Discover the Best Books Written by Erich Fromm

Erich Fromm, born Erich Seligman Fromm, was one of the world’s leading psychoanalysts. He was also attributed as a social behaviorist, a philosopher, and a Marxist. He was born to orthodox Jewish parents in Frankfurt am Main in, Germany, on March 23, 1900. Fromm, the single child of a wine merchant, was reportedly a somewhat intolerable, phobic child. The fact that his mother was afflicted with depression and his father was characteristically a temperamental man did not really create an ideal childhood situation for him. 

Although he was given a conservative (and pluralistic) upbringing and education, Fromm eventually became a rebel, forsaking his religion to become an atheist. He completely debunked religion as the basis of strife, discord, and inequality. Religion spewed hatred, and since he belonged to an insecure era caught in between the First World War and the coming Second World War, he felt it best to give up religion in favor of more humanitarian and realistic philosophies.

Fromm’s academic record can be deemed remarkable. He started out with sociology and found his true calling in psychology. It is perhaps ironically noteworthy that he considered many Jewish intellectuals as his exemplars when he was a young boy. Some of them were the neo-Kantian Hermann Cohen, the free-thinking non-interventionist, the eminent Talmudist Rabbi Nehemia Nobel, who was proficient in psychoanalytic literature as well, and Rabbi Salman Baruch Rabinkow, a Jewish mystic with a compelling approval for socialism. Such strong influences anticipated Erich Fromm’s proclivity for the committed, the analytical, and the unrestricted schools of thought. Thus predictably, his first job was as a rabbi.