0.5 Karen horney and erich fromm  (Page 18/23)

After his break with Horney (both personally and professionally), Fromm married his second wife and spent some time teaching at Yale University. A few years later his wife died, Fromm soon married for the third time, and that marriage lasted until his death. Shortly after his third marriage, Fromm moved to Mexico City, Mexico, where he lived for the next 24 years. He joined the medical faculty at the National Autonomous University of Mexico, and co-founded a Mexican psychoanalytic society. In 1956, he published his acclaimed book The Art of Loving (Fromm, 1956). He taught a seminar with D. T. Suzuki, and their friendship led to the publication of Zen Buddhism&Psychoanalysis (Suzuki, Fromm, and De Martino, 1960). He also conducted important cross-cultural studies in a Mexican peasant village, resulting in the publication of Social Character in a Mexican Village (Fromm&Maccoby, 1970),

In 1966, Fromm suffered a heart attack and began spending more time back in Europe. In 1974, he sold his home in Mexico and settled permanently in Switzerland (where he had been spending his summers). After a series of three more heart attacks, Fromm died in 1980 (Funk, 1982, 2000).

Placing Fromm in Context: Individuality in Relation to Society

Erich Fromm was a colleague and close personal friend of Karen Horney for many years. He shared her interest in the role of culture in personality, and was even more interested in the interactions between the individual and society as a whole. Fromm viewed societies as forces that lead to alienation from a more natural, primitive way of life. As a result, freedom and individuality actually create psychological problems, as we become disconnected from our immediate social groups (such as the family or local community). This often leads to unfortunate consequences, such as seeking fellowship within a society at the expense of one’s regard for self and others, providing a framework within which dictatorships can develop (as individuals completely surrender their freedom).

Fromm examined and combined many different interests in his career, including philosophy, economics, and psychology, and he felt that such a combination of interests was essential for the study of psychology to have real meaning. In one of the longest projects of his life, he and a number of colleagues applied a unique form of “psychoanalysis” to an entire village in rural Mexico. He then described how an understanding of social character can lead to an understanding of individual character, providing guidance for future considerations on planning social development during times of dramatic socioeconomic change.

Our Relationship to Society

Fromm was a prolific writer, whose interests included psychoanalysis, economics, religion, ethics, culture, and societal systems. He evaluated both Freud the man and Freud’s theories in Sigmund Freud’s Mission (Fromm, 1978) and Greatness and Limitations of Freud’s Thought (Fromm, 1980). His religious works include such provocative titles as The Dogma of Christ (Fromm, 1955b) and You Shall Be as Gods (Fromm, 1966). He addressed the person’s place within society in books such as The Sane Society (1955a) and The Revolution of Hope (1968). And a collection of his works on gender psychology, Love, Sexuality, and Matriarchy , was edited by Rainer Funk (1977). The unifying theme throughout Fromm’s writings is each person’s relationship to society, which he addressed most directly in Escape from Freedom (Fromm, 1941).