Erich Fromm's social psychological models

• TYPE OF PSYCHOLOGY: Personality

SIGNIFICANCE: Erich Fromm studied the effects of political, economic, and religious institutions on human personality. Fromm’s work provides powerful insight into the causes of human unhappiness and psychopathology, as well as ideas about how individuals and social institutions could change to maximize mental health and happiness.

Introduction

Erich Fromm (1900-1980) approached the study of human personality from an evolutionary perspective. Specifically, Fromm maintained that humanslike all other creaturesare motivated to survive, which requires adaptation to their physical surroundings. Humans are, however, unique in that they substantially alter their physical surroundings by creating and maintaining cultural institutions. Consequently, Fromm believed that human adaptation occurs primarily in response to the demands of political, economic, and religious institutions.

Fromm made a distinction between adaptations to physical and social surroundings that have no enduring impact on personality, called static adaptation, and and adaptation that does have an enduring impact on personality, called dynamic adaptation. An example of static adaptation is an American learning to drive on the left side of the road in England, while dynamic adaptation can be exemplified by a child who becomes humble and submissive in response to a brutally domineering, egomaniacal parent. Fromm defined personality as how individuals dynamically adapt to their physical and social surroundings to survive and reduce anxiety.

Human adaptation includes the reduction of anxiety for two reasons. First, because humans are born in a profoundly immature and helplessly dependent state, they are especially prone to anxiety, which, although unpleasant, is useful to the extent that it results in signs of distress (such as crying), which alert others and elicit their assistance. Second, infants eventually mature into fully self-conscious humans who, although no longer helpless and dependent, recognize their ultimate mortality and essential isolation from all other living creatures.

Fromm believed that humans have five basic inorganic needs, as opposed to organic needs associated with physical survival, resulting from the anxiety associated with human immaturity at birth and eventual self-consciousness. The need for relatedness refers to the innate desire to acquire and maintain social relationships. The need for transcendence suggests that humans have an inherent drive to become creative individuals. The need for rootedness consists of a sense of belonging to a social group. The need for identity is the need to be a unique individual. The need for a frame of orientation refers to a stable and consistent way of perceiving the world.

Freedom and Individual Potential

Mental health, for Fromm, consisted of realizing one’s unique individual potential, and it requires two kinds of freedom primarily dependent on the structure of a society’s political, economic, and religious institutions. Freedom from external constraints refers to practical concerns such as freedom from imprisonment, hunger, and homelessness. This is how many people commonly conceive of the notion of freedom. For Fromm, freedom from external constraints is necessary but not sufficient for optimal mental health, which also requires the freedom to maximize one’s individual potential.

Freedom to maximize individual potential entails productive love and productive work. Productive love consists of interpersonal relationships based on mutual trust, respect, and cooperation. Productive work refers to daily activities that allow for creative expression and provide self-esteem. Fromm hypothesized that people become anxious and insecure if their need for transcendence is thwarted by a lack of productive work and love. Many people, he believed, respond to anxiety and insecurity by what he termed an escape from freedom: the adoption of personality traits that reduce anxiety and insecurity at the expense of individual identity.

Personality Types and Freedom Escape

Fromm described five personality types representing an escape from freedom. Authoritarian people reduce anxiety and insecurity by fusing themselves with another person or a religious, political, or economic institution. Fromm distinguished between sadistic and masochistic authoritarians: The sadistic type needs to dominateand often hurt and humiliateothers, while the masochistic type needs to submit to the authority of others. The sadist and the masochist are similar in that they share a dependence on each other. Fromm used the people in Nazi Germanymasochistsunder Adolf Hitlera sadistto illustrate the authoritarian personality type.

Destructive people reduce anxiety and insecurity by destroying other people or things. Fromm suggested that ideally, people derive satisfaction and security from constructive endeavors, but he noted that some people lack the skill and motivation to create and, therefore, engage in destructive behavior as an impoverished substitute for constructive activities.

