Love, sex and psychoanalyst Erich Fromm
Created | Updated Oct 24, 2002
Psychoanalysis without sex
A review of:
Erich FROMM, 1956, The Art of Loving.
New York : Harper & Row.
London : George Allen & Unwin 1957, 1995 (Thorsons), pp. vii + 104.
BY h2g2UserRichardIV('Lanky')
ALSO available at some other websites
SUMMARY:
This 7,000-word review considers the chief proposals made in The Art of Loving, the best-selling book by the German-Jewish-American psychoanalyst Erich Fromm (1900-1980). The author's life history and 'Trotskyism' are outlined; and it is especially asked how Fromm came to his 'volitional' and relatively non-biological account of love.
"[Sexuality] is really the central, invisible point of all action and conduct, and peeps out everywhere in spite of all the veils thrown over it."
Arthur SCHOPENHAUER, 1844, 'The life of the species.'
"Unfortunately, in abandoning libido theories, Fromm *did* neglect to give sexual desire its due, both as a formative and disruptive force in human development, and as a reality in the clinical setting."
Daniel BURSTON, 1991, The Legacy of Erich Fromm. Harvard University Press.
What could readers have expected from a book called The Art of Loving and published in America of 1956? -- Especially if they had known that the author called himself a "dialectical humanist", campaigned for Humanistic Communitarian Socialism, and once had an affair with America's top woman psychoanalyst, Karen Horney (1885-1952)? Horney herself had hypothesized a sex drive in the human female that had nothing to do with Freudian 'penis envy'; and she had notoriously enjoyed not only what she said was the *sexual* pleasure of suckling her child but legendary adventures into casual, and indeed impulsive copulation. Presumably, Erich Fromm's The Art of Loving would at least show concern for female orgasmic satisfaction. Such practicality had even been displayed in the mid-1920's work of the stuffier (though most happily married) 56-year-old Oxbridge and Harvard psychologist, William McDougall (1870-1938). The progressive Fromm would surely do still more to help couples towards peak experiences in love and marriage.
In fact, however, Erich Fromm's book (which was to sell 1.7 million copies and to be translated into 28 languages) contains no sexual advice of any kind. Though clear, eloquent and eclectic, it does not begin to require the graphic visual aids of ecstatic sex in warmly lit and centrally heated bedrooms that would automatically accompany any new book having Fromm's title today. Right from the start, the 56-year-old Fromm – by then on his third marriage -- warns that what he means by love is no 'easily indulged sentiment.' Nor has his book anything to do with the miraculous intimacy of 'falling in love' which can so easily wear off once the members of a couple have put their original loneliness behind them. Nor will The Art of Loving concern itself with finding a partner who is a 'bargain'; with making oneself attractive in the sexual/romantic market place; or with establishing the multi-orgasmic relationship that was to become a Western ideal by the 1970's. Just about the only practical advice Fromm's book contains for the would-be lover is, surprisingly, as follows:
"….to get up at a regular hour, to devote a regular amount of time during the day to activities such as meditating, reading, listening to music, walking: not to indulge, at least not beyond a certain minimum, in escapist activities like mystery stories and movies, not to overeat or overdrink…." (p. 87).
Such is the culmination of a quarter of a century of psychoanalytic experience on the part of a man whose life began with heavy Talmudic studies in Weimar Germany and continued with a sociology Ph.D. about three Jewish sects. In 1926, Fromm's sudden repudiation of Zionism for Trotskyism was followed by his escape from Hitler to America where (from bases in Chicago, Michigan, New York and Washington) Fromm became the most popular of neo-Freudian writers. Fromm's career ended with interests in Zen Buddhism and peacenik activism pursued from his post-1947 home in Mexico City. There, Fromm headed the Mexican Psychoanalytic Institute and was able to avoid the attentions of Commie-bashing Senator Joe McCarthy in Washington.
Though Fromm liked to think of himself as the Trotsky of psychoanalysis and was usually admired as a radical rationalist, he was to end up counselling his readers to venerate Albert Schweitzer and to spend at least forty minutes per day in quietistic meditation aiming to have a sense of 'I' as "the centre of my powers, as the creator of my world" (p. 88). Nor were Fromm's rather dull exercises guaranteed to produce any Anthony and Cleopatra, Abelard and Héloïse, Richard and Cosima Wagner or Woody Allen and Soon Yi Previn. Fromm writes:
"People capable of love, under the present system, are necessarily the exceptions: love is by necessity a marginal phenomenon in present-day Western society." (The Art of Loving, p. 103)
Fromm thought that, until the overthrow of capitalism, only the most heroic non-conformist would be capable of a serious love life.
Along the way to this dispiriting conclusion, Fromm displayed a certain common sense and clinical wisdom as well as some familiarity with the German pantheistic mystic, Meister Eckhart (c. 1260-1327). Empirical reference to research is entirely absent from Fromm's repertoire – as one might expect from a person trained in Heidelberg, Berlin and Frankfurt before joining the community of expatriate German Jews in north-eastern America; and Fromm does not even feel moved to invoke the authority of other psychological or psychoanalytic writers – only bothering to give Freud the occasional mention as 'obsessed with sex and biology.' Nevertheless, Fromm thoughtfully outlines his reasonable idea that erotic love will involve CARE, RESPONSIBILITY, RESPECT and KNOWLEDGE – for the unique feature of true romantic love is certainly its astonishing combination of paternalistic assertion over, and childlike veneration for the other partner.
Fromm has other sensible things to say, even if he cannot prove them. Lovers need to be mature, not narcissistic, and to avoid primitive symbiotic aspirations to engulf the other ['sadism'] or to be engulfed by the other ['masochism']. Fromm accepts that divorce is a necessary alternative to re-enactments of insoluble marital conflicts; and that Russian Communism is no more spiritually elevating than capitalism. He warns liberal-leftists about making themselves a laughing stock by pursuing the chimera of natural human equality. He envisages a number of personality types that bear comparison with Freud's concepts (receptive/oral-dependent, exploitative/oral-aggressive, hoarding/anal, and marketing/phallic). Fromm's typology also resembles four of the dimensions of modern psychometry's 'Big Six' (receptive/affect, exploitative/will, hoarding/conscience and marketing/energy). (These last four dimensions of psychological difference are found empirically beyond the super-factors of general intelligence [g] and neuroticism/emotionality [n] – see Brand, 1997.) Fromm's optimism for the political future is pleasing and sensible: "Despair is unrealistic," he once wrote.
Above all, Fromm seems never to have been tempted by the 'constructivist' relativism of today's social psychologists who do not believe in any 'real self.' In his other bestseller, Escape from Freedom (1941), Fromm noted approvingly:
"There is nothing of which we are more ashamed than of not being ourselves. And there is nothing that gives us greater pride and happiness than to think, to feel, and to say what is ours."
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Fromm's good sense will make it easier for some readers to accept Fromm's more remarkable claims. Apparently, 'erotic love' requires a basis of 'brotherly love' between equals; and is not so much a passive 'falling' or passionate excitement as "an act of will" that can be performed with little regard for the individual qualities of the beloved. "One neglects to see an important factor in erotic love," writes Fromm (p. 44), "that of will." And:
"To love somebody is not just a strong feeling – it is a decision, it is a judgement, it is a promise. If love were only a feeling, there would be no basis for the promise to love each other for ever. A feeling comes and it may go. How can I judge that it will stay for ever, when my act does not involve judgement and decision?"
Many would suppose it is marriage rather than love which involves primarily cognitive and volitional components; and that love is better described as a state, condition or composition than as a feeling. Still, it is understandable that Fromm should be concerned to play down the more 'basic' or immature aspects of love and address his readers' minds to meditations higher than those on slapping loins, arching backs and ecstatic moans. Fromm loftily deplores the commodity-oriented modern world where people are "cogs in the machine" – "alienated automata", "close to the picture Huxley describes in Brave New World: well fed, well clad, satisfied sexually, yet without self." In a world where Fromm professes to detect "the disintegration of love", he even sneers at the twentieth-century ideal of 'marriage as team-work', saying such marriages are little but "egoism à deux." He insists:
"Love is not the result of adequate sexual satisfaction, but sexual happiness – even the knowledge of the so-called sexual technique – is the result of love."
With generosity to him, Fromm might be said to have appreciated that the rational passion of love allows delights greater than those of mere sexual congress and nest-building. Such higher pleasures will come partly from careful attention to the other partner's unique nature, studied with care and respect. As is seen elsewhere in his abandonment at age twenty-seven of strict Judaism and in his later qualified attitudes to Marxism, Freudianism and feminism, Fromm was no fool. Not for nothing was he thrown out of the Frankfurt School by the more committed Communist, Max Horkheimer. Though generously funded by a millionaire Argentinean grain merchant, the Frankfurt group refused to publish Fromm's work when (in a rare empirical study of 1930, with Ernst Schachtel) Fromm concluded that 'the authoritarian personality' (Fromm's term) could easily be found in the left-voting German proletariat. Fromm would long maintain his own individuality among 'critical theorists' (the obfuscatory trade name proposed after 1933 for 'Marxist theorists'). Likewise, Fromm deserves credit for deploring any mechanistic account of love and for insisting love must involve 'working together' toward the ever closer fusion of partners who still keep their own mature identities.
Nevertheless, Fromm's determination to play down the contribution of man's biology to the gift of love has at least ten peculiar features, as follows.
1) Pair bonding in animals
Fromm is determined to distance the phenomenon of love from the bestial aspects of human nature. Yet many pairs of human lovers would actually be impressed if they could maintain the substantial lifelong monogamous fidelity and co-operation that is typical in species like songbirds and gibbons. To be sure, recent years have seen empirical discoveries of 10% rates of 'bastardy' in songbirds' offspring. Yet such rates of infidelity are no different from what obtains in human families (according to UK and US blood group studies of the 1990's); and, properly speaking, such occasional 'adultery' makes the long-term pair-bonding in such avian species still more remarkable.
