German-American psychoanalyst, professor, author and social philosopher. Fromm emphasized the role of social and cultural pressures on modern man. After years of writing and lecturing in the U.S., Fromm’s philosophy came to be influential on university campuses across the country.
He was raised by his father Naphtali, a wine merchant and his mother, Rosa Krause Fromm, in Frankfurt. In a devout Jewish family he went to school and studied Spinoza, Goethe, Karl Marx and Freud. At 14, he was shocked at the brutality of WW I and turned to pacifism.
In 1922, he obtained his doctor of philosophy degree from the University of Heidelberg. In Munich and Berlin, he trained as a psychoanalyst from 1923 to 1924. In 1925, he began his psychoanalysis practice and began to obtain a notable reputation in the field. At 26, he decided to stop practicing his strict adherence to the Jewish faith. With his growing reputation in the field, Fromm lectured at the University of Frankfurt from 1929-1932. The Chicago Psychoanalytical Institute arranged for his visit to the U.S. in 1933 and the following year he decided to leave his homeland permanently and become a U.S. citizen.
Fromm was one of many German intellectuals who saw the risk of Nazi imprisonment with the rise of Hitler’s political power in Germany.
In 1934, Fromm connected with Columbia University and Bennington College in Vermont. Despite his reputation at home, he found the psychological establishment in the U.S. difficult and closed to his merits as a leading psychoanalyst. Venturing into uncharted areas, he presented material considered unorthodox and controversial in his lectures and writings. An early disciple of Freud, Fromm rejected his emphasis on individual experiences and family relationships. A deeply religious man all his life, he challenged Freud’s disciples who argued for the dropping of any moral or religious barriers that limited pleasure for an individual.
In 1941, he began the publishing of his best-selling books with “Escape From Freedom.” It examined Western man as a product of his culture, trapped in an industrial society cut off from his real nature. The industrial world created isolation and feelings of insignificance and doubts about life’s meaning for the modern man.
He taught psychology at Michigan State University from 1958-1962. His book, “Sane Society,” dealt with the alienation of man in a consumer-oriented society in a nuclear world. Because of this book, he helped to organize the National Committee for a Sane Nuclear Policy in 1957. His critics harshly reviewed his books, feeling that his propensity was to blame capitalism for mankind’s neuroses and anxieties.
Fromm’s first marriage was to Frieda Reichman on 6/16/1926. This marriage ended in a divorce and on 7/24/1944 he married Henny Gurland who later died, 1952. His third marriage was to Annis Freeman on 12/18/1953. They lived in a modern stone and glass house in Cuernavaca, Mexico and later moved to his retirement home in Muralto, Switzerland. In his leisure time, he enjoyed reading the Bible and the Talmud.
In his retirement, Fromm’s works became influential on university campuses across the United States. His admirers were university students and professors from other academic fields creating a Fromm cult following. He kept current with trends in the psychological field, criticizing colleagues behaving as high priests of the society. Fromm believed psychologists contributed to the dehumanization process of society by preaching conformity to the existing industrial and bureaucratic civilization. He became a prominent member of the peace movement in the ’60s. He died of a heart attack on 3/18/1980 at his home in Muralto, Switzerland.
Link to Wikipedia biography