*Click on the day of the month for the daily quote.*

Love is union with somebody, 
or something, outside oneself, 
under the condition of retaining the 
separateness and integrity of one's own self.
~Erich Fromm~

 Erich Fromm was a German born American social philosopher and psychoanalyst. He was born on March 23, 1900 in Frankfurt Germany. He was an only child of Orthodox Jewish parents. Fromm described his mother as overprotective, his father distant, and himself as an "unbearable, neurotic child." The Fromm family was really into Jewish tradition, and Erich Fromm was studying the Talmud and the Old Testament. Erich Fromm concentrated on justice, righteousness, and universal peace. These topics were written about through his books. In 1926, when Fromm was 26, he abandoned his Jewish faith. 

Fromm's formal education focused on psychology, philosophy, sociology, and later, psychoanalysis. The major intellectual influences for him were Sigmund Freud and Karl Marx although Fromm was eventually to be a revisionist of both of these men.

In 1926 Fromm married a woman ten years older than him. She had also been his psychoanalyst, Frieda Reichman, but the marriage lasted only four years. Nonetheless, Fromm and Freida Fromm Reichman continued to be friends and professional collaborators and she had her own distinguished career as an author and psychotherapist.

In 1933 Fromm left Germany because of the rising tide of Nazism, just one of millions who fled from or perished at the hands of Hitler's legions. In America Fromm became one of the founders of the William Alanson White Institute of Psychiatry, Psychoanalysis and Psychology. At different times he taught at Yale, Columbia, Bennington College, New York University, the University of Michigan and Michigan State as well as the National Autonomous University in Mexico City. He also maintained a psychoanalytic practice for more than forty five years.

Fromm married his second wife in 1944 and moved to Mexico City seeking a more favorable climate for her health. Unfortunately, she died an untimely death in 1952. Fromm was later to marry for a third time, obviously a firm believer in the institution.

In the middle fifties Fromm joined the American Socialist Party and tried to formulate a progressive program for that party-without a great deal of success. However, he continued to be a firm believer in democratic socialism as the most humane and humanistic of political systems. Another prime political interest was the international peace movement and he was a co-founder of SANE, an organization opposing both the atomic arms race and the war in Vietnam. He also was a vigorous supporter of Senator Eugene McCarthy during the 1968 presidential campaign. After Nixon's election, however, Fromm withdrew from political activism. Nixon was surely the cause of many folks questioning their hope for mankind.

During his lifetime Fromm suffered two major bouts of tuberculosis and three heart attacks before finally succumbing to a fourth attack on March 18, 1980, in the Swiss village of Muralto, just five days shy of his 80th birthday.

Gerhard Knapp has said of Fromm that he "Consistently devoted himself and work to one single goal: the propagation of a great visionary hope for a better and more dignified life for all of humanity. [He] clung tenaciously to his unflagging faith in humanity's potential for self-regeneration. This unbroken hope is the spiritual center of his life and his works." Daniel Burston, author of The Legacy of Erich Fromm, has written: [Fromm] was a man who cherished an abiding love for the values of humanistic religion and the Jewish tradition in which he was raised. [He] was nonetheless a committed atheist who regarded belief in a personal creator God as an historical anachronism." Fromm described himself as "an atheistic mystic, a Socialist who is in opposition to most Socialist and Communist parties, a psychoanalyst who is a very unorthodox Freudian."Fromm was a very prolific writer with hundreds of articles and almost two dozen books in English to his credit. The range of his subject matter was broad including psychology and psychoanalysis, sociology, humanism, religion, ethics, Buddhism, Marxism, socialism and foreign policy. 

Most people die before they
are fully born. Creativeness
means to be born before one dies.
~Erich Fromm~

Erich Fromm Quotes

  Collection of Love Quotes

Quote of the Day Archive          Favorite Songs        Inspirational Poems & Stories