2) Sexual influence on culture
Fromm thinks that only a post-materialist culture can do much to improve the chances for would-be lovers; but he neglects the degree to which sex itself shapes culture. Recently, it has been observed that humpback whales change their mating songs to mimic those of sexually successful immigrant whales of previous breeding seasons (New Scientist, 2001); and many artistic innovations in Western music (whether classical or popular) are likewise the result of deviant males producing new performances that have appeal primarily to audiences of sexually excited young females who determine which new variations are finally accepted. Likewise, Western religions have long had appeal primarily to females – to judge by the make-up of church congregations; and, Fromm might be shocked to find, the West's late-twentieth-century enthusiasm for capitalism has been driven not least by females' preferences for the careers that might provide them with the economic security that is so legendarily in demand by the fair sex. Fromm's attempt to view love as dependent on culture, rather than on animalistic biology, must seem strained in days when evolutionary psychology – stressing the Darwinian bases of human culture -- is enjoying as much success as did 'instinct psychology' in the 1920's.
3) *Falling* in love
Fromm's volitional conception of love makes too little room for love's often-remarked mysteries. Some 40% of happily married couples readily declare they 'fell' in love in ways that continue to defy the kind of reasonable explanation which Fromm would prefer. Recently, research has suggested that partners are actually much concerned at the beginning of a relationship to assay the state of each other's hormones – hence the enthusiasm for removing each other's clothes that is so characteristic of early courtship. In particular, a woman (at least when she is in the fertile part of her menstrual cycle) will prefer a man whose pheromonal state indicates an immune system possessing strengths *complementary* to those which her own immune system already possesses. Studies in Germany and Scotland have ascertained that people emit chemical signals so as to communicate their own immunogenetic make-up (Farrar, 2001): people having the gene HLA-A2 prefer the perfumes which they use to contain the ingredients musk and ambergris, whereas people having other genes prefer to use perfumes containing bergemot. That olfaction should play a considerable part in 'falling in love' need surprise no student of the cosmetics industry which today manages to sell its products even to men. It will probably not be long before researchers discover that true lovers like each other's own natural body odours along with many other quirky physical features. (Small, tight buttocks on men are much preferred by females – possibly because they reassure a girl that her partner is not a female or otherwise feminized.) Already, research on voles has found that the concentrated copulation of a new mating pair produces a surge of oxytocin from the female's pituitary gland, and that oxytocin injected into female voles will stimulate sexual bonding (Times 8 ix 2001, p. 1). Apparently the same phenomenon occurs in humans: according to the Wall Street Journal (Meghan Cox Gurdon, 26/27 x 2001): "Scientists at the University of Edinburgh recently found that during sexual intimacy a woman's brain releases a chemical "love potion" that alters her brain's hormonal reactions. Not only does the release of the chemical, oxytocin, create for her a bond with her mate but it appears that the more sex the couple has, the deeper her sense of commitment and love will be. Men's brain's – surprise! – do not work the same way." A woman's sense of smell has been found to be most acute at just the point in her menstrual cycle when she is most easily made pregnant (Times 26 x 2001, p. 1, reporting work by Professor Salvatore Caruso at the University of Catania, Sicily). Fromm seems to have forgotten the psychological (indeed, spiritual changes) that may commence at the very first bodily contact between a man and a young woman. Tolstoy described them delightfully in War and Peace where (Pt. III, Chap. 16), where, at a grand ball, Prince Andrew dances a waltz with the unknown débutante Natasha, her 'bosom scarcely defined':
"…she was the first pretty girl who caught his eye; but scarcely had he embraced that slender, supple figure, and felt her stirring so
close to him and smiling so near him, than the wine of her charm
rose to his head, and he felt himself revived and rejuvenated…."
Delightfully, again, a year later (Pt. V, Chap. 10), at the opera, the deserted Natasha falls for the rake, Anatole Kuragin:
"She did not know how it was that within five minutes she had come to feel herself terribly near to this man. When she turned away she feared he might seize her from behind by her bare arm and kiss her on the neck. They spoke of most ordinary things,yet she felt that they were closer to one another than she had ever been to any man. Natasha kept turning to Hélène and to her father, as if asking what it all meant…."
By contrast, with all the 'will' in the world, men and women who meet via dating agencies seldom fall in love. Notoriously, despite intense selection of partners by rational criteria, the UK television programme 'The Mating Game' struggled even to have its 'lucky' couples say they enjoyed their free week together in a hotel; and marriages seldom resulted.
4) Love's evolution-based triggers
Fromm's disparaging attitude to the possibility of learning sexual techniques and thus improving a romantic/marital relationship can hardly be blamed on him. After all, passably effective 'sex therapy' (a creative branch of 'behaviour therapy') arrived only in the 1960's. However, it is strange that Fromm was so unwilling to consider the very serious contribution that can be made to love and marriage by such simple things as a trim female appearance and a bulging male bank balance. Men need to see regular signals giving reassurance as to their partner's fidelity – signals that are not easy to arrange convincingly in a world where women go out to work. For their part, women need the feeling of security that comes not from occasional massive expenditures on mortgages but from a more constant supply of attention, kindness and tokens of continued affection. (Evolutionarily, the cave-dwelling human female did much better to seek many *small* gifts rather than occasional large donations for which, after all, she had no refrigerator.) To forget such practical contributions to the art of loving is especially strange in a psychoanalyst who is quite frank that love needs to be *practised* and prepared for by 'disciplined exercise.'
5) Physical beauty
Even the sombre Plato maintained that good looks would be a natural part of "authentic love" – though the "disciplined and cultured" lover would admittedly not go beyond kissing and fondling his young boyfriend (Republic 403a). In recent years, Scottish psychologists have shown that beauty is not an individual matter as Fromm likes to believe: rather, men possess absolute Platonic standards of beauty which allow the creation (by computer) of female images agreed to be more beautiful (on averaged ratings) than any they have yet seen. Perrett et al., 1994, record of their overlaid photos of young females: "attractive composites can be made more attractive by exaggerating the shape differences from the sample mean." The pursuit of the idea of physical beauty naturally leads on to the love of moral beauty, as Plato's Socrates explained (in The Symposium). About men, especially, John Updike (2000) has his character Gertrude declare (in his Gertrude and Claudius) "love is part of their ruthless quest for beauty" (p. 186).
6) Sex first -- Love and Happiness later
Fromm's view is:
"Sexual attraction creates, for the moment, the illusion of union; but without love this "union" leaves strangers as far apart as they were before – sometimes it makes them feel ashamed of each other, or even makes them hate each other, because when the illusion has gone they feel their estrangement even more markedly than before" (pp. 54-5).
This claim comes as near to being a testable proposition as Fromm's ideas ever do. Yet research has not been supportive. Sexually liberal couples who told American psychologists they did *not* regard love as a prerequisite for sexual intercourse were actually just as happy and stable over the subsequent two years as were couples holding more conventional views (Peplau et al., 1977): in both cases, some 35% of couples were still dating and 20% had married.
7) The barely detectable work of the will
Fromm was understandably concerned to talk up the long-term nature of love – in line with mankind's deepest aspirations if not with the sorry realities of divorce in the late-twentieth-century West. Yet it is far from clear that an emphasis on the volitional aspect of love is helpful to Fromm's endeavour. Notoriously, the work of the human will is exceptionally hard to pin down. By contrast, there is substantial determination of people by their personalities and by their previous histories of choice. By talking of love as 'an act of will', Fromm might have been thinking of the commitment of young people in 'arranged' Hindu marriages. Here, the hope is that the act of promising between comparative strangers may be followed by the growth of love. Doubtless this *can* happen, just as love *may* follow a Western pair's decision to live together; but such a development of sincere affection and erotic attraction is surely based far more often on the good sense exercised by the Hindu parents when selecting the partners and arranging the terms of the marriage. Notoriously, people can relatively easily fall in love with a partner who has a similar level of attractiveness to third parties. The happy Hindu couple's performative acts of will are only a small part of a much larger pattern of causation.
What actually is the ‘will’ of which Fromm expects so much? 'Will' seems to exist *necessarily* when processes of reason and intelligence furnish adumbrations of the passions and suggest possible strategies for achieving one's objectives. Volition is what emerges from weighing competing passions, reasons and arguments. What a person finally decides to do is a question of which way the balance tips. One cannot 'decide' to want anything; one can only *want* something (more or less 'passionately'), and then find oneself selecting the most reasonable means of achieving it. 'Will' may perhaps *keep* the scales tipped, in preference to resuming the process of reflection; but such 'obstinacy' will itself be either a reasoned or a passionate alternative to re-opening the matter that had been temporarily concluded.
So elusive (if sometimes crucial) is the work of the human will that -- unlike the mind, the heart, the soul and the spirit -- 'the will' does not receive much mention in the Bible. It was actually first introduced by St Augustine as a way of explaining how, despite supposed divine omnipotence, we are all somehow free either to accept God's revelation or to reject it. For Fromm to think the human will capable of producing love is largely mistaken. It is also dangerous, for it may lead Fromm's readers to make vain commitments in their quest for love. Fromm should have remembered Oscar Wilde:
“[Fidelity] has nothing to do with our own will. Young men want to be faithful, and are not; old men want to be faithless, and cannot: that is all one can say” (in The Picture of Dorian Gray).
The only way to make the will responsible for love would be to define 'the will' as something other than it is. An example would be when the philosopher Bishop Berkeley (1685-1753) decided that 'The soul is the will, properly speaking' and asked 'Whether Identity of Person consists not in the Will' (quoted in Warnock, 1987). Again, the twentieth-century Surrealists, André Bréton, Antonin Artaud and Max Ernst, thought of the will as energy which could be liberated through destruction; and they believed – with Adolf Hitler, in fact -- that intellect had become a 'cancer of life' which would be replaced by a new age which was based on Will (Bowden, 1992). However, while to interpret the will as 'soul' or 'energy' would make it more capable of causing love, Fromm the rationalist could never himself have agreed to see will as in any way *opposed* to intellect.
8) Man's dark side
Fromm was concerned to stress man's rational nature and its potential for good. As elsewhere in his work, he believed human reason could yield 'productive love' and triumph over the 'sick' and imperfect social systems under which people find themselves living. The problem for such pleasing optimism and for Fromm's trite homilies is that they do little to explain how human nature worked itself into such a dreadful mess in the first place. Fromm's idealism would be more convincing if it looked as if it were successfully addressing the dark and disagreeable aspects of human nature that have created the necessity for Fromm's spiritualistic moralising. As things stand, Fromm often seems as out-of-touch as is the Polonius of Shakespeare's Hamlet.
