The Art of Loving (Paperback)

Erich Fromm, born as Erich Seligman Fromm, was one of the world’s leading psychoanalysts. He was also attributed as a social behaviorist, a philosopher and a Marxist. He was born in Frankfurt am Main in Germany on March 23, 1900 to orthodox Jewish parents. The single child of a wine merchant, Fromm was reportedly a somewhat intolerable, phobic child. The fact that his mother was afflicted with depression and his father was characteristically a temperamental man did not really create an ideal childhood situation for him. Although he was given a conservative (and pluralistic) upbringing and education, Fromm eventually turned out to be a rebel, forsaking his religion to become an atheist. He completely debunked religion as the basis of strife, discord and inequality. Religion spewed hatred and since he belonged to an insecure era caught in between the First World War and the coming Second World War, he felt it best to give up religion in favor of more humanitarian and realistic philosophies. erich-fromm-1920 Fromm’s academic record can be deemed as remarkable. He started out with sociology and found his true calling in psychology. It is perhaps ironically noteworthy that when he was a young boy he considered many Jewish intellectuals as his exemplars. Some of them were the neo-Kantian Hermann Cohen the free thinking non-interventionist, the eminent Talmudist Rabbi Nehemia Nobel who was proficient in psychoanalytic literature as well, and Rabbi Salman Baruch Rabinkow, a Jewish mystic with a compelling approval for socialism. Such strong influences anticipated Erich Fromm’s proclivity for the committed, the analytical and the unrestricted schools of thought. Thus predictably his first job was as a rabbi. After leading an immensely gratifying intellectual life Erich Fromm passed away in 1980. He had by that time shifted to Locarno in Switzerland, where he eventually succumbed to a heart attack.