of man, which is the historical trend of the future?
2. General Aims
In the light oo these preliminary considerations, we arrive at the formulation of the general aim of the Institute, which is to pursue the scientific study of man in the spirit of humanism. More specifically, this has the following implications. Firstly, the study of man must be based on certain humane concerns, primarily those which have been the concern of the whole humanistic religious and philosophical tradition: the idea of the dignity of man and of his potentialities for love and reason which can be actualized under favorable circumstances. Secondly, the study of man must be based on those concerns which result from our own historical situation: the breakdown of our traditional value system, the uncontrolled and unstructured growth of purely intellectual and technical activities, and the resulting need to find a new, rational foundation for the establishment of the values of the humanistic tradition. These concerns assume that in spite of all differences man is one species, not only biologically and physiologically but also mentally and psychologically.
These general aims can be accomplished only if methods proper to the study of man are examined and developed. The problem is not that of choosing between a scientific and a non-scientific study of man, but of determining what constitutes the proper rational method for the understanding of man and what does not.
A humanistic science of man must continue the work of the great students of man of the past, such as Aristotle and Spinoza. It will be enriched by the new data which biology, physiology and sociology are giving us, and by our own experiences as contemporaries in this age of transition who are concerned with the future of man.
In this latter respect one more remark appears to be necessary. It is often said by social scientists that one condition of scientific inquiry is the absence of any self-interested or preconceived aims. That this is a naive assuption is clearly shown by the development of the natural sciences: they are to a large extent furthered and not hindered by practical aims and necessities. It is the task of the scientist to keep his data objective, not to study without aims - which are what give meaning and impulse to his work. Just as every age has its specific economic and technical problems, so it also has its specific human problems, and the study of man today must be prompted and guided by the problems engendered in this period of world history.
3. Specific Aims
(1) The study of the methods proper for the science of man: It has to be established what differences in approach exist between the study of things and the study of living beings, especially man. For instance, there is a difference between the "objective" approach, in which the "object" is nothing but an object, and an approach in which the observer at the same time relates empathically to the persons he observes.
(2) The study of the concept of man and of human nature: While humanistic philosophy assumes the unity of all mankind, there is a great need for rational and demonstrable proof that there is indeed such a thing as man and human nature beyond the purely anatomical and physiological realm. The concept of human nature must be established by integrating what we know of man in the past with what we know of man in various highly developed and relatively primitive cultures today. The task is to go beyond a descriptive anthropology, and to study the basic human forces behind the manifold varities in which it is expressed. The thoroughgoing dynamic study of all manifestations of human nature will lead to the inference of a tentative picture of human nature and what the laws governing it are. A humanistic science of man must begin with the concept of human nature, while at the same time aiming to discover what this human nature is. Needless to say, a number of studies should be made of different societies (industrial, preindustrial, primitive) in which hypotheses on human nature should be tested.
(3) The study of values: It must be shown that certain values are not simply matters of taste, but are rooted in the very existence of man. It has to be demonstrated which these such basic values are and how they are rooted in the very nature of man. Values in all cultures must be studied in order to find any underlying unity; and a study of the moral evolution of mankind must also be attempted. Furthermore, it is necessary to investigate what effect the violation of basic ethical norms has on the individual and on the culture. According to the relativists, any norm is valid once it is established by the culture whether it is murder or love. Humanism claims that certain norms are inherent in man's existential situation, and that their violation results in certain consequences which are inimical to life.
(4) The study of destructiveness: Related to the above is the study of destructiveness in all its forms: destruction of others, self-destruction, sadism, and masochism. We know almost nothing about the causes of destructiveness, and yet there is an enormous field of empirical data which would permit us to establish at least hypotheses concerning the individual and social causes of destructiveness.
(5) The study of creativeness: There is an equally broad field of observation for the study of creative impulses in children, adolescents and adults, as well as of the factors which further or impede these impulses. The study of creativeness, as of destructiveness, must transcend the American scene and, if possible, use material from as many diverse cultures as can be obtained.
(6) The study of authority: The modern age of freedom and individualism has fought against authority and established as its ideal the complete absence of authority. This absence of overt authority, however, has helped to increase the power of anonymous authority, which, in turn, has led to a dangerous degree of conformity. It is necessary to study the problem of authority afresh and to differentiate empirically between irrational and rational forms of authority; also to study the phenomenon of conformism in all its manifestations.
(7) Study of the psychological premises of democratic organization: The idea of the responsible and well informed citizen who participates in the important decisions of the community is the centralconcept of democracy. But due to the quantitative increase in population and to the influence of methods of mass suggestion, the substance of democracy is weakening. Studies are necessary to show what goes on in the mind of the voter (beyond polling his opinion), how suggestible he is, what the fact that he can do little to influence political action does to the alertness of his political thinking. Experiments in group discussion and decisionmaking must be furthered, and their results studied.
(8) Study of the educational process: The fact is that we have more higher education than any people ever had anywhere in the world, but that our system of higher education does relatively little to stimulate critical thought and to influence character formation. As a number of studies have shown, the students are little affected by their teachers' personalities and, at best, get not much more than purely intellectual knowledge. New studies are needed to examine the learning situation and the student-teacher relationship. How can education can go beyond purely verbal intellectual processes into the realm of meaningful experience?
(9) Study of history as the evolution of man: Conventional history was studied in a provincial way. The roots of our culture in Palestine, Greece and Rome, and then European and American history, were in the center of attention. We need a true world history in which the evolution of man is shown in its right proportions. It must be shown how the same basic ideas have arisen in various branches of the human family, how some have merged and others remained separate, although the differences have been greatly overstated in comparison to the similarities. In a true History of Man, the evolution of man, his character and his ideas could be shown as well as his growth into an ever more integrated unity. Due emphasis would be given to the true proportions of various cultures and ages. Such a history should enable man to have an objective picture of the whole human race, its growth, integration, and unity. In recent years a number of universal histories more or less answering to this type have been written, but they do not meet the real need, which is that for a scholarly work of many volumes, written by a number of outstanding specialists united by a humanistic spirit.
4. General Remarks
(1) The Institute, in order to have any value, must have a distinctive image. This image cannot be adequately expressed in words (not so much because we have no words, but because they are misused in double-talk) but must rather be expressed by people who in their work and personalities express this image.
(2) The Institute should not follow the practice of the big foundations which has been in practice to encourage many people to think about a scientific problem in terms of what they can "sell" to a foundation, to think first about the funding and only later about what one wants to discover. The Institute should make money available only to the extent that a project really needs it. As a matter of principle, budgets should be kept within a reasonable minimum and should be entirely functional. In this way, the Institute would try to encourage the return to an old-fashioned way of working in which thinking and studying, and not the obtaining of funds and their administration, are at the center of research.
(3) The Institute should support two kinds of activities (as well as building up a library devoted to the science of man):
(a) The work of outstanding scholars: here the goal should not be a specific problem, but rather to support a productive personality who should be enabled to pursue his research into the science of man free from other restricting obligations.
(b) Specific research problems to be tackled by gifted people. The discovery of such persons could be one of the tasks of the Institute. Here grants should be given for specific projects.
The governing body of the Institute should develop its own research policy, not only choosing gifted people but also problems on the basis of an integrated study of the whole field. The governing body of the Institute would be, to an extent, a scientific planning body for the study of man.
(4) The Institute should support people and projects outside as well as inside of the U.S.A. Under no circumstances should grants be given to universities or other such bodies. Only persons and specific projects suggested and accepted by the Institute should receive grants.
(5) It is suggested that the Institute has an active governing body of 5 - 7 members who meet for at least a whole week twice a year, in order to discuss not only grants but the general plans for work, and to devote some time during the year to the preparation of this work in their own field. Such a body should be composed of representatives of various branches in the field of the science of man, but members should primarily be chosen on the basis of common principles, productivity and individual imagination. The bureaucratic spirit should be kept to a minimum.
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The Influence of Social Factors in Child Development
by Erich Fromm
The goal of the education of children is not only to teach them, more or less intellectual knowledge, nor only to teach them virtues in the sense of honesty, courage, etc. The functions of any individual, within society, go far beyond the above mentioned: they must learn to work and to consume within the norms demanded by the means of production and the consumption patterns of their group and the society in which they live.
Let us take as an example, to illustrate our point: a primitive society, a tribe that lives on a small island in the middle of the ocean and where fishing is their only means of survival; let us also suppose that the species of fish in those waters require the fishermen's cooperation and we shall clearly see that the people of such an island must develop the wish to cooperate and the need for a peaceful coexistence. The same is true for certain types of exclusively agricultural societies. If, on the other hand, we use as an example a hunting or warring tribe, whose very life depends on hunting or on the conquest of other tribes, the required characterlogical traits of such societies will be those of aggression, combativeness and pride in individual prowess.
As a last example, let us take a feudal one: the members of the upper class had to develop a capacity for leadership, and we could add, the need to exploit others; he had to learn pride bordering on arrogance; he had to learn to find satisfaction in the life of the richness of his time and of waste. Whereas the members of the lower class had to develop the qualities of obedience and the patience necessary to bear misery.
During the 19th century, the main characterlogical traits, which at the same time were the main virtues of the middle classes, were the desire to accumulate and to economize; the desire to exploit others, particularly workers and peoples of other races, and a strong individualistic sense, aptly expressed in the phrase "my home is my castle."
These characterlogical traits are fast disappearing in the 20th century and are no longer considered virtues, for in a society based on ever greater consumption, the individual must feel very satisfied consuming more and more, instead of in accumulating. And, in a society based on the cooperation of thousands of workers and employees within enterprises, what is required is team work, not selfish individualism.
Nevertheless, there remain certain common traits in the 19th and 20th centuries, such as the need to be punctual, orderly and trustworthy on the job; needs pertaining to modern industrial production, and which were practically non-existent, to any comparable degree, in the feudal society of some 300 years ago.
In order to function well, every society must have as its members, individuals who will act, almost automatically, in the way that particular society requires; in other words, they must wish to do what they must do. If any of them had to decide, on a day by day basis if they want to be punctual or not, orderly or not, etc. they would probably decide, just as often as not, against the social demands, thus threatening the good functioning of their society. The individual must act almost automatically in keeping with the norms of his society; this means, that a social behavior trait must become a character trait.
In every society, there are a group of character traits common to the majority of its members, we call this the "social character;" its function is the survival of that society. From the individual's standpoint, its function is to prepare him to operate successfully within his society. Though the social character can be determined by many factors, its roots are built into the child by his parents; since their character conforms with the "social character," they mould the child's character accordingly. In this way, the family becomes the psychological agent of society.
As long as there are no basic changes in the social structure, this procedure functions harmoniously; yet when such changes occur, as they are happening nowadays all over the world, contradictions appear between the traditional social character and the new social demands for which the individual is ill-equipped. Parents, then, frequently feel impotent, they lose all authority and do not understand their children, often appealing for their assistance in a bewildering, dangerous and growing lack of responsibility. This new generation no longer understands the meaning of life, where to go, nor what to aspire to, for though at school and church they are taught the ancient virtues of humility and honesty, the young are immersed in a society centered on the wish for more money and consumption - which often means more waste. They feel out-dated with their education that by-passes new developments and their parents feel powerless for they are also disoriented and confused.
Till now, I have described only one aspect of the situation; the outcome of a society that needs to conform human beings who satisfy her needs; but humans are not a blank sheet of paper on which society writes the text; they have their own basic needs, which they share with all the human race; they need to relate to others; they need to feel rooted in a world they consider their own; they need to transcend their feelings to be a creature either by creating or by destroying; they must have their own sense of identity that allows them to say "I" and to have a frame of orientation that gives some meaning to the world they live in. If a human being is completely unrelated, or is totally destructive, he would be insane.
