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1939a-eErich Fromm

The Social Philosophy of Will Therapy

First published under the title The Social Philosophy of Will Therapy, in:Psychiatry. Journal for the Study of Interpersonal Process, Washington(The William Alanson Psychiatric Foundation), Vol. 2 (1939), pp. 229-237. -The numbers in {brackets} refer to the pages of this first English publication.- Copyright 1939by Erich Fromm; Copyright 2004 by The Literary Es-tate of Erich Fromm, Ursrainer Ring 24, D-72076 Tuebingen, Germany, E-mail: frommfunk[at-symbol]aol.com.

Modern psychotherapy has developed as a branch of medicine. It is a generalbelief that medicine, as other sciences, is objective, that is, that the philosophical,

social, or political viewpoint of the scientist does not influence his results or hismethod. This assumption, like many others of the kind, is not true. The aims andmethods of medicine are in part determined by the particular condition of a givensociety. This may be illustrated by a simple example. The attitude of physicianstoward physical or psychic injuries which may result from abortion, differ widely.In some countries the opinion prevails that abortion is highly dangerous, while inothers it is considered no more than a minor operation. Neither of these view-points is altogether wrong; each simply represents a different focus on the prob-lem and it is easy to see the relationship between different political and socialsystems and the different attitudes toward abortion. Or to take another similarexample, one might imagine that in a culture where contraception is more recog-nized as a legitimate means of birth control, there would have developed much

better scientific methods for contraception than exist in our culture. But, ofcourse, such differences in medical opinion are found only in regard to excep-tional problems. The treatment of a broken leg would be the same regardless ofthe social setting and the doctors political outlook.

In the field of psychotherapy, on the other hand, the picture is no longer onein which Weltanschauung is of little practical importance. In this field, the funda-mental concepts of aim and method depend on ones personal religious, philoso-phical, political and social opinions. Answers to the questions--what is a neurotic,what is the aim of psychotherapeutic treatment, what is psychic health--all de-pend on what the therapist considers best for man. If he answers simply by say-ing the patient should become healthy he uses a word which can mean manythings. Health, as the aim of psychotherapy, may mean complete adaptation tothe rules of our society, expressed in terms of success, popularity, earning ca-pacity. Or, it may mean that the neurotic person should regain the spontaneityand inner freedom which he has lost yet is still struggling for. This means that thepatient should learn to become the subject for his own feelings and thoughts,that he should be able to feel what hereally feels, to think what hereally thinks,and to want what hereally wants, instead of feeling, thinking, and wanting whathe believes he is supposed to feel, think, and want. It is a matter of ones phi-losophy whether one believes that human happiness consist of spontaneous self-expression and is inseparable from inner freedom and activity or whether one be-lieves in success and adaptation as aims of life which psychotherapy has to re-store to those, who are in danger of not attaining them. These remarks by no

means imply that lack of adaptation is an ideal per se or that the ability to beones real self excludes the possibility of a socially well ordered life: In a fewcases there might he an insoluble conflict, but usually the person who becomeshimself and therefore stronger will be able at least to manage reality and live a

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dignified, though sometimes perhaps not a conventional life. The following {230}example deals with a not infrequent type of case where there is a conflict be-tween adaptation and self-expression.

If Nora, in Ibsens Dolls House, had consulted an analyst, his opinion as towhether or not she should leave her husband would have influenced the proce-dure of the analyst. If he believed in the conventional values of marriage, hewould regard as neurotic her reasons for wanting to leave her husband and

would have primarily psychoanalyzed these. If, however, he shared Ibsens beliefthat the integrity and development of her personality depended on leaving heroverbearing and narrow-minded husband, then the analyst would have focusedon psychoanalyzing those fears which would make her put up with an unbearablesituation.

Another important problem is the analysts attitude toward the patient; it maybe one of aloofness, or of authority and superiority; or it may be one of warm,human friendliness. These attitudes determine technique--the way in which theanalyst influences the patient. The attitude of the analyst toward the patient is afunction of his personality; it is part of his type of thinking, of his philosophy.

