Erich Fromm Beyond the Chains of Illusion

Some Personal Antecedents 9 understood-_or even predicted--provided one knows the nature of these laws? When the war ended in 1918, I was a deeply troubled young man who was obsessed by the question of how war was possible, by the wish to understand the irrationality of human mass behavior, by a passionate desire for peace and international understanding. More, I had become deeply suspicious of all official ideologies and declara- tions, and filled with the conviction "'of all one must doubt." I have tried to show which experiences during my adolescence created the conditions for my passionate in- terest in the teachings of Freud and of Marx. I was deeply troubled by questions with regard to individual and social phenomena, and I was eager for an answer. I found answers both in Freud's and in Marx's systems. But I was also stimulated by the contrasts between the two systems and by the wish to solve these contradictions. Eventually, the older I grew and the more I studied, the more I doubted certain assumptions within the two systems. My main interest was clearly mapped out. I wanted to understand the laws that govern the life of the individual man, and the laws of society--that is, of men in their social existence. I tried to see the lasting truth in Freud's concepts as against those assumptions which were in need of revision. I tried to do the same with Marx's theory, and finally I tried to arrive at a synthesis which followed from the understanding and the criticism of both thinkers. This endeavor did not take place solely by means of theoretical speculation. Not that I think little of pure speculation (it all depends on who speculates); but believing in the superior value of blending empirical observation with speculation (much of the trouble with modern social science is that it often contains empirical observations without speculation), I have always 10 BEYOND THE CHAINS OF ILLUSION tried to let my thinking be guided by the observation of facts and have striven to revise my theories when the observation seemed to warrant it. As far as my psychological theories are concerned, I have had an excellent observation point. For over thirty. five years I have been a practicing psychoanalyst. I have examined minutely the behavior, the free associations, and the dreams of the people whom I have psychoanalyzed. There is not a single theoretical conclusion about man's psyche, either in this or in my other writings, which is not based on a critical observation of human behavior carried out in the course of this psychoanalytic work. As far as my study of social behavior is concerned, I have been less of an active participant than I was in my psycho- analytic practice. While I have been passionately inter- ested in politics since the age of eleven or twelve (when I talked politics with a socialist who worked in my father's business) to this day, I have also known that I was temperamentally not suited for political activity. Thus I did not participate in any until recently, when I joined the American Socialist Party and became active in the peace movement. I did this not because I had changed my opinion with regard to my abilities, but because I felt it to be my duty not to remain passive in a world which seems to be moving toward a self-chosen catastrophe. I hasten to add that there was more to it than a sense of obligation. The more insane and dehumanized this world of ours seems to become, the more may an individual feel the need of being together and of working together with men and women who share one's human concerns. I certainly felt that need and have been grateful for the stimulating and encouraging companionship of those with whom I have had the good fortune of working. But even though I was not an active participant in politics, neither has my sociological thought been based entirely on books. IL THE COMMON GROUND B ITONE ENTERING into the discussion of the details of Marx's and Freud's theories, I wish to de- scribe in a brief sketch the fundamental premises common to both thinkers, the common soil, as it were, from which their thinking grows. These fundamental ideas can best be expressed in three short statements, two of them Roman, one Christian. These statements are: 1) De omnibus es dubitandum (Of all one must doubt). 2) Nihil humanum a mihi alienum puto * (I believe nothing human to be alien to me).1 3) The truth shall make you free. The first saying expresses what might be called "the critical mood." This mood is characteristic of modern science. But while in the natural sciences the doubt re- hers mainly to the evidence of the senses, hearsay, and traditional opinions, in Marx's and Freud's thinking the doubt refers particularly to man's thoughts about him- self and about others. As I shall try to show in detail in the chapter on consciousness, Marx believed that most * (Terentius) 1 These two statements were mentioned by Marx as being his two favorite maxims. See in E. Fromm Mart's Concept of Man (New York: Frederick Ungar Publishing Co., Inc., 1961). 13 14 BEYOND THE CHAINS OF ILLUSION of what we think about ourselves and others is sheer illusion, is "ideology." He believed that our individual thoughts are patterned after the ideas any given society develops, and that these ideas are determined by the par- ticular structure and mode of functioning of the society. A watchful, skeptical, doubting attitude toward all ideolo- gies, ideas, and ideals, is characteristic for Marx. He always suspected them as veiling economic and social interests, and his skepticism was so strong that he could hardly ever use words like freedom, truth, justice -precisely be- cause of the fact that they lend themselves to so much misuse, and not because freedom, justice, truth, were not the supreme values for him. Freud thought in the same "critical mood." His whole psychoanalytic method could be described as "the art of doubting." Having been impressed by certain hypnotic experiments which demonstrated to what extent a person in a trance can believe in the reality of what is obviously not real, he discovered that most of the ideas of per- sons who are not in a trance also do not correspond to reality, and that on the other hand most of that which is real is not conscious. Marx thought the basic reality to be the socio-economic structure of society, while Freud believed it to be the libidinal organization of the individual. Yet they both had the same implacable distrust of the clichés, ideas, rationalizations, and ideologies which fill people's minds and which form the basis of what they mistake for reality. This skepticism toward "common thought" is insolubly connected with a belief in the liberating force of truth. Marx wanted to liberate man from the chains