Lawrence J. Friedman. The Lives of Erich Fromm

In this long-awaited and eagerly anticipated work, Lawrence J. Friedman has provided us with the most thorough, well-researched, and balanced biography so far of Erich Fromm. Friedman has written for a general audience, while at the same time maintaining high scholarly standards. He positions his work in relation to the existing literature primarily as an attempt to move beyond a one-sided focus on Fromm's published writings, which he argues can only be understood against the backdrop of his life. Through meticulous research spanning nearly a decade in the Erich Fromm Archives and many other archival collections, and personal interviews with Fromm's friends, relatives, students, analysands, and colleagues, Friedman has succeeded in constructing a rich backdrop that spans the entirety of Fromm's life. The narrative is balanced almost evenly between Fromm's personal relationships, his professional and political activities, and his writings. Friedman's approach to Fromm's “lives” could be described as perspectivalist insofar as he provides the reader with a number of different interpretative models. For example, he discusses what Fromm himself described as his four main personas: a psychoanalytically informed clinician, a political activist, a social critic, and a writer committed to instructing society. He presents a clinically informed analysis of Fromm's psychological character structure, which allegedly fluctuated between exuberance, depression, and feelings of marginality. The book's twelve chapters are organized in three sections around the steadily broadening focus of Fromm's writings and activism, from Germany and Europe, to the Americas, to the world as a whole. Other interpretative threads run through the narrative as well. Friedman follows closely Fromm's efforts to mediate between his intellectual and spiritual foundations in Orthodox and Hasidic Judaism, on the one hand, and a lifelong attraction to humanism and openness to other religious traditions—especially Zen Buddhism and socially minded Catholicism—on the other. Friedman also pays close attention to Fromm's ongoing dialogue with the work of Marx and Freud. He points out that the former was the greater thinker in Fromm's eyes, but the latter remained Fromm's own most important theoretical interlocutor.

Art · Art history · Biography · Character (mathematics) · Epistemology · Feeling · Focus (optics) · Humanities · Literature · Narrative · Persona · Political science · Politics · Psychoanalysis · Relation (database) · Sociology · Diverse Historical and Scientific Studies · Historical Studies and Socio-cultural Analysis · History · Law · Philosophy · Psychology