Fromm Erich Fromm: Biographical History

Fromm Erich Fromm: Biographical History and Theoretical Overview Erich Fromm was a German-born psychoanalyst. From was born in Frankfurt at the very inception of the 20th century, in 1900. Unlike the secular Jewish family that had given birth to Fromm's intellectual mentor and sometimes rival Freud, Fromm's parents were very religious, although he became an atheist in his later life.

His father was a business man and, according to Erich, rather moody an "old, uninteresting, and rather unattractive man." (Beyond the Chains of Illusion, p.4, cited by Boeree, 1997) Fromm's mother was frequently depressed, but was described by her son as "beautiful, attractive, and in addition a painter." (Beyond the Chains of Illusion, p.

4, cited by Boeree, 1997) When her father died, Fromm's mother killed herself "immediately afterwards...and left a will which stipulated that she wanted to be buried with her father." (Fromm, Beyond the Chains of Illusion, p.4, cited by Boeree, 1997) In addition to this personal crisis at age twelve, however, Fromm was soon to meet with a national crisis in his native Germany -- the events that lead up to the flaring up of World War I.

This disgust at the nationalism and militarism of the age prompted Fromm to adopt Marxism, as has political credo. Later, Fromm earned his Ph.D. degree from the University of Heidelberg in 1922. In 1933, Fromm came to the United States to lecture at the Institute for Psychoanalysis in Chicago, and remained in the United States, partly due to the rise of National Socialism in his native Germany. (Boeree, 1997) Fromm became a United States citizen in 1940.

(Decker, 2005) Fromm held various positions in psychoanalytical institutions in the United States and taught at universities in the United States and Mexico until his death. (Decker, 2005) Fromm was quite influenced by the developing theories of Sigmund Freud -- influenced by Freud's theories in the sense that he was opposed to the personal focus of Freudian analysis, although he saw familial parallels with social and economic influences upon the human personality.

Rather than stressing the family's influence upon the individual's psyche, Fromm stressed that social and cultural factors were in the main influences upon people's behaviors. He believed that people come to learn and act as they do, because of the behaviors expected of them by their respective societies. Thus Fromm applied the ideas of sociology to psychoanalysis. (Decker, 2005) Fromm's theory of personality has been described is a rather unique blend of Freud and Marx. "Freud, of course, emphasized the unconscious, biological drives, repression, and so on.

In other words, Freud postulated that our characters were determined by biology. Marx, on the other hand, saw people as determined by their society, and most especially by their economic systems." (Boeree, 1997) Fromm added to this mix of two deterministic systems "something quite foreign to them." (Boeree, 1997) to these deterministic views of human character, Fromm introduced the notion of what he called humanity's essential freedom. Fromm allowed people to transcend the determinisms that Freud and Marx attributed to human family and human economic life as inevitable.

In contrast, Fromm stated that human beings have, in the title of his famous 1947 text, Escape from Freedom, attempted to use authoritarian forms of political and religious control, destructiveness, and social conformity to choose to limit their freedom. But humans can also attempt to free themselves from these controls, as these controls are self-imposed.

Structures of the family, like excessively symbiotic families or withdrawing families may contribute to ways humans chose to limit their freedom, and by actively choosing such political, familial, and social systems, and remaining within these structures, humans may accept limitations -- or throw off such influences by recognizing them and reorganizing their familial and political lives, and thus change their societies and personalities. "Fromm emphasizes that we soak up our society with our mother's milk.

It is so close to us that we usually forget that our society is just one of an infinite number of ways of dealing with the issues of life." (Boeree, 1997) Fromm believes that the human social unconscious is best understood by examining the human personality in economic terms, rather than purely personal terms, like Freud. For example, the receptive orientation of personality is found in cultures that have particularly abundant natural resources, so that one need not work hard for one's sustenance, or in cultures that facilitate symbiotic families.

The exploitative orientation, is the orientation of people expect to have to take what they need, and are also symbiotic family products, families where wants and demands are always satisfied. When the hoarding orientation predominates the personality, people expect to have to keep everything they own and thus see the world as possessions.