Usually people are not aware of the fact that they have any particular phi-losophy. Psychoanalysts like to believe that their procedure is scientific; that it isa technique which has developed purely objectively, and is followed independentof personal opinions and value-judgments. One will find, for instance, in Freudianterminology that what used to be called wicked is now called neurotic or irra-tional or infantile, or what was simply bad is now often called regressive orsomething similar. The change in terminology does not make so much difference,excepting that it makes analytic work much harder for the patient, because whenhe is called bad he at least knows where he stands and may be able to fight,while when scientific terms are applied to him, he is pretty helpless and feels thathe must accept them as something the higher wisdom of scholars has thoughtup.

Although the main purpose of this paper is to point out the social philosophy

underlying Ranks Will Therapy,

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I shall start by analyzing Freuds social philoso-phy partly to illustrate the general point that a psychological system is rooted incertain philosophical premises and partly in order to make Ranks philosophyclearer by contrasting it with Freuds.

The most important philosophic premise of Freud is his belief in the effec-tiveness of reason; his method is based on the opinion that one can cure peopleby helping them to know the truth about themselves.

Freud tries to show the patient the illusions he has, to make him able to seethe truth about his own problems, in the hope that by this procedure the patientwill be able to change, to overcome a character structure which requires those il-lusions.

This belief that truth has a healing effect, that truth changes things, that truth

makes people happy is an old one. It is the principle of original Buddhism--notthat knowledge makes for happiness, but that. knowledge eliminates suffering,which was the best the Buddhists believed man could attain. Socrates and otherGreek philosophers believed that to know the truth is to become good, and to begood means not only to be virtuous but happy.

In modern times, it is especially the German and French enlightenment phi-losophers who have emphasized the power of reason as their central tenet, be-lieving that the knowledge of the truth is a means through which this can bemade a better world.

A second premise of this progressive philosophy is that man is as he is,through the influence of his surroundings, his milieu; that external circumstancesfor which man is not responsible mould him and make him into the person he is.

1 I am indebted to Miss Marion Weidenreich, who is writing a thesis on Ranks work, for having

drawn my attention to the increasing influence which Ranks latest books have on social work inAmerica.

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This thought has been expressed by Helvetius, Herder and many of the morepopular writers of progressive philosophy since the 18th century. Political and so-cial movements may be identified as carrying {231} out this idea that by changingthe conditions of life you can change human character. It does not require anylong explanation to prove that this is also Freuds premise. His whole method isbased on the idea that understanding a persons character structure meansknowing the experiences this person has had in his life, and especially in his

early childhood. Freud was the first to recognize the importance of the most min-ute details of personal experience. He has made it clear that only these minutedetails count and not the general situation of family or community background.

It should be noted however that Freuds emphasis on milieu is in some con-tradiction with his instinctivistic approach. Schematically, milieu operates only byits influence on the sexual instinct in the broad meaning Freud has given to it;sometimes directly as is the case with {232} certain traits of the anal character,which are supposed to be sublimations of pregenital sexuality (e.g., stinginess assublimation of an underlying satisfaction in the retention of feces); sometimes in-directly, as in the case where hatred is aroused by the frustration of infantile sex-ual desires. The emphasis on biological factors versus social factors has becomeincreasingly strong in Freuds writings of recent years. It has found its particularexpression in the theory of the death instinct which holds that man is burdenedwith biologically given impulses driving him to destroy either himself or others. Hecannot change this; the most he can do is what Freud calls to sublimate it (whichis and always has been a vague notion of his entire system).

Another Freudian concept which is not consistent with the progressive, phi-losophical premise of environmental determination is that the interests of individ-ual and those of society are essentially contradictory. To put it in a very simpleformula: here is the individual with a number of instincts which want to be satis-fied; there is society wanting to suppress these instincts because of their opposi-tion to the requirements of society. The repression of instincts can lead to subli-mation,. which is the essential condition for cultural achievements. But sublima-

tion is, according to Freud a talent, which many people do not possess to the ex-tent required by a particular culture. With those people the necessity of repres-sion of instincts leads to neurotic disturbances. Freud arrives at a conclusionwhich can be put schematically in this way: the more repression of instincts, themore sublimation and the more culture. But, also, the more culture, the moreneuroses there are. On the other hand, if instincts are not repressed there mightbe a society of wild men such as Rousseau pictured--people who simply followtheir natural instincts, are happy in doing so but do not have culture.