For the social purpose, human beings must have the objective of their social character. For the ends of man, for his well-being and his self-realization, he must create a society that will fulfill the goals of the human race. A society will be a healthy society, if it tends towards the creation of a social character that approximates the universal human character; the more discrepancies there are between the social demands and the human demands, the worse-off that society will be. In this latter situation, man can only choose between a severe nervous breakdown or to change his society so that it can better fulfill the needs of universal man.
It is of utmost importance that today's parents do not lend themselves to be easily impressed by the social demands to be more successful and have more money and luxuries; they must think over carefully what to do they consider their values and ideals; what to do they consider to be the meaning of their lives and to not surrender so easily to their children and concede with their position that there are no universal values.
Mental illness is always a sign that basic human needs are not being satisfied; that there is a lack of love, a lack of reason for being, a lack of justice; that something important is missing and, because of this, pathological trends are developing. If parents really wish that their children be not only successful but also to be mentally healthy, they must consider as essential those norms and values that lead to mental health and not only those that lead to success.
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Selfishness and Self-Love
by Erich Fromm
Modern culture is pervaded by a taboo on selfishness. It teaches that to be selfish is sinful and that to love others is virtuous. To be sure, this doctrine is not only in flagrant contradiction to the practices of modern society but it also is in opposition to another set of doctrines which assumes that the most powerful and legitimate drive in man is selfishness and that each individual by following this imperative drive also does the most for the common good. The existence of this latter type of ideology does not affect the weight of the doctrines which declare that selfishness is the arch evil and love for others the main virtue. Selfishness, as it is commonly used in these ideologies, is more or less synonymous with self-love. The alternatives are either to love others which is a virtue or to love oneself which is a sin.
This principle has found its classic expression in Calvin's theology. Man is essentiall bad and powerless. He can do nothing - absolutely nothing - good on the basis of his own strength or merits. "We are not our own," says Calvin in his Institutes of the Christian Religion (1928, Book III, Chapter 7, ß 1, p. 619), "therefore neither our reason nor our will should predominate in our deliberations and actions. We are not our own; therefore, let us not propose it as our end, to seek what may be expedient for us according to the flesh. We are not our own; therefore, let us, as far as possible, forget ourselves and all things that are ours. On the contrary, we are God's; to him, therefore, let us live and die. For, as it is the most devastating pestilence which ruins people if they obey themselves, it is the only haven of salvation not to know or to want anything by oneself but to be guided by God who walks before us."2
Man should not only have the conviction of his absolute nothingness. He should do everything to humiliate himself. "For I do not call it humility," says Calvin (1928, Chapter 12, ß 6, p. 681), "if you suppose that we have anything left... we cannot think of ourselves as we ought to think without utterly despising everything that may be supposed an excellence in us. This humility is unfeigned submission of a mind overwhelmed with a weighty sense of its own misery and poverty; for such is the uniform description of it in the word of God."
This emphasis on the nothingness and wickedness of the individual implies that there is nothing he should like about himself. This doctrine is rooted in contempt and hatred for oneself. Calvin makes this point very clear; he speaks of "Self-love" as of a "pest" (1928, Chapter 7, ß4, p. 622).
If the individual finds something in himself "on the strength of which he finds pleasure in himself," he betrays this sinful self-love. This fondness for himself will make him sit in judgment over others and despise them. Therefore, to be fond of oneself, to like anything about oneself is one of the greatest imaginable sins. It excludes love for others* and is identical with selfishness.4
There are fundamental differences between Calvin's theology and Kant's philosophy, yet, the basic attitude toward the problem of love for oneself has remained the same. According to Kant, it is a virtue to want the happiness of others, while to want one's own happiness is ethically "indifferent," since it is something which the nature of man is striving for and a natural striving cannot have positive ethical sense. (Cf. I. Kant, 1909, esp. Part I, Book I, Chapter I, ß VIII, Remark II, p. 126:) Kant admits that one must not give up one's claims for happiness; under certain circumstances it can even be a duty to be concerned with one's happiness; partly because health, wealth, and the like, can be means which are necessary to fulfill one's duty, partly because the lack of happiness - poverty - can seduce a person from fulfilling his duty. (Cf. ibid. Part I, Book I, Chapter III, p. 186.) But love for oneself, striving for one's own happiness, can never be a virtue. As an ethical principle, the striving for one's own happiness "is the most objectionable one, not merely because it is false,... but because the springs it provides for morality are such as rather undermine it and destroy its sublimity..." (Ibid. - in particular Fundamental Principles of the Metaphysics of Morals ; second section, p. 61.) Kant differentiates in egotism, self-love, philautia - a benevolence for oneself; and arrogance - the pleasure in oneself. "Rational self-love" must be restricted by ethical principles, the pleasure in oneself must be battered down and the individual must come to feel humiliated in comparing himself with the sanctity of moral laws. (Ibid. - in particular Part I, Book I, Chapter III, p. 165.) The individual should find supreme happiness in the fulfillment of his duty. The realization of the moral principle - and, therefore, of the individual's happiness - is only possible in the general whole, the nation, the state. Yet, "the welfare of the state - salus rei publicae suprema lex est - is not identical with the welfare of the citizens and their happiness."5
In spite of the fact that Kant shows a greater respect for the integrity of the individual than did Calvin or Luther, he states that even under the most tyrannical government the individual has no right to rebel and must be punished no less than with death if he threatens the sovereign. (Cf. I. Kant, 1907, p. 126.) Kant emphasizes the native propensity for evil in the nature of man (cf. I. Kant, 1934, esp. Book I), for the suppression of which the moral law, the categorical imperative, is necessary unless man should become a beast and human society should end in wild anarchy.
In discussing Calvin's and Kant's systems, their emphasis on the nothingness of man has been stressed. Yet, as already suggested, they also emphasize the autonomy and dignity of the individual, and this contradiction runs through their writings. In the philosophy of the enlightenment period the individual's claims and happiness have been emphasized much more strongly by others than by Kant, for instance by Helvetius. This trend in modern philosophy has found an extreme expression by Stirner and Nietzsche. In the way that they often phrase the problem - though not necessarily in their real meaning - they share one basic premise of Calvin and Kant: that love for others and love for oneself are alternatives. But in contradiction to those authors, they denounce love for others as weakness and self-sacrifice and postulate egotism, selfishness, and self-love - they too confuse the issue by not clearly differentiating between these phenomena - as virtue. Thus Stirner says: "Here, egoism, selfishness must decide, not the principle of love, not love motives like mercy, gentleness, good-nature, or even justice and equity - for iustitia too is a phenomenon of love, a product of love: love knows only sacrifice and demands self-sacrifice." (M. Stirner, 1912, p. 339.)
The kind of love denounced by Stirner is the masochistic dependence which makes the individual a means for achieving the purposes of somebody or something outside himself. With this conception of love could he scarcely avoid a formulation which postulated ruthless egotism as a goal. The formulation is, therefore, highly polemical and overstates the point. The positive principle with which Stirner was concerned6 was directed against an attitude which had run through Christian theology for many centuries - and which was vivid in the German idealism which was passing in his time; namely, to bend the individual to submit to and find his center in a power and a principle outside of himself. To be sure, Stirner was not a philosopher of the stature of Kant or Hegel, yet he had the courage to make a radical rebellion against that side of idealistic philosophy which negated the concrete individual and thus helped the absolute state to retain its oppressive power over the individual. Although there is no comparison between the depth and scope of the two philosophers, Nietzsche's attitude in many respects is similar to that of Stirner. Nietzsche also denounces love and altruism as the expressions of weakness and self-negation. For Nietzsche, the quest for love is typical of slaves who cannot fight for what they want and, therefore, try to get it through "love." Altruism and love for mankind is thus a sign of degeneration. (Cf. F. Nietzsche, 1910, in particular stanza 246, 362, 369, 373 and 728.) For him, it is the essence of a good and healthy aristocracy that is ready to sacrifice countless people for its interests without having a guilty conscience. Society should be a "foundation and scaffolding by means of which a select class of beings may be able to elevate themselves to their higher duties, and in general to their higher existence." (F. Nietzsche, 1907, stanza 258, p. 225.) Many quotations could be added to document this spirit of sadism, contempt and brutal egotism. This side of Nietzsche has often been understood as the philosophy of Nietzsche. Is this true; is this the "real" Nietzsche?
To answer this question would require a detailed analysis of his work which cannot be attempted here. There are various reasons which made Nietzsche express himself in the sense mentioned above. First of all, as in the case of Stirner, his philosophy is a reaction - a rebellion - against the philosophical tradition of subordinating the empirical individual to a power and a principle outside of himself. His tendency to overstatements shows this reactive quality. Second, there were traits in Nietzsche's personality, a tremendous insecurity and anxiety, which explain that, and why he had sadistic impulses which led him to those formulations. Yet, these trends in Nietzsche do not seem to me to be the "essence" of his personality nor the corresponding views the essence of his philosophy. Finally Nietzsche shared some of the naturalistic ideas of his time as they were expressed in the materialistic-biologistic philosophy, for which the concepts of the physiologicalroots of psychic phenomena and the "survival of the fittest" were characteristic. This interpretation does not do away with the fact that Nietzsche shared the view that there is a contradiction between love for others and love for oneself. Yet, it is important to notice that Nietzsche's views contain the nucleus from development of which this wrong dichotomy can be overcome. The "love" which he attacks is one which is rooted not in one's own strength, but in one's own weakness. "Your neighbor love is your bad love for yourselves. You flee into your neighbor from yourselves and would fain make a virtue thereof. But I fathom your unselfishness." He states explicitly, "You cannot stand yourselves and you do not love yourselves sufficiently." (F. Nietzsche, s.a., p. 75.) The individual has for Nietzsche "an enormously great significance" (F. Nietzsche, 1910, stanza 785). The "strong" individual is the one who has "true kindness, nobility, greatness of soul, which does not give in order to take, which does not want to excell by being kind; - waste as type of true kindness, wealth of the person as a premise." (L. c., stanza 935.)
He expresses the same thought also in Thus Spake Zarathustra : "The one goeth to his neighbor because he seeketh himself, the other one because would he fain lose himself." (F. Nietzsche, s. a., p. 76.)
The essence of these views is: love is a phenomenon of abundance, its premise is the strength of the individual who can give. Love ois affirmation, "it seeketh to create what is loved!" (L. c., p. 102.) To love another person is only a virtue if it springs from this inner strength, but it is detestable if it is the expression of the basic inability to be oneself. (Cf. F. Nietzsche, 1910, stanza 820; F. Nietzsche, 1911, stanza 35; F. Nietzsche, 1991a. stanza 2; F. Nietzsche, Nachlaß, pp. 63-64.)
However, the fact remains that Nietzsche left the problem of the relationship between self-love and love for others as unsolved antinomy, even if by interpreting him one may surmise in what direction his solution would have been found. (Compare the important paper by Max Horkheimer, 1936, which deals with the problem of egotism in modern history.)
The doctrine that selfishness is the arch-evil that one has to avoid and that to love oneself excludes loving others is by no means restricted to theology and philosophy. It is one of the stock patterns used currently in home, school, church, movies, literature, and all the other instruments of social suggestion. "Don't be selfish" is a sentence which has been impressed upon millions of children, generation after generation. It is hard to define what exactly it means. Consciously, most parents connect with it the meaning not to be egotistical, inconsiderate, without concern for others. Factually, they generally mean more than that. "Not to be selfish" implies not to do what one wishes, to give up one's own wishes for the sake of those in authority; i.e., the parents, and later the authorities of society. "Don't be selfish," in the last analysis, has the same ambiguity that we have seen in Calvinism. Aside from its obvious implication, it means, "don't love yourself," "don't be yourself," but submit your life to something more important than yourself, be it an outside power or the internalization of that power as "duty." "Don't be selfish" becomes one of the most powerful ideological weapons in suppressing spontaneity and the free development of personality. Under the pressure of this slogan one is asked for every sacrifice and for complete submission: only those aims are "unselfish" which do not serve the individual for his own sake but for the sake of somebody or something outside of him.