of depend- ency, from alienation, from slavery to the economy. What was his method? Not, as is widely believed, force. He wanted to win the minds of the majority of the people. V HUMAN MOTIVATION WHat are the motivating fores which make man act in certain ways, the drives which propel him to strive in certain directions? It seems as if in the answer to this question Marx and Freud find themselves furthest apart and that there is an insoluble contradiction between their two systems. Marx's "materialistic" theory of history is usually understood to mean that man's main motivation is his wish for material satisfaction, his desire to use and to have more and more. This greed for material things as man's essential motiva- ton is then contrasted with Freud's concept according to which it is man's sexual appetite which constitutes his most potent motivation for action. The desire for property on the one hand and the desire for sexual satisfaction on the other seem to be the two conflicting theories as far as human motivation is concerned. That this assumption is an oversimplifying distortion as far as Freud is concerned follows from what has been al- ready said about this theory. Freud sees man as motivated by contradictions; by the contradiction between his striving for sexual pleasure and his striving for survival and mas- tery of his environment. This conflict became even more complicated when Freud later posited another factor which 38 咖is 学 Ner 001 matto 3 Human Motivation 39 conflicted with the ones already mentioned-_the super-ego, the incorporated authority of the father and the norms he represented. For Freud, then, man is motivated by forces conflicting with each other and by no means only by the desire for sexual satisfaction,1 The cliché of Marx's theory of motivation is an even more drastic distortion of his thinking than the cliché of Freud's. The distortion begins with the misunderstanding of the term "materialism." This term and its counterpart, "idealism," have two entirely different meanings, depend- ing on the context in which they are applied. When applied to human attitudes, one refers to the "materialist" as one who is mainly concerned with the satisfaction of material strivings, and to the "idealist" as one who is motivated by an idea, that is, a spiritual or ethical motivation. But "ma- terialism" and "idealism" have entirely different meanings in philosophical terminology, and "materialism" must be used in this meaning when one refers to Marx's "historical materialism" (a term which, in fact, Marx himself never used). Philosophically, idealism means that one assumes ideas form the basic reality, and that the material world which we perceive by means of our senses has no reality as such. For the materialism prevalent at the end of the nine- teenth century matter was real, not ideas. Marx, in con- trast to this mechanical materialism (which was also un- derlying Freud's thinking), was not concerned with the causal relationship between matter and mind but with un- derstanding all phenomena as results of the activity of real human beings. "In direct contrast to German philosophy," Marx Wrote, "which descends from the heaven to earth, here we ascend from earth to heaven. That is to say, we 1 In a further development of his theories, which I mention only in passing, Freud again thought in terms of a contradiction, that between the "life instinct" and the "death instinct" as the two forces battling constantly within man and motivating his actions. 40 BEYOND THE CHAINS OF ILLUSION do not set out from what men imagine, conceive, in order to arrive at man in the flesh. We set out from real active men and on the basis of their real life process we demon- strate the development of the ideological reflexes and echoes of this life process." 1 Marx's "materialism" implies that we begin our study of man with the real man as we find him, and not with his ideas about himself and the world by which he tries to explain himself. In order to understand how this confusion between personal and philosophical materialism could have arisen in the case of Marx, we must proceed further and consider Marx's so-called "'economic theory of his- tory." This term has been misunderstood to mean that, ac- cording to Marx, only economic motives determine man's actions in the historical process; in other words, the "eco- nomic" factor has been understood to refer to a psycho- logical, subjective motive, that of economic interests. But Marx never meant this. Historical materialism is not at all a psychological theory; its main postulate is that the way in which man produces determines his practice of life, his way of living, and this practice of life determines his think- ing and the social and political structure of his society. Economy in this context refers not to a psychic drive, but to the mode of production; not to a subjective psychologi- cal but to an objective socio-economic factor. Marx's idea that man is formed by his practice of life was not new as such. Montesquieu had expressed the same idea in terms of "institutions form men"; Robert Owen expressed it in similar ways. What was new in Marx's system is that he analyzed in detail what these institutions are, or rather, that the institutions themselves were to be understood as part of the whole system of production which character- izes a given society. Various economic conditions can pro- 1 German Ideology, p. 14. (My italics, E.F.) Human Motivation 41 duce different psychological motivations. One economic system may lead to the formation of ascetic tendencies, as early capitalism did; another economic system to the pre- ponderance of the desire to save and hoard, as nineteenth century capitalism did; still another, to the preponderance of the desire for spending and for ever-increasing consump- tion, as twentieth century capitalism does. There is only one quasi-psychological premise in Marx's system: man must first of all eat and drink, have shelter and clothing, before he can pursue politics, science, art, religion, etc. Therefore the production of the immediate material means of subsistence, and consequently the degree of economic development attained by a given society, form the founda- tion upon which social and political institutions, and even art and religion, have been evolved. Man himself, in each period of history, is formed in terms of the prevailing prac- tice of life which in turn is determined by his mode of production. All this does not mean, however, that the drive to produce or consume is man's main motivation. On the contrary, Marx's main criticism of capitalist society is precisely that this society makes the wish to "have" and to "'use" into the most dominant desire in man; Marx believed that a man who is dominated by the