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In this most challenging critique, Dr. Fromm reaffirms his reputation as one of the foremost social psychiatrists of today. Here he continues the development of the thesis of “Escape from Freedom.” This postulates that just as Man's desire for an external authoritarian system is one way of evading the responsibilities and other concomitants of individual freedom, so too may the mechanization and dehumanization of our era be another way.
The psychologist who would analyze society must run between the Scylla of anthropomorphism—treating society's body-politic as a humanoid entity and applying human psychodynamics to it—and the Charybdis of pure political-economic-sociological analyzing, which is not psychology at all. That Dr. Fromm does a little of both does not detract from the power of his arguments. The alternative would be to envisage society as an aggregate of individual personalities, each seen within an environmental context, which it influences and by which it is influenced at the same time.
Where Dr. Fromm presents his observations of the unhealthy traits of a great number of persons today, they are succinct, pertinent and exact. His observations on the pathology of our modern (Western) civilization, namely, its stultifying and destructive effects upon the human spirit, are clear and excellent. But it is in the relating of one to the other that directions and lines should be clearly drawn, since the application of any remedy must depend thereon. Such questions as whether the individual is the product or creator of his environment, or whether history is made by heroes or is a blind, inevitable, cyclic development, with the outstanding individual as an incidental by-product, would come within the framework of this relationship. Although this book does not answer them—no simple answer could be given—it is in this area that the author's exposition is not clear. He seems to shift back and forth between individual psychoanalysis and culture analysis with, at least t