This picture, we must repeat, is in a certain sense one-sided. Beside the doctrine that one should not be selfish, the opposite doctrine is propagandized in modern society: have your own advantage in mind, act according to what is best for you - and by doing so, you will also bring about the greatest advantage for all others. As a matter of fact, the idea that the pursuit of individual egotism is the basis for the development of general welfare is the principle on which competetive capitalism has been built. It may seem strange that two such seemingly contradictory principles could be taught side by side in one culture. Of the fact, there can be no doubt. One result of this contradiction of ideological patterns certainly is confusion in the individual. To be torn between the one and the other doctrine is a serious blockage in the process of integration of personality and has often led to neurotic character formation. (This point has been emphasized by K. Horney, 1937, and by R. S. Lynd, 1939.)
One must observe that this contradictory pair of doctrines has had an important social function. The doctrine that everybody should pursue his individual advantage obviously was a necessary stimulus for private initiative on which the modern economic structure is built. The social function of the doctrine "don't be selfish" was an ambiguous one. For the broad masses of those who had to live on the level of mere subsistence, it was an important aid to resignation to having wishes which were unattainable under the given socioeconomic system. It was important that this resignation should be one which was not thought of as being brought about by external pressure, since the inevitable result of such a feeling has to be a more or less conscious grudge and a defiance against society. By making this resignation a moral virtue, such a reaction could to a considerable extent be avoided. While this aspect of the social function of the taboo on selfishness is obvious, another, its effect upon the privileged minority, is somewhat more complicated. It only becomes clear if we consider further the meaning of "selfishness." If it means to be concerned with one's economic advantage, certainly the taboo on selfishness would have been a severe handicap to the economic initiative of business men. But what it really meant, especially in the earlier phases of English and American culture was, as has been pointed out before: don't do what you want, don't enjoy yourself, don't spend money or energy for pleasure, but feel it as your duty to work, to be successful, to be prosperous.
It is the great merit of Max Weber, to have shown that this principle of what he calls innerweltliche Askese [innerworldly asceticism] was an important condition for creating an attitude in which all energy could be directed toward work and the fulfillment of duty. (Cf. M. Weber, 1930.) The tremendous economic achievements of modern society would not have been possible if this kind of asceticism had not absorbed all energy to the purpose of thrift and relentless work. It would transcend the scope of this paper to enter into an analysis of the character structure of modern man as he emerged in the 16th century. Suffice it to say here, that the economic and social changes in the 15th and 16th centuries destroyed the feeling of security and "belonging" which was typical of the members of medieval society.7 The socioeconomic position of the urban middle class, the peasantry and the nobility were shaken in their foundations (cf. R. Pascal, 1933; J. B. Kraus, 1930; R. H. Tawney, 1926); impoverishment, threats to traditional economic positions as well as new chances for economic success arose. Religious and spiritual ties which had established a rounded and secure world for the individual had been broken. The individual found himself completely alone in the world, paradise was lost for good, his success and failure were decided by the laws of the market; the basic relationship to everyone else had become one of merciless competition. The result of all this was a new feeling of freedom attended, however, by an increased anxiety. This anxiety, in its turn, created a readiness for new submission to religious and secular authorities even more strict than the previous ones had been.
The new individualism on the one hand, anxiety and submission to authority on the other, found their ideological expression in Protestantism and Calvinism. At the same time, these religious doctrines did much, to stimulate and increase these new attitudes. But even more important than the submission to external authorities was the fact that the authorities were internalized, that man became the slave of a master inside himself instead of one outside. This internal master drove the individual to relentless work and striving for success and never allowed him to be himself and enjoy himself. There was a spirit of distrust and hostility directed not only against the outside world, but also toward one's own self.
This modern type of man was selfish in a twofold sense: he had little concern for others and he was anxiously concerned with his own advantage. But was this selfishness really a concern for himself as an individual, with all his intellectual and sensual potentialities? Had "he" not become the appendix of his socioeconomic role, a cog in the economic machine, even if sometimes an important cog? Was he not the slave of this machine even if he subjectively felt as if he were following his own orders? Was his selfishness identical with self-love or was it instead rooted in the very lack of it?
We must postpone answering these questions, since we have still to finish a brief survey of the doctrine of selfishness in modern society. The taboo on selfishness has been reinforced in the authoritarian systems. One of the ideological cornerstones of National-Socialism is the principle: "Public good takes precedence over private good" ("Gemeinnutz geht vor Eigennutz"). According to the original propaganda technique of National-Socialism, the thought was phrased in a form purposed to permit the workers to believe in the "Socialist" part of the Nazi program. However, if we consider its meaning in the context of the whole Nazi philosophy, the implication is this: the individual should not want anything for himself; he should find his satisfaction in the elimination of his individuality and in participating as a small particle in the greater whole of the race, the state or its symbol, the leader. While Protestantism and Calvinism emphasized individual liberty and responsibility even as it emphasized the nothingness of the individual, Nazism is focused essentially on the latter. Only the "born" leaders are an exception, and even they should feel themselves as instruments of someone higher up in the hierarchy - the supreme leader as an instrument of destiny.
The doctrine that love for oneself is identical with "selfishness," and that it is an alternative to love for others has pervaded theology, philosophy and the pattern of daily life; it would be surprising if one would not find the same doctrine also in scientific psychology, but here as an allegedly objective statement of facts. A case in point is Freud's theory on narcissism. He says, in short, that man has a certain quantity of libido. Originally, in the infant, all this libido has as its objective the child's own person, primary narcissism. Later on, the libido is directed from one's own person toward other objects. If a person is blocked in his "object-relationships," the libido is withdrawn from the object and returned to one's own person, secondary narcissism. According to Freud, there is an almost mechanical alternative between ego-love and object-love. The more love I turn toward the outside world the less love I have for myself, and vice versa. Freud is thus moved to describe the phenomenon of falling in love as an impoverishment of one's self-love because all love is turned to an object outside of oneself. Freud's theory of narcissism expresses basically the same idea which runs through protestant religion, idealistic philosophy, and the everyday patterns of modern culture. This by itself does not indicate that he is right or wrong. Yet, this translation of the general principle into the categories of empirical psychology gives us a good basis for examining the principle.
These questions arise: Does psychological observation support the thesis that there is a basic contradiction and the state of alternation between love for oneself and love for others? Is love for oneself the same phenomenon as selfishness, is there a difference or are they in fact opposites?
Before we turn to the discussion of the empirical side of the problem, it may be noted that from a philosophical viewpoint, the notion that love for others and love for oneself are contradictory is untenable. If it is a virtue to love my neighbor as a human being, why must not I love myself too? A principle which proclaims love for man but which taboos love for myself, exempts me from all other human beings. The deepest experience of human existence, however, is to have this experience with regard to oneself. There is no solidarity of man in which I myself am not included. A doctrine which proclaims such an exclusion proves its objective insincerity by this very fact.8
We have come here to the psychological premises on which the conclusions of this paper are built. Generally, these premises are: not only others, but also we ourselves are the "object" of our feelings and attitudes; the attitude towards others and toward ourselves, far from being contradictory, runs basically parallel. (This viewpoint has been emphasized by K. Horney, 1939, esp. Chapters 5 and 7). With regard to the problem under discussion this means: Love for others and love for ourselves are not alternatives. Neither are hate for others and hate for ourselves alternatives. On the contrary, an attitude of love for themselves will be found in those who are at least capable of loving others. Hatred against oneself is inseparable from hatred against others, even if on the surface the opposite seems to be the case. In other words, love and hatred, in principle, are indivisible as far as the difference between "objects" and one's own self is concerned.
To clarify this thesis, it is necessary to discuss the problem of hatred and love. With regard to hatred one can differentiate between "reactive hatred" and "character conditioned hatred." By reactive hatred I mean a hatred which is essentially a reaction to an attack on ones life, security, or ideals or on some other person that one loves and identifies oneself with. Its premise is one's positive attitude toward one's life, toward other persons and toward ideals. If there is a strong affirmation of life, a strong hatred necessarily is aroused if life is attacked. If there is love, hatred must be aroused if the loved one is attacked. There is no passionate striving for anything which does not necessitate hatred if the object of this striving is attacked. Such hatred is the counterpoint of life. It is aroused by a specific situation, its aim is the destruction of the attacker and, in principle, it ends when the attacker is defeated. (F. Nietzsche, 1911a, Stanza 2, has emphasized the creative function of destruction.)
Character-conditioned hatred is different. To be sure, the hatred rooted in the character structure once arose a reaction to certain experiences undergone by the individual in his childhood. It then became a character trait of the person; he is hostile. His basic hostility is observable even when it is not giving rise to manifest hatred. There is something in the facial expression, gestures, tone of voice, kind of jokes, little unintentional reactions which impress the observer as indications of the fundamental hostility, which also could be described as a continuous readiness to hate. It is the basis from which reactive hatred springs if and when it is aroused by a specific stimulus. This hate reaction can be perfectly rational; as much so, as a matter of fact, as is the case in the situations which were described as arousing reactive hatred. There is, however, a fundamental difference. In the case of reactive hatred it is the situation which creates the hatred. In the case of character-conditioned hatred an "idling" hostility is actualized by the situation. In the case where the basic hatred is aroused, the person involved appears to have something like a feeling of relief, as though he were happy to have found the rational opportunity to express his lingering hostility. He shows a particular kind of satisfaction and pleasure in his hatred which is missing in the case of an essentially reactive hatred.
In the case of a proportionality between hate reaction and external situation, we speak of a "normal" reaction, even if it is the actualization of character-conditioned hatred. From this normal reaction to an "irrational" reaction found in the neurotic or psychotic person, there are innumerable transitions and no sharp demarcation line can be drawn. In the irrational hate-reaction, the emotion seems disproportionate to the actual situation. Let me illustrate by referring to a reaction which psychoanalysts have ample opportunity to observe; an analysand has to wait ten minutes because the analyst is delayed. The analysand enters the room, wild with rage at the offense done to him by the analyst. Extreme cases can be observed more clearly in psychotic persons; in those the disproportionality is still more striking. Psychotic hatred will be aroused by something which from the standpoint of reality is not at all offensive. Yet, from the standpoint of his own feeling it is offensive, and thus the irrational reaction is irrational only from the standpoint of external objective reality, not from the subjective premises of the person involved.
The lingering hostility can also be purposely aroused and turned into manifest hatred by social suggestion; that is, propaganda. If such propaganda which wants to instill people with hatred toward certain objects is to be effectual, it must build upon the character-conditioned hostility in the personality structure of the members of the groups to which it appeals. A case in point is the appeal of Nazism to the group which formed its nucleus, the lower middle class. Latent hostility was peculiarly the lot of the members of this group long before it was actualized by Mazi propaganda and that is why they were such fertile soil for this propaganda.
Psychoanalysis offers ample opportunity to observe the conditions responsible for the existence of hatred in the character structure.
The decisive factors for arousing character-conditioned hatred may be stated to be all the different ways by which spontaneity, freedom, emotional and physical expansiveness, the development of the "self" of the child are blocked or destroyed.9 The means of doing this are manifold; they vary from open, intimidating hostility and terror, to a subtle and "sweet" kind of "anonymous authority," which does not overtly forbid anything but says: "know you will or will not like this or that."
