Feist−Feist: Theories of
Personality, Seventh
EditionII. Psychodynamic
Theories- Fromm: Humanistic
Psychoanalysis
(^196) © The McGraw−Hill
Companies, 2009
him, Fromm, along with Harry Stack Sullivan, Clara Thompson, and several other
members, quit the association and immediately made plans to begin an alternative
organization (Quinn, 1987). In 1946, this group established the William Alanson
White Institute of Psychiatry, Psychoanalysis, and Psychology, with Fromm chairing
both the faculty and the training committee.
In 1944, Fromm married Henny Gurland, a woman two years younger than
Fromm and whose interest in religion and mystical thought furthered Fromm’s own
inclinations toward Zen Buddhism. In 1951, the couple moved to Mexico for a more
favorable climate for Gurland, who suffered from rheumatoid arthritis. Fromm
joined the faculty at the National Autonomous University in Mexico City, where he
established a psychoanalytic department at the medical school. After his wife died in
1952, he continued to live in Mexico and commuted between his home in Cuer-
navaca and the United States, where he held various academic positions, including
professor of psychology at Michigan State University from 1957 to 1961 and adjunct
professor at New York University from 1962 to 1970. While in Mexico, he met Annis
Freeman, whom he married in 1953. In 1968, Fromm suffered a serious heart attack
and was forced to slow down his busy schedule. In 1974 and still ill, he and his wife
moved to Muralto, Switzerland, where he died March 18, 1980, a few days short of
his 80th birthday.
What kind of person was Erich Fromm? Apparently, different people saw him
in quite different ways. Hornstein (2000) listed a number of opposing traits that have
been used to describe his personality. According to this account, Fromm was au-
thoritarian, gentle, pretentious, arrogant, pious, autocratic, shy, sincere, phony, and
brilliant.
Fromm began his professional career as a psychotherapist using orthodox psy-
choanalytic technique, but after 10 years he became “bored” with the Freudian ap-
proach and developed his own more active and confrontational methods (Fromm,
1986, 1992; Sobel, 1980). Over the years, his cultural, social, economic, and psy-
chological ideas have attained a wide audience. Among his best-known books are
Escape from Freedom(1941), Man for Himself(1947), Psychoanalysis and Religion
(1950), The Sane Society(1955), The Art of Loving(1956), Marx’s Concept of Man
(1961), The Heart of Man(1964), The Anatomy of Human Destructiveness(1973),
To Have or Be(1976), and For the Love of Life(1986).
Fromm’s theory of personality borrows from myriad sources and is, perhaps,
the most broadly based theory in this book. Landis and Tauber (1971) listed five im-
portant influences on Fromm’s thinking: (1) the teachings of the humanistic rabbis;
(2) the revolutionary spirit of Karl Marx; (3) the equally revolutionary ideas of Sig-
mund Freud; (4) the rationality of Zen Buddhism as espoused by D. T. Suzuki; and
(5) the writings of Johann Jakob Bachofen (1815–1887) on matriarchal societies.
Fromm’s Basic Assumptions
Fromm’s most basic assumption is that individual personality can be understood
only in the light of human history. “The discussion of the human situation must
precede that of personality, [and] psychology must be based on an anthropologic-
philosophical concept of human existence” (Fromm, 1947, p. 45).
190 Part II Psychodynamic Theories