Fromm, Erich. Sigmund Freud’s Mission: An Analysis of his Personality & Influence. New York: Harper & Brothers Publishers, 1959.

“Sapere aude” (dare to know).

Truth and reason are opposed to common sense and public opinion. The majority cling to convenient rationalizations and to the views that can be glimpsed from the surface of things. The function of reason is to penetrate this surface, and to arrive at the essence hidden behind that surface; to visualize objectively, that is, without being determined by one’s wishes and fears, what the forces are which move matter and men. (8)

The type of the “rebel,” in this psychological sense, can be found among many radical politicians who are rebels before they have power, and turn conservative once they have acquired power for themselves. (60)

A “revolutionary” in the psychological sense is someone who overcomes his ambivalence toward authority because he frees himself from attachment to authority and from the wish to dominate others. He achieves true independence and he overcomes the yearning for domination of others. (60)

“The development of the Ego progresses from the recognition of the instincts to their domination, from obedience to them to their inhibition. The Super-Ego, being partly reaction formation against the instinctual processes in the Id, participates greatly in this achievement. Psychoanalysis is the instrument destined for the progressive conquest of the Id.

Freud, The Ego and the Id, Chapter 5

Up to Freud the attempt had been made to dominate man’s irrational affects by reason, without knowing them, or rather without knowing their deeper sources. Freud, believing that he had discovered these sources in the libidinous strivings and their complicated mechanisms of repression, sublimation, symptom formation, etc., had to believe that now, for the first time, the age old dream of man’s self-control and rationality could be realized. (93-94)

What I wanted to point out is that Freud did not transcend the notion of man current in his society. He even gave new weight to the current concepts by showing how they were rooted in the very nature of the libido and its operation. Freud was, in this respect, the psychologist of nineteenth-century society, who showed that the assumptions about man underlying the economic system were even more right than the economists have imagined. His concept of Homo sexualis was a deepened and enlarged version of the economist’s concept of Homo economicus. (100)

Indeed, Freud’s great discovery, that of a new dimension of human reality, the unconscious, is one element in a movement aiming at human reform. But this very discovery bogged down in a fatal way. It was applied to a small sector of reality, man’s libidinal strivings and their repression, but little nor not at all to the wider reality of human existence and to social and political phenomena. (109)

The individual in any given society represses the awareness of those feelings and phantasies which are incompatible with the thought patterns in his society. The force effecting this repression is the fear of being isolated and of becoming an outcast through having thoughts and feelings which nobody would share. (110) Considering this, it is imperative for the psychoanalyst to transcend the thought patterns of his society, to look at them critically, and to understand the realities which produce these patterns. The understanding of the unconscious presupposes and necessitates the critical analysis of his society. (110)

There is, incidentally, a strange – though negative – connection between orthodox Freudian and orthodox Marxist theory: Freudians saw the individual unconscious, and were blind to the social unconscious; orthodox Marxists, on the contrary, were keenly aware of the unconscious factors in social behavior, but remarkably blind in their appreciation of individual motivation. This led to a deterioration of Marxist theory and practice, just as the reverse phenomenon has led to the deterioration of psychoanalytic theory and therapy. The result should not surprise anybody. Whether one studies society or individuals, one always deals with human beings, and that means that one deals with their unconscious motivations; one cannot separate man as an individual from man as a social participant – and if one does, one ends up by understanding neither. (111)

While the middle class of the nineteenth century was dominated by the principle to save, the middle class of the twentieth century obeys the rule of consumption, the principle of consuming immediately, without postponing the satisfaction of any wish longer than absolutely necessary. This attitude refers to the consumption of commodities, just as much as to the satisfaction of sexual needs. If a society built around the maximal and immediate satisfaction of all needs, there can be little distinction between the various spheres of needs. (113)