This requirement of a choice between culture which is a good thing and re-pression of instincts which, as Freud has shown, is not such a good thing, pre-sents a rather pessimistic outlook which is basically in contradiction to the pro-gressive part of his philosophy mentioned before.

What is Freuds aim in therapy? He has formulated a concept which saysthat the aim is to give to the individual a capacity for work and pleasure,

This concept is one of compromise. There are two factors in it. An individualshould enjoy life, which to Freud means essentially to enjoy sex. This is a narrowidea of what human happiness means,2 but at least it is the individuals satisfac-tion which Freud has in mind. As far as the capacity for work is concerned,Freud uses this conventional term for social adaptation and success. Not thatthere is a necessary contradiction between work and happiness; work if it is thespontaneous expression of a person in a given medium, can be one of the mostprofound sources of human happiness. This, however, is not often the case with

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It may be noted that this concept of happiness or rather satisfaction is always a negative one, re-lief from painful tension. This is inseparably connected with his instinctivistic theory. His systemdoes not know happiness which comes from overflowing vital energy (sexual or otherwise) but onlysatisfaction which is rooted in hunger (again sexual or hunger in the narrower sense). Love asoverflowing life (Balzac) is a concept alien to Freuds thinking.

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work in our culture, where, for most people work is only a means to an end, mak-ing money and achieving success. This ability to play the role in society which theindividual is supposed to play, to be able to function smoothly as a cog in a bigmachine, is essentially what capacity for work implies.

Freud and the orthodox wing of his school waver between adaptation andhappiness as aims of psychoanalytic therapy. The emphasis is neither entirely onone or the other side but they look toward a compromise between individual hap-

piness and social adaptation. Freud certainly has not taken a very radical standas far as that problem goes; he has not said that self-expression, growing devel-opment of the self, is the aim of psychotherapy. He has not discussed what heconsiders to be the more important aim in those cases where there exists an ac-tual conflict between human happiness and adaptation.

Again, one might easily see that this compromise attitude which is character-istic of Freuds therapeutic aim is more or less the same as that found in modernreformist movements--in criminal reform, in sexual reform, in educational reform--which claim that the person should have more happiness, more opportunity,more ability to express himself and to be himself, but which do not say exactlywhere and how the line is to be drawn between the individuals claims and theclaims of society to have him function as a cog in the machine.

A last premise in Freuds technique concerns his attitude toward the patient.Freuds advice is that the analyst should be blank like a mirror; he should beneutral and tolerant, as though saying to the patient, After all, you are neu-rotic because you have had these experiences in childhood, or because youcould not sublimate so well. We can understand that. Understanding means for-giving. As I have tried to show elsewhere (E. Fromm, 1935a) Freuds attitudetoward sexual morality is not quite as liberal as it is supposed to be. There is arather strong underlying condemnation of sexual liberty, and a rather Puritan atti-tude toward sex.

This whole approach to the patient, of being tolerant, friendly, though not toofriendly, of looking at him as if he were an object much as when a doctor looks at

the lungs through a fluoroscope, is the general attitude of medicine and it is quiteall right as far as medicine goes. There is little question of the emotional rapportwith a patient while his lungs are being examined or his appendix removed. Butin psychotherapy it matters a great deal.

It seems to me that perhaps the greatest error in Freuds technique lies inthis very tact of his neutral distant attitude toward the patient. One cannot helpanyone emotionally or understand him psychologically if one remains distant andlooks at him as an object. There is a sentence by Goethe which expresses allthat could be said about this problem: If you want to understand a person, youmust not depend on his coming to you, you must go and visit him.

The implication seems to be obvious. There is no. psychological understand-ing if we do not make a move, if we do not reach out toward the person whom we

want to understand. Not only is there no psychotherapeutic help otherwise, butthere is no real understanding of the person--if by understanding we mean morethan simply putting two and two together.