desire to have and to use is a crippled man. His aim was a socialist society or- ganized in such a way that not profit and private property, but the free unfolding of man's human powers are man's dominant aims. Not the man who has much, but the man who is much is the fully developed, truly human man. It is indeed one of the most drastic examples of man's capacity for distortion and rationalization that Marx is at- tacked by the spokesmen for capitalism because of his al- legedly "materialistic" aims. Not only is this not true, but what is paradoxical is that the same spokesmen for cap- italism combat socialism by saying that the profit motive- on which capitalism is based--is the only potent motive for 42 BEYOND THE CHAINS OF ILLUSION human creative activity, and that socialism could not work effectively because it excludes the profit motive as the main stimulus in the economy. All this is even more complex and paradoxical if one considers that Russian communism has adopted this capitalist thinking, and that for Soviet managers, workers, and peasants, the profit motive is by far the most important incentive in the present Soviet economy. Not only in practice but often also in theoretical statements about human motivation, the Soviet system and the capitalist system agree with each other, and both are equally in contradiction to Marx's theories and aims,] 1 Tucker wrongly assumes that Marx believed that the com- pulsion that transforms free creative self-activity into alien- ated labor is the compulsion to amass wealth. Tucker's error is based on an erroneous translation of the Marx text he refers to. Marx says, in the Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts: "'die einzigen Raeder, die die National Oekonomie in Bewegung setzt, sind die Habsucht," etc. This means: "the only wheels that political economy sets in motion are greed," and not as Tucker translates, "the only wheels that set political economy in motion are greed." Subject and predicate are reversed. BEYOND THE CHAINS OF ILLUSION 50 the moral, is independent from the other, "'each is concen- trated upon a specific area of alienated activity and is itself alienated from the other." 1 Marx foresaw with amazing clarity how the needs of man in an alienated society would be perverted into true weak- nesses. In capitalism, as Marx sees it, "Every man specu- lates upon creating a new need in another in order to force him to a new sacrifice, to place him in a new dependence, and to entice him into a new kind of pleasure and thereby into economic ruin. Everyone tries to establish over others an alien power in order to find there the satisfaction of his own egoistic need. With the mass of objects, therefore, there also increases the realm of alien entities to which man is subjected. Every new product is a new potentiality of mutual deceit and robbery. Man becomes increasingly poor as a man; he has increasing need of money in order to take possession of the hostile being. The power of money dimin- ishes directly with the growth of the quantity of produc- tion, i.e., his need increases with the increasing power of money. The need for money is therefore the real need created by the modern economy, and the only need which it creates. The quantity of money becomes increasingly its only important quality. Just as it reduces every entity to its abstraction, so it reduces itself in its own development to a quantitative entity. Excess and immoderation become its true standard. This is shown subjectively, partly in the fact that the expansion of production and of needs becomes an ingenious and always calculating subservience to inhu- man, depraved, unnatural, and imaginary appetites. Pri- vate property does not know how to change crude need into human need; its idealism is fantasy, caprice and fancy. No eunuch flatters his tyrant more shamefully or seeks by more infamous means to stimulate his jaded appetite, in 1 Ibid. The Sick Individual and the Sick Society 51 order to gain some favor, than does the eunuch of industry, the entrepreneur, in order to acquire a few silver coins or to charm the gold from the purse of his dearly beloved neighbor. (Every product is a bait by means of which the individual tries to entice the essence of the other person, his money. Every real or potential need is a weakness which will draw the bird into the lime. As every imperfec- tion of man is a bond with heaven, a point at which his heart is accessible to the priest, so every want is an oppor- tunity for approaching one's neighbor with the air of friend- ship, and saying, Dear friend, I will give you what you need, but you know the conditio sine qua non. You know what ink you must use in signing yourself over to me. I shall swindle you while providing your enjoyment.' All this constitutes a universal exploitation of human com- munal life.) The entrepreneur accedes to the most de- praved fancies of his neighbor, plays the role of pander be- tween him and his needs, awakens unhealthy appetites in him, and watches for every weakness in order, later, to claim the remuneration for this labor of love." 1 The man who has thus become subject to his alienated needs is 662 mentally and physicaly dehumanized being. . . the self- conscious and self-acting commodity." 2 This commodity- man knows only one way of relating himself to the world outside, by having it and by consuming (using) it. The more alienated he is, the more the sense of having and using constitutes his relationship to the world. "The less you are, the less you express your life, the more you have, the greater is your alienated life and the greater is the sav- ing of your alienated being." 8 Discussing Marx's concept of alienation, it might be of some interest to point to the close connection between the 1 Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts, Pp. 140-2. 2 Ibid., p. 111. 