You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
Each author has shown different reasons why reading Fromm today is important. As psychoanalyst, sociologist, radical humanist, public intellectual, and clinician, Fromm brought a brilliant mind, clear and at times eloquent writing, courage, and a passionate commitment to his humanistic values to everything he wrote. The range of articles show the breadth of Fromm’s scholarship. The sheer body of work spanning over 50 years is impressive. In my estimation, he was one of the greatest psychoanalysts of the Twentieth Century and one of the greatest humanists of all times (Cortina, 2015b). Yet like any major author there are problematic issues and contradictions in his work that we can see more clearly with the benefit of hindsight. Daniel Burston in his 1991 book The Legacy of Erich Fromm points out that Fromm is best characterized as part of the “loyal opposition” to Freud’s work. Fromm was highly critical of Freud’s authoritarianism and biological instinct theory of human nature. But as Burston notes, he came closer to Freud toward the end of life by trying to revise Freud’s life and death instinct theory with an existentially based theory of biophilia and necrophilia in The Anatomy of Human Destructiveness . I have argued earlier (Cortina, 2015a) and in this issue, that his existential humanism failed to provide an adequate sociobiological basis as an alternative to Freud’s life and death instinct theory.
What would Fromm have to say about today’s troubled world? Fromm wrote The Sane Society in a period of enormous economic prosperity that lasted for 30 years following the Second World War. At that time, there was a widespread belief and hope shared by Fromm that the gains in technology and economic productivity could in principle solve issues of economic scarcity in the world.
This economic prosperity began fraying when neoliberal policies and attacks on unions began with the Reagan and Thatcher administrations. The problem that Fromm saw was that the economic prosper