One often hears discussion as to whether psychoanalysis involves any dan-ger to the person. It seems to me that often people who hold that idea overesti-mate the effect of psychoanalysis in general. The danger is at times not great be-cause in many cases psychoanalysis is not effective enough to be dangerous.There is one danger, however, which really exists; it is the danger of a hiddenhostility on the part of the analyst toward the patient. If an anxious and insecureperson is brought into a situation where he must be himself, where he must dis-arm, where he must give up his defenses, where he is assured at least of sometolerance if not of friendliness, and actually instead {233} meets with hostility, this

in my opinion is sufficient to cause grave dangers to the patient.All these elements, truth as effecting change, milieu as a basically molding

factor, the compromise between human happiness and social adaptation, human

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distance and neutrality toward the patient, which are some of Freuds philosophi-cal premises are also premises which are typical of modern liberal and progres-sive thought.

This philosophy originated with the urban middle class who in their struggleagainst the absolute state developed this kind of Weltanschauung. If one looks atthe analysts and the patients who come to analysis, one will find that they belongmore or less to the same social stratum, that is, the middle and upper classes of

the large cities. The same people are also those who are susceptible to progres-sive or liberal thought. Of course, this must be taken with a grain of salt. It doesnot mean that everybody--every analyst or every patient--comes from that groupor has that philosophy; but it means that there is a certain impressive coincidencebetween the social stratum from which psychoanalysts and patients emerge andthe social philosophy underlying psychoanalysis.

Turning now to Rank, I will not attempt to evaluate his system as a whole. I wishonly to emphasize the social philosophy underlying the last phase of Ranks workand to contrast it with Freuds philosophy.

The first of Ranks philosophical premises to be considered is the premisethat there is no truth and truth is ineffectual in curing a person. This is exactly theopposite of Freuds main principle. I shall quote some of Ranks remarks at ran-dom: If doubt represents the conscious counter-will truth represents the will intel-lectually. Crudely put, one might say; What I will is true, that is, what I maketruth, or to be banal, What I want. to believe. Truth therefore is the consciousconcomitant, yes, the affirmation of the constructive or creative completion of willon the intellectual level, just as we understand the perception of pleasure as theemotional affirmation of will expression. (O. Rank, 1936, pp. 76-77.) That is,truth is not anything, objective, but is, as he says, what we want.

It is to the effect, he says also in Truth and Reality, that our seeking thetruth in human motives for acting and thinking is destructive. With the truth, onecannot live. To be able to live one needs illusions, not only outer illusions such as

art, religion, philosophy, science and love afford, but inner illusions which firstcondition the outer. The more a man can take reality as truth, appearance as es-sence, the sounder, the better adjusted, the happier will he be. At the momentwhen we begin to search after truth we destroy reality and our relation to it.(Ibid., p. 83) ... the more one experiences of truth, the more one knows, theunluckier one becomes. (O. Rank, 1936a)

I think that these few quotations are sufficient to illustrate Ranks principlethat truth is not only ineffective but that it is dangerous.

The second principle emphasized by Rank is that the neurotic has a bad re-lationship to reality not because reality is bad but because he wants to create itinstead of using it. (O. Rank 1936a, p. 275.) Although he says that acceptanceof reality is in actuality never a passive taking over of the given but an active ap-

propriation of it for individual ends. (Ibid., p. 279) The fact remains that he putsthe whole emphasis on the inner ambivalence while criticism of social reality is ofno importance to him. His final suggestion in Will Therapy is that if the patientlearns to live in harmony with the inevitable in himself, not outside, then he willalso be able to accept reality as it is. (Ibid., p. 289) Again, the contradiction ofthis viewpoint with that of Freud can be easily seen. While it is true that Freudhas not taken a very radical stand with regard to changing reality, he certainlyhas not put the emphasis as onesidedly on the inner reality as Rank does, whosays: Everything {234} has its roots within. (O. Rank, 1936, p. 103.) This differ-ence between Rank and Freud was evident already in Ranks birth trauma the-ory; if a great deal of anxiety is generated by the process of birth, then, of course,not much can be done to avoid this anxiety. But Freuds belief that the way in

which children are brought up is largely responsible for their anxieties implies thatsomething can be done.

