5 :: SOCIAL THEORY SINCE FREUD
TRAVERSING SOCIAL IMAGINARIES
through which the economic situation exerts its...influence on the individual’s psyche’
(Fromm, 1932:483). Fromm contends that the family implants regression at the heart
of subjectivity, sustains economic conditions as ideology, and infuses perceptions of
the self as submissive, self-effacing and powerless. The central message of Fromm’s
early work is that the destructive effects of late capitalism are not only centred in
economic mechanisms and institutions, but involve the anchoring of domination
within the inner life and psychodynamic struggles of each individual.
As the 1930s progressed, Fromm became increasingly sceptical of orthodox
Freudianism. He strongly criticized Freud’s notion of the death drive for its biological
reductionism, and argued that it only served to legitimate at a theoretical level the
destructive and aggressive tendencies of capitalism. Significantly, Fromm also
became influenced by neo-Freudian analysts—such as Harry Stack Sullivan and
Karen Homey—who stressed larger social and cultural factors in the constitution of
selfhood. This emphasis on cultural contributions to identity- formation was
underscored by Fromm in his major books, Escape from Freedom (1941) and The Sane
Society (1956), both of which argued the idea of an essential ‘nature of man’, a nature
repressed and distorted by capitalist patterns of domination.
Although Fromm’s early studies on the integration of individuals into capitalism were
broadly accepted by other members of the Frankfurt School, his subsequent, more
sociological diagnosis of an essential human nature twisted out of shape by
capitalism was strongly rejected. Marcuse, for example, charged Fromm (and other
neo-Freudian revisionists) with undoing the critical force of Freud’s most important
ideas, such as the unconscious, repression and infantile sexuality. According to
Marcuse, Fromm’s revisionism underwrites the smooth functioning of the ego only by
displacing the dislocating nature of the unconscious. Marcuse (1956:240–1) sums up
the central point in the following way:
Whereas Freud, focusing on the vicissitudes of the primary drives,
discovered society in the most concealed layer of the genus and
individual man, the revisionists, aiming at the reified, ready-made
form rather than at the origin of the societal institutions and
relations, fail to comprehend what these institutions and relations
have done to the personality that they are supposed to fulfil.Fromm’s attempt to add sociological factors to psychoanalysis, says Marcuse, results
in a false political optimism as well as a liquidation of what is truly revolutionary in
Freud: the discovery of the repressed unconscious.