8 Ibid., p. 144, whe 52 BEYOND THE CHAINS OF ILLUSION phenomenon of alienation and the phenomenon of trans- ference which is one of the most fundamental concepts in Freud's system. Freud had observed that the psycho- analytic patient tended to fall in love with the analyst, to be afraid of him, or to hate him, and all this quite without regard to the reality of the analyst's personality. Freud be- lieved that he had found the theoretical explanation to this phenomenon by the assumption that the patient trans- ferred the feelings of love, fear, hate, he had experienced as a child toward father and mother, to the person of the analyst. In the "'transference, " so Freud reasoned, the child in the patient relates himself to the person of the analyst as to his father or mother. Undoubtedly, Freud's interpretation of the transference phenomenon has much truth in it, and is supported by a good deal of evidence. Yet it is not a complete interpretation. The grown-up patient is not a child, and to talk about the child in him, or "his? unconscious, is using a topological lan- guage which does not do justice to the complexity of the facts. The neurotic, grown-up patient is an alienated hu- man being; he does not feel strong, he is frightened and in- hibited because he does not experience himself as the sub- ject and originator of his own acts and experiences. He is neurotic because he is alienated. In order to overcome his sense of inner emptiness and impotence, he chooses an ob- ject onto whom he projects all his own human qualities: his love, intelligence, courage, etc. By submitting to this object, he feels in touch with his own qualities; he feels strong, wise, courageous, and secure. To lose the object means danger of losing himself. This mechanism, idolatric worship of an object, based on the fact of the individual's alienation, is the central dynamism of transference, that which gives transference its strength and intensity. The less alienated person may also transfer some of his infantile experience to the analyst, but there would be little intensity The Sick Individual and the Sick Society 53 in it. The alienated patient, in search for and in need of an idol, finds the analyst and usually endows him with the qualities of his father and mother as the two powerful per- sons he knew as a child. Thus the content of transference is usually related to infantile patterns while its intensity is the result of the patient's alienation. Needless to add that the transference phenomenon is not restricted to the ana- lytic situation. It is to be found in all forms of idolization of authority figures, in political, religious, and social life. Tranference is not the only phenomenon of psycho- pathology which can be understood as an expression of alienation. Indeed, it is not accidental that aliéné, in French and alienado in Spanish, are older words for the psychotic, and the English "alienist" refers to a doctor who cares for the insane, the absolutely alienated person.] Alienation as a sickness of the self can be considered to be the core of the psychopathology of modern man even in those forms which are less extreme than psychosis. Some clinical examples may serve to illustrate the process. The most frequent and obvious case of alienation is per- haps the false "great love." A man has fallen enthusiasti- cally in love with a woman; after she had responded at first, she is beset by increasing doubts and breaks off the relationship. He is overcome by a depression which brings him close to suicide. Life, he feels, has no more meaning to him. Consciously he explains the situation as a logical result of what happened. He believes that for the first time he has experienced what real love is, that with this woman, and only with her, could he experience love and happiness. If she leaves him, there will never be anyone 1 Cf. my discussion of this point in The Sane Society, P. 121f. and in Tucker's Philosophy and Myth in Karl Marx, p. 144f. Cf. also Karen Horney's remarks in Neuroses and Human Growth on the feeling of being driven but not driving and Tucker's refer- ences to Horney. 56 BEYOND THE CHAINS OF ILLUSION I just quoted. "History," he wrote in The Holy Family, "does nothing, it possesses no colossal riches, it fights no battles! It is rather man, actual and living man, who does all this; 'history' does not use man as a means for its purposes as though it were a person apart; it is nothing but the activity of man pursuing his ends." The phenomenon of alienation has other clinical aspects, which I can discuss only briefly. Not only are all forms of depression, dependence and idol worship (including the "fanatic") direct expressions of, or compensations for, alienation; the phenomenon of the failure to experience one's identity which is a central phenomenon at the root of psychopathological phenomena is also a result of aliena- tion. Precisely because the alienated person has trans- formed his own functions of feeling and thought to an ob- ject outside he is not himself, he has no sense of "I," of identity. This lack of a sense of identity has many conse- quences. The most fundamental and general one is that it prevents integration of the total personality, hence it leaves the person disunited within himself, lacking either capacity 'to will one thing" 1 or if he seems to will one thing his will lacks authenticity. In the widest sense, every neurosis can be considered an outcome of alienation; this is so because neurosis is char- acterized by the fact that one passion (for instance, for money, power, women, etc.) becomes dominant and sep- arated from the total personality, thus becoming the ruler of the person. This passion is his idol to which he submits even though he may rationalize the nature of his idol and give it many different and often well-sounding names. He is ruled by a partial desire, he transfers all he has left to this desire, he is weaker the stronger "it" becomes. He has 1 Cf. S. Kierkegaard, Purity of Heart is to Will One Thing, Torch Books. The Sick Individual and the Sick Society 57 become alienated from himself precisely because "he" has become the slave of a part of himself. Seeing alienation as a pathological phenomenon must, however, not obscure the fact that Hegel and Marx con- sidered it a necessary phenomenon, one which is inherent in human evolution. This is true with regard to the aliena- tion of reason as well as of love. Only when I can distin- guish between the world outside and myself, that is, only if the world outside becomes an object, can I grasp it and make it my world, become one with it again. The infant, for whom the world is not yet conceived as "'object," can also not grasp it with his reason and reunite himself with it. Man has to become alienated in order to overcome this split in the activity of his reason. The same holds true for love. As long as the infant has not separated himself from the world outside he is still part of it, and hence cannot love. In order to love, the "other" must become a stranger, and in the act of love, the stranger ceases to be a stranger and becomes me. Love presupposes alienation--and at the same time overcomes it. The same idea is to found in the prophetic concept of the Messianic Time and in Marx's concept of socialism. In Paradise man still is one with nature, but not yet aware of himself as separate from na- ture and his fellowman. By his act of disobedience man acquires self-awareness, the world becomes estranged from him. In the process of history, according to the prophetic concept, man develops his human powers so fully that eventually he will acquire a new harmony with men and nature. Socialism, in Marx's sense, can only