9) Instinct according to Fromm
Actually, Fromm himself was far from being resolutely averse to attributing importance to biological factors as decreed by evolutionary history. Around 1950, Fromm made a sally into speculation about necrophilia, concluding that humans have an 'anal-olfactory-hating orientation' -- supposedly characteristic of four-legged mammals and apparently demanding an obsessive sniffing of each other's bottoms. No doubt Fromm wished to pay proper homage to Freud's appreciation that there are deep-seated destructive (thanatic) as well as constructive (erotic) tendencies in human nature. Yet man is intrinsically a bipedal animal built for carrying food over long distances. The whole history of male arrangements to ensure female fidelity (notably by means of religion) probably dates back to the hunting males of northern latitudes who had to be absent from their females for days so as to provision them and their offspring. Fromm's foolish attempt to link man's nature to that of grazing quadrupeds serves only to highlight a remarkable point: even though Fromm was prepared to postulate deep, indeed animalistic bases for disgust and hate, he was not prepared to envisage a strong biological basis for love.
10) Penis envy
Fromm's 'Trotskyite' revisionism, like that of Karen Horney, focused particularly on denying Freud's claims that the human female experiences 'penis envy' and blames her 'missing penis' on her mother. Yet the idea of penis envy arguably expresses a very serious biological reality: that women want to have boy children who will for the first time 'give them a penis' by which they can breed in quantity and not just for quality. More prosaically, little girls may be well advised to envy their penis-equipped brothers – for that is indeed where any surplus maternal resources are likely to be wasted (see Badcock, 1994). In drawing her mother's attention to such wasteful expenditure on her brothers (i.e. by 'telling tales'), a little girl may have her best chance of diverting maternal resources from her brother(s) to herself. It is strange that Fromm should have been reluctant to acknowledge the specially powerful bond that exists in most cultures between mothers and their sons – at least when the son does well in early Oedipal jousting and seems worthy of maternal investment. Again, Fromm's railing against Freud's notion of the 'castration complex' needs a modern corrective. Since, in blood group studies, 10% of Western children are *not* the biological offspring of the man they call 'Daddy', many boys are indeed at risk of a serious lack of co-operation from, and indeed aggression from their local adult male as they move into adolescence. The fear which male homosexuals not uncommonly have for the vagina may be, for them, a vital part of a strategy that will steer relatively unprotected boys through adolescence without dangerous male-male conflicts over females.
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How can such a guru as Fromm have come to advise that true love is more volitional and cognitive than it is affective? Why would Fromm have wished to go beyond Plato and Freud in saying not just that the dark passions of the libido need harnessing into intelligent and cultured expression, but that it would be better for the senses and biology to be largely ignored by anyone wanting to educate others in 'the art of loving'?
A first possibility is that, at least as a young man, Fromm was personally embarrassed by the world of the instincts and senses. It is a notable feature of Fromm's thought that he sets much store by the joys of hedonistic matriarchal society. There, allegedly equal siblings bask in unconditional maternal love untroubled by prowling adult male monsters. In fact, Fromm found in the work of the Swiss historian, J. J. Bachofen (1815-87), the notion that aeons of pre-Athenian matriarchy might have left as much of a mark on the Western psyche as did the patriarchy that was to follow. (Eventually, the story goes, men created a society of male ownership to ensure their own paternity of children -- and incidentally gave themselves a rationale for the hard labour that civilization requires.) Yet Fromm was arguably too enamoured of man's supposed matriarchal evolutionary phase. This phase is actually doubted by today's anthropologists who acknowledge no present human society at all as matriarchal (i.e. allowing power, and not just property to what are called 'matrilineal' females). Fromm even forgot that Bachofen himself had deplored the blood feuding associated with matriarchy and regarded patriarchy as quite the more elevated and 'spiritual' social arrangement (Burston, 1981). As for the fantasy of co-operation between siblings, Fromm had not read enough of the first Freudian deviant, Alfred Adler (1870-1937), who thought birth order the most significant fact about individual history; and, today, Fromm's fable meets a continuing corrective in research showing the differences and rivalries that often occur between siblings (Sulloway, 1996; McGuffin et al., 2001).
It bears consideration that Fromm's idealization of matriarchy and mother-child bonding was a distraction that made him unappreciative of patriarchal sex between a security-offering male and a nubile female. Childhood pictures of Fromm show him with a distinctly pudgy mother who was in fact as overprotective as she looks (Burston, 1981). The crucial experience that awoke Fromm's interest in psychology was when, at 13, a beautiful and talented 24-year-old painter of his family's acquaintance committed suicide soon after the death of her own beloved father. This event totally amazed the young Fromm -- who never seems to have embarked upon, let alone resolved any real contest for the affection of the opposite-sex parent. Fromm's own ambitious wine merchant father would later turn up in Heidelberg to look after his son during university examinations. It may be that Fromm adopted 'spiritual values' as a way of avoiding the topic of Oedipal rivalry – though this unusual choice did not spare him a childhood which he himself called "unbearable." Whatever its origins, Fromm's unusual fascination with older women was to dominate his young adulthood.
First, in 1927, Fromm fell for and married a woman who was older than him by ten years -- his own psychoanalyst, Frieda Fromm-Reichman (as she would become known). Fromm-Reichman was a famously perceptive, empathic and nurturant woman, but the marriage soon went disastrously wrong and Fromm ended up suffering tuberculosis in a Swiss sanatorium for a year – though the couple did not actually divorce till 1940. This was perhaps the biggest romantic involvement of Fromm's life, for he was described as "immersed in grief and prayer" when Frieda finally died in 1957.
Fromm's second known affair, in the USA, with Karen Horney, involved an even larger, fifteen-year age gap between him and the caring older woman who had helped him escape from Nazi Germany. The relationship disintegrated amidst considerable animosity after Fromm undertook a psychoanalysis of Horney's 17-year-old daughter. Horney even tried to persuade the American psychoanalytic community to restrict Fromm's practice as a lay psychoanalyst. Two further marriages took the form of Fromm looking after a German-Jewish arthritic mother of a seventeen-year-old son; and subsequently, after his second wife's demise in 1952, being himself looked after till his own death by a third wife, from Alabama, whom he married in 1953.
Fromm was handsome and, after his 1941 bestseller, he was a rich man; but he remained childless and his best friend was the notoriously homosexual psychoanalyst Harry Stack Sullivan. A further hint that Fromm maintained a childish and less than fully libidinal relationship to women comes from his reluctance to break with Freud in his psychological theorizing. Though Fromm deplored Freud's simplistic biologizing, he never wanted to make the kind of break with Freud that Karen Horney had made. From preferred not to claim his 'birthright', just as he seems never to have challenged his own biological father. In the 1930's, Fromm said "I feel like a pupil and translator"; and he liked to describe himself as providing no more than the "loyal opposition" to Freud. Nor was Fromm much of a fighter in sibling competition with other Freudians. Though he once complained privately of Wilhelm Reich's "pathological self-love and arrogance", he generally stayed stranded on the sidelines of psychoanalytic debates. He preferred this position, says Burston (1991), to "discussions with posturing illiterates."
There is certainly something odd about a man with such a history wanting to counsel others in 'the art of loving'; and the mystery deepens when it is seen that Fromm counsels that erotic love needs a firm basis in *brotherly* love -- a phenomenon which the singleton Fromm had never himself experienced. The most likely explanation is that Fromm had never completed – perhaps had never even begun -- his Oedipal work. Arguably, he remained enthralled lifelong by an idealized, spiritualized matriarchal dreamworld which he could conceive to involve no challenge to male authority. It is perhaps no accident that Fromm thought love 'a decision, a judgement, a promise': for mothers do notoriously make big investment decisions, committing some infants to death and others to a lifetime of support far greater than any father would unconditionally bestow (see Hrdy, 1999). A man can afford to treat children according to his feelings – perhaps especially according to whether he senses a genetic affinity. A man's wrong decisions can always be rectified by him having more children. By contrast, a human mother always knows her children are carrying her own genes. Thus her love is automatic and the only question for her is that of how much to invest – of how much, in all reason and judgment, to promise to each child. Perhaps his lack of a truly romantic and hard-fought relation with his own mother explains why Fromm concluded love was a decision.
A second possible reason for Fromm's aversion to biology and its animalistic facts of red-blooded-male-with-younger-female life is related to Fromm's wish to tell a plausible story of German anti-Semitism and the rise of Hitler. From 1933, a key preoccupation for the Marxists of the Frankfurt School was to explain why the German working class had let down the Communist Party and voted for Hitler. Fromm was a key figure in this intellectual salvage work, for in 1930 he had identified 'authoritarianism' in German workers. Unfortunately, there was a problem: there was plenty of punitive militarism, conformism, "sado-masochism" and contempt for democracy to be found in at least 10% of workers who voted on the *left.* This empirical result was altogether unacceptable to Horkheimer and other luminaries of the Frankfurt School; so they prevented its publication. As the School's millionaire moved it to New York, work on authoritarianism continued to tiptoe around the question of 'authoritarianism of the left.' Faced with this rejection of his finding, Fromm took the easy way out and spent his time lamenting that modern man was prone to 'escape from freedom' by choosing simplistic dogmas and authority figures. Rather than ask about individual differences (let alone about the low intelligence levels of those who find totalitarian ideas attractive), Fromm offered a vague set of anxieties about personality development that could apply to just about anyone. Astonishingly, Fromm came up with this gurgle when, across the Atlantic, the British were actually fighting for Europe's freedom at the cost of their Empire.