Withdrawn people reduce anxiety and insecurity by willingly or unwillingly refusing to participate in a socially prescribed conception of reality. Instead, they withdraw into their own idiosyncratic versions of reality. In one social conception, for example, many devout Christians believe that God created the earth in six days, that Christ was born approximately two thousand years ago, and that he has not yet returned to Earth. The withdrawn individual might singularly believe that Earth was hatched from the egg of a giant bird a few years ago and that Christ had been seen eating a hamburger yesterday. Psychiatrists and clinicians would generally characterize these withdrawn people as psychotic or schizophrenic.

Self-inflated people reduce anxiety and insecurity by unconsciously adopting glorified images of themselves as superhuman individuals who are vastly superior to others. They are arrogant, strive to succeed at the expense of others, are unable to accept constructive criticism and avoid experiences that might disconfirm their false conceptions of themselves.

Finally, Fromm characterized American society in the 1940s as peopled by automaton conformists, who reduce anxiety and insecurity by unconsciously adopting the thoughts and feelings demanded of them by their culture. They are then no longer anxious and insecure because they are like everyone else around them. According to Fromm, automaton conformists are taught to distrust and repress their own thoughts and feelings during childhood through impoverished and demoralizing educational and socializing experiences. The result is the of pseudo-thoughts and pseudo-feelings, which people believe to be their own but which are actually socially infused. For example, Fromm contended that most Americans vote the same way their parents do, although very few would claim that parental preference was the cause of their political preferences. Rather, most American voters would claim that their decisions are thorough, rational consideration of genuine issuesa pseudo-thoughtinstead of a mindless conformity to parental influencea genuine thought.

Impact of Historical Constraints

In Escape from Freedom (1941), Fromm applied his theory of personality to a historical account of personality types by considering how political, economic, and religious changes in Western Europe from the Middle Ages to the twentieth century affected “freedom from” and “freedom to.” Fromm argued that the feudal political system of the Middle Ages engendered very little freedom from external constraints. Specifically, there was limited physical mobility; the average person died in the same place they were born, and many people were indentured servants who could not leave their feudal lord even if they had somewhere to go. Additionally, there was no choice of occupation: A man’s job was generally inherited from his father.

Despite the lack of freedom from external constraints, however, economic and religious institutions provided circumstances that fostered freedom to maximize individual potential through productive work and productive love. Economically, individual craftsmanship was the primary means by which goods were produced. Although this was time-consuming and inefficient by modern standards, craftspeople were responsible for the design and production of entire products. A shoemaker would choose the design and materials, make the shoes, and sell the shoes. A finished pair of shoes thus represented a tangible manifestation of the creative energies of the producer, thus providing productive work.

Additionally, the crafts were regulated by the guild system, which controlled access to apprenticeships and materials and set wages and prices to guarantee maximum employment and a fair profit to the craftspeople. The guilds encouraged relatively cooperative behavior among craftspeople and consequently engendered productive love. Productive love was also sustained by the moral precepts of the then-dominant Roman Catholic Church, which stressed the essential goodness of humankind, the idea that humans had free will to choose their behavior on Earth and hence influence their ultimate fate after death, the need to be responsible for the welfare of others, and the sinfulness of extracting excessive profits from commerce and accumulating money beyond that which is necessary to exist comfortably.

The dissolution of the feudal system and the consequent transition to parliamentary democracy and capitalism provided the average individual with a historically unprecedented amount of freedom from external constraints. Physical mobility increased dramatically as the descendants of serfs were able to migrate freely to cities to seek employment of their choosing; however, according to Fromm, increased freedom from external constraints was acquired at the expense of the circumstances necessary for freedom to maximize individual potential through productive work and productive love.

Fromm's views on the morality of religion, its role as an external constraint, and its impact on human psychology in several books, including Psychoanalysis and Religion (1950), Man for Himself: An Inquiry into the Psychology of Ethics (1947), and Zen Buddhism and Psychoanalysis (1960).