come, once man has cut off all primary bonds, when he has become completely alienated and thus is able to reunite himself with men and nature without sacrificing his integrity and individuality. The concept of alienation has its roots in a still earlier phase of the Western tradition, in the thought of the Old 58 BEYOND THE CHAINS OF ILLUSION Testament prophets, more specifically in their concept of idolatry. The prophets of monotheism did not denounce heathen religions as idolatrous primarily because they worshiped several gods instead of one. The essential differ- ence between monotheism and polytheism is not one of the numbers of gods, but lies in the fact of alienation. Man spends his energy, his artistic capacities on building an idol, and then he worships this idol, which is nothing but the result of his own human effort. His life forces have flowed into a "thing, " and this thing, having become an idol, is not experienced as a result of his own productive effort, but as something apart from himself, over and against himself, which he worships and to which he sub- mits. As the prophet Hosea says (XIV, 8): "Assur shall not save us; we will not ride upon horses; neither will we say any more to the work of our hands, you are our gods; for in thee the fatherless finds love." Idolatrous man bows down to the work of his own hands. The idol represents his own life-forces in an alienated form. The principle of monotheism, in contrast, is that man is infinite, that there is no partial quality in him which can be hypostatized into the whole. God, in the monotheistic concept, is unrecognizable and indefinable; God is not a "thing." Man being created in the likeness of God is cre- ated as the bearer of infinite qualities. In idolatry man bows down and submits to the projection of one partial quality in himself. He does not experience himself as the center from which living acts of love and reason radiate. He becomes a thing, his neighbor becomes a thing, just as his gods are things. "The idols of the heathen are silver and gold, the work of men's hands. They have mouths but they speak not; eyes have they, but they see not; they have ears but they hear not; neither is there any breath in their mouths. They that make them are like them; so is every- one that trusts in them." (Psalm 135) The Sick Individual and the Sick Society 59 Modern man, in industrial society, has changed the form and intensity of idolatry. He has become the object of blind economic forces which rule his life. He worships the work of his hands, he transforms himself into a thing. Not the working class alone is alienated (in fact, if any- thing, the skilled worker seems to be less alienated than those who manipulate men and symbols) but everybody is. This process of alienation which exists in the European- American industrialized countries, regardless of their po- litical structure, has given rise to new protest movements. The renaissance of socialist humanism is one symptom of this protest. Precisely because alienation has reached a point where it borders on insanity in the whole industrial- ized world, undermining and destroying its religious, spir- itual, and political traditions and threatening general de- struction through nuclear war, many are better able to see that Marx had recognized the central issue of modern man's sickness; that he had not only seen, as Feuerbach and Kierkegaard had, this "sickness" but that he had shown that contemporary idolatry is rooted in the con- temporary mode of production and can be changed only by the complete change of the economic-social constella- tion together with the spiritual liberation of man. Surveying the discussion of Freud's and Marx's respec- tive views on mental illness, it is obvious that Freud is primarily concerned with individual pathology, and Marx is concerned with the pathology common to a society and resulting from the particular system of that society. It is also clear that the content of psychopathology is quite dif- ferent for Marx and for Freud. Freud sees pathology es- sentially in the failure to find a proper balance between the Id and Ego, between instinctual demands and the demands of reality; Marx sees the essential illness, as what the nine- teenth century called la maladie du siécle, the estrangement of man from his own humanity and hence from his fellow 60 BEYOND THE CHAINS OF ILLUSION man, Yet it is often overlooked that Freud by no means thought exclusively in terms of individual pathology. He speaks also of a "social neurosis." "If the evolution of civ- ilization," he writes, "has such a far-reaching similarity with the development of an individual, and if the same methods are employed in both, would not the diagnosis be justified that many systems of civilization-or epochs of it -possibly even the whole of humanity_have become "neurotic' under the pressure of civilizing trends? To ana- lytic dissection of these neuroses, therapeutic recom- mendations might follow which could claim a great prac- tical interest. I would not say that such an attempt to apply psychoanalysis to civilized society would be fanciful or doomed to fruitlessness. But it behooves us to be very careful, not to forget that after all we are dealing only with analogies, and that it is dangerous, not only with men but also with concepts, to drag them out of the region where they originated and have matured. The diagnosis of col- lective neuroses, moreover, will be confronted by a special difficulty. In the neurosis of an individual we can use as a starting point the contrast presented to us between the pa- tient and his environment which we assume to be 'normal.' No such background as this would be available for any society similarly affected; it would have to be supplied in some other way. And with regard to any therapeutic appli- cation of our knowledge, what would be the use of the most acute analysis of social neuroses, since no one pos- sesses the power to compel the community to adopt the therapy? In spite of all these difficulties, we may expect that one day someone will venture upon this research into the pathology of civilized communities." I 1S. Freud, Civilization and its Discontents, translated from the German by J. Riviere (London: The Hogarth Press, Ltd., 1953), Pp. 141-2. (Italics mine, E.F.) The Sick Individual and the Sick Society 61 But in spite of Freud's interest in the "'social neuroses," 1 one fundamental difference between Freud's and Marx's thinking remains: Marx sees man as formed by his society, and hence sees the root of pathology in specific qualities of the social organization. Freud sees man as primarily formed by his experience in the family group; he appre- ciates little that the family is only the representative and agent of society, and he looks at