Books Written by Erich Fromm

Twenty-two, published between 1941 and 1980. A further twelve or so titles carry his name and were edited out of his papers after he died, which is why you will see counts anywhere between twenty and forty. The split matters: everything up to Greatness and Limitations of Freud’s Thought (1980) he saw through the press himself, and everything after it was assembled by his literary executor.

Escape from Freedom (1941), Man for Himself (1947), Psychoanalysis and Religion (1950), The Forgotten Language (1951), The Sane Society (1955), The Art of Loving (1956), Sigmund Freud’s Mission (1959), Zen Buddhism and Psychoanalysis (1960), Marx’s Concept of Man and May Man Prevail? (both 1961), Beyond the Chains of Illusion (1962), The Dogma of Christ (1963), The Heart of Man (1964), Socialist Humanism (1965), You Shall Be as Gods (1966), The Revolution of Hope and The Nature of Man (both 1968), The Crisis of Psychoanalysis and Social Character in a Mexican Village (both 1970), The Anatomy of Human Destructiveness (1973), To Have or To Be? (1976) and Greatness and Limitations of Freud’s Thought (1980).

The Art of Loving (1956) if you want to know why people still recommend him, and Escape from Freedom (1941) if you want to know why academics still cite him. Both stand alone. Read To Have or To Be? (1976) last, not first — it assumes you already know what he thinks.

Nothing. They are the same book. Escape from Freedom is the American title, Farrar & Rinehart, 1941; The Fear of Freedom is the British one, Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1942. Bibliographies that list both as separate works, and some do, are counting one book twice.

A German-American social psychologist and psychoanalyst, born 23 March 1900 in Frankfurt am Main and died 18 March 1980 in Muralto, Switzerland. He took a doctorate in sociology at Heidelberg in 1922, joined the Frankfurt Institute for Social Research in 1930, emigrated to New York in 1934, and spent more than twenty years in Mexico City. He is usually grouped with the Frankfurt School and with the neo-Freudians, and he fits neither box comfortably.

Yes, and then no. He joined the Institute for Social Research in 1930 as its specialist in psychoanalysis and did the empirical work the Institute is least known for. He fell out with Adorno and Horkheimer over how far Freud’s drive theory should be revised and left in the late 1930s. He is in every account of the Frankfurt School and in none of its later self-descriptions.

That love is a practice rather than a feeling. Fromm’s claim is that people treat love as a problem of finding the right object, when it is a problem of developing the capacity — and that a capacity takes discipline, concentration and patience, like any other. It covers love between parent and child, erotic love, self-love, and love of God, in about a hundred and thirty pages.

Two ways of being alive. In the having mode you define yourself by what you own, including your knowledge, your feelings and the people in your life; in the being mode you define yourself by what you do and experience. Fromm traces the split through grammar, through the Bible, through Meister Eckhart and Marx, and argues that industrial societies have made the having mode feel like human nature.

English, from 1934 onward. His German writing is his 1922 doctoral dissertation and his pre-emigration essays. Confusingly, several of the books published after his death appeared in German translation before his English originals reached print — in one case twenty years before.

The Anatomy of Human Destructiveness (1973), his longest. It rejects the idea that human cruelty is an instinct, arguing against both Freud’s death drive and Konrad Lorenz’s ethology, and separates defensive aggression from what Fromm calls malignant aggression. The Heart of Man (1964) is the same argument at a fifth of the length.

The diagnosis has lasted better than the programme. His account of why people give their freedom away, why consumption does not satisfy, and why love is treated as a matter of luck reads as though it were written recently. The proposals at the end of The Sane Society and The Revolution of Hope are very much of the 1950s and 1960s, and he would be the first to say so.

To Have or To Be?, because it assumes the earlier books; Zen Buddhism and Psychoanalysis, because two thirds of it is not by him; and anything from the posthumous list, because those are working papers rather than books he finished.

On 18 March 1980 at his home in Muralto, in the Swiss canton of Ticino, of a heart attack, five days before his eightieth birthday. He had moved to Switzerland from Mexico in 1974.

The Nelly Sachs Prize in 1979, the year before he died. There is also an Erich Fromm Prize, awarded in his name by the International Erich Fromm Society, which is a different thing and is sometimes confused with one he won.