Authors Like Erich Fromm

Sigmund Freud

Austrian · The Interpretation of Dreams (1899), Civilization and Its Discontents (1930)

Freud was born in 1856 in Freiberg, Moravia, and spent almost his whole working life in Vienna, where he founded psychoanalysis. Civilization and Its Discontents argues that society demands the repression of instinct and that unhappiness is the price. After the Nazi annexation of Austria in 1938 he fled to London, where he died in 1939.

Karen Horney

German-American · The Neurotic Personality of Our Time (1937), Neurosis and Human Growth (1950)

Horney was born near Hamburg in 1885 and was among the first women admitted to study medicine in Germany. She trained at the Berlin Psychoanalytic Institute, challenged Freud’s theory of penis envy, and moved to the United States in 1932. She and Fromm were close colleagues and partners in New York in the 1930s. She died in 1952.

Viktor Frankl

Austrian · Man’s Search for Meaning (1946), The Doctor and the Soul (1946)

Frankl was born in Vienna in 1905 and trained as a psychiatrist and neurologist. In 1942 he was deported to Theresienstadt and later to Auschwitz and Dachau subcamps; his wife, parents and brother were killed. Man’s Search for Meaning describes the camps and sets out logotherapy, his therapy built on the need for meaning. He died in 1997.

Every book by Viktor Frankl →

Herbert Marcuse

German-American · Eros and Civilization (1955), One-Dimensional Man (1964)

Marcuse was born in Berlin in 1898 and, like Fromm, belonged to the Frankfurt School’s Institute for Social Research. In 1955, in Dissent and in the epilogue to Eros and Civilization, he accused Fromm and the other ‘revisionists’ of turning psychoanalysis into a philosophy of adjustment; Fromm replied in Dissent. One-Dimensional Man made him a hero of the New Left. He died in 1979.

Hannah Arendt

German-American · The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951), The Human Condition (1958), Eichmann in Jerusalem (1963)

Arendt was born near Hanover in 1906, studied philosophy with Martin Heidegger and Karl Jaspers, and fled Germany in 1933, reaching New York in 1941. Her report on the Eichmann trial, with its phrase ‘the banality of evil’ and its account of the Jewish councils, caused a fierce controversy that still divides readers. She died in 1975.

Every book by Hannah Arendt →

D. T. Suzuki

Japanese · An Introduction to Zen Buddhism (1934), Zen and Japanese Culture (1959)

Suzuki was born in Kanazawa in 1870 and spent decades explaining Zen Buddhism to Western readers in English. In 1957 he and Fromm led a workshop in Cuernavaca, Mexico, that became their joint book Zen Buddhism and Psychoanalysis (1960). Since Brian Victoria’s Zen at War (1997), scholars have debated his writings in support of Japanese militarism. He died in 1966.

Every book by D. T. Suzuki →

Rollo May

American · Man’s Search for Himself (1953), Love and Will (1969), The Courage to Create (1975)

May was born in Ada, Ohio, in 1909 and became one of the founders of existential psychology in the United States. Love and Will, a bestseller, argues that modern people have separated love from the will to act on it. He died in 1994.

Every book by Rollo May →

bell hooks

American · Ain’t I a Woman (1981), All About Love (2000)

bell hooks was born Gloria Jean Watkins in Hopkinsville, Kentucky, in 1952 and wrote more than thirty books on race, feminism, class and teaching. All About Love argues that love is a set of actions and choices, not a feeling, and that a culture of domination makes it hard to practise. She died in 2021.

Every book by bell hooks →

Byung-Chul Han

Korean-German · The Burnout Society (2010), The Agony of Eros (2012)

Han was born in Seoul in 1959, studied metallurgy in Korea and then philosophy in Germany, where he teaches. His short books argue that people today exploit themselves in the name of freedom and achievement, and that this leaves them exhausted and unable to love.

Every book by Byung-Chul Han →

Esther Perel

Belgian-American · Mating in Captivity (2006), The State of Affairs (2017)

Perel was born in Leuven, Belgium, in 1958 to parents who had survived the Holocaust, and works as a couples therapist in New York. Mating in Captivity asks why desire fades in secure relationships; her podcast Where Should We Begin? records real couples’ sessions.