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On the Feeling of Powerlessness is a significant essay in many respects. It is the last essay that Fromm wrote in German, as well as the last of his writings that appeared in the Zeitschrift für Sozialforschung. Unlike any of his other pieces, the essay also stands out for the way it shows Fromm as a psychoanalyst and an analytical therapist.
In On the Feeling of Powerlessness, Fromm attempts to describe clinically and explain psychodynamically the feeling of powerlessness against the background of his psychotherapeutic experiences. At the same time, he wants to understand the feeling as a feature of bourgeois character and explain its genesis. The essay shows paradigmatically how Fromm determines the border between ‘neurosis’ and ‘bourgeois normality’, in which clinical observation and a socially critical perspective, psychoanalytic and sociopsychological thinking come together.
Based on his experiences as a therapist, Fromm first describes the different ways in which the feeling of powerlessness expresses itself, as well as our awareness of it and its intensity. He then describes the most important rationalizations and reaction formations related to this feeling, and its affective-emotional symptoms like rage, defiance, anxiety and excessive solicitude. After a short exploration of the technical analytic question of the analyst's powerlessness, Fromm then offers a classical example of how he understands, with his social-psychoanalytical approach, the origin of the feeling of powerlessness in the bourgeois character. His focus is on the way in which children are not taken seriously, which is of special interest for all kinds of pedagogy and education. In the final pages, he gives a compelling - but dire - portrait of the effects of the feeling of