Simple frustration of instinctual impulses does not create deep seated hostility; it only creates a reactive hate reaction. Yet, this was Freud's assumption and his concept of the Oedipus Complex is based on it; it implies that the frustration of sexual wishes directed toward the father or the mother creates hatred which in its turn leads to anxiety and submission. To be sure, frustration often appears as a symptom of something which does create hostility: not taking the child seriously, blocking his expansiveness, not allowing him to be free. But the real issue is not isolated frustration but the fight of the child against those forces which tend to suppress his freedom and spontaneity. There are many forms in which the fight for freedom is fought and many ways in which the defeat is disguised. The child may be ready to internalize the external authority and be "good," it may overtly rebel and yet remain dependent. It may feel that it "belongs" by completely conforming to the given cultural patterns at the expense of the loss of its individual self - the result is always a lesser or greater degree of inner emptiness, the feeling of nothingness, anxiety and resulting from all that a chronic hatred, and ressentiment, which Nietzsche characterized very well as Lebensneid, envy of life.
There is a slight difference, however, between hatred and this envy of life. The aim of hatred is in the last analysis the destruction of the object outside of my self. By destroying it I attain strength in relative, although not in absolute terms. In envy of life, the begrudging attitude aims at the destruction of others too; not, however, in order to gain relative strength, but to have the satisfaction that others are being denied the enjoyment of things which - for external or reasons - I cannot enjoy myself. It aims at removing the pain, rooted in my own inability for happiness, by having nobody else who by his very existence demonstrates what I am lacking.10
In principle, the same factors condition the development of chronic hatred in a group. The difference here as in general between individual psychology and social psychology is only to be found in this: while in individual psychology, we are looking for the individual and accidental conditions which are responsible for those character traits by which one individual varies from other members of his group, in social psychology we are interested in the character structure as far as it is commonto and, therefore, typical of the majority of the members of that group. As to the conditions, we are not looking for accidental individual conditions like an overstrict father or the sudden death of a beloved sister, but for those conditions of life which are a common experience for the group as such. This does not mean the one or the other isolated trait in the whole mode of life, but the total structure of basic life experiences as they are essentially conditioned by the socio-economic situation of a particular group. (Cf. E. Fromm, 1932a.)
The child is imbued with the "spirit" of a society long before it makes the direct acquaintance with it in school. The parents represent in their own character structure the spirit prevalent in their society and class and transmit this atmosphere to the child from the day of his birth onward. The family thus is the "psychic agency" of society.
The bearing on our problem of the differentiation in hatred will have become clear by now. While in the case of reactive hatred the stimulus which is at the same time the object, constitutes the "cause" for the hatred; in the case of character-conditioned hatred, the basic attitude, the readiness for hatred, exists regardless of an object and before a stimulus makes the chronic hostility turn into manifest hatred. As has been indicated, originally, in childhood, this basic hatred was brought into existence by certain people, but later it has become part of the personality structure and objects play but a secondary rle. Therefore, in its case, there is, in principle, no difference between objects outside of myself and my own self. The idling hostility is always there; its outside objects change according to circumstances and it but depends on certain factors whether I myself become one of the objects of my hostility. If one wants to understand why a certain person is hated in one case, why I myself am hated in another case, one has to know the specific factors in the situation which make others or myself the object of manifest hatred. What interests us in this context, however, is the general principle that character-conditioned hatred is something radiating from an individual and like a searchlight focussing sometimes on this and sometimes on that object, among them myself.
The strength of basic hatred is one of the major problems of our culture. In the beginning of this paper, it has been shown how Calvinism and Protestantism pictured man as essentially evil and contemptible. Luther's hatred against the revolting peasants is of extraordinary intensity.
Max Weber has emphasized the distrust for and hostility toward others which runs through the Puritan literature replete with warnings against having any confidence in the help and friendliness of our fellow men. Deep distrust even toward one's closest friend is recommended by Baxter. Th. Adams says: "He - the knowing man - is blind in no man's cause but best sighted in his own. He confines himself to the circle of his own affairs and thrusts not his fingers in needless fires... He sees the falseness of it [the world] and, therefore, learns to trust himself ever, others so far as not to be damaged by their disappointments." (Work of the Puritan Divines, quoted by M. Weber, 1930, p. 222.)
Hobbes assumed that man's nature was that of a predatory animal, filled with hostility, set to kill and rob. Only by the consensus of all, submitting to the authority of the state, could peace and order be created. Kant's opinion of man's nature is not too distant from Hobbes, he too thought that man's nature had a fundamental propensity for evil. Among psychologists, chronic hatred as an inherent part of human nature has been a frequent assumption. William James considered it as being so strong that he took for granted that we all feel a natural repulsion against physical contact with other persons. (Cf. W. James, 1893, esp. vol. 2, p. 348.) Freud, in his theory of the death instinct, assumed that for biological reasons, we all are driven by an irresistible force to destroy either others or ourselves.
Although some of the philosophers of the enlightenment period believed that the nature of man was good and that his hostility was the product of the circumstances under which he lives, the assumption of hostility as an inherent part of man's nature runs through the ideas of representative thinkers of the modern era from Luther up to our days. We need not discuss whether this assumption is tenable. At any rate, the philosophers and psychologists who held this belief were good observers of man within their own culture, even though they made the mistake of believing that modern man in his essence is not a historical product but is as nature made him to be.
While important thinkers clearly saw the strength of hostility in modern man, popular ideologies and the convictions of the average man tend to ignore the phenomenon. Only a relatively small number of people have an awareness of their fundamental dislike of others. Many have only a feeling of just having little interest or feeling for others. The majority are completely unaware of the intensity of the cronic hatred in themselves as well as in others. They have adopted the feeling that they know they are supposed to have: to like people, to find them nice, unless or until they have actually committed an act of aggression. The very indiscriminateness of this "liking people" shows its thinness or rather its compensatory quality a basic lack of fondness.
While the frequency of un(ierlying distrust and dislike for others is known to many observers of our social scene, the dislike for oneself is a less clearly recognized phenomenon. Yet, this self-hatred may be considered rare only so long as we think of cases in which people quite overtly hate or dislike themselves. Mostly, this self-dislike is concealed in various ways. One of the most frequent indirect expressions of self-dislike are the inferiority feelings so widespread in our culture. Consciously, these persons do not feel that they dislike themselves: what they do feel is only that they are inferior to others, that they are stupid, unattractive or whatever the particular content of the inferiority feelings is.11
To be sure, the dynamics of inferiority feelings are complex and there are factors other than the one with which we are dealing. Yet, this factor is never missing and dislike for oneself or at least a lack of fondness for one's own person is always present and is dynamically an important factor.
A still more subtle form of self-dislike is the tendency toward constant self-criticism. These people do not feel inferior but if they make one mistake, discover something in themselves which should not be so, their self-criticism is entirely out of proportion to the significance of the mistake or the shortcoming. They must either be perfect according to their own standards, or at least perfect enough according to the standards of the people around them so that they get affection and approval. If they feel that what they did was perfect or if they succeed in winning other people's approval, they feel at ease. But whenever this is missing they feel overwhelmed by an otherwise repressed inferiority feeling. Here again, the basic lack of fondness for themselves is one source from which the attitude springs. This becomes more evident if we compare this attitude toward oneself with the corresponding one toward others. If, for example, a man who believes that he loves a woman should feel if she makes any mistake that she is no good, or if his feeling about her is entirely dependent on whether others criticize or praise her, we cannot doubt that there is a fundamental lack of love for her. It is the person who hates who seizes every opportunity to criticize another person and who does not miss any blunder.
The most widespread expression of the lack of fondness for oneself, however, is the way in which people treat themselves. People are their own slave drivers; instead of being the slaves of a master outside of themselves, they have put the master within. This master is harsh and cruel. He does not give them a moment's rest, he forbids them the enjoyment of any pleasure, does not allow them to do what they want. If they do so, they do it furtively and at the expense of a guilty conscience. Even the pursuit of pleasure is as compulsory as is work. It does not lead them away from the continual restlessness which pervades their lives. For the most part, they are not even aware of this. There are some exceptions. Thus, the banker, James Stillman, who, when in the prime of life, had attained wealth, prestige and power reached only by but few people said: I never in my life have done what I wanted and never shall do so. (Cf. A. Robeson, 1927.)
The rle of "conscience" as the internalization of external authorities and as the bearer of deep seated hostility against oneself has been seen clearly by Freud in the formulation of his concept of the Super-Ego. He assumed that the Super-Ego contains a great deal of the basic destructiveness inherent in man and turns it against him in terms of duty and moral obligation. In spite of objections to Freud's Super-Ego theory, which cannot be presented here (see my discussion of the Super-Ego in E. Fromm, 1936a), Freud undoubtedly has sensed keenly the hostility and cruelty contained in the "conscience" as it was conceived in the modern era.
What holds true of hostility and hatred holds also true of love. Yet, love for others and self-love is by far a more difficult problem to discuss; and this for two reasons. One is the fact that while hatred is a phenomenon to be found everywhere in our society and, therefore, an easy object for empirical observation and analysis, love is a comparatively rare phenomenon, which lends itself to empirical observation only under difficulties; any discussion of love, therefore, implies the danger of being unempirical and merely speculative. The other difficulty is perhaps even greater. There is no word in our language which has been so much misused and prostituted as the word "love." It has been preached by those who were ready to condone every cruelty if it served their purpose; it has been used as a disguise under which to force people into sacrificing their own happiness, into submitting their whole self to those who profited from this surrender. It has been used as the moral basis for unjustified demands. It has been made so empty that for many people love may mean no more than that two people have lived together for 20 years just without fighting more often than once a week. It is dangerous and somewhat embarrassing to use such a word. Yet a psychologist may not properly succumb to this embarrassment. To preach love is at best bad taste. But to make a cool and critical analysis of the phenomenon of love and to unmask pseudo-love - tasks which cannot be separated from each other - is an obligation that the psychologist has no right to avoid.
It goes without saying that this paper will not attempt to give an analysis of love. Even to describe the psychological phenomena which are conventionally covered by the term "love" would require a good part of a book. One must attempt, however, the presentation necessary to the main trend of thought of this paper.
Two phenomena closely connected with each other are frequently presented as love - the masochistic and sadistic love. In the case of masochistic love, one gives up one's self, one's initiative and integrity in order to become submerged entirely in another person who is felt to be stronger. Because of deep anxieties which give rise to the feeling that one cannot stand on one's own feet, one wants to be rid of one's own individual self and to become part of another being, thus becoming secure and finding a center which one misses in oneself. This surrender of one's own self has often been praised as the example of "the great love." It is actually a form of idolatry, and also an annihilation of the self. The fact that it has been conceived as love has made it the more seductive and dangerous.
The sadistic love on the other hand springs from the desire to swallow its object to make him a will-less instrument in one's own hands. This drive is also rooted in a deep anciety and an inability to stand alone, but instead oi finding increased strength by being swallowed, strength and security are found in having a limited power over the other person. The masochistic as well as the sadistic kind of love are expressions of one basic need which springs from a basic inability to be independent. Using a biological term, this basic need may be called a "need for symbiosis." The sadistic love is frequently the kind of love that parents have for their children. Whether the domination is overtly authoritarian or subtly "modern" makes no essential difference. In either case, it tends to undermine the strength of the self of the child and leads in later years to the development in him of the very same symbiotic tendencies. The sadistic love is not infrequent among adults. Often in relationships of long duration, the respective rles are permanent, one partner representing the sadistic, the other one the masochistic pole of the symbiotic relationship. Often the rles change constantly - a continuous struggle for dominance and submission being conceived as love.
