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

In the middle section of the essay (154-158), Fromm identifies a moralistic “core” to Freud’s standpoint. This moralism, which Fromm reconstructs from Freud’s writings, reflects the ambiguities of “tolerance” canvassed in our last entry. Alongside his critical, naturalistic disenchantment of mental life, and to some degree obscured by it, Freud also persistently betrays a perfectly conventional, liberal-bourgeois endorsement of sexual, political, economic, and more broadly social norms.

This is particularly conspicuous, Fromm argues, in Freud’s conception of the antagonism between sexual gratification and culture. For Freud, this antagonism is, not merely unsurpassable, but also desirable inasmuch as, via sublimation, it is responsible for all human progress at individual and collective levels. Accordingly, where sublimation is practicable it ought to be pursued, whereas neurotics who are less “capable” of the renunciation involved are to be pitied, and “tolerantly” allowed their perversions.

Freud’s conventionality does not end with sexuality, though. It is also detectable in his unreflective acceptance of certain criteria of mental health — “a capacity for work and enjoyment” — which promote the aims of “the successful, professionally active citizen” (157), and “the capitalist character in its most developed form” (157). It is evident, too, in a prejudice that any political radicalism is de facto a symptom of infantilism, an unresolved Oedipal Complex, and the like — “for Freud, anything running counter to the bourgeois norm is a priori “neurotic” (157). And indeed, the whole conceptual structure of psychoanalysis had by the time of Fromm’s article acquired a moralistic tinge:

“Freud and some of his disciples use psychological terms, where other members of the same social class make plain judgments. In this language, “neurotic,” “infantile,” “unanalyzed” means bad and inferior. ”Resistance” means hard-boiled obstinacy, the ”will to get well” means repentance and the wish to reform” (157-158)

Finally, Fromm’s critiques an important dimension of Freud’s thinking as follows:

“Bourgeois society is characterized by its patriarchal or patricentric character. According to the patricentric view, the meaning of life lies not in man’s happiness or well-being, but in the fulfillment of duty and subordination to authority. There is no unconditional right to love and happiness; it depends on the degree of fulfillment of duty and subordination, and has to be justified, even in the small amount permitted, by achievement and success. Freud is a classical representative of the patricentric character type” (158)

Having sketched the historical conditions of the value “tolerance” — its emergence and development — and identified a conformist, “patricentric” streak in Freud’s writings — their radicalism notwithstanding — Fromm now returns to the theme that began his reflections. He is interested, after all, in how analytic practice may best serve analytic ends. If the patient’s repressions and their resulting neuroses are ultimately rooted in anxiety; if, indeed, anxiety stubbornly persists behind the “resistance” holding these repressions in place; then an analyst who hopes to liberate the patient from suffering must somehow address this central obstacle: anxiety.

Yet precisely the “patricentric character” (158) embodied by Freud, idealized in his writings, and eventually assimilated by his disciples — precisely this unconscious moralism precludes the effort to address the patient’s anxiety. It was, Fromm reminds us, the patient’s negative experience and subsequent fear of critical judgment regarding his impulses that occasioned the original repression. For the developing child, the “possession” of these unacceptable impulses comes to coincide with the loss of love from family and later peers — a possibility fraught with such anxiety that it is preferable not to acknowledge the existence of these impulses at all.

If the analyst now unconsciously communicates to the patient an identical “patricentric” judgment that these repressed impulses are basically unacceptable, that generally speaking the patient enjoys no “unconditional right to happiness”  — beneath a hypocritical veneer of “tolerance” and despite his conscious intentions — then these impulses will remain anxiety-ridden and therefore repressed. And, of course, the path to approaching these materials will remain obstructed by “resistance” — the patient correctly suspecting, at some level, that the situation is not sufficiently hospitable or “safe” for exhuming the offending impulses.

Fromm describes the impossible situation engendered by traditional psychoanalysis in a long paragraph, well worth quoting in its entirety, since it brings together a number of threads which have until now been kept separate. These threads include anxiety, happiness, repression, “patronizing” tolerance, the patricentric ethos, and the official liberal-bourgeois order grounded in that ethos:

“The problem of the analyst’s patricentric character is of decisive importance for analytical therapy. Perhaps the patient’s most important need necessary for his recovery is for an unconditional acknowledgment of his claims to happiness and well-being. He has to feel, during treatment, that the analyst acknowledges the human claim to happiness and well-being as unquestioned and unconditional. It is precisely the lack of such unconditional affirmation in the average bourgeois family, the cruelty with which “enemies” or “failure” are equated, and with which both are viewed as just punishment of even one single misstep, that are among the most important conditions of neurotic illness. If a human being who has become ill in such an atmosphere is to be helped to clear up the unconscious parts of his instinctual life, he needs an environment in which he is certain of the unconditional and unshakable affirmation of his claims to happiness and well-being—indeed, since the neurotic mostly does not dare to make these demands, he needs an attitude on the part of the analyst that encourages him to do so. The patricentric attitude does not permit this atmosphere to develop. It rather entails an analytic situation whose unspoken or partly unconscious essence one might in caricature express somewhat as follows: “Here you come, patient, with all your sins. You have been bad, and that is why you suffer. But one can excuse you. The most important reasons for your misdeeds lie in the events of your childhood for which you cannot be made responsible. Furthermore, you want to reform, and you show this in coming into analysis and in giving yourself up to my directions. If, however, you do not comply, do not see that I am right in what I demand or what I say of you, then you cannot be helped, and the last way out of your suffering is closed to you.” It is undeniable that a patient’s lack of subordination towards an analyst of the patricentric character type not seldom calls forth hostility in the latter—albeit frequently unconscious—towards the patient. Such hostility not only makes all therapeutic success impossible but also represents a serious danger to the patient’s psychic health. The patricentric, authoritarian attitude of the analyst just outlined is unconscious, also in Freud, and is masked by the typical liberalistic tendency to permit every one to find salvation according to his own fashion…What is important, however, for the effect the analyst’s attitude has on the patient, is not his conscious stance, but the unconscious authoritarian, patricentric attitude usually hidden behind ‘tolerance’” (158-159)

In the next entry, I will conclude my commentary on Fromm's piece.