It is only in line with Ranks attitude toward reality that he stresses the value

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of illusions and self-deception. He says: This displacement if it succeeds, we re-gard and rightly so as healing, for this constantly effective process of self-deceiving, pretending and blundering, is no psychopathological mechanism, butthe essence of reality, the--as it were--continuous blunder. (Ibid., p. 84)

If man is the more normal, healthy and happy, the more he can accept theappearance of reality as truth, that is, the more successfully he can repress, dis-place, deny, rationalize, dramatize himself and deceive others, then it follows that

the suffering of the neurotic comes not from a painful reality but from painful truthwhich only secondarily makes reality unbearable... .He [the neurotic] suffers notfrom all the pathological mechanisms which are psychically necessary for living,and wholesome, but in the refusal of these mechanisms which is just what robshim of the illusions important for living. (Ibid., p. 85.) The aim off psychotherapyis therefore that the patient learns to live on the plane of illusion. (O. Rank,1936a, p. 246.)

We refer, Rank says, in general to religion, art, play, sport and certain pro-fessional ideologies, which not only lift man out of his every-dayness, but out ofhimself. (Ibid., p. 244.)

This whole notion of lifting man out of himself has a very definite implication,namely, that man should not, and in fact cannot, become himself. but that ourhappiness consists in being lifted out of ourselves.

Another philosophical premise of Rank is what may be called sado-masochistic Weltanschauung; for him the world consists of the weak and thestrong, or rather, the powerful and the powerless, and the weak are to be sacri-ficed for the sake of the strong.

At all events, Rank says, the use or alteration of reality must come aboutindividually, and is certainly determined for different types. It is important toremember that in the last analysis the neurotic remains as to type that whichhe was before the treatment, just as the psychopathic and also the creativetype will always maintain their essential quality. If one conceives of the neu-rotic as a type, with psychological significance in itself, and not as a person

deviating from a social norm, then one can see that there exists a place forthis type socially, yes, a real need, otherwise he would perhaps not havecome into existence in our civilization at all. If the fundamental life fear of theindividual leads, figuratively speaking, to the end that he has no other choicethan to be slain or to slay, the question is who are the sacrifices that mustconstantly fall in this way? I think it is the type which we today designate asneurotic and whom Nietzsche in the ideology of earlier times has describedas the slave type.

These humans who constantly kill themselves, perhaps to escape beingsacrificed, need at all events not be killed any more in order to be utilized asfertilizers of civilization. In offering themselves up as it were in a false Chris-tian sense, they make it not too hard for the others who slay, the lordly na-

tures, the men of will. In view of the difficulties of the therapy one must askwhether it is not a vain therapeutic ambition to want to transform this. sacrifi-cial type into god-men, and even if this were successful, where shall be forth-coming the necessary hecatombs for the creative type. (O. Rank, 1936a, p.280.)

The same viewpoint that any relationship is one of rulership and dependence isimplied in Ranks belief about love. He says, for instance: A deeper study of{235} the love life makes it clear also that human beings depend more on the onewho rules them than on the one who loves them. Love, where it exists in suchcases, is then taken only as proof that this ruling will not be too severe or ear-nest, that one will be punished just enough to spare self-punishment, but that this

punishment will be no death punishment. (O. Rank, 1936a, p. 287.)Consistent with his conviction of the necessity of the subordination of the

powerless to the powerful are Ranks ideas concerning the attitude of the analyst

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toward the patient. According to Freuds technique the analysts attitude is one ofneutrality, tolerance, distance, and it is a criterion of a successful analysis to haveanalyzed and dissolved the transference relationship to the analyst. For Rankthe analyst functions as an assistant ego. The treatment shows whether thepatient will remain neurotically dependent on the assistant ego or whether he canuse the situation constructively as assistant reality. Both are possible and goodoutcomes if the patient carries it through consistently to the end. Even in the first

case the patient may become socially valuable and personally satisfied andhappy as a life long dependent. (O. Rank, 1936a, p. 282.)

