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BEYOND THE CHAINS OF ILLUSION (182 pp.)-Erich Fromm-Trident Press...
...Erich Fromm is a world-famous psychoanalyst whose interests of late have had little to do with psychoanalysis. On lecture podiums and on television, in books and magazines, he has called for an overhaul of U.S. society because, he argues, it is maiming the individual and steering the world toward war and chaos. Partly on the basis of Fromm's reputation as a psychoanalyst, many people are taking him seriously as an expert on history, morals, politics and military strategy...
Just how shaky these credentials are can be seen from Fromm's latest book, an account of his own intellectual devel opment and a paean of praise to Karl Marx at the expense of Sigmund Freud. In comparing the two thinkers, Fromm praises both for breaking new ground and taking a "dynamic" approach to human behavior. But while Freud uncovered the "individual unconscious," Marx revealed the "social unconscious," the forces at work changing society. Fromm came to a heretical conclusion for a psychoanalyst: "Marx is a figure of world historical significance with whom Freud cannot even be compared...
Messianic Tastes. Fromm has always found Freud too pessimistic for his taste. In fact, he has broken radically with Freud, though he is still euphemistically known as a "Freudian revisionist." Freud saw man as the prisoner of his primitive drives; Fromm thinks he can be infinitely shaped by society. Freud thought every life was blighted by the childhood Oedipus complex; Fromm sees nothing worse in childhood than a healthy rebellion against parental authority. Fromm finds Marx much more congenial than Freud because he promises so much more, once the socialist millennium has arrived: a free and unfettered individual, brimful...
...reasonably perceptive reader might have suspected from Fromm's earlier writings that he was spellbound by Marx. Fromm has a secure place in American middle-class society; he teaches at New York University and is required reading at innumerable colleges. But Marx apparently has taught him to believe that middle-class life is rotten to the core...