various societies mainly in terms of the quantity of repression they demand, rather than the quality of their organization and of the impact of this social quality on the quality of the thinking and feeling of the members of a given society. This discussion of the difference between Marx's and Freud's views on psychopathology, brief as it is, must men- tion one more aspect in which their thinking follows the same method. For Freud the state of primary narcissism of the infant, and the later oral and anal stages of libido de- velopment, are "normal" inasmuch as they are necessary stages in the process of evolution. The dependent, greedy infant is not a sick infant. Yet the dependent, greedy adult, who has been "ixated" on, or who has "regressed" to, the oral level of the child is a sick adult. The main needs and strivings are the same in the infant and in the adult; why then is the one healthy and the other sick? The answer lies quite obviously in the concept of evolution. What is normal at a certain stage is pathological at another stage. Or, to put it differently: what is necessary at one stage is also nor- mal or rational. What is unnecessary, seen from the stand- point of evolution, is irrational and pathological. The adult who "repeats" an infantile stage at the same time does not and cannot repeat it, precisely because he is no longer a child. 1 In my The Sane Society (New York: Rinehart & Company, Inc., 1955), I have attempted an analysis of the "social neurosis" of our time, of the "pathology of normalcy." 62 BEYOND THE CHAINS OF ILLUSION Marx following Hegel, employs the same method in viewing the evolution of man in society. Primitive man, medieval man, and the alienated man of industrial society are sick and yet not sick, because their stage of develop- ment is a necessary one. Just as the infant has to mature physiologically in order to become an adult, so the human race has to mature sociologically in the process of gaining mastery of nature and of society in order to become fully human. All irrationality of the past, while regrettable, is rational inasmuch as it was necessary. But when the human race stops at a stage of development which it should have passed, when it finds itself in contradiction with the possi- bilities which the historical situation offers, then its state of existence is irrational or, if Marx had used the term, pathological. Both Marx's and Freud's concepts of pathol- ogy can be understood fully only in terms of their evolu- tionary concept of individual and human history. 82 BEYOND THE CHAINS OF ILLUSION greater satisfaction of human needs are easier to make when certain material conditions are given which facilitate such changes. It follows from these considerations that the relation between social change and economic change is not only the one which Marx emphasized, namely, the interests of new classes in changed social and political conditions, but that social changes are at the same time determined by the fundamental human needs which make use, as it were, of favorable circumstances for their reali- zation. The middle class which won the French revolu- tion wanted freedom for their economic pursuits from the fetters of the old order. But they also were driven by a genuine wish for human freedom inherent in them as human beings. While most were satisfied with a narrow concept of freedom after the revolution had won, the very best spirits of the bourgeoisie became aware of the limitations of bourgeois freedom and, in their search for a more satisfactory answer to man's needs, arrived at a concept which considered freedom to be the condition for the unfolding of the total man. Provided this concept of the genesis and function of the social character is correct, we are confronted with a puzzling problem. Is not the assumption that the char- acter structure is molded by the role which the individual has to play in his culture contradicted by the assumption that a person's character is molded in his childhood? Can both views pretend to be true in view of the fact that the child in his early years of life has comparatively little con- tact with society as such? This question is not as difficult to answer as it may seem at first glance. We must differ- entiate between the factors which are responsible for the particular contents of the social character and the methods by which the social character is produced. The structure of society and the function of the individual in the social structure may be considered to determine the content of Individual and Social Character 83 the social character. The family, on the other hand, may pal to be considered to be the psychic agency of society, the in- SiliDion which has the Trunetion of transmitting the re Fenikernater port quirements of society to the growing child. The family fulfills this function in two ways: (1) by the influence the character of the parents has on the character formation of the growing child; since the character of most parents is an expression of the social character, they transmit in this way the essential features of the socially desirable character structure to the child. (2) In addition to the character of the parents, the methods of childhood training which are cus- tomary in a culture also have the function of molding the character of the child in a socially desirable direction. There are various methods and techniques of child train- ing which can fulfill the same end and, on the other hand, there can be methods which seem identical but which nev- ertheless are different because of the character structure of those who practice these methods. By focusing on methods of child training, we can never explain the social character. Methods of child training are significant only as a mech- anism of transmission, and they can be understood cor- rectly only if we understand first what kinds of personali- ties are desirable and necessary in any given culture. Thus far we have looked at the social character as the structure through which human energy is molded in such specific ways, that it is usable for the purposes of any given society. We have now to show that it is also the basis from which certain ideas and ideals draw their strength and attractiveness. This relation between char- acter and ideas, which has been mentioned before, is easy to recognize in the case of the individual character struc- ture. A person with a hoarding (anal, according to Freud) character orientation, will be attracted to the ideal of saving, he will be repelled by ideas of what he would call "reckless spending." On the other hand, the person with 84 BEYOND THE CHAINS OF ILLUSION a productive character will find a philosophy centered around saving "dirty," and will embrace ideas which emphasize creative efforts and the