Escape from Freedom
Why people give away the freedom they have won. Written in 1941 and still uncomfortable.
Fromm argues that freedom carries a weight many people cannot bear. As traditional bonds of church, guild and fixed social rank dissolved, the individual gained independence but also isolation, and with it a fear that pushes toward surrender. He traces the psychological mechanisms of that surrender: submission to authority, destructiveness turned against the self and others, and the automaton conformity that lets a person disappear into the crowd while feeling free.
Writing in 1941 against the rise of fascism, Fromm reads Nazism not as an accident but as an answer to this fear, a way of trading the burden of self for the comfort of belonging. He sets against it what he calls spontaneous activity, the union of love and work through which a person can be both separate and connected.
For the consulting room, the book gives a vocabulary for the patient who flees from choice, mistakes obedience for safety, and organises a life around avoiding the anxiety that autonomy brings.
About the author
Erich Fromm
Erich Fromm (1900 to 1980) was a German-born psychoanalyst and social psychologist. Trained in the Freudian tradition, he broke with orthodox drive theory to argue that personality is shaped as much by economic and cultural conditions as by biology. His concept of social character, and works such as Escape from Freedom, examined how people manage the anxiety of autonomy. Associated with the neo-Freudian and interpersonal schools, he helped shape humanistic psychoanalysis.
Details
- 1941
- English
- Henry Holt
- Henry Holt, 1941
- 320
- 9780805031492