Books written by sociologists, novelists, and psychologists describing this cultural turn of events were suddenly thick on the ground: David Riesman’s The Lonely Crowd (1950), Harry Stack Sullivan’s Interpersonal Theory of Psychiatry (1953), Sloan Wilson’s The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit (1953), and in some ways the most penetrating of all, Richard Yates’s Revolutionary Road, a novel published in 1961 but set in 1955. It was a time, Yates claimed, that embodied “a kind of blind, desperate clinging to safety and security at any price.”
The book, however, that accounted most fully for the ’50s’ near-morbid desire for security at any price, had been written a decade earlier by the émigré psychoanalyst Erich Fromm. Escape from Freedom (1941), rooted in a European intellectual thought that had been heavily influenced by the work of both Karl Marx and Sigmund Freud, brought social psychology to the United States where, in the years ahead, it flourished wildly. The book launched its author on one of the most celebrated careers that any public intellectual, anywhere, has ever achieved. (...)
Overnight, it seemed, millions of people, indifferent to the loss of democracy, were happy to capitulate to the rule of the strongman, relieved to feel order restored when they were being told what they could and could not do, no matter the human cost. This was a crisis that, in Fromm’s view, threatened “the greatest achievement of modern culture—individuality and uniqueness of personality.”
Why was this happening? What was it in the human psyche that welcomed what Fromm could only think of as a return to tribalism? The more he thought about it, the more clearly he saw that in all human beings a tug of war persisted between the desire to have freedom and the desire to shun its responsibilities. Friedman calls the latter “conformist escapism.”
In Fromm’s view, humanity was always trading freedom for the comfort of external authority. (...)
And it is just here that Fromm and Freud part company in a way that accounts for the vital difference between social psychology and hard-worked analysis. For Freud, the all-important loneliness of mankind was inborn; for Fromm it was culturally created. Freud said the conflict of instinctual drives means that human beings are born into a sense of loss and abandonment that can be ameliorated only through psychoanalysis. Fromm said it was enough to understand that the race is born with a sense of connectedness that is destroyed by the social climate.
Ironically, though, for each of these thinkers, it was the exercise of the very powers that had brought about our downfall that alone could release human beings from the imprisonment of such separateness. If men and women learned to occupy their own conscious selves, fully and freely, they would find that they were no longer alone: they would have themselves for company. Once one had company one could feel benign toward others.
This, Fromm said, was the only solution to the problem of the alienated individual in relation to the modern world. The only thing that could save humanity from its own soul-destroying loneliness was the individual’s ability to inhabit what came to be known as the “authentic” self. If you achieved authenticity, you would be rewarded with the inner peace necessary to become a free agent who is happy to do unto others as you would have others do unto you.
The fly in the ointment, as Fromm the Marxist saw it, was that we were living in a world where “economic, social and political conditions . . . do not offer a basis for the realization of individuality.” That meant that the struggle to achieve authenticity was continually being so undercut that it became “an unbearable burden.” If a burden is unbearable one will do almost anything to be relieved of it, even if relief demands submission to a set of social conventions that suffocates the spirit. This, however, is a Faustian bargain that creates anxiety. Now, something was needed to dull the anxiety. Capitalism, as Fromm and many other Frankfurt intellectuals said, had just the thing: consumerism. The pursuit of worldly goods—escapist conformism—would etherize the unrealized hunger for a genuine self. (...)
In the Art of Loving Fromm argued that the phrase “falling in love” was a dangerous misnomer. We did not fall into anything; what we did, once attraction had allowed a relationship to form, was recognize ourselves in the other and then—through affection, respect, and responsibility—work hard to teach ourselves how to honor that recognition. “Once one had discovered how to listen to, appreciate, and indeed love oneself,” Friedman paraphrases The Art of Loving, “it would be possible to love somebody else . . . to fathom the loved one’s inner core as one listened to one’s own core.” In short, the dynamic would induce an emotional generosity that allowed each of us to be ourselves in honor of the other. Once one had achieved this admittedly ideal state, Fromm declared, as he did in every single book he wrote, one could extend that love to all mankind.
by Vivian Gornick, Boston Review | Read more:
Photo courtesy of Anita Hagan