It appears from what has been said that love cannot be separated from freedom and independence. In contradiction to the symbiotic pseudo-love, the basic premise of love is freedom and equality. Its premise is the strength, independence, integrity of the self, which can stand alone and bear solitude. This premise holds true for the loving as well as for the loved person. Love is a spontaneous act, and spontaneity means - also literally - the ability to act of one's own free volition. If anxiety and weakness of the self makes it impossible for the individual to be rooted in himself, he cannot love.
This fact can be fully understood only if we consider what love is directed toward. It is the opposite of hatred. Hatred is a passionate wish for destruction; love is a passionate affirmation of its "object".12 That means that love is not an "affect" but an active striving, the aim of which is the hapiness, development, and freedom of its "object." This passionate affirmation is not possible if one's own self is crippled, since genuine affirmation is always rooted in strength. The person whose self is thwarted, can only love in an ambivalent way; that is, with the strong part of his self he can love, with the crippled part he must hate.13
The term passionate affirmation easily leads to misunderstanding; it does not mean intellectual affirmation in the sense of purely rational judgment. It implies a much deeper affirmation, in which one's personality takes part as a whole: one's intellect, emotion and senses. One's eyes, ears and nose are often as good or better organs of affirmation than one's brain. If it is a deep and passionate one, the affirmation is related to the essence of the "object," not merely toward partial qualities. There is no stronger expression of God's love for man in the Old Testament than the saying at the end of each day of creation: "And God saw that it was good."
There is another possible misunderstanding which should particularly be avoided. From what has been said, one might come to the conclusion that every affirmation is love, regardless of the worthiness of the object to be loved. This would mean that love is a purely subjective feeling of affirmation and that the problem of objective values does not enter into it. The question arises: Can one love the evil? We come here to one of the most difficult problems of psychology and philosophy, a discussion of which can scarcely be attempted here. I must repeat, however, that affirmation in the sense here used is not something entirely subjective. Love is affirmation of life, growth, joy, freedom and by definition, therefore, the evil which is negation, death, compulsion cannot be loved. Certainly, the subjective feeling can be a pleasurable excitement, consciously conceived in the conventional term of love. The person is apt to believe that he loves, but analysis of his mental content reveals a state very different from what I have discussed as love.
Much the same question arises with regard to certain other problems in psychology, for instance, the problem as to whether happiness is an entirely subjective phenomenon or whether it includes an objective factor. Is a person who feels "happy" in dependence and self-surrender happy because he feels to be so, or is happiness always dependent on certain values like freedom and integrity? One has always used the argument that the people concerned are "happy" to justify their suppression. This is a poor defense. Happiness cannot be separated from certain values, and is not simply a subjective feeling of satisfaction. A case in point is masochism. A person can be satisfied with submission, with torture, or even with death, but there is no happiness in submission, torture or death. Such considerations seem to leave the ground of psychology and to belong to the field of philosophy or religion. I do not believe that this is so. A sufficiently refined psychological analysis, which is aware of the difference in the qualities of feelings according to the underlying personality structure, can show the difference between satisfaction and happiness. Yet, psychology can be aware of these problem's only if it does not try to separate itself from the problem of values. And, in the end does not shrink from the question of the goal and purpose of human existence.
Love, like character-conditioned hatred, is rooted in a basic attitude which is constantly present; a readiness to love, a basic sympathy as one might call it. It is started, but not caused, by a particular object. The ability and readiness to love is a character trait just as is the readiness to hate.14 It is difficult to say what the conditions favoring the development of this basic sympathy are. It seems that there are two main conditions, a positive and a negative one. The positive one is simply to have experienced love from others as a child. While conventionally, parents are supposed to love their children as a matter of course, this is rather the exception than the rule. This positive condition is, therefore, frequently absent. The negative condition is the absence of all those factors, discussed above, which make for the existence of a chronic hatred. The observer of childhood experiences may well doubt that the absence of these conditions is frequent.
From the premise that actual love is rooted in a basic sympathy there follows an important conclusion with regard to the objects of love. The conclusion is, in principle, the same as was stated with regard to the objects of chronic hatred: the objects of love do not have the quality of exclusiveness. To be sure, it is not accidental that a certain person becomes the object of manifest love. The factors conditioning such a specific choice are too numerous and too complex to be discussed here.
The important point, however, is that love for a particular object is only the actualization and concentration of lingering love with regard to one person; it is not, as the idea of romantic love would have it, that there is only the one person in the world whom one could love, that it is the great chance of one's life to find that person, and that love for him or her results in a withdrawal from all others. The kind of love which can only be experienced with regard to one person demonstrates by this very fact that it is not love, but a symbiotic attachment. The basic affirmation contained in love is directed toward the beloved person as an incarnation of essentially human qualities.
Love for one person implies love for man as such. The kind of "division of labor" as William James calls it - namely, to love one's family, but to be without feeling for the "stranger," is a sign of a basic inability to love. Love for man as such is not, as it is frequently supposed to be, an abstraction coming "after" the love for a specific person, or an enlargement of the experience with a specific object; it is its premise, although, gentically, it is acquired in the contact with concrete individuals.
From this, it follows that my own self, in principle, is as much an object of my love as another person. The affirmation of my own life, happiness, growth, freedom is rooted in the presence of the basic readiness of and ability for such an affirmation. If an individual has this readiness, he has it also toward himself; if he can only love others, he cannot love at all. In one word, love is as indivisible as hatred with regard to its objects.
The principle which has been pointed out here, that hatred and love are actualizations of a constant readiness, holds true for other psychic phenomena. Sensuality, for instance, is not simply a reaction to a stimulus. The sensual or as one may say, the erotic person, has a basically erotic attitude toward the world. This does not mean that he is constantly excited sexually. It means that there is an erotic atmosphere which is actualized by a certain object, but which is there underneath before the stimulus appears. What is meant here is not the physiologically given ability to be sexually excited, but an atmosphere of erotic readiness, which under a magnifying glass could be observed also when the person is not in a state of actual sexual excitement. On the other hand, there are persons in whom this erotic readiness is lacking. In them, sexual excitement is essentially caused by a stimulus operating on the sexual instinct. Their threshold of stimulation can vary between wide limits, but there is a common quality in this type of sexual excitement; namely, its separateness from the whole personality in its intellectual and emotional qualities.
Another illustration of the same principle is the sense of beauty. There is a type of personality who has a readiness to see beauty. Again, that does not mean that he is constantly looking at beautiful pictures, or people, or scenery; yet, when he sees them a continuously present readiness is actualized, and his sense of beauty is not simply aroused by the object. Here too, a very refined observation shows that this type of person has a different way of looking at the world, even when he looks at objects which do not stimulate an acute perception of beauty. We could give many more examples for the same principle, if space permitted. The principle should already be clear: While many psychological schools15 have thought of human reactions in terms of stimulus-response, the principle presented here is that character is a structure of numerous readinesses of the kind mentioned, which are constantly present and are actualized but not caused by an outside stimulus. This view is essential for such a dynamic psychology as psychoanalysis is.
Freud assumed that all these readinesses are rooted in biologically given instincts. It is here assumed that although this holds true for some of them, many others have arisen as a reaction to the individual and social experiences of the individual.
One last question remains to be discussed. Granted that love for oneself and for others in principle runs parallel, how do we explain the kind of selfishness which obviously is in contradiction to any genuine concern for others. The selfish person is only interested in himself, wants everything for himself, is unable to give with any pleasure but is only anxious to take; the world outside himself is conceived only from the standpoint of what he can get out of it; he lacks interest in the needs of others, or respect for their dignity and integrity. He sees only himself, judges everyone and everything from the standpoint of its usefulness to him, is basically unable to love. This selfishness can be manifest or disguised by all sorts of unselfish gestures; dynamically it is exactly the same. It seems obvious that with this type of personality there is a contradiction between the enormous concern for oneself and the lack of concern for others. Do we not have the proof here that there exists an alternative between concern for others and concern for oneself? This would certainly be the case if selfishness and self-love were identical. But this assumption is the very fallacy which has led to so many mistaken conclusions with regard to our problem. Selfishness and self-love far from being identical, actually are opposites.
Selfishness is one kind of greediness. (The German word Selbstsucht (addiction to self) very adequately expresses this quality common to all Sucht.) Like all greediness, it contains an insatiability, as a consequence of which there is never any real satisfaction. Greed is a bottomless pit which exhausts the person in an endless effort to satisfy the need without ever reaching satisfaction. This leads to the crucial point: close observation shows that while the selfish person is always anxiously concerned with himself, he is never satisfied, is always restless, always driven by the fear of not getting enough, of missing something, of being deprived of something. He is filled with burning envy of anyone who might have more. If we observe still closer, especially the unconscious dynamics, we find that this type of person is basically not fond of himself but deeply dislikes himself. The puzzle in this seeming contradiction is easy to solve. The selfishness is rooted in this very lack of fondness for oneself. The person who is not fond of himself, who does not approve of himself, is in a constant anxiety concerning his own self. He has not the inner security which can exist only on the basis of genuine fondness and affirmation. He must be concerned about himself, greedy to get everything for himself, since basically his own self lacks security and satisfaction. The same holds true with the so-called narcissistic person, who is not so much overconcerned with getting things for himself as with admiring himself. While on the surface it seems that these persons are very much in love with themselves, they actually are not fond of themselves, and their narcissism - like selfishness - is an overcompensation for the basic lack of self-love. Freud has pointed out that the narcissistic person has withdrawn his love from others and turned it toward his own person. While the first part of this statement is true, the second one is a fallacy. He neither loves others nor himself.
It is easier to understand this mechanism when we compare it with overconcern and overprotectiveness for others. Whether it is an oversolicitous mother or an overconcerned husband, sufficiently deep observation shows always one fact: While these persons consciously believe that they are particularly fond of the child or husband, there actually is a deep repressed hostility toward the very objects of their concern. They are overconcerned because they have to compensate not only for a lack of fondness but for an actual hostility.
The problem of selfishness has still another aspect. Is not the sacrifice of one's own person the extreme expression of unselfishness, and, on the other hand, could a person who loves himself make that supreme sacrifice? The answer depends entirely on the kind of sacrifice that is meant. There is one sacrifice, as it has been particularly emphasized in recent years by Fascist philosophy. The individual should give himself up for something outside of himself which is greater and more valuable; the Leader, the race. The individual by himself is nothing and by the very act of self-annihilation for the sake of the higher power finds his destiny. In this concept, sacrificing oneself for something or someone greater than oneself is in itself the greatest attainable virtue. If love for oneself as well as for another person means basic affirmation and respect, this concept is in sharp contrast to self-love. But there is another kind of sacrifice: if it should be necessary to give one's life for the preservation of an idea which has become part of oneself or for a person whom one loves, the sacrifice may be the extreme expression of self-affirmation. Not, of course, an affirmation of one's physical self, but of the self in the sense of the kernel of one's total personality. In this case the sacrifice in itself is not the goal; it is the price to be paid for the realization and affirmation of one's own self. While in this latter case, the sacrifice is rooted in self-affirmation, in the case of what one might call the masochistic sacrifice, it is rooted in the lack of self-love and self-respect; it is essentially nihilistic.