In fact, there is a huge difficulty about why so many Germans followed Hitler. This difficulty has never been resolved by any psychological analysis and it is hardly illumined by Daniel Goldhagen's (1997) much lauded new claim that Germans of the 1930's were, quite simply, frothing anti-Semites. (Rather than indict 'the usual suspects' of German 'authoritarianism', 'sadism' or 'conformity', Goldhagen postulates a quite specific and virulent German hatred of Jews. Goldhagen's claim is that ordinary German soldiers and police positively enjoyed baiting and tormenting Jews and took personal pride in such activities – sending back to their own relatives photos of elderly Polish Jews whose beards they had set alight or whom they had made to skip and jump in the streets.) It is certainly true that German people were misled into putting their country in the hands of an uneducated ex-corporal who would govern lazily, tolerate terror, dismantle normal government and within ten years – by refusing to surrender to the Western allies -- abandon what he by then thought his 'traitorous' Volk to the mercies of Russia's Red Army. Yet why did the Germans do it? Until 1917, anti-Semitism had been more of a Russian speciality – as it continues to be today. What was the German problem?
What Fromm could not mention, despite his intimate familiarity with the matter, was the fact of race. It was not just that Fromm was philosophically averse to the concept – saying when breaking with Judaism in 1927 that he "just didn't want to participate in any division of the human race, whether religious or political." There was also an abiding practical problem for him, as for other Jews. The problem for Germany's Jews was that the international leaders of their race, religion and nation had betrayed the country which had taken in so many Jews after the ferocious Moscow pogrom of 1881. In 1917, seeing the opportunity for a Zionist homeland in Palestine, international Jewry had used its financial influence and contacts in Washington to bring America into the First World War. The Jewish price for this help was Britain's Balfour Declaration of 1917, promising to allow Diaspora Jews into Palestine. Having thus brought America to the aid of Britain and France at a desperate time, Jews could hardly expect an easy ride in a defeated Germany lurching through years of hyperinflation. Yet Fromm feels unable even to *mention* the possibility that German anti-Semitism might have had as rational a basis as other enmities between Western nations and between ethnic groups.
Fromm was unable to face the possibility that the elite of his race had, very understandably, used its financial muscle to buy territory in Palestine at the cost of dispossessing Arabs (who were uniquely betrayed by Britain -- which had used them to help fight Germany's ally, Turkey). Fromm found it easier to avoid any talk of real, deep-seated differences between groups and, for good measure, between individuals. Once more, Fromm was shutting himself off from a good part of human behaviour, history and psychology so as to maintain a left-wing illusion; and he did this even when he knew the left was not actually prepared to publish his own empirical results. Fromm was indeed more of a Marxist than a Freudian. It is no wonder that Freud (1932) issued Fromm and kindred neo-Freudians with the following rebuke to their insistence on the importance of socio-economic factors:
"Mankind never lives entirely in the present. The past, the tradition of the race and the people, lives on in the ideologies of the super-ego, and yields only slowly to the influences of the present."
--
If Fromm was indeed a timid and mother-fixated man who was incapable of acknowledging the competitive stratagems of his own kith and kin, a way opens up to understanding his contentless religious piety. This – even more than Fromm's de-realized version of the art of loving – was intended by him as his culminating gift to the world. After discussing such phenomena as the maternal bond, the (surely unlikely) phenomenon of egalitarian brotherly love, the supposedly 'illusion-avoiding' decision making of erotic love, and self love (a good idea, thinks Fromm, if maturely practised), The Art of Loving treats readers to a passage on 'the love of God.' Here, Fromm summarizes world religious history as a progress from dependence on Mother, through deference to Father, to contracts with Father and the final death of Father altogether. In this "negative theology," mature atheistic love of the truly un-nameable God, 'Yahweh', is to involve the continuing elaboration of rule systems which eventually require no divine intervention. Textual analysis and scholarly argument will work towards a utopia run by lawyers – rather as in the weekly deliberations on the Talmud at the better synagogues in the typical Western metropolis. As Meister Eckhart had once put it, "God and I: we are one" – a happy notion for the utopian law-maker even if it is not so immediately applicable to people of mediocre IQ.
Many psychologists of today could doubtless settle for some such version of religiosity. Nevertheless, it is actually remarkable that a proposal to make human law-making the central task of religion should have emanated from a psychologist. Where, in Fromm's scheme, is that account of the realities of human nature which any but the most frenzied law-maker is going to need? Where is the Christian injunction to examine and purify the heart – an injunction which deepened Socrates' advice to 'Know thyself' and which was eventually pursued to telling effect by Shakespeare and Freud? (Freud's own postulation of repression of memories has lately been vindicated in experimental work: 'deliberate forgetting' is possible and persists even when subjects are paid to recall verbal associations which they have successfully inhibited – Anderson & Green, 2001.). Christianity insisted on examining the heart's dark places and of ridding the heart of hypocrisy (I Peter ii 1) and "double-mindedness" (James iv 8); and it threw in God's love and forgiveness as a spectacular therapeutic stimulus to emendation of basic personality and outlook. Whereas Fromm wants his putative lovers to make 'a decision, a judgment, a promise', the New Testament is wary about judgments ('Judge not that ye be not judged' – Matthew vii 1; 'Judge nothing before the appointed time; wait till the Lord comes' – I Corinthians iv 4). Likewise, Jesus counselled against taking oaths ('…do not swear' – James v 12) -- preferring a change of heart to any amount of public protestation and politicking. Contrary to the expiatory tendencies of most religions, Christianity required a purification that was not to be arranged by priests or purchased from pardoners, let alone soaked up gradually from the systemic socio-economic changes for which the Trotskyite Fromm so much hoped. Rather than attempt the classic religious task of aligning the heart in accordance with the demands of a contract-making father-figure God, Fromm prefers to carry on as if such a task were not fundamental to Western consciousness and civilization.
In his own life, Fromm had suddenly, in 1927, rejected the rabbinical aspirations for him of his two devout parents (both of whose own parents were descended from long lines of rabbis). With the help of older women, Fromm had then embarked on a philosophical voyage that saw him pay homage in turn to all the trendy ideologies that ever appealed to mid-twentieth-century Western liberal-left intellectuals. Sadly, along the way, Fromm needed to deny that sensual love, individual biology and racial identity were of any particular importance. Here was a serious thinker and writer who was actually trying to improve the human condition *without* using psychology. He maintained what Burston (1991) calls "a Kantian insistence that valid norms for all humanity can be arrived at through 'reason' irrespective of prevailing norms and practices" – and irrespective of empirical evidence about human nature. Fromm would have done better to remember the words of Confucius:
"I have never seen anyone who loved virtue as much as sex."
Or the words of the playwright Anton Chekhov:
"The most important thing in family life is love, sexual attraction, being 'one flesh.' All else is unreliable and boring, however ingeniously we may rationalize it."
Fromm's British psychological predecessor, William McDougall, had put such matters well when he himself was in his mid-fifties (1927):
"[Our emotional or active tendencies] are the dynamic foundations of the whole structure of personality. They rough-hew our ends, shape them how we may. …[For example, sex is] not the source of all the manifestations of love between man and woman; but it is indisputably the ground tone of the chords of that harmony."
McDougall here articulated what the West learned in its progressive development of Christianity's promise of love. Fromm's artistic successor, John Updike (2000), put the point more graphically when he envisaged a passionate mediaeval affair, conducted at a retreat outside Elsinore, between King-to-be Claudius and Queen Gertrude – the illicit affair that was eventually to give rise to Prince Hamlet's sullen but famous disaffection:
"[Gertrude] would have lain down in warm mud for [Claudius], even the mud of the pigsty, to enter the exaltation she found in his brute love. He was not always gentle nor always rough; he maintained the small surprises of the seducer's art, which yet she had to feel arose involuntarily in him, to impart movement to the great element in herself beyond the control of her will."
Fromm, whose very name means 'pious' in German, did his best to take such captivation and enchantment out of love, along with much of infatuation, rapture and ecstasy. Thus did he arguably hide from himself, as from his father, his own Oedipal yearning. But, after the last thirty years in which sex has at last achieved its proper, central place in discussions of human happiness, few are likely to wish to return to a self-made and Marx-based mysticism of 1926-56, however civilized and well-intentioned. Fromm's name would be little remembered today were it not for his choice of an eye-catching, but misleading title for his 1956 book.
------
References:
ANDERSON, M. C. & GREEN, C. (2001). 'Suppressing unwanted memories by executive control.' Nature 410, 15 iii, pp. 366-9.
BADCOCK, Christopher (1994). PsychoDarwinism: The New Synthesis of Darwin and Freud. London : HarperCollins.
BOWDEN, Jonathan (1992). Sade. London : Egotist.
BRAND, C. R. (1997). 'Hans Eysenck's personality dimensions: their number and nature.' In H. Nyborg, The Scientific Study of Human Nature: Tribute to Hans J. Eysenck at Eighty. Oxford : Pergamon.
BURSTON, Daniel (1991). The Legacy of Erich Fromm, Harvard University Press
FARRAR, Steve (2001). 'Immune system wins by a nose', Times Higher 9 iii, p. 56.
FREUD, S. (1932). New Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis, Standard Edition, vol. 22, p. 67
GOLDHAGEN, Daniel (1997). Hitler's Willing Executioners. New York.
HRDY, Sarah Blaffer (1999). Mother Nature. London : Chatto & Windus.
McDOUGALL, William (1927). Character and the Conduct of Life. London : Methuen.
McGUFFIN, P, RILEY, B. & PLOMIN, R. (2001). 'Toward behavioral genomics.' Science 291, 1232-3, 16 ii.
PEPLAU, L. A., RUBIN, A. & HILL, C. (1977). 'Sexual intimacy in dating relationships.' Journal of Social Issues 33, 86-109.
PERRETT, D. I., MAY, K. A., & YOSHIKAWA, S. (1994). 'Facial shape and judgments of female attractiveness.' Nature 368, 17 iii, pp. 239-42.
SULLOWAY, F. J. (1996). Born to Rebel. New York : Little Brown.
UPDIKE, John (2000). Gertrude and Claudius. London : Hamish Hamilton.
WARNOCK, G. J. (1987). 'Berkeley.' In R.Gregory, The Oxford Companion to the Mind. Oxford University Press.
FINIS
Websites for more on Fromm:
uta.edu/huma/illuminations/kell9.htm
ship.edu/~cgboeree/fromm.html
erichfromm.de/english/life/life_bio2.html
For a stern critique of Fromm, finding him 'unscientific, self-contradictory and overly ambitious in his aspirations':
SCHAAR, John H. (1961). Escape from Authority: the Perspectives of Erich Fromm. New York : Harper.
