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PAUL A. ROBINSON
of behavior: nonsexual sadism, defined as "the passion to have absolute
and unrestricted control over a living being," and nonsexual necrophilia,
defined as "the passion to transform that which is alive into something
unalive."
It
is at this point that my anger is aroused. Even granting that
these passions exist, why not simply call the first authoritarianism (or
dominance, or something of the sort) and the second destructiveness?
Why, in other words, impoverish the language by pinning manifestly
sexual labels on forms of behavior that one insists all the while have
nothing to do with sexuality? I can only conclude that one does so for
prurient reasons.
It
is not merely sexual categories that Fromm cannibalizes. Nearly
all the bodily functions to which Freudians have attributed weighty
psychological significance are treated similarly. Thus there is much talk
about "anality," particularly in Fromm's discussion of Heinrich Himmler
and Adolph Hitler, whom he treats as representatives of, respectively, the
sadistic and necrophilic character structures. But anality turns out to
have very little to do with anuses, feces, or elimination. It is simply
Fromm's lurid term for the traits of orderliness and pedantry. This usage
would be justified had he retained the psychoanalytic derivation of such
traits from the manner in which anal functions are handled in childhood.
But of course he will have none of that. Again, he is entitled to his
opinion, but he ought more honestly to speak simply of orderliness and
pedantry rather than seeking to cash in on the shock value of psycho–
analytic terminology while ignoring its substance.
Fromm reached the height of his popularity in the 1950s, and his
influence cannot be dissociated from the complacency of that decade in
our intellectual and cultural history. He stood for moderation, for the
retreat from dogmatism (not only Freudian dogmatism but Marxist
dogmatism as well--witness his transformation of Marx into an
existential humanist in
Marx's Concept of Man),
and for the conviction
that personal fulfillment lay within each individual's grasp. To be sure,
his politics were to the left of those of most fifties intellectuals, but the
differences were of degree rather than kind. In the 1960s, quite under–
standably, he suffered an eclipse, as more tough-minded and radical
intellectuals, such as his old adversary Herbert Marcuse, came to the fore .
One wonders, now, whether he will stage a comeback in what are shaping
up as the conservative seventies. Many of the prerequisites for such a
renaissance are there, including a tolerance for the religious enthusiasms
of the moribund counterculture. Still, I doubt that
The Anatomy of
Human Destructiveness
will enjoy the success of
The Art of Loving
or
The Sane Society.
It is too scholarly (as well as too political) to appeal to
the audience that now reads
I'm O.K. - - You're O.K.
and
How To Be