The problem of selfishness has a particular bearing on psychotherapy. The neurotic individual often is selfish in the sense that he is blocked in his relationship to others or overanxious about himself. This is to be expected since to be neurotic means that the integration of a strong self has not been achieved successfully. To be normal certainly does not mean that it has. It means, for the majority of well-adapted individuals that they have lost their own self at an early age and replaced it completely by a social self offered to them by society. They have no neurotic conflicts because they themselves, and, therefore, the discrepancy between their selves and the outside world has disappeared. Often the neurotic person is particularly unselfish, lacking in self-assertion and blocked in following his own aims. The reason for this unselfishness is essentially the same as for the selfishness. What he is practically always lacking is self-love. This is what he needs to become well. If the neurotic becomes well, he does not become normal in the sense of the conforming social self. He succeeds in realizing his self, which never had been completely lost and for the preservation of which he was struggling by his neurotic symptoms. A theory, therefore, as Freud's on narcissism which rationalizes the cultural pattern of denouncing self-love by identifying it with selfishness, can have but devastating effects therapeutically. It increases the taboo on self-love. Its effects can only be called positive if the aim of psychotherapy is not to help the individual to be himself; that is, free, spontaneous and creative - qualities conventionally reserved for artists - but to give up the fight for his self and conform to the cultural pattern peacefully and without the noise of a neurosis.
In the present era, the tendency to make of the individual a powerless atom is increasing. The authoritarian systems tend to reduce the individual to a will-less and feelingless instrument in the hands of those who hold the reins; they batter him down by terror, cynicism, the power of the state, large demonstrations, fierce orators and all other means of suggestion. When finally he feels too weak to stand alone, they offer him satisfaction by letting him participate in the strength and glory of the greater whole, whose powerless part he is. The authoritarian propaganda uses the argument that the individual of the democratic state is selfish and that that he should become unselfish and socially minded. This is a lie. Nazism substituted the most brutal selfishness of the leading bureaucracy and of the state for the selfishness of the average man. The appeal for unselfishness is the weapon to make the average individual still more ready to submit or to renounce.
The criticism of democratic society should not be that people are too selfish; this is true but it is only a consequence of something else. What democracy has not succeeded in is to make the individual love himself; that is, to have a deep sense of affirmation for his individual self, with all his intellectual, emotional, and sensual potentialities. A puritan-protestant inheritance of self-denial, the necessity of subordinating the individual to the demands of production and profit, have made for conditions from which Fascism could spring. The readiness for submission, the pervert courage which is attracted by the image of war and self-annihilation, is only possible on the basis of a - largely unconscious - desperation, stifled by martial songs and shouts for the Führer. The individual who has ceased to love himself is ready to die as well as to kill. The problem of our culture, if it is not to become a fascist one, is not that there is too much selfishness but that there is no self-love. The aim must be to create those conditions which make it possible for the individual to realize his freedom, not only in a formal sense, but by asserting his total personality in his intellectual, emotional, sensual qualities. This freedom is not the rule of one part of the personality over another part - conscience over nature, Super-Ego over Id - but the integration of the whole personality and the factual expression of all the potentialities of this integrated personality.
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Freedom in the Work Situation
by Erich Fromm
Freedom means many things to many people. Do we mean by freedom, a freedom from - freedom from drudgery, from monotony, from the stupidity of manual work, freedom from the irrational authority of a boss or foreman, freedom from exploitation? Or, on the other hand, do we mean a freedom to - freedom to participate actively in the work process or freedom to enjoy work? Actually our concept of freedom today is essentially a negative one It is freedom from and not freedom to, because we are mostly concerned with what we are against and not what we are for - against whom we should defend ourselves rather than what we are living for.
The word freedom shares this ambiguous quality with some other words that we frequently use. For instance, we use the word democracy and mean by it - more or less unconsciously - "consent manipulated without force." Or we use the word equality and mean by it sameness, rather than what equality meant originally that no man must be the means toward the end of another man. Or we speak of happiness and really mean unrestricted consumption.
In discussing that ambiguous term, freedom, I will try to say something about the psychological problem of modern man in general, and the worker specifically.
Little needs to be said about the basic economic facts of twentieth-century capitalism as distinguished from the nineteenth century - just this much today we live in an era of mass production, both in the sense of production of great quantity of commodities and in the sense of masses of people working together in a well-organized, smooth way without friction. Consumption is to some extent predictable by market research; it is managed by advertising - by creating needs synthetically. Mass man is confronted with the four great bureaucracies the bureaucracy of industry, of labor, of government, and of the armed forces. These bureaucracies work together and form a network which interacts with the mass man, who is quite willing to be managed by them provided he has the illusion that his decisions are free and that he is "really" the one who tells them what to do.
I should like to say a word about bureaucracy from a psychological standpoint because this has a bearing on what I have to say later. Bureaucracy is not simply administration. In any differentiated society we need administration of things, and we need even a certain amount of regulation of people. What I mean by bureaucracy is the administration of men as if they were things, or, to quote Marx, to relate to men as objects. This attitude is inherent in every bureaucracy. The problem of bureaucracy, in the sense I have in mind, is not the question of cruel versus human treatment of people. When we think of the Russians, we always emphasize that they treat the people cruelly. This is not the point here. Furthermore, the problem is not only one of bureaucracy - as if bureaucracy took over and the unwilling people were forced to submit to it. Bureaucracy is a relationship between the bureaucrat and his objects, the people, The bureaucrat treats people as things, and people agree to be treated as things as long as they don't know it, as long as they have their initials on their sportshirts or handbags, as long as they have the illusion of individuality and freedom.
Modern capitalism, then, needs men who cooperate smoothly and in large numbers, who want to consume ever more, and whose tastes are standardized and can be easily influenced and anticipated; men who feel free and independent - not subject to any authority or principle or conscience - yet willing to be commanded to do what is expected of them, to fit into the social machine without friction; to be guided without force, led without leader, prompted without aim - except the one to make good - to be on the move, to function, go ahead.
The paradox in the relationship between the bureaucrats and their followers is that the bureaucrats have no aim and the followers have no aim, but each group thinks that the other one has an aim. That is to say, the followers think the bureaucrats know what they are doing and where they are going; and the bureaucrats, in a vague sense, think that their followers have told them where to go. Actually the two are like the two blind men who walk on the street each thinking the other sees.
We are concerned with instrumentalities - with how we are doing things; we are no longer concerned with why we are doing things. We build machines that act like men and we want to produce men who act like machines. Our danger today is not that of becoming slaves, but of becoming automatons.
Indeed, means have become ends. Material production once was supposed to be a means for a more dignified, happier life, and the aim was clearly the fuller, more dignified, more human life. Today production and consumption have become ends in themselves. Nobody asks any longer, why or what for? We are happy discovering how we can produce more. In fact, our economic system is based on ever-increasing consumption and production. But why we want to produce more, why we want this, that, and the other - this is a question which is not asked.
Let us take another example. We are all eager to save time. But what do we do with the time we have saved? We are embarrassed and we try to kill it. Anyone who knows the presentday situation realizes what would happen to the United States if we had a general 20-hour work week today. We would have thousands more psychiatrists to take care of the nervous breakdowns which would occur if people would have that much more free time on their hands without knowing what to do with it.
Our consumption also is an end in itself. You might say that modern man's concept of heaven is a tremendous department store with new things every day, and with enough money to buy everything he pleases. We are the eternal sucklings, drinking in cigarettes and lectures and movies and television. Many people speak of love as one talks of milk. "The child didn't get enough love, it didn't get enough affection." You drink it in. That is exactly the picture described in the Brave New World by Huxley. "Why postpone a satisfaction until tomorrow when you can have it today?"
If I may add a footnote It has been said that the change in sex mores which happened after 1914 is due to Freud. I think this is erroneous. Freud above all was a Puritan and nothing was further from his thoughts then the advocacy of uninhibited sexual activity. Freud was only used for the purposes of our consumption craziness. We want to satisfy every need immediately - the need for sex, a car, television.
To speak from another standpoint, man, being preoccupied with the production of things, has unconsciously transformed himself into a thing. Consciously we talk about our dignity and all the things which are based on a tradition of hundreds and even thousands of years. But actually, most people unconsciously speak of themselves as things and treat each other as things. A person might come to a psychoanalyst - a person he has never seen before - and tell his tragic life story as if he complained to a garage mechanic that the car has stalled. This problem is related to a central issue - to the phenomenon of alienation. The term comes from Hegel; it was a central issue with Marx; and all existentialist philosophy is a reaction to alienation - from Kierkegaard to Sartre and in the most significant existentialist philosopher, Marx.
It is one of the peculiar phenomena of our present-day culture that, aside from the Old Testament, there is hardly any book which is so much talked about as Marx and so little known. The Russians have claimed that they represent Marx's ideas, yet they represent exactly the opposite. They are the most reactionary regime in Europe. I am not speaking of the terror but of their school system, their social relations; they are about where Europe was in 1830, in a period of fast accumulation of capital. But certainly they have nothing whatever to do with the aims of Marx, and we do them a tremendous service by confirming to the world their own claim that they represent the aims of Marx.
To talk about alienation we might start with a concept which is clear to anyone who knows the Old Testament - the concept of idolatry. The prophets had as their main object the fight against idolatry. This is often understood to mean that they believed in one god and the others in many gods and that this numerical difference is the point of monotheism. But this is not so at all. The concept of idolatry is clearly defined in the Old Testament as man bowing down and worshiping the work of his own hands. As one of the prophets expressed it so beautifully Here you have a piece of wood; one half you take and make a fire and warm yourself, or boil your meat; with the other half you make a statue, and this statue you worship as your god. Or as one of the psalms said "They have ears and they do not hear; they have eyes and they do not see; they have hands and they do not touch." That is to say, man disowns his own creative power, transfers it to an object and then worships his own power in an alienated form, by worshiping the idol. He does not experience himself any more as a creator, as a subject of these powers; he is in touch with himself only by the indirect and alienated was of being in touch with that which his own power has created. A quotation from Marx shows how closely related this definition is to the concept of idolatry in the Old Testament. Marx said, "Man's own act becomes to him an alien power, standing over and against him instead of being ruled by him." And he goes on to say that all history is also the history of man's alienation from himself and from his own human power; that history is the consolidation of our own product to an objective power above us - outgrowing our control, defeating our expectations, alienating our calculations; that man has been the object of circumstances; and that he must become the subject so that man becomes the highest theme for man.
The history of the Christian Church provides another example of idolatry. What was Luther protesting against when he separated from the Catholic Church? There were many issues, but one of them was that in the Church man faced God only through the bureaucracy of the Church, through the priests. In other words, man was alienated from God; he did not face God directly but was instead in touch with a priest through whom he was put in touch with God. So Luther protests, insisting that each man is an individual who should and can be in direct touch with God.
This Lutheran tradition is one of the bases of our modern concept of freedom and individuality. And yet what do we see today? We see exactly the same situation that Luther fought. Church membership and participation in services is, relatively, the highest in a hundred years. And what is the result? Ours is a very unreligious culture. Here we see the fact of alienation. By belonging to a church, by attending a service on Sunday, the individual has the conscious feeling of being in touch with God - with his own spiritual powers. But in reality it is idolatry and alienation because he does not have a religious experience. He only his a quasi-religious experience by being in touch with those powers to whom the religious experience is relegated.
The same happens in our social situation. The American citizen today is concerned almost exclusively with private problems. By "concerned," I mean enough interested in a problem to lose one's sleep sometimes, not merely just to talk about it. He loses his sleep about health, money, and family problems. He does not lose his sleep about problems of society, because he has cut himself off from the experiences of social concern, from the relatedness to others as part of his life. He is a private individual with only private interests, separated from a general interest in the whole, and has projected his social relatedness to government, to the specialist. If he goes to the polls, which 40 per cent to 50 per cent never do, then be does about the same as going to church on Sunday. He is under the illusion that by being in touch with those who represent him as a social being, he himself experiences his social relatedness. He does not.
