The Rotten Middle Class

BEYOND THE CHAINS OF ILLUSION (182 pp.)--Erich Fromm--Trident Press ($3.95).

Erich Fromm is a world-famous psychoanalyst whose interests of late have had little to do with psychoanalysis. On lecture podiums and on television, in books and magazines, he has called for an overhaul of U.S. society because, he argues, it is maiming the individual and steering the world toward war and chaos. Partly on the basis of Fromm's reputation as a psychoanalyst, many people are taking him seriously as an expert on history, morals, politics and military strategy.

Just how shaky these credentials are can be seen from Fromm's latest book, an account of his own intellectual devel opment and a paean of praise to Karl Marx at the expense of Sigmund Freud. In comparing the two thinkers, Fromm praises both for breaking new ground and taking a "dynamic" approach to human behavior. But while Freud uncovered the "individual unconscious," Marx revealed the "social unconscious," the forces at work changing society. Fromm came to a heretical conclusion for a psychoanalyst: "Marx is a figure of world historical significance with whom Freud cannot even be compared."

Messianic Tastes. Fromm has always found Freud too pessimistic for his taste. In fact, he has broken radically with Freud, though he is still euphemistically known as a "Freudian revisionist." Freud saw man as the prisoner of his primitive drives; Fromm thinks he can be infinitely shaped by society. Freud thought every life was blighted by the childhood Oedipus complex; Fromm sees nothing worse in childhood than a healthy rebellion against parental authority. Fromm finds Marx much more congenial than Freud because he promises so much more, once the socialist millennium has arrived: a free and unfettered individual, brimful of love and "productivity." Writes Fromm: "Marx had an unbroken faith in man's perfectibility rooted in the Messianic tradition of the West from the prophets through Christianity, and Enlightenment thinking."

Any reasonably perceptive reader might have suspected from Fromm's earlier writings that he was spellbound by Marx. Fromm has a secure place in American middle-class society; he teaches at New York University and is required reading at innumerable colleges. But Marx apparently has taught him to believe that middle-class life is rotten to the core.

"Could it be," he asks in his book, The Sane Society, "that the middle-class life of prosperity, while satisfying our material needs, leaves us with a feeling of intense boredom . . . that modern civilization fails to satisfy profound needs in man?" Capitalistic society, Fromm charges, has turned men into robots who have sur rendered their freedom to machines. They suffer, he writes, from a "receptive orientation in which the aim is to receive, to 'drink in,' to have something new all the time, to live with a continuously open mouth, as it were." They can be saved only by the sane, socialist society which Fromm describes vaguely, if vibrantly.

Protestant Powerlessness. In Escape from Freedom (1941), his best-known book, Fromm traces the origin of this pathetic middle-class creature to Martin Luther. Putting Luther on the couch, Fromm concludes that Luther plunged modern man into despair. In a neat, if oversimplified analysis, Fromm argues that this Protestant feeling of "powerlessness" paved the way for the acceptance of Hitler. In May Man Prevail?, Fromm continues his war against the middle class with considerably less plausibility. He blames the cold war on the paranoiac attitude of the American middle class (though reserving a few knocks for Russia too), and then in a concluding chapter--written little more than a year before the Cuban missile crisis--he assures his readers that Khrushchev wants to end the cold war so badly he would never think of trying to use Cuba as a military base against the U.S.

Perhaps Fromm should never have deserted Freud--or the couch.

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