230 Part II Psychodynamic Theories
observed firsthand. He was sure that the British and French were equally irrational,
and once again he was struck by a troubling question: How could normally ratio-
nal and peaceful people become so driven by national ideologies, so intent on
killing, so ready to die? “When the war ended in 1918, I was a deeply troubled
young man who was obsessed by the question of how war was possible, by the
wish to understand the irrationality of human mass behavior, by a passionate desire
for peace and international understanding” (Fromm, 1962, p. 9).
During adolescence, Fromm was deeply moved by the writings of Freud and
Karl Marx, but he was also stimulated by differences between the two. As he
studied more, he began to question the validity of both systems. “My main interest
was clearly mapped out. I wanted to understand the laws that govern the life of
the individual man, and the laws of society” (Fromm, 1962, p. 9).
After the war, Fromm became a socialist, although at that time, he refused
to join the Socialist Party. Instead, he concentrated on his studies in psychology,
philosophy, and sociology at the University of Heidelberg, where he received his
PhD in sociology at either age 22 or 25. [Fromm was such a private person that
his biographers do not agree on many facts of his life (Hornstein, 2000).]
Still not confident that his training could answer such troubling questions as
the suicide of the young woman or the insanity of war, Fromm turned to psycho-
analysis, believing that it promised answers to questions of human motivation not
offered in other fields. From 1925 until 1930 he studied psychoanalysis, first in
Munich, then in Frankfurt, and finally at the Berlin Psychoanalytic Institute, where
he was analyzed by Hanns Sachs, a student of Freud. Although Fromm never met
Freud, most of his teachers during those years were strict adherents of Freudian
theory (Knapp, 1989).
In 1926, the same year that he repudiated Orthodox Judaism, Fromm married
Frieda Reichmann, his analyst, who was more than 10 years his senior. Reichmann
would later obtain an international reputation for her work with schizophrenic
patients. G. P. Knapp (1989) claimed that Reichmann was clearly a mother figure
to Fromm and that she even resembled his mother. Gail Hornstein (2000) added that
Fromm seemed to have gone directly from being his mother’s darling to relationships
with a number of older women who doted on him. In any event, the marriage of
Fromm and Fromm-Reichmann was not a happy one. They separated in 1930 but
were not divorced until much later, after both had emigrated to the United States.
In 1930, Fromm and several others founded the South German Institute for
Psychoanalysis in Frankfurt, but with the Nazi threat becoming more intense, he
soon moved to Switzerland where he joined the newly founded International Insti-
tute of Social Research in Geneva. In 1933, he accepted an invitation to deliver a
series of lectures at the Chicago Psychoanalytic Institute. The following year he
emigrated to the United States and opened a private practice in New York City.
In both Chicago and New York, Fromm renewed his acquaintance with
Karen Horney, whom he had known casually at the Berlin Psychoanalytic Institute.
Horney, who was 15 years older than Fromm, eventually became a strong mother
figure and mentor to him (Knapp, 1989). Fromm joined Horney’s newly formed
Association for the Advancement of Psychoanalysis (AAP) in 1941. Although he
and Horney had been lovers, by 1943 dissension within the association had made
them rivals. When students requested that Fromm, who did not hold an MD degree,