Radical Humanist Psychoanalysis

Abstract

In the earliest part of Fromm’s career, the time from which he cofounded the Frankfurt Psychoanalytic Institute to his emigration to the United States along with the Institut für Sozialforschung, his work had focused primarily on the development of a psychoanalytic social psychology, which could be used in historical materialist analysis. All throughout this period, it is clear that he adhered to what was a more or less orthodox Freudian position characterized by the understanding of the individual as driven by “libido,” “libidinal strivings,” “instincts,” etc. His works during this period were invariably concerned with the social application of psychoanalysis and with the conceptual preparation necessary for this application to occur. What was increasingly clear in these writings is that, through his repeated drawing out of the implicit and explicit constructions of Freudian theory that allow, and even demand the social extension that he proposes, the logic of Fromm’s own argument seemed to point ever more clearly at the insuf- ficiency of that theory itself.¹ By the time of the publication of Escape from Freedom, Freud’s failure to, as Fromm saw it, adequately acknowledge the importance of social relations, social structure, and wider society beyond the family, narrowly conceived, is taken as one facet of a deeper failure: namely, the inadequate conception of relatedness per se. In particular, Fromm took issue with what he saw as Freud’s relatively denuded account of human moti- vation and its base in the flawed philosophical and physiological theories of his teachers.