Book Review: The Fear of Freedom

This is essentially a book of its time: a psycho-historical text within the Freudo-Marxist genre, popular in Western Europe in the two decades or so preceding the second world war, and a component part of Fromm's overall project to combine the psychology of Freud with the social theory of Marx. Fromm's central thesis, true to Marx's dictum, is that individual (superstructural) consciousness derives from social infrastructures. The text is historically grounded as both a treatise on human freedom, which can be read within the existentialist tradition, and as a formal indictment of European fascism in the 1930s and 40s.

The first chapter, setting the scene for the theme of the book, clarifies the existential axiom that human nature is partly biologically and socially fixed. Fromm marries Marxist and Freudian themes in his argument that individual and group structures of consciousness, biologically driven, are shaped and checked by dynamic adaptation to the social and production and distribution arrangements of a given society at a given time. The resultant interaction of economic, psychological and ideological factors gives rise to corporate and individual consciousness.

Having set the scene, Fromm's next task is to analyse the meaning of freedom by deconstructing the impact of aspects of European culture from the late Middle Ages and his own time. He draws stark parallels between the period of the Reformation and mid-twentieth century Europe, in terms of the ambiguous nature of freedom in both eras. At neither time could the individual cope with his or her own freedom because of a culturally-intelligible sense of unworthiness, paving the way for a rise in charismatic authority submission to which facilitated an escape from existential anxiety.

In support of this, Fromm's first case study explores the principles of freedom and morality inherent in the rise of Protestantism. During the Reformation, Luther enabled the expression of middle class individualistic hostility to the Catholic Church - a previously secure monolith. This coincided with, and contributed to, the burgeoning ideological and lived experience of Rationalism. The consequent ascendancy of the individual as an isolated entity - in significant ways for the first time - foregrounded the importance of ownership of property in the development of early forms of capitalism.

Social pressure resulted in the experience of feeling less of an individual in proportion to one's relative lack of property, where property was defined as material possessions and power -including the power of a man within his own immediate social group, obeyed by his wife and family. This new middle class appropriated Protestantism, as its inherent individualism signified human autonomy and dignity. However, freedom became a problematic experience as a result of its religious concepts, particularly the notion of a merciless God who has sentenced some of mankind to eternal damnation through no fault of their own, with the correlative concept that man is inherently evil and depends on God's grace.

The negative aspect of this freedom was the isolation and powerlessness that it gave to man, making it a burden and a danger. Fromm argues that the middle classes then, as in Hitler's Germany, displaced their resultant fear - reworked as moral indignation - on to those who seemed to have the means to enjoy life.

Although a temporary solution, this only served to reinforce the experience of isolation and powerlessness. In the psychology of Nazism this solution gave a middle class, disaffected in their own country prior to the Third Reich, a short-term position within which to feel less isolated and alone, with people above to respect and people below to despise. Thus, the Reformation is linked with Fascism in the overall thesis that freedom has a twofold meaning for Fromm's contemporary man: he has been freed from traditional authorities (eg the Catholic church and disadvantaging economic structures) and has become an individual, but is isolated and powerless at the same time. Because societal infrastructure -broadly in the form of the State - undermines his freedom and threatens him, it makes him ready for submission to new kinds of bondage.

Man's inability to cope with his own freedom makes him embrace psychological adjustments/modes of escape. Fromm suggests several of those including authoritarianism, or the sacrifice of the weak self to a strong power, and the related mode of escape, automaton conformity; to cease to be oneself, sacrificing this for a social role already culturally available.

As a logical consequence to the above, Fromm finally explores the illusory nature of freedom within democracies. If such freedoms - of thought and action - are normative freedoms, then 'the right to express our thoughts.... means nothing since we are not able to have thoughts of our own'. Fromm sees exceptions to the inauthentic rule in the form of a few genuinely spontaneous individuals including artists. Anticipating Rogers, he argues in favour of organismic as opposed to (illusory) social or automaton growth.

What does Fromm's text say for the contemporary practice of psychotherapy and, by implication, who should read this book? Generally speaking, the book challenges the implicit notion held by many that somehow psychotherapy exists in an historical sense, both culturally and politically (with both a small and a large 'p') independent. For this reason it may be helpful to those therapists who think that sociological studies are generally irrelevant to their task. The text would equally be a useful addition to a collection of existential readings, particularly to give a historical grounding to central existential motifs, and for anyone generally interested in the relationship between the history of ideas and psychology and psychotherapy.

Among the implications for existential therapists are issues arising from Fromm's central proposition. If consciousness is constructed, then what is the function of psychotherapy for the freedom inherent in bourgeois individualism? Is that which purports to be enlivening (ie existential psychotherapy) paradoxically part of a cultural infrastructure that functions to allow its adherents to escape from anxiety - not by embracing life at all, but by embracing Existentialism and existential therapy, as both an abstract and concrete 'hero-rescuer' structure - in some senses as an escape from life? Implicit in Fromm's text is that we still phylogenically lack the capacity for true freedom.

What does the book lack? As a social theorist, Fromm, not surprisingly - given the time in which the book was written, seems guilty of crude Marxism. He suggests a unidirectional flow from base to superstructure and an uncritical definition of the middle classes, rather than a more carefully defined exploration of class blocs. For those reasons, it would be helpful for the reader to have some understanding of Gramscian Marxism, and in particular the regulating concept of hegemony.

There are also major problems at the level of the philosophical substrates underpinning Fromm's Freudo-Marxist project. The attempt to combine Freudian psychology and Marxist social theory is arguably a fundamentally impossible task since the theoretical systems created by Freud and Marx are based on diametrically opposed methodologies. The incompatibility of subjective idealism and metaphysics versus dialectics and materialism is probably why the synthesis never really caught on.

Despite the philosophical and theoretical problems - which should be treated in a sympathetic way in any case, given the time the book was written in, the text remains an important work and a useful addition to a Psychotherapeutic or existential collection.

Alec Duncan-Grant