BOOKS
CLEANING UP FREUD
THE ANATOMY OF HUMAN DESTRUCTIVENESS.
By
Erich
Fromm.
Holt, Rinehart and
Winston. $10.95.
Erich Fromm is such a reasonable and humane man that one
almost feels guilty criticizing him. Nonetheless
The Anatomy ofHuman
Destructiveness
is an irritating book, and since it has already received
several friendly reviews, perhaps this is the proper time and forum for
the opposition to be heard.
Fromm has a single topic: the causes of aggression. He devotes the
first third of the book to a critique of two popular explanations of
human destructiveness, those of the instinctualists and the behaviorists.
The former, represented here by Freud and Konrad Lorenz, argue that
aggression is innate. Lorenz supports his contention with analogies drawn
from animal behavior, while Freud's rests on abstract metapsychological
considerations. The behaviorists, most prominently B.F. Skinner, hold
that aggression is a product of conditioning, and in a number of clever
experiments they pretend to demonstrate that any person can be
programmed to destroy.
Fromm effectively dissects the weaknesses of both positions. In fact
his critique is the only fully satisfactory portion of the book. The
instinctualists, he shows, mistake a good deal of purely defensive
behavior for aggression, and they are unable to account for the virtual
absence of destructiveness in many societies. The behaviorists, for their
part, ignore the underlying continuities in character development, as well
as the basic biological and psychic needs that define the limits of
conditioning.
When one turns from the critical to the constructive parts of the
book the waters gradually cloud. Obviously Fromm wants to occupy a
middle ground between his two antagonists, preserving the sense of
psychological continuity championed by the instinctualists but allowing
for the influence of circumstance--understood now not in the behav–
iorists' narrow sense of conditioning but as the more enduring realities of
fam ily and society. Unfortunately, no clear picture emerges of what