We as a nation are being ruled by things and circumstances, and there was never an age in which the fact was demonstrated in such a terrifying way as today. Because today, indeed, we are ruled by the bomb. The bomb is something of our making. The circumstances, the various governments are things of our making; and yet we have become almost helpless prisoners of circumstances which might lead any day to the destruction of everything alive and everything we value. We know this fact, yet we do not experience the effect of fear, horror, and protest that a normal person would experience. This split between thought and affect, a mechanism characteristic for schizophrenia, is characteristic for modern man. Yet, because we all suffer from it, we do not consider it pathological.
The result of this alienated schizoid life is something for which the French had a word one hundred and fifty years ago. They called it la malaise du siËcle - the illness of the century, or ennui. Today we call it neurotic. We are indoctrinated not to feel unhappy, because if you feel unhappy you are not a success. But you are permitted to feel neurotic. So you go to the doctor, and you say you suffer from insomnia or you "have a problem." You have a car, you have a wife, you have kids, you have a house - you have a problem. Our way of thinking and feeling is that all the emphasis is not on "to Be" but on "to Have". We have much - but we are little. This attitude leads to defeatism, although it may be unconscious.
I believe, for instance, that although we all pretend to believe in democracy, many people believe in democracy only in the sense, as I said before, of "consent manipulated without force," and not in democracy as the voluntary, active, productive participation of responsible citizens. We all repeat formulas in which we have, at best, a half-hearted belief. As a result of this, we are insecure, we lack the sense of identity based on our convictions and our faith, and we get a sense of identity only by conformity; that is, I know that I am I - not because I have a conviction, not because I feel intensity, but because I am like everybody else. And if I am three feet away from the herd, that makes me very insecure because then I don't know any more who I am.
I would like to discuss now specifically the problem of work and the worker in the United States. This is difficult, because the working class in this country is not a sharply limited class today as it was in Europe and in the United States a hundred years ago. In many ways, psychologically speaking, the working class today belongs to the middle class just as everybody else psychologically belongs or tries to belong to the middle class.
What are some of the differences between the situation of the worker in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries? The worker in the nineteenth century was exploited and excluded from humanity. The average nineteenth-century capitalist had no feeling of identity with the worker, just as he had none with people of other races. Actually he could exploit the worker to the extent that he did only if he did not identify himself with the worker; and the capitalist had to exploit the worker for the purpose of the accumulation of capital.
The worker in the nineteenth century did not work as the middle class did, on the basis of a Protestant-Puritan "drive for work"; he did not like his work - he worked because he had to. Work was essentially forced labor, and work was stupid. As a reaction to this inhuman situation of the worker, there arose the movement which was, in my opinion, one of the few genuinely religious movements in the nineteenth century, although it was not perceived in such terms. With the introduction of labor unions the worker began to experience his own sense of human dignity and solidarity, his sense of self, his own human powers. He had a vision of a non-alienated, humanistic society. The movement of labor unions had as its aim, of course, higher wages and a better standard of living, but by no means was this the only goal, and maybe not even the main one. This movement, like socialism, was originally a humanistic, a spiritual movement of human liberation and solidarity.
The situation of the worker today is different. The worker today is also the consumer - and I mean the consumer in the psychological sense. Of course, he was always a consumer because be had to eat and drink. But he is now a consumer with the same craving for consuming that the members of all other classes have. The worker is not only part of the great consumers mass whose tastes and desires are manipulated by industry; he is also manipulated by the industrial bureaucracy in his work situation, by the union bureaucracy through his membership in the union, by the government bureaucracy because he is a citizen, and, if he gets drafted or otherwise comes in contact with the armed forces, he is manipulated by that bureaucracy too.
The worker has the same private and alienated concern for himself. The worker today does not dream so much of becoming president of General Motors or anything of that sort. But the new car, the new house, the new television set, the larger refrigerator - these are his dreams. These are his convictions, these are his hopes. He is caught in the net of bureaucracies; he is the alienated mass man, headed in the same direction of human automation as the whole society.
What is the meaning of work today? The generally accepted aim of our social effort is held to be increase of production and consumption. There is an axiom What is good for production is good for the worker. And in the past few years the belief has gained ground that what is good for the worker is good for production. This new axiom has furthered efforts in the study of what is called "human relations," "industrial psychology," "human engineering," and all that kind of thing. One discovers that if the worker is happier he produces more effectively, and, since the aim is to produce more effectively, the conclusion is by all means - let him be happy, Then the question arises - what can we do to make him happy? The assumption is, axiomatically, that all the things which correspond to our ideology - participation, democracy in the work situation - make also for greater efficiency and productivity of work. There are many studies which prove this, but there are some studies which prove that sometimes it is not so - for instance, that a greater participation in work may not make for greater productivity.
Here we come to a basic problem of value. It is all very nice if the happy, democratic, participating worker also produces more. Such preordained harmony between the aims of production and the aims of man is wonderful. But what if it is not so? Are we in favor of participation in work as a democratic process even though it might lead to somewhat less production? This question is simply not raised, and most of our psychologists try to ignore it. We have the same problem today with regard to political democracy. You find many people who say democracy of course is very good. But what should happen if we find out that we are less efficient than the Russians? Should we still use our democratic system? Or should we say it is just a myth and we have to have a managed society instead of one based on the active, responsible participation of each citizen? We talk all the time about our ideas, our principles, and yet in reality we shy away from making value judgments which will commit us. Those judgments can be made only if one confronts the possibility that one may not combine the best of both worlds - God's and Caesar's - and there the problem begins. As long as one assumes that there cannot be a conflict between democratic procedure and maximum efficiency, one does not truly judge.
I am reminded of the title of Elton Mayo's famous book, The Human Problem of an Industrial Society. The title tells the whole story (although Mayo had his heart on the side of man). Industry is a subject and it has a human problem. The question is whether we talk about the human problem of industry or whether we talk about the industrial problem of humanity. In the latter case, humanity is the subject which has an industrial problem. Between these two formulations lies the difference between two opposite philosophical, spiritual value judgments.
We come now to the crucial question What are the conditions to make the worker happy? There are two main answers. One is that the worker can be happy within the work situation. Many suggestions are made to achieve this aim, such as profit-sharing - an appeal to the worker's interest in increased profit and often a concealed antiunion attitude; or making the worker feel that he participates - but the feeling that one participates is not necessarily the same as the fact of participating. Much of what is recommended as participation is fiction. The most important field in which one tries to make the worker happier today is called human relations, largely promoted by psychologists. Here a strange process is going on In the name of the ideas of Spinoza and Freud, and particularly in the name of Socrates' idea that man should know himself in order to be himself, the very opposite is done. Man is manipulated and smoothed out to such an extend that nothing of his individuality is left. These so-called human relations are to a large extent based on an alienated concept of life that man is a thing and that there's a specialist to deal with this thing. If you belong to the middle or upper class you talk with a Freudian on a couch and with a non-Freudian in a comfortable chair, and you might have the idea that if you have talked long enough you will end up as the well-rounded happy person who has no problems. But if you are a worker, this is not possible. It is much too expensive to talk for years, for one thing. Instead, the talking is done for a few hours. That is in itself very nice in a culture in which nobody listens anyway. We are all polite to each other, like each other quite generally, and arc not hostile. That is one of the good traits of our present-day American society. But we are essentially indifferent to each other and we do not want to listen. Hence one can speak to somebody who is paid to listen for one or two or five hours and perhaps sometimes even listens with interest that is in itself a pleasant or quieting experience. It helps to bear the drudgery of life for another year and then one may go back to the man and talk again. I do not mean to imply that all industrial psychology is of this alienated type. But I do want to point to the danger that psychology is often used for the purpose of further alienation and manipulation and that human relations in industry become the most inhuman relations one could imagine - inhuman not in the sense of cruelty but in the sense of alienation, of the "re-ification" of man - the treatment of man as a thing.
The other answer to the problem of the worker's happiness is exactly the opposite. Since the worker can never be happy in work, this answer says, there is only one solution as little work as possible, as mechanized work as possible and he will be happy in his free time. This answer is accepted by many people, and in many ways it is a very plausible answer, considering the fact that the working week has changed from more than 70 hours in 1850 to 40 hours in 1950, that we are coming closer to a 35-hours week, and that it is not at all fantastic to of a 20-hour week in the future. All this, from the standpoint of the nineteenth century, would have seemed the most alluring Utopia.
But I cannot see that leisure as the answer to the worker's happiness is satisfactory. Leisure today means essentially consumption and passivity. A man who works 20 hours a week would turn into the complete consumer; he would be exactly like the man in Huxley's Brave New World ; he would lack the inner creativity or productivity which is the condition of genuine happiness. Work is not only an economical problem but a profoundly human problem.
My own ideas about the satisfaction and happiness of the worker are presented in my book The Sane Society. I have attempted to show there that the goal for the worker as well as for all other members of society must be to overcome the alienation and re-ification which pervades society. Man must cease to be the consumer and become a productive human being who is aware of and responds to his world creatively. This means, applied to the worker, that be must become a responsible and active participant in the whole process of work. There are many possibilities for more active interest and participation in the work process itself. (Georges Friedmann in his works has given important suggestions in this direction.) Increased technical knowledge could make even routine work more interesting, Furthermore, the factory is more than a combination of machines - it is an economic and social entity. Even if the work itself is boring, each worker can participate actively in the economic planning and the considerations preceding it, and in the organization and administration of the factory as a social unit where man spends the larger part of his life.
All this requires active participation of the worker in the management of the factory. How this can be achieved legally and socially is a question which transcends this discussion. Ways and means can be found, provided one recognizes the importance of the aim. One specific point, however, I wish to make. I wish to emphasize the error of popular Socialist thinking - misunderstanding the essential idea of socialism - that the most important point is the change from private to public ownership of the means of production. This idea was based on the overestimation of legal ownership characteristic for the nineteenth century. Today we can differentiate between legal ownership of a big enterprise (the stockholders) and social ownership the management, which controls the enterprise without legally owning it). The problem of the future is to restore to man his initiative and activity. Applied to the worker, that means that work in the factory, technically, economically, and socially, becomes meaningful to him because he becomes an active participant in managing the life of the factory. Only then can he make use also of his leisure time in a productive way rather than as a passive consumer.
The worker can be the leader in the movement to overcome alienation and to bring the reintegration of man, because, in some ways, be is less caught than those who deal with symbols - figures or men. The manual worker sells his energy and his skill but not his "personality." This makes a great difference. His efficiency, his work, do not depend on whether be is a nice "personality package." The respect of his co-workers does not depend on that. It depends on how reliable he is; how well he performs his functions. In some ways, therefore, I would say there are possibilities for the worker to be less alienated than for the average person. I would say there is another possibility, the union movement, provided it could, instead of being a bureaucracy manipulating alienated men, become again a movement in which general and unalienated solidarity is expressed among men who share the same basic experience - their work. That, of course, would require the workers and the union leaders to have a different picture of what the function of a union should be. But I believe the union could perform an important function in helping to change our history from the dangerous course of ever-increasing alienation to a direction in which man counts again, and in which he is not the object of circumstances that be has created but their master.
I believe it is necessary to realize that changes must be made in all spheres of culture simultaneously. It was a mistake of religion to think that one can make a change in the spiritual sphere alone and leave out the other sections of life. It was a mistake when those who misunderstood Marx proclaimed in his name that one can make a change in the economic sphere alone and everything good will follow. It was a mistake of political democracy to think that one can make a change in the political sphere alone. Effective changes can be made only if they are made in all spheres together, because man is not compartmentalized. One step in an integrated way is more important than twenty steps in one sphere to the exclusion of the others.
