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In memory of Malcom Owen Slavin.
My personal and ideological lexicon can be condensed into five interpenetrating words: relations, responsibility, agency, music, freedom. They did not arrive together. As a child I sang, loudly and somewhat off-key, a patriotic Greek song whose refrain translated, “Better one hour of freedom than forty years of slavery.”1 My teacher, Kyria Philipa, gently asked me to lower my voice without dampening my fervor. At the time, freedom seemed self-evident, even lyrical. It would take decades, and psychoanalysis, to understand that freedom is rarely sung in a single key.
Erich Fromm, writing in Escape from Freedom (1941), grasped what my childhood enthusiasm could not: freedom is psychologically destabilizing. As traditional authorities recede, the individual confronts not exhilaration but aloneness and groundlessness. Freedom exposes us to choice, separateness, and uncertainty, conditions that can feel less like liberation than abandonment. The psyche, unable to metabolize this openness, seeks relief in submission, conformity, or domination. For Fromm, authoritarianism is not merely political; it is an anxious solution to the burden of being a self among other selves. His book has aged well.
Jessica Benjamin later reformulated this dilemma relationally. The problem is not simply that we flee freedom, but that we cannot sustain the tension between asserting our own mind and recognizing the equal reality of another’s. When recognition collapses, complementarity emerges: doer and done-to, master and subject. Domination is thus a failure of intersubjectivity—a tragic simplification of relational life. Adam Phillips adds that we are ambivalent not only about being constrained but about wanting at all; authority can feel like a relief from the demand to invent ourselves.