A review of:
Erich FROMM, 1956, The Art of Loving.
New York : Harper & Row.
London : George Allen & Unwin 1957, 1995 (Thorsons), pp. vii + 104.
BY h2g2UserRichardIV('Lanky')
ALSO available at some other websites
SUMMARY:
This 7,000-word review considers the chief proposals made in The Art of Loving, the best-selling book by the German-Jewish-American psychoanalyst Erich Fromm (1900-1980). The author's life history and 'Trotskyism' are outlined; and it is especially asked how Fromm came to his 'volitional' and relatively non-biological account of love.
"[Sexuality] is really the central, invisible point of all action and conduct, and peeps out everywhere in spite of all the veils thrown over it."
Arthur SCHOPENHAUER, 1844, 'The life of the species.'
"Unfortunately, in abandoning libido theories, Fromm *did* neglect to give sexual desire its due, both as a formative and disruptive force in human development, and as a reality in the clinical setting."
Daniel BURSTON, 1991, The Legacy of Erich Fromm. Harvard University Press.
What could readers have expected from a book called The Art of Loving and published in America of 1956? -- Especially if they had known that the author called himself a "dialectical humanist", campaigned for Humanistic Communitarian Socialism, and once had an affair with America's top woman psychoanalyst, Karen Horney (1885-1952)? Horney herself had hypothesized a sex drive in the human female that had nothing to do with Freudian 'penis envy'; and she had notoriously enjoyed not only what she said was the *sexual* pleasure of suckling her child but legendary adventures into casual, and indeed impulsive copulation. Presumably, Erich Fromm's The Art of Loving would at least show concern for female orgasmic satisfaction. Such practicality had even been displayed in the mid-1920's work of the stuffier (though most happily married) 56-year-old Oxbridge and Harvard psychologist, William McDougall (1870-1938). The progressive Fromm would surely do still more to help couples towards peak experiences in love and marriage.
In fact, however, Erich Fromm's book (which was to sell 1.7 million copies and to be translated into 28 languages) contains no sexual advice of any kind. Though clear, eloquent and eclectic, it does not begin to require the graphic visual aids of ecstatic sex in warmly lit and centrally heated bedrooms that would automatically accompany any new book having Fromm's title today. Right from the start, the 56-year-old Fromm – by then on his third marriage -- warns that what he means by love is no 'easily indulged sentiment.' Nor has his book anything to do with the miraculous intimacy of 'falling in love' which can so easily wear off once the members of a couple have put their original loneliness behind them. Nor will The Art of Loving concern itself with finding a partner who is a 'bargain'; with making oneself attractive in the sexual/romantic market place; or with establishing the multi-orgasmic relationship that was to become a Western ideal by the 1970's. Just about the only practical advice Fromm's book contains for the would-be lover is, surprisingly, as follows:
"….to get up at a regular hour, to devote a regular amount of time during the day to activities such as meditating, reading, listening to music, walking: not to indulge, at least not beyond a certain minimum, in escapist activities like mystery stories and movies, not to overeat or overdrink…." (p. 87).
Such is the culmination of a quarter of a century of psychoanalytic experience on the part of a man whose life began with heavy Talmudic studies in Weimar Germany and continued with a sociology Ph.D. about three Jewish sects. In 1926, Fromm's sudden repudiation of Zionism for Trotskyism was followed by his escape from Hitler to America where (from bases in Chicago, Michigan, New York and Washington) Fromm became the most popular of neo-Freudian writers. Fromm's career ended with interests in Zen Buddhism and peacenik activism pursued from his post-1947 home in Mexico City. There, Fromm headed the Mexican Psychoanalytic Institute and was able to avoid the attentions of Commie-bashing Senator Joe McCarthy in Washington.
Though Fromm liked to think of himself as the Trotsky of psychoanalysis and was usually admired as a radical rationalist, he was to end up counselling his readers to venerate Albert Schweitzer and to spend at least forty minutes per day in quietistic meditation aiming to have a sense of 'I' as "the centre of my powers, as the creator of my world" (p. 88). Nor were Fromm's rather dull exercises guaranteed to produce any Anthony and Cleopatra, Abelard and Héloïse, Richard and Cosima Wagner or Woody Allen and Soon Yi Previn. Fromm writes:
"People capable of love, under the present system, are necessarily the exceptions: love is by necessity a marginal phenomenon in present-day Western society." (The Art of Loving, p. 103)
Fromm thought that, until the overthrow of capitalism, only the most heroic non-conformist would be capable of a serious love life.
Along the way to this dispiriting conclusion, Fromm displayed a certain common sense and clinical wisdom as well as some familiarity with the German pantheistic mystic, Meister Eckhart (c. 1260-1327). Empirical reference to research is entirely absent from Fromm's repertoire – as one might expect from a person trained in Heidelberg, Berlin and Frankfurt before joining the community of expatriate German Jews in north-eastern America; and Fromm does not even feel moved to invoke the authority of other psychological or psychoanalytic writers – only bothering to give Freud the occasional mention as 'obsessed with sex and biology.' Nevertheless, Fromm thoughtfully outlines his reasonable idea that erotic love will involve CARE, RESPONSIBILITY, RESPECT and KNOWLEDGE – for the unique feature of true romantic love is certainly its astonishing combination of paternalistic assertion over, and childlike veneration for the other partner.
Fromm has other sensible things to say, even if he cannot prove them. Lovers need to be mature, not narcissistic, and to avoid primitive symbiotic aspirations to engulf the other ['sadism'] or to be engulfed by the other ['masochism']. Fromm accepts that divorce is a necessary alternative to re-enactments of insoluble marital conflicts; and that Russian Communism is no more spiritually elevating than capitalism. He warns liberal-leftists about making themselves a laughing stock by pursuing the chimera of natural human equality. He envisages a number of personality types that bear comparison with Freud's concepts (receptive/oral-dependent, exploitative/oral-aggressive, hoarding/anal, and marketing/phallic). Fromm's typology also resembles four of the dimensions of modern psychometry's 'Big Six' (receptive/affect, exploitative/will, hoarding/conscience and marketing/energy). (These last four dimensions of psychological difference are found empirically beyond the super-factors of general intelligence [g] and neuroticism/emotionality [n] – see Brand, 1997.) Fromm's optimism for the political future is pleasing and sensible: "Despair is unrealistic," he once wrote.
Above all, Fromm seems never to have been tempted by the 'constructivist' relativism of today's social psychologists who do not believe in any 'real self.' In his other bestseller, Escape from Freedom (1941), Fromm noted approvingly:
"There is nothing of which we are more ashamed than of not being ourselves. And there is nothing that gives us greater pride and happiness than to think, to feel, and to say what is ours."
--
Fromm's good sense will make it easier for some readers to accept Fromm's more remarkable claims. Apparently, 'erotic love' requires a basis of 'brotherly love' between equals; and is not so much a passive 'falling' or passionate excitement as "an act of will" that can be performed with little regard for the individual qualities of the beloved. "One neglects to see an important factor in erotic love," writes Fromm (p. 44), "that of will." And:
"To love somebody is not just a strong feeling – it is a decision, it is a judgement, it is a promise. If love were only a feeling, there would be no basis for the promise to love each other for ever. A feeling comes and it may go. How can I judge that it will stay for ever, when my act does not involve judgement and decision?"
Many would suppose it is marriage rather than love which involves primarily cognitive and volitional components; and that love is better described as a state, condition or composition than as a feeling. Still, it is understandable that Fromm should be concerned to play down the more 'basic' or immature aspects of love and address his readers' minds to meditations higher than those on slapping loins, arching backs and ecstatic moans. Fromm loftily deplores the commodity-oriented modern world where people are "cogs in the machine" – "alienated automata", "close to the picture Huxley describes in Brave New World: well fed, well clad, satisfied sexually, yet without self." In a world where Fromm professes to detect "the disintegration of love", he even sneers at the twentieth-century ideal of 'marriage as team-work', saying such marriages are little but "egoism à deux." He insists:
"Love is not the result of adequate sexual satisfaction, but sexual happiness – even the knowledge of the so-called sexual technique – is the result of love."
With generosity to him, Fromm might be said to have appreciated that the rational passion of love allows delights greater than those of mere sexual congress and nest-building. Such higher pleasures will come partly from careful attention to the other partner's unique nature, studied with care and respect. As is seen elsewhere in his abandonment at age twenty-seven of strict Judaism and in his later qualified attitudes to Marxism, Freudianism and feminism, Fromm was no fool. Not for nothing was he thrown out of the Frankfurt School by the more committed Communist, Max Horkheimer. Though generously funded by a millionaire Argentinean grain merchant, the Frankfurt group refused to publish Fromm's work when (in a rare empirical study of 1930, with Ernst Schachtel) Fromm concluded that 'the authoritarian personality' (Fromm's term) could easily be found in the left-voting German proletariat. Fromm would long maintain his own individuality among 'critical theorists' (the obfuscatory trade name proposed after 1933 for 'Marxist theorists'). Likewise, Fromm deserves credit for deploring any mechanistic account of love and for insisting love must involve 'working together' toward the ever closer fusion of partners who still keep their own mature identities.
Nevertheless, Fromm's determination to play down the contribution of man's biology to the gift of love has at least ten peculiar features, as follows.
1) Pair bonding in animals
Fromm is determined to distance the phenomenon of love from the bestial aspects of human nature. Yet many pairs of human lovers would actually be impressed if they could maintain the substantial lifelong monogamous fidelity and co-operation that is typical in species like songbirds and gibbons. To be sure, recent years have seen empirical discoveries of 10% rates of 'bastardy' in songbirds' offspring. Yet such rates of infidelity are no different from what obtains in human families (according to UK and US blood group studies of the 1990's); and, properly speaking, such occasional 'adultery' makes the long-term pair-bonding in such avian species still more remarkable.