use of material goods as far as they enrich life. As far as the social character is concerned, the relationship between character and ideas is the same. Some examples ought to show this relation clearly. With the end of the feudal age, private property became the central factor in the economic and social sys- tem. There had been, of course, private property before. But in feudalism private property consisted largely in land, and it was connected to the social station of the landowner in the hierarchic system. It was not salable on the market since it was part of the social role of the owner. Modern capitalism destroyed the feudal system. Private property is not only property in land, it is also property in the means of production. All property is alienable; it can be bought and sold on the market, and its value is expressed in an abstract form--that of money. Land, machines, gold, diamonds--they all have in common the abstract money form in which their value can be expressed. Any- body can acquire private property, regardless of his posi- tion in the social system. It may be through industrious- ness, creativeness, luck, ruthlessness, or inheritance--the ownership of private property is not affected by the means of its acquisition. The security, power, sense of strength of a person does not, as in the feudal system, depend any longer on a person's status, which was relatively unalter- able, but on the possession of private property. If the man of the modern era loses his private property he is nobody-_socially speaking; the feudal lord could not lose it as long as the feudal system remained intact. As a re- sult, the respective ideals are different. For the feudal lord, and even for the artisan belonging to a guild, the main concern was the stability of the traditional order, the harmonious relation to his superiors, the concept of a Individual and Social Character 85 God who was the final guarantor of the stability of the feudal system. If any of these ideas were attacked, a mem- ber of feudal society would even risk his life in order to defend what he considered to be his deepest convictions. For modern man the ideals are quite different. His fate, security, and power rest on private property; hence for bourgeois society, private property is sacred, and the ideal of the invulnerability of private property is a cornerstone in its ideological edifice. Although the majority of people in any of the capitalist societies do not own private prop- erty in the sense used here (property in the means of production), but only "personal" property such as a car, television set, etc.-that is, consumer goods--the great bourgeois revolution against the feudal order has never- theless formulated the principle of the invulnerability of private property so that even those who do not belong to the economic élite have the same feeling, in this respect, as those who belong. Just as the member of the feudal society considered an attack against the feudal system immoral, and even inhuman, so the average person in a capitalist society considers an attack against private prop- erty a sign of barbarism and inhumanity. He will often not say so directly but rationalize his hate against the violators of private property in terms of their godlessness, injustice, and so on; yet, in reality, and often uncon- sciously, they appear to him as inhuman because they have violated the sanctity of private property. The point is not that they have hurt him economically, or that they even threaten his economic interests realistically; the point is that they threaten a vital ideal. It seems, for instance, that the repugnance and hate which so many people in capitalistic countries have against the communist countries is, to a large extent, based on the very repugnance they feel against the outright violators of private property. There are so many other examples of ideas which are Conversation opened. 1 read message. Skip to content Using Gmail with screen readers in:sent 3 of 1,023 From chains end kac attac Sun, Sep 24, 3:47 PM (3 days ago) to Stefan XI SOME RELATED IDEAS ises- or consequences- of the concepts discussed in the THORP are still ideas left which are preme bulk of this book, yet which did not fall precisely under any one of the chapter headings dealing with Freud's and Marx's concepts. In this present chapter I shall try to deal with some of these related ideas. The first of these ideas deals with the connection be- tween "thought" and "concern." Both psychology and so- ciology have as their object man. I can get to know a great deal about man by observing him like any other object. I the observer-_stand against my "ob-ject" ("ob-ject" and "objection" have the same root; in German, Gegenstand "counterstand") to observe it, describe it, measure it, weigh it--yet I do not understand that which is alive if it remains an "'object." I understand man only in the situation of being related to him, when he ceases to be a split-off object and becomes part of me or, to be still more correct, when he becomes "me, " yet remains also "not-me." If I remain a distant observer I see only manifest behavior, and if this is all I want to know, I can be satisfied with being an observer. But in this position the whole of the other person, his full reality, escapes me. I have described him from this and the other aspect-_yet I have never met 149 150 BEYOND THE CHAINS OF ILLUSION him. Only if I am open to him and respond to him, and that is, precisely, if I am related to him, do I see my fellow man; and to see him is to know him. How can I see the other if I am filled with myself? To be filled with oneself means to be filled with one's own image, with one's greed, or with one's anxiety. But it does not mean "being oneself." Indeed, I need to be myself in order to see the other. How could I understand his fear, his sadness, his aloneness, his hope, his love-unless I felt my own fear, sadness, aloneness, hope, or love? If I cannot mobilize my own human experience, mobilize it and en- gage myself with my fellow man, I might come to know a great deal about him, but I shall never know him. To be open is the condition to enable me to become filled with him, to become soaked with him, as it were; but I need to be I, otherwise how could I be open? I need to be myself, that is, my own authentic, unique self, in order to throw out myself, in order to transcend the illusion of the reality of this unique self. As long as I have not established my own identity, as long as I have not fully emerged from the womb, from the family, from the ties of race and nation- in other words, as long as I have not fully become an indi- vidual, a free man, I cannot throw away this individual and thus experience that I am nothing but the drop of water on the crest