Malignant Aggression (Fromm)

Erich Fromm (1900–1980), a practicing psychoanalyst and a critical theorist, who fled Hitler’s Germany in 1933 and had a lifetime commitment to stopping war and militarism, discussed malignant aggression in many of his books, but especially in The Heart of Man: Its Genius for Good and Evil (1964) and 7 years later – in his more analytical and detailed Anatomy of Human Destructiveness (1973). He is known as a Freudian revisionist, rejecting the idea that malignant aggression is rooted in Freud’s “death instinct” and the human physical makeup. Consequently, Fromm searches for alternative general causes of aggression in light of his more dynamic theory of human nature and character development. This allows him to distinguish benign aggression from malignant aggression.

Most aggressiveness is benign, “biologically adaptive,” and life-affirming at root, (contact sports, fighting in self-defense, etc.). (See the “Benign Aggression (Fromm)” entry in this Encyclopedia.) Malignant aggression,...