2) Sexual influence on culture
Fromm thinks that only a post-materialist culture can do much to improve the chances for would-be lovers; but he neglects the degree to which sex itself shapes culture. Recently, it has been observed that humpback whales change their mating songs to mimic those of sexually successful immigrant whales of previous breeding seasons (New Scientist, 2001); and many artistic innovations in Western music (whether classical or popular) are likewise the result of deviant males producing new performances that have appeal primarily to audiences of sexually excited young females who determine which new variations are finally accepted. Likewise, Western religions have long had appeal primarily to females – to judge by the make-up of church congregations; and, Fromm might be shocked to find, the West's late-twentieth-century enthusiasm for capitalism has been driven not least by females' preferences for the careers that might provide them with the economic security that is so legendarily in demand by the fair sex. Fromm's attempt to view love as dependent on culture, rather than on animalistic biology, must seem strained in days when evolutionary psychology – stressing the Darwinian bases of human culture -- is enjoying as much success as did 'instinct psychology' in the 1920's.
3) *Falling* in love
Fromm's volitional conception of love makes too little room for love's often-remarked mysteries. Some 40% of happily married couples readily declare they 'fell' in love in ways that continue to defy the kind of reasonable explanation which Fromm would prefer. Recently, research has suggested that partners are actually much concerned at the beginning of a relationship to assay the state of each other's hormones – hence the enthusiasm for removing each other's clothes that is so characteristic of early courtship. In particular, a woman (at least when she is in the fertile part of her menstrual cycle) will prefer a man whose pheromonal state indicates an immune system possessing strengths *complementary* to those which her own immune system already possesses. Studies in Germany and Scotland have ascertained that people emit chemical signals so as to communicate their own immunogenetic make-up (Farrar, 2001): people having the gene HLA-A2 prefer the perfumes which they use to contain the ingredients musk and ambergris, whereas people having other genes prefer to use perfumes containing bergemot. That olfaction should play a considerable part in 'falling in love' need surprise no student of the cosmetics industry which today manages to sell its products even to men. It will probably not be long before researchers discover that true lovers like each other's own natural body odours along with many other quirky physical features. (Small, tight buttocks on men are much preferred by females – possibly because they reassure a girl that her partner is not a female or otherwise feminized.) Already, research on voles has found that the concentrated copulation of a new mating pair produces a surge of oxytocin from the female's pituitary gland, and that oxytocin injected into female voles will stimulate sexual bonding (Times 8 ix 2001, p. 1). Apparently the same phenomenon occurs in humans: according to the Wall Street Journal (Meghan Cox Gurdon, 26/27 x 2001): "Scientists at the University of Edinburgh recently found that during sexual intimacy a woman's brain releases a chemical "love potion" that alters her brain's hormonal reactions. Not only does the release of the chemical, oxytocin, create for her a bond with her mate but it appears that the more sex the couple has, the deeper her sense of commitment and love will be. Men's brain's – surprise! – do not work the same way." A woman's sense of smell has been found to be most acute at just the point in her menstrual cycle when she is most easily made pregnant (Times 26 x 2001, p. 1, reporting work by Professor Salvatore Caruso at the University of Catania, Sicily). Fromm seems to have forgotten the psychological (indeed, spiritual changes) that may commence at the very first bodily contact between a man and a young woman. Tolstoy described them delightfully in War and Peace where (Pt. III, Chap. 16), where, at a grand ball, Prince Andrew dances a waltz with the unknown débutante Natasha, her 'bosom scarcely defined':
"…she was the first pretty girl who caught his eye; but scarcely had he embraced that slender, supple figure, and felt her stirring so
close to him and smiling so near him, than the wine of her charm
rose to his head, and he felt himself revived and rejuvenated…."
Delightfully, again, a year later (Pt. V, Chap. 10), at the opera, the deserted Natasha falls for the rake, Anatole Kuragin:
"She did not know how it was that within five minutes she had come to feel herself terribly near to this man. When she turned away she feared he might seize her from behind by her bare arm and kiss her on the neck. They spoke of most ordinary things,yet she felt that they were closer to one another than she had ever been to any man. Natasha kept turning to Hélène and to her father, as if asking what it all meant…."
By contrast, with all the 'will' in the world, men and women who meet via dating agencies seldom fall in love. Notoriously, despite intense selection of partners by rational criteria, the UK television programme 'The Mating Game' struggled even to have its 'lucky' couples say they enjoyed their free week together in a hotel; and marriages seldom resulted.
4) Love's evolution-based triggers
Fromm's disparaging attitude to the possibility of learning sexual techniques and thus improving a romantic/marital relationship can hardly be blamed on him. After all, passably effective 'sex therapy' (a creative branch of 'behaviour therapy') arrived only in the 1960's. However, it is strange that Fromm was so unwilling to consider the very serious contribution that can be made to love and marriage by such simple things as a trim female appearance and a bulging male bank balance. Men need to see regular signals giving reassurance as to their partner's fidelity – signals that are not easy to arrange convincingly in a world where women go out to work. For their part, women need the feeling of security that comes not from occasional massive expenditures on mortgages but from a more constant supply of attention, kindness and tokens of continued affection. (Evolutionarily, the cave-dwelling human female did much better to seek many *small* gifts rather than occasional large donations for which, after all, she had no refrigerator.) To forget such practical contributions to the art of loving is especially strange in a psychoanalyst who is quite frank that love needs to be *practised* and prepared for by 'disciplined exercise.'
5) Physical beauty
Even the sombre Plato maintained that good looks would be a natural part of "authentic love" – though the "disciplined and cultured" lover would admittedly not go beyond kissing and fondling his young boyfriend (Republic 403a). In recent years, Scottish psychologists have shown that beauty is not an individual matter as Fromm likes to believe: rather, men possess absolute Platonic standards of beauty which allow the creation (by computer) of female images agreed to be more beautiful (on averaged ratings) than any they have yet seen. Perrett et al., 1994, record of their overlaid photos of young females: "attractive composites can be made more attractive by exaggerating the shape differences from the sample mean." The pursuit of the idea of physical beauty naturally leads on to the love of moral beauty, as Plato's Socrates explained (in The Symposium). About men, especially, John Updike (2000) has his character Gertrude declare (in his Gertrude and Claudius) "love is part of their ruthless quest for beauty" (p. 186).
6) Sex first -- Love and Happiness later
Fromm's view is:
"Sexual attraction creates, for the moment, the illusion of union; but without love this "union" leaves strangers as far apart as they were before – sometimes it makes them feel ashamed of each other, or even makes them hate each other, because when the illusion has gone they feel their estrangement even more markedly than before" (pp. 54-5).
This claim comes as near to being a testable proposition as Fromm's ideas ever do. Yet research has not been supportive. Sexually liberal couples who told American psychologists they did *not* regard love as a prerequisite for sexual intercourse were actually just as happy and stable over the subsequent two years as were couples holding more conventional views (Peplau et al., 1977): in both cases, some 35% of couples were still dating and 20% had married.
7) The barely detectable work of the will
Fromm was understandably concerned to talk up the long-term nature of love – in line with mankind's deepest aspirations if not with the sorry realities of divorce in the late-twentieth-century West. Yet it is far from clear that an emphasis on the volitional aspect of love is helpful to Fromm's endeavour. Notoriously, the work of the human will is exceptionally hard to pin down. By contrast, there is substantial determination of people by their personalities and by their previous histories of choice. By talking of love as 'an act of will', Fromm might have been thinking of the commitment of young people in 'arranged' Hindu marriages. Here, the hope is that the act of promising between comparative strangers may be followed by the growth of love. Doubtless this *can* happen, just as love *may* follow a Western pair's decision to live together; but such a development of sincere affection and erotic attraction is surely based far more often on the good sense exercised by the Hindu parents when selecting the partners and arranging the terms of the marriage. Notoriously, people can relatively easily fall in love with a partner who has a similar level of attractiveness to third parties. The happy Hindu couple's performative acts of will are only a small part of a much larger pattern of causation.
What actually is the ‘will’ of which Fromm expects so much? 'Will' seems to exist *necessarily* when processes of reason and intelligence furnish adumbrations of the passions and suggest possible strategies for achieving one's objectives. Volition is what emerges from weighing competing passions, reasons and arguments. What a person finally decides to do is a question of which way the balance tips. One cannot 'decide' to want anything; one can only *want* something (more or less 'passionately'), and then find oneself selecting the most reasonable means of achieving it. 'Will' may perhaps *keep* the scales tipped, in preference to resuming the process of reflection; but such 'obstinacy' will itself be either a reasoned or a passionate alternative to re-opening the matter that had been temporarily concluded.
So elusive (if sometimes crucial) is the work of the human will that -- unlike the mind, the heart, the soul and the spirit -- 'the will' does not receive much mention in the Bible. It was actually first introduced by St Augustine as a way of explaining how, despite supposed divine omnipotence, we are all somehow free either to accept God's revelation or to reject it. For Fromm to think the human will capable of producing love is largely mistaken. It is also dangerous, for it may lead Fromm's readers to make vain commitments in their quest for love. Fromm should have remembered Oscar Wilde:
“[Fidelity] has nothing to do with our own will. Young men want to be faithful, and are not; old men want to be faithless, and cannot: that is all one can say” (in The Picture of Dorian Gray).
The only way to make the will responsible for love would be to define 'the will' as something other than it is. An example would be when the philosopher Bishop Berkeley (1685-1753) decided that 'The soul is the will, properly speaking' and asked 'Whether Identity of Person consists not in the Will' (quoted in Warnock, 1987). Again, the twentieth-century Surrealists, André Bréton, Antonin Artaud and Max Ernst, thought of the will as energy which could be liberated through destruction; and they believed – with Adolf Hitler, in fact -- that intellect had become a 'cancer of life' which would be replaced by a new age which was based on Will (Bowden, 1992). However, while to interpret the will as 'soul' or 'energy' would make it more capable of causing love, Fromm the rationalist could never himself have agreed to see will as in any way *opposed* to intellect.
8) Man's dark side
Fromm was concerned to stress man's rational nature and its potential for good. As elsewhere in his work, he believed human reason could yield 'productive love' and triumph over the 'sick' and imperfect social systems under which people find themselves living. The problem for such pleasing optimism and for Fromm's trite homilies is that they do little to explain how human nature worked itself into such a dreadful mess in the first place. Fromm's idealism would be more convincing if it looked as if it were successfully addressing the dark and disagreeable aspects of human nature that have created the necessity for Fromm's spiritualistic moralising. As things stand, Fromm often seems as out-of-touch as is the Polonius of Shakespeare's Hamlet.
