Book Review: The Legacy of Erich Fromm

The Legacy of Erich Fromm by Daniel Burston, Harvard University Press (1991), £23.95.

Daniel Burston's The Legacy of Erich Fromm is a fine example of scrupulously researched, appreciative, critical scholarship. What is particularly impressive about the book is that Dr Burston has managed successfully to chart and to evaluate the work and thought of such a complex, restless figure as Erich Fromm. For this intellectual biography must have been a tremendous challenge since Fromm did venture far and wide in his long career as psychoanalyst and social critic-philosopher. The book is packed with engrossing details of Fromm's excursions into the fields of Marxist thought, existential philosophy, sociology - all contiguous to, but in tension with, clinical and theoretical psychoanalysis. One is continuously amazed by Dr Burston's capacity to bring together in 240 pages of engaging prose the diverse intellectual endeavours of such an argumentative thinker and prolific writer as Fromm. While reading Dr Burston's book this reviewer at times felt almost overwhelmed by the sheer wealth of scholarship so generously and meticulously laid out. In fact, it is doubtful that a short review could do adequate justice to the book.

Erich Fromm (1900 - 80) was a totally committed, earnest explorer of the human condition in all its psychological - social - political - cultural complexity. We marvel at his creative application of the intersecting disciplines of psychoanalysis, Marxist thought, existential philosophy and social psychology to interrogate the human condition as he saw it, from the thirties through to the seventies. Furthermore, while reading Dr Burston's book one realises that Fromm indeed was a major twentieth century social thinker who collaborated in significant inter-disciplinary projects with other major social investigators especially during the forties and fifties in both Europe and America. This begs the obvious question: why then Fromm's relative neglect, even marginalisation?

One senses from Dr Burston's book that Fromm may have been "too much" for some of his contemporaries to take. Was he too Marxist in his outlook, too outspoken about social injustice, too radical in his diagnosis of our psychological - social - political condition? It would appear that Fromm was as much embraced as a daring social critic-philosopher as he was dismissed or viewed with suspicion as excessively questioning, especially during the post-war years when the emphasis, understandably, was on (material) reconstruction, preserving hard-won peace, and maintaining social order. Perhaps Fromm's preoccupation with social critique and his strident criticism of (capitalist) society clashed with the collective drive at the time for material property and progress in Europe and America.

Dr Burston observes that on the one hand: "friends and admirers have remarked widely on Fromm's deep and spontaneous generosity, his sympathy for the outsider and the underdog, and his uncompromising dislike of sham and pretence". On the other hand, (Fromm's) critics "have often charged him with being doctrinaire and fostering a cliquish and sycophantic group of followers in New York City". Adding: "Both perspectives contain a measure of truth". Interestingly, some of Fromm's former colleagues recalled in conversation with Dr Burston that ".... Fromm's penchant for moralising occasionally coloured his formulations of clinical case material and could intrude in face-to-face interviews as well." Shades of Fromm's passionate pursuit of social criticism and reform driving him to be intrusive and prescriptive in the relatively unobtrusive practice of psychoanalysis. Readers of the Journal may be particularly interested in Chapter 4 "Fromm's Existentialism". Dr Burston notes that: "One of Fromm's chief contributions to psychology was his concept of 'existential needs'". Consequently, even though Fromm as a neo-Freudian was "keenly aware of the influence of social conditions and gender roles on the development of character... and on the prevalence of traits such as co-operation or competition in any given society", (he) "also believed that there is a universal human nature or 'essence'.... and ... that inasmuch as we are human, reason discloses what that 'something' that unites us is...." In this respect, Fromm's thought is situated in the (noble) tradition of philosophical humanism, according to Dr Burston.

At the end of Chapter 1 "The Man and His Work", Dr Burston suggested modestly: "The man who emerges in the following pages was, if nothing else, a probing, creative and sometimes visionary thinker whose life's work merits study". Dr Burston has done his subject proud. His intellectual biography is a revelation of the greatness (and limitations) of an unjustly neglected figure in the formative years of twentieth century psychological - social thought. In turn the book merits close study by ourselves interested in the history of ideas and exercised by the human condition in a terribly problematic world. We could say that Dr Burston's critical-appreciative text is itself an impressive example of the "Legacy of Erich Fromm".

Harvard University Press is to be congratulated for having printed and produced a well-crafted book.

Neville Singh