In surveying the chief points of Ranks social philosophy--his disbelief in theexistence and effectiveness of truth, his emphasis on the unimportance of reality,his concept of the necessity of submission and sacrifice and finally his view thatlife long dependence on the analyst is a possible and good outcome of therapystrikes one that there is a close kinship with the elements of Fascist3 philosophy.

Fascism is not only what it seems to be on the surface, a political systemand creed, but there is a more or less well defined philosophy underlying it. Thisphilosophy has its roots in the period before Fascism came to power and it. is tobe found also in democratic countries and in groups which politically are or be-lieve to be enemies of political fascism. It would transcend the scope of this; pa-per were I to try to give a description of Fascist philosophy. It might suffice topoint to several of its essential features and to show that they are parts of Ranksphilosophy. Needless to say, this analysis does no imply any inference as toRanks political conviction.

One essential feature of Fascist philosophy is the relativismthe believe thatthere is no truth and that the search for truth is vain and even harmful. Mussolinihas emphasized the relativistic character of Fascist philosophy. The ideology andpractice of German Nazism leaves no doubt that it believes in the power of armsand not in the power of truth and that words and ideologies essentially have thefunction of being manipulated for the sake of power. The same viewpoint is ex-pressed by Rank, in this formulation: What I will is true, that is, what I make

truth, or to be banal, what I want to believe. To be sure, skepticism toward truthis not an invention of Fascist philosophy. It can be traced back to the liberal think-ing of the 19th century, and the same skepticism is to be found among positivisticthinkers of our day who although believing that they insist on factual knowledge,actually are spiritually rooted in complete nihilism and assume philosophical atti-tudes which lead to complete nihilism.

The second element of Fascist philosophy is its deep conviction that injusticeand suffering as it exists in our society and as it has existed throughout thegreater part of history cannot be changed; that it is an essential part of human ex-istence. Hitlers Mein Kampfexpresses his feeling that every attempt basically tochange reality in the sense of lessening the suffering of man, is futile; it is lessthan futile. To him the man who believes in a basic improvement of human exis-

tence is either a swindler or an idiot. The question is only whether you will slay orwhether your will be slain, whether you suffer or whether you make another per-son or nation suffer; injustice and unhappiness are inherent and necessary fea-tures of human life. Fascist philosophy prides itself on being realistic; its basic{236} policy is to stamp out the wish for a better world and to force people to ac-cept reality and to adapt to it. This attitude is an exact opposite of the hopewhich has run through the progressive philosophical and political thought ofEurope and America in the last few centuries. Ranks belief that reality is not bad,but that the fault is in the neurotic who cannot adapt himself to it, and thereforethat not reality but the individual has to be changed, corresponds to Fascist phi-losopher as much as it contradicts the trend of progressive thought just men-tioned. Another essential point in Fascist philosophy is its authoritarian outlook.

For this authoritarian or as we may also call it masochistic Weltanschauung

3The term Fascist is used here and throughout the paper to denote both the Italian and German au-

thoritarian systems.

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there are only two sexes, not men and women, but powerful ones and power-less ones. These two groups have a very specific attraction to the sado-masochistic person, the powerful are to be loved and the powerless to becrushed and enslaved.

Hitlers philosophy is pervaded by the idea of power over others. He believesthat what the masses wish is the victory of the strong one and the destructionand complete surrender of the weak one. The supreme man, according to him,

will become the sole master of this world and he hopes that the German Reichwill become master of the Universe. On the other hand, there is an unlimitedlove for the powerful. Hitler when writing Mein Kampf is as much impressed bythe power of nature, destiny, the past, as he is by the power of Great Britain. Hemakes fun of those oriental revolutionaries who fought for the liberation of theircountries from British domination. He calls them charlatans who will never suc-ceed in freeing India. It should be noted however that strong and weak to Hit-ler means powerful and powerless and have not at all the meaning of innerweakness or strength. In the authoritarian philosophy any concept of equality islacking; since one can only be superior or inferior, differences such as differ-ences of race or sex are always conceived in terms of superiority inferiority.Therefore, it is one of the fundamental dogmas of Fascist philosophy to believein the principle of inequality of all men. (H. Brcher, 1925.)