9) Instinct according to Fromm
Actually, Fromm himself was far from being resolutely averse to attributing importance to biological factors as decreed by evolutionary history. Around 1950, Fromm made a sally into speculation about necrophilia, concluding that humans have an 'anal-olfactory-hating orientation' -- supposedly characteristic of four-legged mammals and apparently demanding an obsessive sniffing of each other's bottoms. No doubt Fromm wished to pay proper homage to Freud's appreciation that there are deep-seated destructive (thanatic) as well as constructive (erotic) tendencies in human nature. Yet man is intrinsically a bipedal animal built for carrying food over long distances. The whole history of male arrangements to ensure female fidelity (notably by means of religion) probably dates back to the hunting males of northern latitudes who had to be absent from their females for days so as to provision them and their offspring. Fromm's foolish attempt to link man's nature to that of grazing quadrupeds serves only to highlight a remarkable point: even though Fromm was prepared to postulate deep, indeed animalistic bases for disgust and hate, he was not prepared to envisage a strong biological basis for love.
10) Penis envy
Fromm's 'Trotskyite' revisionism, like that of Karen Horney, focused particularly on denying Freud's claims that the human female experiences 'penis envy' and blames her 'missing penis' on her mother. Yet the idea of penis envy arguably expresses a very serious biological reality: that women want to have boy children who will for the first time 'give them a penis' by which they can breed in quantity and not just for quality. More prosaically, little girls may be well advised to envy their penis-equipped brothers – for that is indeed where any surplus maternal resources are likely to be wasted (see Badcock, 1994). In drawing her mother's attention to such wasteful expenditure on her brothers (i.e. by 'telling tales'), a little girl may have her best chance of diverting maternal resources from her brother(s) to herself. It is strange that Fromm should have been reluctant to acknowledge the specially powerful bond that exists in most cultures between mothers and their sons – at least when the son does well in early Oedipal jousting and seems worthy of maternal investment. Again, Fromm's railing against Freud's notion of the 'castration complex' needs a modern corrective. Since, in blood group studies, 10% of Western children are *not* the biological offspring of the man they call 'Daddy', many boys are indeed at risk of a serious lack of co-operation from, and indeed aggression from their local adult male as they move into adolescence. The fear which male homosexuals not uncommonly have for the vagina may be, for them, a vital part of a strategy that will steer relatively unprotected boys through adolescence without dangerous male-male conflicts over females.
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How can such a guru as Fromm have come to advise that true love is more volitional and cognitive than it is affective? Why would Fromm have wished to go beyond Plato and Freud in saying not just that the dark passions of the libido need harnessing into intelligent and cultured expression, but that it would be better for the senses and biology to be largely ignored by anyone wanting to educate others in 'the art of loving'?
A first possibility is that, at least as a young man, Fromm was personally embarrassed by the world of the instincts and senses. It is a notable feature of Fromm's thought that he sets much store by the joys of hedonistic matriarchal society. There, allegedly equal siblings bask in unconditional maternal love untroubled by prowling adult male monsters. In fact, Fromm found in the work of the Swiss historian, J. J. Bachofen (1815-87), the notion that aeons of pre-Athenian matriarchy might have left as much of a mark on the Western psyche as did the patriarchy that was to follow. (Eventually, the story goes, men created a society of male ownership to ensure their own paternity of children -- and incidentally gave themselves a rationale for the hard labour that civilization requires.) Yet Fromm was arguably too enamoured of man's supposed matriarchal evolutionary phase. This phase is actually doubted by today's anthropologists who acknowledge no present human society at all as matriarchal (i.e. allowing power, and not just property to what are called 'matrilineal' females). Fromm even forgot that Bachofen himself had deplored the blood feuding associated with matriarchy and regarded patriarchy as quite the more elevated and 'spiritual' social arrangement (Burston, 1981). As for the fantasy of co-operation between siblings, Fromm had not read enough of the first Freudian deviant, Alfred Adler (1870-1937), who thought birth order the most significant fact about individual history; and, today, Fromm's fable meets a continuing corrective in research showing the differences and rivalries that often occur between siblings (Sulloway, 1996; McGuffin et al., 2001).
It bears consideration that Fromm's idealization of matriarchy and mother-child bonding was a distraction that made him unappreciative of patriarchal sex between a security-offering male and a nubile female. Childhood pictures of Fromm show him with a distinctly pudgy mother who was in fact as overprotective as she looks (Burston, 1981). The crucial experience that awoke Fromm's interest in psychology was when, at 13, a beautiful and talented 24-year-old painter of his family's acquaintance committed suicide soon after the death of her own beloved father. This event totally amazed the young Fromm -- who never seems to have embarked upon, let alone resolved any real contest for the affection of the opposite-sex parent. Fromm's own ambitious wine merchant father would later turn up in Heidelberg to look after his son during university examinations. It may be that Fromm adopted 'spiritual values' as a way of avoiding the topic of Oedipal rivalry – though this unusual choice did not spare him a childhood which he himself called "unbearable." Whatever its origins, Fromm's unusual fascination with older women was to dominate his young adulthood.
First, in 1927, Fromm fell for and married a woman who was older than him by ten years -- his own psychoanalyst, Frieda Fromm-Reichman (as she would become known). Fromm-Reichman was a famously perceptive, empathic and nurturant woman, but the marriage soon went disastrously wrong and Fromm ended up suffering tuberculosis in a Swiss sanatorium for a year – though the couple did not actually divorce till 1940. This was perhaps the biggest romantic involvement of Fromm's life, for he was described as "immersed in grief and prayer" when Frieda finally died in 1957.
Fromm's second known affair, in the USA, with Karen Horney, involved an even larger, fifteen-year age gap between him and the caring older woman who had helped him escape from Nazi Germany. The relationship disintegrated amidst considerable animosity after Fromm undertook a psychoanalysis of Horney's 17-year-old daughter. Horney even tried to persuade the American psychoanalytic community to restrict Fromm's practice as a lay psychoanalyst. Two further marriages took the form of Fromm looking after a German-Jewish arthritic mother of a seventeen-year-old son; and subsequently, after his second wife's demise in 1952, being himself looked after till his own death by a third wife, from Alabama, whom he married in 1953.
Fromm was handsome and, after his 1941 bestseller, he was a rich man; but he remained childless and his best friend was the notoriously homosexual psychoanalyst Harry Stack Sullivan. A further hint that Fromm maintained a childish and less than fully libidinal relationship to women comes from his reluctance to break with Freud in his psychological theorizing. Though Fromm deplored Freud's simplistic biologizing, he never wanted to make the kind of break with Freud that Karen Horney had made. From preferred not to claim his 'birthright', just as he seems never to have challenged his own biological father. In the 1930's, Fromm said "I feel like a pupil and translator"; and he liked to describe himself as providing no more than the "loyal opposition" to Freud. Nor was Fromm much of a fighter in sibling competition with other Freudians. Though he once complained privately of Wilhelm Reich's "pathological self-love and arrogance", he generally stayed stranded on the sidelines of psychoanalytic debates. He preferred this position, says Burston (1991), to "discussions with posturing illiterates."
There is certainly something odd about a man with such a history wanting to counsel others in 'the art of loving'; and the mystery deepens when it is seen that Fromm counsels that erotic love needs a firm basis in *brotherly* love -- a phenomenon which the singleton Fromm had never himself experienced. The most likely explanation is that Fromm had never completed – perhaps had never even begun -- his Oedipal work. Arguably, he remained enthralled lifelong by an idealized, spiritualized matriarchal dreamworld which he could conceive to involve no challenge to male authority. It is perhaps no accident that Fromm thought love 'a decision, a judgement, a promise': for mothers do notoriously make big investment decisions, committing some infants to death and others to a lifetime of support far greater than any father would unconditionally bestow (see Hrdy, 1999). A man can afford to treat children according to his feelings – perhaps especially according to whether he senses a genetic affinity. A man's wrong decisions can always be rectified by him having more children. By contrast, a human mother always knows her children are carrying her own genes. Thus her love is automatic and the only question for her is that of how much to invest – of how much, in all reason and judgment, to promise to each child. Perhaps his lack of a truly romantic and hard-fought relation with his own mother explains why Fromm concluded love was a decision.
A second possible reason for Fromm's aversion to biology and its animalistic facts of red-blooded-male-with-younger-female life is related to Fromm's wish to tell a plausible story of German anti-Semitism and the rise of Hitler. From 1933, a key preoccupation for the Marxists of the Frankfurt School was to explain why the German working class had let down the Communist Party and voted for Hitler. Fromm was a key figure in this intellectual salvage work, for in 1930 he had identified 'authoritarianism' in German workers. Unfortunately, there was a problem: there was plenty of punitive militarism, conformism, "sado-masochism" and contempt for democracy to be found in at least 10% of workers who voted on the *left.* This empirical result was altogether unacceptable to Horkheimer and other luminaries of the Frankfurt School; so they prevented its publication. As the School's millionaire moved it to New York, work on authoritarianism continued to tiptoe around the question of 'authoritarianism of the left.' Faced with this rejection of his finding, Fromm took the easy way out and spent his time lamenting that modern man was prone to 'escape from freedom' by choosing simplistic dogmas and authority figures. Rather than ask about individual differences (let alone about the low intelligence levels of those who find totalitarian ideas attractive), Fromm offered a vague set of anxieties about personality development that could apply to just about anyone. Astonishingly, Fromm came up with this gurgle when, across the Atlantic, the British were actually fighting for Europe's freedom at the cost of their Empire.
