Erich Fromm

Erich Seligmann Fromm (March 23, 1900 – March 18, 1980) was a German-American social psychologist, psychoanalyst, sociologist, humanistic philosopher, and democratic socialist.

He was a German Jew who fled the Nazi regime and settled in the United States.

He was one of the founders of The William Alanson White Institute of Psychiatry, Psychoanalysis and Psychology in New York City and was associated with the Frankfurt School of critical theory.

Erich Fromm was born on March 23, 1900, at Frankfurt am Main, the only child of Orthodox Jewish parents, Rosa (Krause) and Naphtali Fromm.

He started his academic studies in 1918 at the University of Frankfurt am Main with two semesters of jurisprudence.

During the summer semester of 1919, Fromm studied at the University of Heidelberg, where he began studying sociology under Alfred Weber (brother of sociologist Max Weber), psychiatrist-philosopher Karl Jaspers, and Heinrich Rickert.

During the mid-1920s, he trained to become a psychoanalyst through Frieda Reichmann's psychoanalytic sanatorium in Heidelberg.

Fromm received his PhD in sociology from Heidelberg in 1922 with a dissertation "On Jewish Law".

Fromm at the time became strongly involved in Zionism, under the influence of the religious Zionist rabbi Nehemia Anton Nobel.

He was very active in Jewish Studentenverbindungen and other Zionist organisations.

But he soon turned away from Zionism, saying that it conflicted with his ideal of a "universalist Messianism and Humanism".

They married in 1926, but separated shortly after and divorced in 1942.

However, Fromm turned away from orthodox Judaism in 1926, towards secular interpretations of scriptural ideals.

The cornerstone of Fromm's humanistic philosophy is his interpretation of the biblical story of Adam and Eve's exile from the Garden of Eden.

Drawing on his knowledge of the Talmud, Fromm pointed out that being able to distinguish between good and evil is generally considered to be a virtue, but that biblical scholars generally consider Adam and Eve to have sinned by disobeying God and eating from the Tree of Knowledge.

However, departing from traditional religious orthodoxy on this, Fromm extolled the virtues of humans taking independent action and using reason to establish moral values rather than adhering to authoritarian moral values.

He began his own clinical practice in 1927.

In 1930 he joined the Frankfurt Institute for Social Research and completed his psychoanalytical training.

Their relationship ended in the late 1930s.

After the Nazi takeover of power in Germany, Fromm moved first to Geneva and then, in 1934, to Columbia University in New York.

Together with Karen Horney and Harry Stack Sullivan, Fromm belongs to a Neo-Freudian school of psychoanalytical thought.

Horney and Fromm each had a marked influence on the other's thought, with Horney illuminating some aspects of psychoanalysis for Fromm and the latter elucidating sociology for Horney.

He was on the faculty of Bennington College from 1941 to 1949, and taught courses at the New School for Social Research in New York from 1941 to 1959.

Beginning with his first seminal work of 1941, Escape from Freedom (known in Britain as The Fear of Freedom), Fromm's writings were notable as much for their social and political commentary as for their philosophical and psychological underpinnings.

Indeed, Escape from Freedom is viewed as one of the founding works of political psychology.

After leaving Columbia, Fromm helped form the New York branch of the Washington School of Psychiatry in 1943, and in 1946 co-founded the William Alanson White Institute of Psychiatry, Psychoanalysis, and Psychology.

His second important work, Man for Himself: An Inquiry into the Psychology of Ethics, first published in 1947, continued and enriched the ideas of Escape from Freedom.

Taken together, these books outlined Fromm's theory of human character, which was a natural outgrowth of Fromm's theory of human nature.

When Fromm moved to Mexico City in 1949, he became a professor at the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM) and established a psychoanalytic section at the medical school there.

Fromm's most popular book was The Art of Loving, an international bestseller first published in 1956, which recapitulated and complemented the theoretical principles of human nature found in Escape from Freedom and Man for Himself—principles which were revisited in many of Fromm's other major works.

Central to Fromm's world view was his interpretation of the Talmud and Hasidism.

He began studying Talmud as a young man under Rabbi J. Horowitz and later under Rabbi Salman Baruch Rabinkow, a Chabad Hasid.

While working towards his doctorate in sociology at the University of Heidelberg, Fromm studied the Tanya by the founder of Chabad, Rabbi Shneur Zalman of Liadi.

Fromm also studied under Nehemia Nobel and Ludwig Krause while studying in Frankfurt.

Fromm's grandfather and two great-grandfathers on his father's side were rabbis, and a great uncle on his mother's side was a noted Talmudic scholar.

Meanwhile, he taught as a professor of psychology at Michigan State University from 1957 to 1961 and as an adjunct professor of psychology at the graduate division of Arts and Sciences at New York University after 1962.

He taught at UNAM until his retirement, in 1965, and at the Mexican Society of Psychoanalysis (SMP) until 1974.

In 1974 he moved from Mexico City to Muralto, Switzerland, and died at his home in 1980, five days before his eightieth birthday.

All the while, Fromm maintained his own clinical practice and published a series of books.

Fromm was reportedly an atheist but described his position as "nontheistic mysticism".