Since Fascist philosophy conceives of mankind as divided into the powerfulwho have to slay and the powerless who must be slain, its political system af-fords ample opportunity to rule and to obey at the same time. It is a hierarchy inwhich everybody has a superior to whom to submit and an inferior over whom torule. Even the leader, as the supreme being, is subjected to destiny, fate or God,who for Hitler is nothing but a symbol of supreme power. This philosophy is ex-pressed in Fascist political strategy. It is its fundamental axiom not to attack anenemy who is believed to have real power. Both in Hitlers domestic and later inhis foreign policy he waits for the enemy to reach a state of weakness wherethere is no real danger in attack. Balzac gives an excellent description of this kind

of courage: There are people whose courage consists in correctly evaluating theanxiety of their enemies.The quotations cited should show without further comment that the authori-

tarian philosophy closely corresponds to what Rank has to say about the neces-sity of hecatombs to be sacrificed by the strong-willed men. It is essentially thesame theory, whether expressed in the categories of racial differences of Naziphilosophy or in psychological terms of Rank.

Closely connected with this philosophy of power and submission is theleader principle in Fascist philosophy. Schematically Fascist philosophy says,You as an individual are nothing; you are just a little bit of dust. You must recog-nize that and renounce the false claims for individuality nourished by the 18thand 19th centuries. If, however, you give yourself up entirely as an individual, if

you submit completely to the leader, then you can become part of him and byparticipating in his glamour and strength, you can gain self-confidence andstrength. The principle of Fascism is to strengthen the {237} individual, not by in-creasing his independence, but by making the leader his alter ego, on thestrength of which he Ives.

There are elements in Ranks views which are contradictory to the onespointed out here, as for instance, his emphasis on creativeness. As a matter offact one can easily find quite a number of such contradictory statements. Butanalysis of the spirit of a particular system must be a matter of understanding itsfundamental trends and can not be a mechanical compilation of individual quota-tions. To use the latter method would be particularly difficult with an author withas much versatility and lack of consistency as Rank. The essential point is that

the basic trend of Ranks philosophy is akin to Fascist philosophy and this seemsthe more convincing since he certainly had no intention of copying a Nazi for-mula.

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There remains a puzzling problem: how is it that Ranks work has been warmaccepted by many people who are strictly opposed to Fascist ideas and why inparticular by many social workers? Two answers may be offered tentatively. Oneis that this acceptance of Rank seems to indicate the inroads that Fascist phi-losophy can make, if only it avoids mention of those political symbols which makeit unacceptable to liberals and Jews. The popularity of Ranks theories amongsocial workers might be attributed to the specific difficulty of social work in trying

to help solve the emotional problems of clients. Social workers deal mainly withpeople whose economic situation is so distressing that efficient remedy without abasic change in the clients material situation is frequently not possible. Rankstheory seems to offer a solution to this difficult and sometimes insoluble problem.If, as he says, reality is not bad and the aim of psychotherapy is to teach the pa-tient to live with illusions, many social workers may feel much relieved and mostappreciative of Ranks theory without becoming aware of the real reasons.

References:

Brcher, H., 1925: Ernst Hckel. Ein Wegbereiter des biologischen Staatsdenksn, in:

Nationalsozialistische Monatshefte, 1925.Fromm, E., 1935a: Die gesellschaftliche Bedingtheit der psychoanalytischen Therapie,

in: Zeitschrift fr Sozialforschung, Paris (Librairie Flix Alcan), Band IV (1935), S.365-397. English translation: The Social Determinants of PsychoanalyticTheory, in: International Forum of Psychoanalysis, Vol. 9 (No. 3-4, October 2000)S. 149-165; English by Ernst Falzeder and Caroline Schwarzacher.

Rank, O., 1936: Truth and Reality, New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1936, IX and 193 pp.Rank, O., 1936a: Will Therapy, New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1936, XXV and 290 pp.

Copyright 1939by Erich FrommCopyright 2004 by The Literary Estate of Erich Fromm

Ursrainer Ring 24, D-72076 Tuebingen, GermanyE-mail: frommfunk[at-symbol]aol.com