Erich Fromm 1900 – 1980

Erich Fromm was a German-Jewish social psychologist, psychoanalyst, and humanist philosopher associated in his early career with the Frankfurt Institute for Social Research. After fleeing Nazi Germany he lived and taught in the United States and Mexico, where he integrated Freud and Marx into a sustained analysis of the character structures generated by modern capitalism. Escape from Freedom, The Art of Loving, and To Have or to Be reached a wide popular audience and shaped humanistic psychology. His critique of consumer society and his vision of love as a productive activity remain influential.

Erich Fromm was born in 1900 in Frankfurt am Main, the only child of an Orthodox Jewish wine merchant. He studied sociology at Heidelberg under Alfred Weber, taking his doctorate in 1922 with a thesis on Jewish law; he afterward trained as a psychoanalyst in Munich and Berlin. From 1930 he was associated with the Institute for Social Research under Max Horkheimer, contributing the early empirical studies of authority and the German working class.

Forced into exile in 1934 he settled in New York, taught at Columbia, Bennington, the New School, and Yale, broke publicly with the orthodox Freudians, and from 1949 lived for two decades in Mexico, where he founded the Mexican Institute of Psychoanalysis. His major books include Escape from Freedom (1941), Man for Himself (1947), Psychoanalysis and Religion, The Sane Society (1955), The Art of Loving (1956), Marx's Concept of Man, You Shall Be as Gods, The Anatomy of Human Destructiveness (1973), and To Have or to Be (1976).

Fromm reread Freud through Marx and the prophetic Jewish tradition, diagnosing the modern condition in terms of alienation, escape from freedom, and the marketing personality, and proposed in their place an ethic of productive love and being. His writings reached a vast general public and made him one of the bridges between the Frankfurt School and humanistic psychology. He died at Muralto in Switzerland in 1980.