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In Man for Himself Erich Fromm continues the examination of the psychological interrelationships between man and his society begun in his previous book, Escape from Freedom. In the earlier book the emphasis was on authoritarianism in government, particularly Nazism, which was the dominating force of the time. He traced the rise of that phenomenon to the powerless-ness and loneliness which has generally beset modern man. Nazism was grasped as an anchorage by one group which had been shaken out of its traditional religious and economic securities as a result of the rise of capitalism and the spread of the Enlightenment—the forces which culminated in our Western civilization. In the present volume the emphasis is on authoritarianism in the individual. Fromm seeks an answer to the more general and more comprehensive question: Can man really trust himself to determine his own way of life instead of depending on authoritatively-promulgated ethics, divine or otherwise.
To this age-old problem Fromm feels that psychoanalysis can bring new clarifications from the increased knowledge it has obtained on human motivation. This has been gained from a better understanding of unconscious forces and the recognition of behavior traits as expressions of a more or less definable character structure of an individual. It has made possible a deeper insight into such concepts as love, hate, selfishness, pleasure, etc., and into their rational and irrational elements.
The nature of the contribution that psychoanalysis can make to this problem obviously depends on the theory one is working with. What this is in the case of Fromm is not always clear. He apparently makes a distinction between “neurotic symptoms” on the one hand and character “orientations” on the other as far as causation is concerned, although he uses the term “neurotic character” at times as equivalent to his “non-productive orientation.” At the root of neurotic symptoms, he at one time puts the repression of sexual strivings