Our only alternative to the danger of robotism is humanistic communitarianism. The problem is not primarily the legal problem of property ownership, nor that of sharing profits; it is that of sharing work, sharing experience. Changes in ownership must be made to the extent necessary to create a community of work, and to prevent the profit motive from directing production into socially harmful directions. Income must be equalized to the extent of giving everybody the material basis for a dignified life and thus preventing economic differences from creating a fundamentally different experience of life among various social classes. Man must be reinstituted in his supreme place in society - never a means, never a thing to be used by others or by himself. Man's use by man must end, and economy must become the servant for the development of man. Capital must serve labor; things must serve life. Instead of the exploitative and hoarding orientation dominant in the nineteenth century, and the receptive and marketing orientation dominant today, the productive orientation must be the end that all social arrangements serve. Freedom in the work situation is not freedom from work (in order to have leisure), it is not freedom from exploitation; it is the freedom to spend one's energy in a meaningful, productive way by being an active, responsible, unalienated participant in the total work situation. The unions, by starting to introduce such participation within their own organization can make a first step in the direction of freedom at the work bench.
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Summerhill - A Radical Approach to Child Rearing
by Erich Fromm
I.
During the eighteenth century, the ideas of freedom, democracy, and self-determination were proclaimed by progressive thinkers; and by the first half of the 1900's these ideas came to fruition in the field of education. The basic principle of such self-determination was the replacement of authority by freedom, to teach the child without the use of force by appealing to his curiosity and spontaneous needs, and thus to get him interested in the world around him. This attitude marked the beginning of progressive education and was an important step in human development.
But the results of this new method were often disappointing. In recent years, an increasing reaction against progressive education has set in. Today, many people believe the theory itself erroneous and that it should be thrown overboard. There is a strong movement afoot for more and more discipline, and even a campaign to permit physical punishment of pupils by public school teachers.
Perhaps the most important factor in this reaction is the remarkable success in teaching achieved in the Soviet Union. There the old-fashioned methods of authoritarianism are applied in full strength; and the results, as far as knowledge is concerned, seem to indicate that we had better revert to the old disciplines and forget about the freedom of the child.
Is the idea of education without force wrong? Even if the idea itself is not wrong, how can we explain its relative failure?
I believe the idea of freedom for children was not wrong, but the idea of freedom has almost always been perverted. To discuss this matter clearly we must first understand the nature of freedom; and to do this we must differentiate between overt authority and anonymous authority. (A more detailed analysis of the problem of authority can be found in E. Fromm, Escape from Freedom, Rinehart and Co. Inc., New York, 1941.) Overt authority is exercised directly and explicitly. The person in authority frankly tells the one who is subject to him, "You must do this. If you do not, certain sanctions will be applied against you." Anonymous authority tends to hide that force is being used. Anonymous authority pretends that there is no authority, that all is done with the consent of the individual. While the teacher of the past said to Johnny, "You must do this. If you don't, I'll punish you"; today's teacher says, "I'm sure you'll like to do this." Here, the sanction for disobedience is not corporal punishment, but the suffering face of the parent, or what is worse, conveying the feeling of not being "adjusted," of not acting as the crowd acts. Overt authority used physical force; anonymous authority employs psychic manipulation.
The change from the overt authority of the nineteenth century to the anonymous authority of the twentieth was determined by the organizational needs of our modern industrial society. The concentration of capital led to the formation of giant enterprises managed by hierarchically organized bureaucracies. Large conglomerations of workers and clerks work together, each individual a part of a vast organized production machine, which in order to run at all, must run smoothly and without interruption. The individual worker becomes merely a cog in this machine. In such a production organization, the individual is managed and manipulated.
And in the sphere of consumption (in which the individual allegedly expresses his free choice) he is likewise managed and manipulated. Whether it be the consumption of food, clothing, liquor, cigarettes, movies or television programs, a powerful suggestion apparatus is at work with two purposes: first, to constantly increase the individual's appetite for new commodities; and secondly, to direct these appetites into the channels most profitable for industry. Man is transformed into the consumer, the eternal suckling, whose one wish is to consume more and "better" things.
Our economic system must create men who fit its needs; men who cooperate smoothly; men who want to consume more and more. Our system must create men whose tastes are standardized, men who can be easily influenced, men whose needs can be anticipated. Our system needs men who feel free and independent but who are nevertheless willing to do what is expected of them, men who will fit into the social machine without friction, who can be guided without force, who can be led without leaders, and who can be directed without any aim except the one to "make good." (For a more detailed analysis of the influence of our industrial system on the character structure of the individual, see E. Fromm, The Sane Society, Rinehart and Co. Inc., New York, 1955.) It is not that authority has disappeared, nor even that it has lost in strength, but that it has been transformed from the overt authority of force to the anonymous authority of persuasion and suggestion. In other words, in order to be adaptable, modern man is obliged to nourish the illusion that everything is done with his consent, even though such consent be extracted from him by subtle manipulation. His consent is obtained, as it were, behind his back, or behind his consciousness. The same artifices are employed in progressive education. The child is forced to swallow the pill, but the pill is given a sugar coating. Parents and teachers have confused true non-authoritarian education with education by means of persuasion and hidden coercion. Progressive education has been thus debased. It has failed to become what it was intended to be and has never developed as it was meant to.
II.
A. S. Neill's system is a radical approach to child rearing. In my opinion, his book is of great importance because it represents the true principle of education without fear. In Summerhill School authority does not mask a system of manipulation. Summerhill does not expound a theory; it relates the actual experience of almost 40 years. The author contends that "freedom works." The principles underlying Neill's system are presented in this book simply and unequivocally. They are these in summary.
1. Neill maintains a firm faith "in the goodness of the child." He believes that the average child is not born a cripple, a coward, or a soulless automaton, but has full potentialities to love life and to be interested in life.
2. The aim of education - in fact the aim of life - is to work joyfully and to find happiness. Happiness, according to Neill, means being interested in life; or as I would put it, responding to life not just with one's brain but with one's whole personality.
3. In education, intellectual development is not enough. Education must be both intellectual and emotional. In modern society we find an increasing separation between intellect and feeling. The experiences of man today are mainly experiences of thought rather than an immediate grasp of what his heart feels, his eyes see, and his ears hear. In fact, this separation between intellect and feeling has led modern man to a near schizoid state of mind in which he has become almost incapable of experiencing anything except in thought.
4. Education must be geared to the psychic needs and capacities of the child. The child is not an altruist. He does not yet love in the sense of the mature love of an adult. It is an error to expect something from a child which he can show only in a hypocritical way. Altruism develops after childhood.
5. Discipline, dogmatically imposed, and punishment create fear; and fear creates hostility. This hostility may not be conscious and overt, but it nevertheless paralyzes endeavor and authenticity of feeling. The extensive disciplining of children is harmful and thwarts sound psychic development.
6. Freedom does not mean license. This very important principle, emphasized by Neill, is that respect for the individual must be mutual. A teacher does not use force against a child, nor has a child the right to use force against a teacher. A child may not intrude upon an adult just because he is a child, nor may a child use pressure in the many ways in which a child can.
7. Closely related to his principle is the need for true sincerity on the part of the teacher. The author says that never in the 40 years of his work in Summerhill has he lied to a child. Anyone who reads this book will be convinced that this statement, which might sound like boasting, is the simple truth.
8. Healthy human development makes it necessary that a child eventually cut the primary ties which connect him with his father and mother, or with later substitutes in society, and that he become truly independent. He must learn to face the world as an individual. He must learn to find his security not in any symbiotic attachment, but in his capacity to grasp the world intellectually, emotionally, artistically. He must use all his powers to find union with the world, rather than to find security through submission or domination.
9. Guilt feelings primarily have the function of binding the child to authority. Guilt feelings are an impediment to independence; they start a cycle which oscillates constantly between rebellion, repentance, submission, and new rebellion. Guilt, as it is felt by most people in our society, is not primarily a reaction to the voice of conscience, but essentially an awareness of disobedience against authority and fear of reprisal. It does not matter whether such punishment is physical or a withdrawal of love, or whether one simply is made to feel an outsider. All such guilt feelings create fear; and fear breeds hostility and hypocrisy.
10. Summerhill School does not offer religious education. This, however, does not mean that Summerhill is not concerned with what might be loosely called the basic humanistic values. Neill puts it succinctly: "The battle is not between believers in theology and non-believers in theology; it is between believers in human freedom and believers in the suppression of human freedom." The author continues: "Some day a new generation will not accept the obsolete religion and myths of today. When the new religion comes, it will refute the idea of man's being born in sin. A new religion will praise God by making men happy."
Neill is a critic of present-day society. He emphasizes that the kind of person we develop is a mass-man. "We are living in an insane society" and "most of our religious practices are sham." Quite logically, the author is an internationalist, and holds a firm and uncompromising position that readiness for war is a barbaric atavism of the human race.
Indeed, Neill does not try to educate children to fit well into the existing order, but endeavors to rear children who will become happy human beings, men and women whose values are not to have much, not to use much, but to be much. Neill is a realist; he can see that even though the children he educates will not necessarily be extremely successful in the worldly sense, they will have acquired a sense of genuineness which will effectually prevent their becoming misfits or starving beggars. The author has made a decision between full human development and full market-place success-and he is uncompromisingly honest in the way he pursues the road to his chosen goal.
III.
Reading this book, I have felt greatly stimulated and encouraged. I hope many other readers will. This is not to say that I agree with every statement the author makes. Certainly most readers will not read this book as if it were the Gospel, and I am sure that the author, least of all, would want this to happen.
I might indicate two of my main reservations. I feel that Neill somewhat underestimates the importance, pleasure, and authenticity of an intellectual in favor of an artistic and emotional grasp of the world. Furthermore, the author is steeped in the assumptions of Freud; and as I see it, he somewhat overestimates the significance of sex, as Freudians tend to do. Yet I retain the impression that the author is a man with such realism, and such a genuine grasp of what goes on in a child, that these criticisms refer more to some of his formulations than to his actual approach to the child.
I stress the word "realism" because what strikes me most in the author's approach is his capacity to see, to discern fact from fiction, not to indulge in the rationalizations and illusions by which most people live, and by which they block authentic experience. Neill is a man with a kind of courage rare today, the courage to believe in what he sees, and to combine realism with an unshakable faith in reason and love. He maintains an uncompromising reverence for life, and a respect for the individual. He is an experimenter and an observer, not a dogmatist who has an egotistic stake in what he is doing. He mixes education with therapy, but for him therapy is not a separate matter to solve some special "problems," but simply the process of demonstrating to the child that life is there to be grasped, and not to run away from.
It will be clear to the reader that the experiment about which this book reports is necessarily one which cannot be repeated many times in our present-day society. This is so not only because it depends on being carried out by an extraordinary person like Neill, but also because few parents have the courage and independence to care more for their children's happiness than for their "success." But this fact by no means diminishes the significance of this book.
Even though no school like Summerhill exists in the United States today, any parent can profit by reading this book. These chapters will challenge him to rethink his own approach to his child. He will find that Neill's way of handling children is quite different from what most people sneeringly brush aside as "permissive." Neill's insistence on a certain balance in the child relationship - freedom without license - is the kind of thinking that can radically change home attitudes.
The thoughtful parent will be shocked to realize the extent of pressure and power that he is unwittingly using against the child. This book should provide new meanings for the words love, approval, freedom.
Neill shows uncompromising respect for life and freedom and a radical negation of the use of force. Children reared by such methods will develop within themselves the qualities of reason, love, integrity, and courage, which are the goals of the Western humanistic tradition.
If it can happen once in Summerhill, it can happen everywhere - once the people are ready for it. Indeed there are no problem children as the author says, but only "problem parents" and a "problem humanity." I believe Neill's work is a seed which will germinate. In time, his ideas will become generally recognized in a new society in which man himself and his unfolding are the supreme aim of all social effort.
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