Cultural Foundations of Political Psychology

Paul Roazen

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• eBook ISBN: 9781351524582
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: History & Theory in Psychology
• Index: Psychology

Over the centuries all of the great philosophers made psychology central to understanding social life. Indeed, the ancient Greeks thought it impossible to conceive of political life without insight into the human soul. Yet insuffficient professional legitimization attaches to the central importance of modern depth psychology in understanding politics. Cultural Foundations of Political Psychology explores the linkages between psychology and politics, focusing on how rival conceptions of the good life and unspoken moral purposes in the social sciences have led to sectarian intolerance.

Roazen has always approached the history of psychoanalysis with the conviction that ethical issues are implicit in every clinical encounter. Thus, his opening chapter on Erich Fromm's exclusion from the International Psychoanalytic Association touches on a host of political matters, including collaboration as opposed to resistance to Nazi tyranny. Roazen also brings a public/private perspective to such well-known episodes as the Hiss/Chambers case, the circumstances of Virginia Woolf's madness and suicide, and the matter of CIA funding of the monthly Encounter. He deals with the reaction to psychoanalysis on the part of three major philosophers--Althusser, Wittgenstein, and Buber--and looks at the link between psychology and politics in the work of such political theorists as Machiavelli, Rousseau, Burke, Tocqueville, Berlin, and Arendt. A chapter grappling with Vietnam and the Cold War illustrates how political psychology should be concerned with questions of an ethical or "ought" character.

In examining the social and psychological bases for political theorizing, Roazen shows how both psychology and politics must change and redefine their methodologies as a result of their interaction. Roazen concludes with a chapter on how political psychology must deal with issues posed by changing conceptions of femininity. This volume is a pioneering exploration of the intersection of psychology and politics.

1
The Exclusion of Erich Fromm from the IPA

The subject of psychoanalytic lineage has recently acquired a new respectability among historians in the field; although privately analysts have known and acknowledged how critical it is who has gone where and to whom for training, it is only relatively rarely that public attention has been focused on the unusually powerful impact that such training analyses can have. The special suggestive role of analytic training experiences was long ago pointed out in the course of controversial in-fighting by such differently oriented pioneers as Edward Glover¹ and Jacques Lacan, but it has been unusual to find the institution of training analysis itself publicly challenged. It remains too little known that historically the requirement that all analysts be themselves analyzed for purposes of training only officially got going under the auspices of the International Psychoanalytic Association (IPA) in 1925, after Freud became ill with cancer and had implicitly to concede his inability personally to control the future of his movement.²

At the same time, however, that analytic lineage—family tree matters³—deserve to get full attention, it can be too easy to forget the role that books themselves play, especially for intellectuals, in spreading ideas. One might think it a truism that people not only go for treatment but respond powerfully to what they come across in print. Many of us were first attracted to psychoanalysis by reading the writings of Erich Fromm (1900-80). Erich Fromm’s powerful papers from the early 1930s were once almost unknown, but a book of his like Escape From Freedom⁴ became for years a central text in the education of social scientists. Works of Fromm’s like Man For Himself, Psychoanalysis and Religion, The Forgotten Language, and also The Sane Society⁵ formed an essential part of my generation’s general education. Fromm’s most hortatory last writings, and his specifically political ones, fall, I think, into a different category as far as the general influence that he had; still, the book Fromm co-authored with Michael Maccoby, Social Character in a Mexican Village, deserves more attention.⁶ Fromm’s The Art of Loving has meanwhile sold millions of copies, and To Have Or To Be? succeeded in selling a million copies in Germany alone; The Anatomy of Human Destructiveness was also a notable achievement.⁷

Ernest Jones’s biography of Freud was also formative in the psychoanalytic education of my time, as was Fromm’s short and relatively neglected retort to Jones: Sigmund Freud’s Mission: An Analysis of His Personality and Influence.⁸ Jones’s multiple distortions are so built into his heavily documented narrative that they continue to slide by even many of the most conscientious researchers. Let me give just one example from Sigmund Freud’s Mission of the persuasiveness of Fromm’s reasoning, as he follows an interpretive line entirely his own—and at odds with Jones. In the following passage Fromm was writing about the “secret” Committee, made up of Karl Abraham, Jones, Otto Rank, Sandor Ferenczi, Hanns Sachs, and Max Eitingon, which was designed before World War I to safeguard the psychoanalytic “cause” after the so-called defection of Carl G. Jung:

Who were these first most loyal disciples, the wearers of the six rings? They were urban intellectuals, with a deep yearning to be committed to an ideal, to a leader, to a movement, and yet without having any religious or political or philosophical ideal or convictions; there was neither a socialist, Zionist, Catholic nor Orthodox Jew among them. (Eitingon may have had mild Zionist sympathies.) Their religion was the Movement. The growing circle of analysts came from the same background; the vast majority were and are middle-class intellectuals, with no religious, political or philosophical interests or commitments. The great popularity of psychoanalysis in the West, and particularly in the United States, since the beginning of the thirties has undoubtedly the same social basis. Here is a middle class for whom life has lost meaning. They have no political or religious ideals, yet they are in search of a meaning, of an idea to devote themselves to, of an explanation of life which does not require faith or sacrifices, and which satisfies this need to feel part of a movement. All these needs were fulfilled by the Movement.⁹

These words seem to me still strikingly valid. Entirely aside from any of Fromm’s other clinical and theoretical contributions, one essay of his (which originally appeared in the old Saturday Review of Literature) played a notable role, despite an effort to rebut it by an orthodox analyst, in helping to start the “rehabilitation” of the historical reputations of both Ferenczi and Rank¹⁰; Jones had been singularly unfair to both. In fact, I think that the recent renaissance in Ferenczi’s clinical reputation is the one great success story in contemporary psychoanalytic historiography.

Yet bureaucratic struggles, as we shall see, were to limit Fromm’s own historical place. By now, he can be accurately described as a “forgotten intellectual,” and the whole school of thought once known as “neo-Freudianism” (Fromm did not like having the term applied to himself) has been considered as a “failure” within intellectual history.¹¹ Even while he was alive, Fromm saw how peculiar and wayward a direction the history of ideas seemed to be moving in, as his rightful standing seemed to sink ever since the late 1960s. When the term “psycho-history,” thanks largely to the initiative of the work of Erik H. Erikson, had first started to take hold in the late 1950s and early 1960s, Fromm justifiably felt somehow left out of the whole story. (Freud’s own most speculative works might appeal to political philosophers, but not to most practicing social scientists.) Fromm could not understand how Erikson could proceed in ignoring Fromm’s own pioneering work in this area; after all, Fromm’s The Dogma of Christ¹²—a text among those the Nazis banned—had originally come out as long ago as 1930.

We only now know that Erikson had explicitly discussed Fromm’s Escape From Freedom at a meeting of the San Francisco Psychoanalytic Society in March 1943, well before Erikson’s own Childhood and Society saw the light of day in 1950.¹³ Erikson always proceeded more than warily about ever even citing Fromm. And so Erikson could be fearful of risking the fate of Fromm’s having been excluded as a psychoanalyst, even more than the consequences of Erikson’s favorably mentioning—in his last works—the otherwise dread name of Jung; Erikson publicly idealized Freud at the same time he was moving away from orthodox thinking in an original direction.¹⁴ (Fromm would remain intransigently unforgiving about Jung’s work, and in good part this was related to Jung’s politics in the 1930s that we will be touching on.)

Yet Erikson had himself played a subtle part in assisting in the process of Fromm’s being stigmatized as a professional alien; Fromm seems to have been virtually alone in pointing out, in reading Erikson’s Young Man Luther, the significance of the passage where Erikson refers to “sociological treatises of our time by authors from Weber to Fromm.”¹⁵ The word “sociological” was clearly meant to distance Erikson from Fromm, and the very designation of being a sociologist (rather than an analyst) Erikson had feared being used about himself by his own analyst, Anna Freud. (This was part of a tradition in which on December 19, 1934, Jones had written to Anna Freud: “Like [Franz] Alexander and many others she [Karen Horney] seems to be replacing Psychoanalysis by a pseudo-sociology.”) Karl Menninger’s harsh 1942 critique of Fromm’s Escape From Freedom helped establish the party line which Erikson was dutifully following; for Menninger had maintained in a review in the Nation that “Erich Fromm was in Germany a distinguished sociologist. His book is written as if he considered himself a psychoanalyst.”¹⁶ Otto Fenichel had also been thoroughly severe, and pointedly described his review as “psychoanalytic remarks” on Fromm’s book.¹⁷ Freud had himself set the unfortunate pattern, in arguing against Alfred Adler and Jung, of polemically depriving free-thinkers, who then were categorized as “mavericks” if not “heretics,” of the right to call themselves analysts.