In fact, there is a huge difficulty about why so many Germans followed Hitler. This difficulty has never been resolved by any psychological analysis and it is hardly illumined by Daniel Goldhagen's (1997) much lauded new claim that Germans of the 1930's were, quite simply, frothing anti-Semites. (Rather than indict 'the usual suspects' of German 'authoritarianism', 'sadism' or 'conformity', Goldhagen postulates a quite specific and virulent German hatred of Jews. Goldhagen's claim is that ordinary German soldiers and police positively enjoyed baiting and tormenting Jews and took personal pride in such activities – sending back to their own relatives photos of elderly Polish Jews whose beards they had set alight or whom they had made to skip and jump in the streets.) It is certainly true that German people were misled into putting their country in the hands of an uneducated ex-corporal who would govern lazily, tolerate terror, dismantle normal government and within ten years – by refusing to surrender to the Western allies -- abandon what he by then thought his 'traitorous' Volk to the mercies of Russia's Red Army. Yet why did the Germans do it? Until 1917, anti-Semitism had been more of a Russian speciality – as it continues to be today. What was the German problem?
What Fromm could not mention, despite his intimate familiarity with the matter, was the fact of race. It was not just that Fromm was philosophically averse to the concept – saying when breaking with Judaism in 1927 that he "just didn't want to participate in any division of the human race, whether religious or political." There was also an abiding practical problem for him, as for other Jews. The problem for Germany's Jews was that the international leaders of their race, religion and nation had betrayed the country which had taken in so many Jews after the ferocious Moscow pogrom of 1881. In 1917, seeing the opportunity for a Zionist homeland in Palestine, international Jewry had used its financial influence and contacts in Washington to bring America into the First World War. The Jewish price for this help was Britain's Balfour Declaration of 1917, promising to allow Diaspora Jews into Palestine. Having thus brought America to the aid of Britain and France at a desperate time, Jews could hardly expect an easy ride in a defeated Germany lurching through years of hyperinflation. Yet Fromm feels unable even to *mention* the possibility that German anti-Semitism might have had as rational a basis as other enmities between Western nations and between ethnic groups.
Fromm was unable to face the possibility that the elite of his race had, very understandably, used its financial muscle to buy territory in Palestine at the cost of dispossessing Arabs (who were uniquely betrayed by Britain -- which had used them to help fight Germany's ally, Turkey). Fromm found it easier to avoid any talk of real, deep-seated differences between groups and, for good measure, between individuals. Once more, Fromm was shutting himself off from a good part of human behaviour, history and psychology so as to maintain a left-wing illusion; and he did this even when he knew the left was not actually prepared to publish his own empirical results. Fromm was indeed more of a Marxist than a Freudian. It is no wonder that Freud (1932) issued Fromm and kindred neo-Freudians with the following rebuke to their insistence on the importance of socio-economic factors:
"Mankind never lives entirely in the present. The past, the tradition of the race and the people, lives on in the ideologies of the super-ego, and yields only slowly to the influences of the present."
--
If Fromm was indeed a timid and mother-fixated man who was incapable of acknowledging the competitive stratagems of his own kith and kin, a way opens up to understanding his contentless religious piety. This – even more than Fromm's de-realized version of the art of loving – was intended by him as his culminating gift to the world. After discussing such phenomena as the maternal bond, the (surely unlikely) phenomenon of egalitarian brotherly love, the supposedly 'illusion-avoiding' decision making of erotic love, and self love (a good idea, thinks Fromm, if maturely practised), The Art of Loving treats readers to a passage on 'the love of God.' Here, Fromm summarizes world religious history as a progress from dependence on Mother, through deference to Father, to contracts with Father and the final death of Father altogether. In this "negative theology," mature atheistic love of the truly un-nameable God, 'Yahweh', is to involve the continuing elaboration of rule systems which eventually require no divine intervention. Textual analysis and scholarly argument will work towards a utopia run by lawyers – rather as in the weekly deliberations on the Talmud at the better synagogues in the typical Western metropolis. As Meister Eckhart had once put it, "God and I: we are one" – a happy notion for the utopian law-maker even if it is not so immediately applicable to people of mediocre IQ.
Many psychologists of today could doubtless settle for some such version of religiosity. Nevertheless, it is actually remarkable that a proposal to make human law-making the central task of religion should have emanated from a psychologist. Where, in Fromm's scheme, is that account of the realities of human nature which any but the most frenzied law-maker is going to need? Where is the Christian injunction to examine and purify the heart – an injunction which deepened Socrates' advice to 'Know thyself' and which was eventually pursued to telling effect by Shakespeare and Freud? (Freud's own postulation of repression of memories has lately been vindicated in experimental work: 'deliberate forgetting' is possible and persists even when subjects are paid to recall verbal associations which they have successfully inhibited – Anderson & Green, 2001.). Christianity insisted on examining the heart's dark places and of ridding the heart of hypocrisy (I Peter ii 1) and "double-mindedness" (James iv 8); and it threw in God's love and forgiveness as a spectacular therapeutic stimulus to emendation of basic personality and outlook. Whereas Fromm wants his putative lovers to make 'a decision, a judgment, a promise', the New Testament is wary about judgments ('Judge not that ye be not judged' – Matthew vii 1; 'Judge nothing before the appointed time; wait till the Lord comes' – I Corinthians iv 4). Likewise, Jesus counselled against taking oaths ('…do not swear' – James v 12) -- preferring a change of heart to any amount of public protestation and politicking. Contrary to the expiatory tendencies of most religions, Christianity required a purification that was not to be arranged by priests or purchased from pardoners, let alone soaked up gradually from the systemic socio-economic changes for which the Trotskyite Fromm so much hoped. Rather than attempt the classic religious task of aligning the heart in accordance with the demands of a contract-making father-figure God, Fromm prefers to carry on as if such a task were not fundamental to Western consciousness and civilization.
In his own life, Fromm had suddenly, in 1927, rejected the rabbinical aspirations for him of his two devout parents (both of whose own parents were descended from long lines of rabbis). With the help of older women, Fromm had then embarked on a philosophical voyage that saw him pay homage in turn to all the trendy ideologies that ever appealed to mid-twentieth-century Western liberal-left intellectuals. Sadly, along the way, Fromm needed to deny that sensual love, individual biology and racial identity were of any particular importance. Here was a serious thinker and writer who was actually trying to improve the human condition *without* using psychology. He maintained what Burston (1991) calls "a Kantian insistence that valid norms for all humanity can be arrived at through 'reason' irrespective of prevailing norms and practices" – and irrespective of empirical evidence about human nature. Fromm would have done better to remember the words of Confucius:
"I have never seen anyone who loved virtue as much as sex."
Or the words of the playwright Anton Chekhov:
"The most important thing in family life is love, sexual attraction, being 'one flesh.' All else is unreliable and boring, however ingeniously we may rationalize it."
Fromm's British psychological predecessor, William McDougall, had put such matters well when he himself was in his mid-fifties (1927):
"[Our emotional or active tendencies] are the dynamic foundations of the whole structure of personality. They rough-hew our ends, shape them how we may. …[For example, sex is] not the source of all the manifestations of love between man and woman; but it is indisputably the ground tone of the chords of that harmony."
McDougall here articulated what the West learned in its progressive development of Christianity's promise of love. Fromm's artistic successor, John Updike (2000), put the point more graphically when he envisaged a passionate mediaeval affair, conducted at a retreat outside Elsinore, between King-to-be Claudius and Queen Gertrude – the illicit affair that was eventually to give rise to Prince Hamlet's sullen but famous disaffection:
"[Gertrude] would have lain down in warm mud for [Claudius], even the mud of the pigsty, to enter the exaltation she found in his brute love. He was not always gentle nor always rough; he maintained the small surprises of the seducer's art, which yet she had to feel arose involuntarily in him, to impart movement to the great element in herself beyond the control of her will."
Fromm, whose very name means 'pious' in German, did his best to take such captivation and enchantment out of love, along with much of infatuation, rapture and ecstasy. Thus did he arguably hide from himself, as from his father, his own Oedipal yearning. But, after the last thirty years in which sex has at last achieved its proper, central place in discussions of human happiness, few are likely to wish to return to a self-made and Marx-based mysticism of 1926-56, however civilized and well-intentioned. Fromm's name would be little remembered today were it not for his choice of an eye-catching, but misleading title for his 1956 book.
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References:
ANDERSON, M. C. & GREEN, C. (2001). 'Suppressing unwanted memories by executive control.' Nature 410, 15 iii, pp. 366-9.
BADCOCK, Christopher (1994). PsychoDarwinism: The New Synthesis of Darwin and Freud. London : HarperCollins.
BOWDEN, Jonathan (1992). Sade. London : Egotist.
BRAND, C. R. (1997). 'Hans Eysenck's personality dimensions: their number and nature.' In H. Nyborg, The Scientific Study of Human Nature: Tribute to Hans J. Eysenck at Eighty. Oxford : Pergamon.
BURSTON, Daniel (1991). The Legacy of Erich Fromm, Harvard University Press
FARRAR, Steve (2001). 'Immune system wins by a nose', Times Higher 9 iii, p. 56.
FREUD, S. (1932). New Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis, Standard Edition, vol. 22, p. 67
GOLDHAGEN, Daniel (1997). Hitler's Willing Executioners. New York.
HRDY, Sarah Blaffer (1999). Mother Nature. London : Chatto & Windus.
McDOUGALL, William (1927). Character and the Conduct of Life. London : Methuen.
McGUFFIN, P, RILEY, B. & PLOMIN, R. (2001). 'Toward behavioral genomics.' Science 291, 1232-3, 16 ii.
PEPLAU, L. A., RUBIN, A. & HILL, C. (1977). 'Sexual intimacy in dating relationships.' Journal of Social Issues 33, 86-109.
PERRETT, D. I., MAY, K. A., & YOSHIKAWA, S. (1994). 'Facial shape and judgments of female attractiveness.' Nature 368, 17 iii, pp. 239-42.
SULLOWAY, F. J. (1996). Born to Rebel. New York : Little Brown.
UPDIKE, John (2000). Gertrude and Claudius. London : Hamish Hamilton.
WARNOCK, G. J. (1987). 'Berkeley.' In R.Gregory, The Oxford Companion to the Mind. Oxford University Press.
FINIS
Websites for more on Fromm:
uta.edu/huma/illuminations/kell9.htm
ship.edu/~cgboeree/fromm.html
erichfromm.de/english/life/life_bio2.html
For a stern critique of Fromm, finding him 'unscientific, self-contradictory and overly ambitious in his aspirations':
SCHAAR, John H. (1961). Escape from Authority: the Perspectives of Erich Fromm. New York : Harper.