of the wave, a separate entity for a split of a second. Being related, being engaged, means to be concerned. If I am a participant rather than a distant observer, I become interested (inter-esse means "to-be-in"). "To-be-in" means not to be outside. If "I-am-in," then the world becomes my concern. This concern can be one of destruction. The "in- terest" of the suicidal person in himself is the interest to destroy himself, just as the "interest" of the homicidal per- son in the world is that of destroying it. But this latter in- terest is a pathological one; not because "'man is good," Some Related Ideas 151 but because it is the very quality of life that it tends to sus- tain itself; "to-be-in" the world means to be concerned with the life and the growth of myself and all other beings. Concerned knowledge, the "being-in" knowledge, then, leads to the desire to help; it is, if we use the word in a broad sense, therapeutically oriented knowledge. This qual- ity of concerned knowledge has found its classic expres- sion in Buddhist thought. When the Buddha saw an old man, a sick man, a dead man, he did not remain a distant observer; he was moved to think about the question how man can be saved from suffering. It was his concern to help man which led the Buddha to his discovery that if man can liberate himself from his greed and ignorance, he can liberate himself from suffering. Once the orientation to the world has become one of passionate concern, all think- ing about the world takes different paths. The simplest ex- ample for this is offered by medicine. How many medical discoveries would have been made without the wish to heal? It is the same concern which underlies all Freud's discoveries. Had he not been prompted by the wish to cure mental disturbances, how could he have discovered the un- conscious in the various disguises in which it appears in symptoms and dreams? Quite obviously, random and un- interested observation rarely leads to significant knowl- edge. All questions posed by the intellect are determined by our interest. This interest, far from being opposed to knowledge, is its very condition, provided it is blended with reason, that is, with the capacity to see things as they are, "to let them be." I was greatly helped in seeing this by my activity as a psychoanalyst. I had been trained in accordance with the strictly orthodox Freudian procedure of analyzing a patient while sitting behind him and listening to his associations. This technique of psychoanalysis was modeled along the lines of the laboratory experiment: the patient was the introversion He win 154 BEYOND THE CHAINS OF ILLUSION factors which can be combined; they are interrelated in such a way that knowledge becomes fertilized by practice and practice is guided by knowledge; theory and practice both change their nature once they cease to be separate. The problem of the interrelation between theory and practice has still another facet, the connection between in- telligence and character. To be sure, every individual is born with a certain level of intelligence, and no psycho- logical factors are responsible for his being either an idiot or a genius. But idiots and geniuses are exceptions; what impressed me more and more was the stupidity of the vast majority of people who do not fall under either of these ex- treme categories. I am not referring to the lack of the sort of intelligence which is measured by intelligence tests, but to the incapacity for understanding the less obvious causes of phenomena, of grasping contradictions within the same phenomenon, of making connections between different and not obviously related factors. This stupidity is most ap- parent in the views people have about personal relation- ships and social affairs. Why is it that people cannot see the most obvious facts in personal and social affairs and, instead, cling to clichés which are endlessly repeated with- out ever being questioned? Intelligence, aside from the native faculty, is largely a function of independence, courage, and aliveness; stupidity is equally a result of sub- mission, fear, and inner deadness. If an essential part of intelligence consists in the ability to make connections between factors which so far have not been seen as being related, the person who sticks to the cliché and to con- vention will not dare to recognize such connections; the person who is afraid of being different will not dare to recognize fictions for what they are, and hence will be greatly impeded from uncovering reality. The little boy in the story of the emperor's clothes who sees that the emperor is naked, is, after all, not more intelligent Some Related Ideas 155 than the adults, but he is not yet so eager to conform. Fur- thermore, any new discovery is an adventure, and the ad- ventures require not only a certain degree of inner se- curity, but also a vitality and joy which can be found only in those for whom living is more than releasing tensions and avoiding pain. In order to reduce the general level of stupidity, we need not more "intellect" but a different kind of character: men who are independent, adventurous, and R who are in love with life. I cannot leave the topic of intellect without talking about 71) another aspect, the danger of intellectualization and of the misuse of words. Words can be used without meaning what they purport to mean; words can be empty shells and one can learn certain philosophical, religious, and political ideas as one learns a foreign language. Indeed one of the greatest dangers to be avoided is to confuse words with facts; the fetishism of words prevents the understanding of reality. This can be observed in all areas-_most of all, perhaps, in religion, politics, and philosophy. The vast majority of all Americans believe in God; yet from all observations, scientifically organized as well as random observations, it seems clear that this belief in God has very little conse- quence for action and the conduct of life. Most people are concerned with health, money, and "education" (the latter as part of social success), and not at all with the problems which would arise if they were concerned with God. We are consumption-hungry and production-proud, and show precisely all the traits of materialism of which we accuse the "godless." If there is anything to be taken seriously in our profession of God, it is to recognize the fact that God Wilh The O 77 continued silence sure -lt dapacter t introf ex fo, or at lea't not ereeise'T has become an idol. Not an idol of wood or stone like the ones our ancestors worshiped, but an idol of words, phrases, doctrines. We violate at every moment the com- mand not to use God's name in vain, which means using intellectu lization nisuse of words?! clearly this is ittelf a case in point!