Are people mad because of society's influence upon them, or is their insanity something that occurs from within, independent of the world and what is happening in it? This is the central question that German psychologist, philosopher and Marxist sociologist Erich Fromm seeks to answer in what has become one of his most famous works on the subject of society and its effects on the human mind.
Instead of analyzing the psychological make up of individuals, Fromm instead analyzes the psychological make up of society and contends that it is the sickness of society that contributes to, and in some cases, completely causes, the sickness of the individual. So, rather than observing that society has become more violent because of the acts of the psychopathic individual, Fromm asserts that a growing violence within society as a whole makes individuals prone to violent thoughts or acts more likely to commit an atrocity. The book is contention based, and is in many ways a psychoanalytical representation of the eternal question, what came first, the chicken or the egg.
Erich Fromm is one of the pre-eminent German psychologists and psychoanalysts of his generation, renowned for his tendency to consistently disagree with almost everything written by Freud. After fleeing Nazi Germany with his family, he settled in the United States where he began his association with fellow psychoanalysts Karen Horney and Harry Stack Sullivan who also classed themselves as Neo-Freudian.
In the nineteen seventies, Fromm became known to an extended public audience after his book The Anatomy of Human Destructiveness was published, which dealt with the issue of psychopathy and sociopathy in the context of society, revisiting the central tenets of this book, using Charles Manson and his followers as examples of his theories. As the Manson family murders were still fresh in people's minds at the time of the book's publication the book reached a far wider audience than his previous works had done.
Fromm's best-known work is Escape from Freedom, which focuses on the fact that humans crave an authority figure which he uses to criticize the capitalist system under which he was living. Fromm himself passed away in March 1980.
