“Love is the only satisfactory response to the problem of human existence.”
Philosopher, humanist, psychoanalyst, and social psychologist, Erich Pinchas Fromm was born on March 23, 1900 in Frankfurt on the Main, and was one of the leading intellectuals of his time. He comes from an extremely religious family of Orthodox Jews, and in his later years declared himself as an “atheistic mystic”. He did not have a happy childhood – with a temperamental father and a mother prone to depression, his youth was marked by the suicide of a friend and the terrifying hysteria of World War I (which prompted him to explore the irrationality of mass behavior). He earned a doctorate in sociology at the University of Heidelberg under the guidance of Alfred Weber, Karl Jaspers, and Heinrich Rickert, and was influenced by the famous Frankfurt School of critical theory, as well as the neo-Kantian philosopher Hermann Cohen. As a psychotherapist, he began his own clinical practice at the Institute for Social Research in Frankfurt. With the rise of the Nazis, he went into exile in Switzerland. Erich Fromm first went to Vienna, then to America where he helped establish the Washington School of Psychiatry and the William Alanson White Institute. In New York, he met other European intellectuals who had found refuge in America, as well as Karen Horney, who had a significant private and ideological influence on him. He was also active in American politics. Towards the end of his career, he went to Mexico City where he taught and wrote works about the connections between economic class and personality types. He died in Switzerland in 1980.
Erich Fromm is the author of numerous books and articles, and he dedicatedly, critically, and openly presented his understanding of human nature, always in clear and simple language, while expressing the essence of its theoretical definition and practical manifestation. He wrote about love, freedom, religion, economic and political systems, destruction, socialism, and even Zen Buddhism. Fromm’s religious studies were influenced by his grandfather and two great-grandfathers who were rabbis, and his great-uncle was a Talmudic scholar. The Talmud I studied under Rabbi Nehemiah Nobel, a renowned Talmudist and psychoanalyst, as well as Rabbi Salman Baruch Rabinkow, a disciple of Jewish mysticism and supporter of socialism.