Impact of Capitalism

Capitalism shifted the focus of commerce from small towns to large cities and stimulated the development of fast and efficient means of production, but assembly-line production methods divested the worker of opportunities for creative expression. The assembly-line worker has no control over the design of a product, does not engage in the entire production of the product, and has nothing to do with the sale and distribution of the product. Workers in a modern automobile factory might put on hubcaps or install radios for eight hours each day as cars roll by on the assembly line. They have no control over the process of production and no opportunity for creative expression, given the monotonous and repetitive activities of their jobs.

In addition to the loss of opportunities to engage in productive work, the inherent competitiveness of capitalism undermined the relatively cooperative interpersonal relationships engendered by the guild system, transforming the stable small-town economic order into a frenzied free-for-all in which people compete with their neighbors for the resources necessary to survive, hence dramatically reducing opportunities for people to acquire and maintain productive love. Additionally, these economic changes were supported by the newly dominant Protestant churches represented by the teachings of John Calvin and Martin Luther and stressed the inherent evilness of humankind, the lack of free will, and the notion of predetermination. Despite the absence of free will and the idea that an individual’s fate was predetermined, Protestant theologians claimed that people could get a sense of God’s intentions by their material success on Earth, thus encouraging people to work very hard to accumulate as much as possible according to the so-called Protestant work ethic as an indication that God’s countenance was shining on them.

Call to Embrace Positive Freedom

Fromm argued that the average person in Western industrial democracies has freedom from external constraints but lacks opportunities to maximize individual potential through productive love and productive work. The result was pervasive feelings of anxiety and insecurity. Most people respond to anxiety and insecurity by unconsciously adopting personality traits that reduce anxiety and insecurity but at the expense of their individuality, which Fromm referred to as an escape from freedom. For Fromm, psychopathology was the general result of the loss of individuality associated with an escape from freedom. The specific manifestation of psychopathology depends on the innate characteristics of the individual in conjunction with the demands of the person’s social environment.

Fromm argued that while escaping from freedom is a typical response to anxiety and insecurity, it is not an inevitable one. Instead, he urged people to embrace positive freedom by pursuing productive love and work, which he claimed would require individual and social change. Individually, Fromm advocated a life of spontaneous exuberance made possible by love and being loved. He described children's play and artists' behavior as illustrations of this kind of lifestyle. Socially, Fromm believed strongly that the fundamental tenets of democracy should be retained but that capitalism in its present form must be modified to ensure every person’s right to live, to distribute resources more equitably, and to provide opportunities to engage in productive work.

Theoretical Influences

Fromm’s ideas reflect the scientific traditions of his time, his extensive training in history and philosophy, and his psychological background. Fromm was considered a along with Karen Horney (1885-1952), Carl Jung (1875- 1961), Harry Stack Sullivan (1892-1949), and othersbecause of his acceptance of some of Freud’s basic ideas. Specifically, Fromm accepted the role of unconsciously motivated behaviors in human affairs and the notion that anxiety-producing inclinations are repressed or prevented from entering conscious awareness, while rejecting Freud’s reliance on the role of biological instinctssex and aggressionr understanding human behavior. Instead, the neo-Freudians were explicitly concerned with the influence of the social environment on personality development. Fromm wrote about these inspirations and challenged several of Freud's theories in Beyond the Chains of Illusion: My Encounter with Marx and Freud (1962).

Additionally, Fromm was very much influenced by Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution, existential philosophy, and the economic and social psychological ideas of Karl Marx (1818-1883). Fromm’s use of adaptation in the service of survival to define personality is derived from basic evolutionary theory. His analysis of the sources of human anxiety, especially the awareness of death and perception of isolation and aloneness, is extracted from existential philosophy. The notion that human happiness requires productive love and work and that capitalism is antithetical to mental health was originally proposed by Marx. Fromm’s work has never received the attention that it deserves in the United States because of his open affinity for some of Marx’s ideas and his insistence that economic change is utterly necessary to ameliorate the unhappiness and mental illness that pervade American society. He expressed these views and his views on Marx in Marx's Concept of Man (1961). Nevertheless, his ideas are vitally important from both a theoretical and practical perspective.

Bibliography

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