Erikson continued to steer clear of the “controversial” status of Fromm’s name, even though so much of what Erikson was trying to accomplish through re-naming more positively early libidinal phases, and by bringing ethics and psychoanalysis together, had in reality been anticipated by Fromm. For Escape From Freedom, through Fromm’s powerful concept of “social character,” really put the social environment on the map for all future analytic thinkers. By the time of Young Man Luther, Fromm was training his own school of candidates in Mexico, a “heretical” offense to the organizational powers-that-be within psychoanalysis that Erikson never risked duplicating. (And in New York City, Fromm, once allied with Karen Horney, had notably continued to teach at the William Alanson White Institute, also outside of the IPA.) But everything Fromm had done to incorporate the social perspective within psychoanalytic thinking, including an interest in matters of identity and conformity, was swamped by the immense, if perhaps transitory, success of Erikson’s own teachings.¹⁸ (To be fair to psychoanalysis’s intra-mural feuding, Marxists had their own brand of sectarianism, and Fromm had to struggle against the criticisms of his former allies at the Frankfurt Institute for Social Research; Herbert Marcuse’s ill-founded charges against Fromm and other “revisionists” like Horney and Harry Stack Sullivan were to gain notoriety starting in the mid-1950s.)

Fromm’s organizational problems within psychoanalysis, which culminated in his finally being excluded from the IPA in the early 1950s, really got their start with the coming to power of the Nazis in Germany in early 1933. It is essential to start out by providing the full specifics of Fromm’s official standing as an analyst in Germany. On June 18, 1927. Fromm, who was then living in Heidelberg, delivered his first paper, as a “guest” of the Germany Psychoanalytic Society—the “DPG”—in Berlin. (The name of the old Berlin Psychoanalytic Society had been changed in 1926 to become the German Psychoanalytic Society, and it continues to be known there as the “DPG.”) Some five years earlier, Fromm had received his doctorate in sociology, working under Max Weber’s younger brother Alfred, at Heidelberg. It is also historically significant that in early 1927 Fromm’s first wife Frieda Fromm-Reichmann had been elected an associate member of the German Society; she became a full member in 1929.

The first “sub-section” of the German Psychoanalytic Society (DPG) was located in Frankfurt and started in October 1926; Fromm, Fromm-Reichmann, along with Clara Happel, Karl Landauer, and Heinrich Meng were listed as members. (Landauer, who had been analyzed by Freud but died in the concentration camp at Bergen-Belsen, was one of Fromm’s analysts, along with Fromm-Reichmann herself, Sachs, Wilhelm Wittenberg, and Theodor Reik.) In February 1929 the South-West German Psychoanalytic Society in Frankfurt created an Institute of its own, mainly directed to giving public lectures. This Institute, with Landauer as director, was associated with the Institute for Social Research, a Marxist group that was headed by Max Horkheimer and linked to the University of Frankfurt.

Fromm, along with Landauer, Meng, and Fromm-Reichmann, was one of the original four lecturers at the Frankfurt Psychoanalytic Institute. (S. H. Fuchs, who later immigrated to England where he changed his name to Foulkes and became prominent especially in group analysis, was to be another early notable figure at the Frankfurt Psychoanalytic Institute.) Fromm gave another paper in Berlin at the German Psychoanalytic Society, where he was elected an associate member on October 7, 1930. Finally Fromm was moved up to being a full member on October 8, 1932; he was fully entitled to IPA membership. Besides the study group in Frankfurt, the German Society had ones in Leipzig, Hamburg, and later Stuttgart. Fro...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Preface
• 1. The Exclusion of Erich Fromm from the IPA
• 2. The Strange Case of Alger Hiss and Whittaker Chambers
• 3. Notes on Leonard and Virginia Woolf
• 4. Tragedy in America
• 5. The Old Encounter
• 6. Three Philosophers Analyze Freud: Wittgenstein, Althusser, and Buber
• 7. Theorists
• 8. Vietnam and the Cold War
• 9. On Intellectuals and Exile
• 10. Methodology
• 11. Hannah Arendt
• 12. Geoffrey Gorer
• 13. Biography
• 14. Affairs of State
• Conclusions: The Psychology of Women
• Index