Fromm, “The Social Determinants of Psychoanalytic Therapy” (1935) (I)

Erich Fromm wrote this piece in 1935, while still on relatively friendly terms with his Frankfurt School peers and, one imagines, under their influence. In it, Fromm does a number of things: he offers a useful gloss on the concepts and principles  of psychoanalysis, as it was then understood; he reconstructs the historical context — economic, political, more broadly social — that implicitly shaped the psychoanalytic self-understanding; and he develops a critique of that self-understanding, and the clinical practice based upon it, both of which are problematically entangled in that historical context. The critique is internal or “immanent” inasmuch as Fromm judges Freud’s position in terms of its own ideals and aims. Ultimately, argues Fromm, Freud’s clinical recommendations — organized around “tolerance” and related “liberal” norms — conflict with Freud’s own objectives, namely, the effort to release repressions and “make the unconscious conscious.” In short, Fromm critiques Freudian “means” in the name of Freudian “ends.”

In this entry and the following ones, I will take the stages of Fromm’s account in turn: his selective summary of the Freudian “position”; his description of the clinical attitude — “tolerance” — suggested by Freud and the classical tradition; his identification of the socio-historical “content” of this tolerance, which establishes the value-horizon for classical analysis and imposes limitations on clinical efficacy; and his critique of classical therapeutic norms for their unreflective collusion with this value-horizon.

The essay’s first section (149-152) is restricted to recapitulating the main ideas of psychoanalysis, theoretical and clinical — though even here Fromm’s emphasis is selective, and he embroiders his exposition with revisions and criticisms of his own. He begins, uncontroversially, with the claim that psychoanalysis “is based on the uncovering of unconscious tendencies that lead to symptom formation or…neurotic character traits” (149), while continuing — in a slightly more tendentious vein — that the “most important cause of repression,” or the expulsion of these “tendencies” from consciousness in the first place, “is anxiety” (149). But he now, in what is surely an innovative gesture, differentiates this repression-occasioning anxiety into several “types” and, moreover, takes the liberty of ranking their relative pathogenic values. Thus we are invited to distinguish, in ascending significance, (a) the “fear of external force” — by which Fromm must mean “castration threats,” real or imagined; (b) the fear of “los[ing] the sympathy and love” of intimates; (c) fear of losing “one’s self-respect”; (d) finally — the substantial innovation of these passages, though Fromm does not frame it this way — fear of losing social esteem or acceptance. So Fromm writes:

“Generally, repressions only take place when an impulse is condemned not only by a single person, or even by several individuals, but by the social group to which the person in question belongs. In this case, in addition to the threat of external punishment, and to losing the love of the individual most important to the person in question, there is the danger of isolation and of the loss of social support. It seems that this danger produces more anxiety in most people than the one previously mentioned, and that this social isolation is the most important source of repression” (149)

Yet whatever the cause, object, or profundity of the anxiety, the mechanism is much the same: some impulse or package of impulses, originally conscious, seem in practice to evoke such anxiety — because of their effect on significant others in one’s environment — that they must be “repressed,” banished from awareness, where they nonetheless persist as “unconscious.” Repressed impulses are by this definition those the expression of which, hence ultimately even the awareness of which, are felt to imperil their bearers. The power of mind that prevents the re-emergence into awareness of these repressed impulses — which, so to speak, secures and continually renews the repression — is called “resistance.” Since an analysis is dedicated to consciously accessing the unconscious, hence lifting the repressions obstructing that access, it has centrally to do with this “resistance" — all the defensive means at the patient’s disposal for thwarting an analysis, for keeping these impulses unconscious.

Drawing blanks in the midst of free association or flight from distressing material; sudden anger towards the analyst and the analysis itself; illnesses or other symptoms that prevent the patient from attending sessions — all of these may be expressions of resistance. The appearance of these resistances is, Fromm emphasizes, neither an unfortunate accident nor a premonition of clinical failure, but rather “the most reliable signal that repressed material has been touched, and that one is not merely moving about on the psychic surface” (150). The whole substance of analysis, then, consists in eliciting these resistances, in order to address and overcome them. (“Transference” is the most important instrument in this program.)

What exactly is required, though, “in working one’s way through the resistance to the repressed material” (150)? Or again, more specifically: which characteristics of an analyst, and of an analytic situation, will best help in dissolving the resistances, so liberating the repressed impulses into consciousness?

The answer to these questions is connected, of course, to the original problem, namely, “which factors the strength of the resistance depends on” (150). As we saw above, anxiety of a particular sort drives impulses from awareness; it is finally this same anxiety which, via resistance, holds the repression in place. The strength of resistance, then — the necessary analytic obstacle — is a measure of the anxiety surrounding the repressed content. It follows that the effort to weaken the patient’s resistances must at the same time address this anxiety.