Erikh Fromm

ERICH SELIGMANN FROMM was a German-American psychologist and philosopher. He based his work on the postulate of the social conditioning of the human psyche, and in many places his position echoes the anthropological works of K. Marx. He developed a psychotherapeutic method of “humanistic psychoanalysis,” intended to harmonize relations between humankind, nature, and society.

Erich Fromm was born on March 23, 1900, in Frankfurt am Main, which at the time was part of the German Empire. He was the only child in a family of Orthodox Jews. Two great-grandfathers and his paternal grandfather were rabbis, and his maternal uncle was a well-known Talmudic scholar. The family life, however, was determined both by extreme religiosity and by the commercial occupation typical of most Frankfurt Jews. Fromm himself described his childhood as two lives in two worlds: the world of faith and the world of trade.

According to his own account, the future psychotherapist first began to think about the meaning of life after a very bitter event. A young woman, a friend of the Fromm family, took her own life. The teenager was deeply shaken by the fact that, by all accounts, the suicide had everything needed for happiness. Yet happiness was somehow absent.

At the age of thirteen, after his bar mitzvah, Erich began studying the Talmud on his own. A year later, the First World War broke out. The mood in society changed sharply. Peaceful, balanced people began bloodthirstily calling for calamities to fall on the heads of enemies whom they had only recently not even regarded as enemies. It was no accident that suicide and aggression became Fromm’s subjects of study as a psychologist and sociologist.

During 14 years of study, Erich was successively drawn to socialist ideas, humanist philosophy, and Hasidism. Alongside sacred books, he also studied secular sciences. In 1918, Erich Fromm entered Goethe University in his native city and spent two semesters there studying law. In 1919, he spent the summer semester at Heidelberg University, where he transferred to study sociology. Among Fromm’s teachers were such well-known professors as Heinrich Rickert, Alfred Weber (the brother of the philosopher Max Weber), and Karl Jaspers himself