Reflections on War and Human Conflict

hy war? Why can’t nations get along? Why can’t people from different countries relate to one another, if not in a respectful manner at least in an acceptable one? How can people avoid the violence that leads to and perpetuates slaughter on the battlefield? As the young boy pondered these questions, a war raged throughout his homeland. This war that he saw firsthand was World War I, the Great War, the War to End All Wars. He saw that the people of his country— Germany—hated people of the opposing countries—mostly France and England, and he was sure that the people of France and England hated the people of Germany. The war made no sense. Why would normally friendly and rational people revert to such senseless killing? These questions weren’t the first to have bothered the young boy. He was also at a loss in trying to understand the suicide of a beautiful young artist who killed herself immediately after the death of her father—an event that left the 12-year-old boy confused and perplexed. The young woman—a friend of the boy’s family—was both beautiful and talented, whereas her father was old and unattractive. Yet she left a suicide note stating that she wished to be buried with her father. The young boy could make no sense of either her wish or her actions. The beautiful artist seemed to have had much to live for, but she chose death rather than a life without her father. How could the young woman make such a decision? A third experience that helped shape the young man’s early life was his training by Talmudic teachers. He was especially moved by the compassionate and redemptive tone of the Old Testament prophets Isaiah, Hosea, and Amos. Although he later abandoned organized religion, these early experiences with the Talmudic scholars, combined with his distaste for war and his puzzlement over the suicide of the young artist, contributed substantially to the humanistic views of Erich Fromm. W Overview of Humanistic Psychoanalysis Erich Fromm’s basic thesis is that modern-day people have been torn away from their prehistoric union with nature and also with one another, yet they have the power of reasoning, foresight, and imagination. This combination of lack of animal instincts and presence of rational thought makes humans the freaks of the universe. Self-awareness contributes to feelings of loneliness, isolation, and homelessness. To escape from these feelings, people strive to become reunited with nature and with their fellow human beings. Trained in Freudian psychoanalysis and influenced by Karl Marx, Karen Horney, and other socially oriented theorists, Fromm developed a theory of personality that emphasizes the influence of sociobiological factors, history, economics, and class structure. His humanistic psychoanalysis assumes that humanity’s separation from the natural world has produced feelings of loneliness and isolation, a condition called basic anxiety. Fromm was more than a personality theorist. He was a social critic, psychotherapist, philosopher, biblical scholar, cultural anthropologist, and psychobiographer. His humanistic psychoanalysis looks at people from a historical and cultural perspective rather than a strictly psychological one. It is less concerned with the individual and more concerned with those characteristics common to a culture. Fromm takes an evolutionary view of humanity. When humans emerged as a separate species in animal evolution, they lost most of their animal instincts but gained “an increase in brain development that permitted self-awareness, imagination, planning, and doubt” (Fromm, 1992, p. 5). This combination of weak instincts and a highly developed brain makes humans distinct from all other animals. A more recent event in human history has been the rise of capitalism, which on one hand has contributed to the growth of leisure time and personal freedom, but on the other hand, it has resulted in feelings of anxiety, isolation, and powerlessness. The cost of freedom, Fromm maintained, has exceeded its benefits. The isolation wrought by capitalism has been unbearable, leaving people with two alternatives: (1) to escape from freedom into interpersonal dependencies or (2) to move to self-realization through productive love and work. Biography of Erich Fromm Like the views of all personality theorists, Erich Fromm’s view of human nature was shaped by childhood experiences. For Fromm, a Jewish family life, the suicide of a young woman, and the extreme nationalism of the German people contributed to his conception of humanity. Fromm was born on March 23, 1900, in Frankfurt, Germany, the only child of middle-class Orthodox Jewish parents. His father, Naphtali Fromm, was the son of a rabbi and the grandson of two rabbis. His mother, Rosa Krause Fromm, was the niece of Ludwig Krause, a wellknown Talmudic scholar. As a boy, Erich studied the Old Testament with several prominent scholars, men who were regarded as “humanists of extraordinary tolerance” (Landis & Tauber, 1971, p. xi). Fromm’s humanistic psychology can be traced to the reading of these prophets, “with their vision of universal peace and harmony, and their teachings that there are ethical aspects to history—that nations can do right and wrong, and that history has its moral laws” (p. x). Fromm’s early childhood was less than ideal. He recalled that he had “very neurotic parents” and that he was “probably a rather unbearably neurotic child” (Evans, 1966, p. 56). He saw his father as being moody and his mother as prone to depression. Moreover, he grew up in two very distinct worlds, one the traditional Orthodox Jewish world, the other the modern capitalist world. This split existence created tensions that were nearly unendurable, but it generated in Fromm a lifelong tendency to see events from more than one perspective (Fromm, 1986; Hausdorff, 1972). The chapter opening vignette chronicled the shocking and puzzling suicide of an attractive artistic young woman who killed herself so she could be buried with her father, who had just died. How was it possible that this young woman could prefer death to being “alive to the pleasures of life and painting”? (Fromm, 1962, p. 4). This question haunted Fromm for the next 10 years and eventually led to an interest in Sigmund Freud and psychoanalysis. As Fromm read Freud, he began to learn about the Oedipus complex and to understand how such an event might be possible. Later, Fromm would interpret the young woman’s irrational dependence on her father as a nonproductive symbiotic relationship, but in those early years he was content with the Freudian explanation. Fromm was 14 when World War I began, too young to fight but not too young to be impressed by the irrationality of the German nationalism that he had observed firsthand. He was sure that the British and French were equally irrational, and once again he was struck by a troubling question: How could normally rational and peaceful people become so driven by national ideologies, so intent on killing, so ready to die? “When the war ended in 1918, I was a deeply troubled young man who was obsessed by the question of how war was possible, by the wish to understand the irrationality of human mass behavior, by a passionate desire for peace and international understanding” (Fromm, 1962, p. 9). During adolescence, Fromm was deeply moved by the writings of Freud and Karl Marx, but he was also stimulated by differences between the two. As he studied more, he began to question the validity of both systems. “My main interest was clearly mapped out. I wanted to understand the laws that govern the life of the individual man, and the laws of society” (Fromm, 1962, p. 9). After the war, Fromm became a socialist, although at that time, he refused to join the Socialist Party. Instead, he concentrated on his studies in psychology, philosophy, and sociology at the University of Heidelberg, where he received his PhD in sociology at either age 22 or 25. [Fromm was such a private person that his biographers do not agree on many facts of his life (Hornstein, 2000).] Still not confident that his training could answer such troubling questions as the suicide of the young woman or the insanity of war, Fromm turned to psychoanalysis, believing that it promised answers to questions of human motivation not offered in other fields. From 1925 until 1930 he studied psychoanalysis, first in Munich, then in Frankfurt, and finally at the Berlin Psychoanalytic Institute, where he was analyzed by Hanns Sachs, a student of Freud. Although Fromm never met Freud, most of his teachers during those years were strict adherents of Freudian theory (Knapp, 1989).