Fromm

I was reminded of Erich Fromm’s “The Art of Loving,” which I read when I was 15.

As I try to make sense of this sick yearning and poisoned nostalgia, I have been returning to the work of the highly influential social psychologist and psychoanalyst Erich Fromm.

In a 1973 essay in the New York Times about Fromm’s then-new book, “The Anatomy of Human Destructiveness,” Sara Sanborn wrote the following:

Fromm covers much of this ground again, analyzing Heinrich Himmler and Josef Stalin as case studies of the sadist driven by the need to dominate.

And Erich Fromm becomes the 10,000th American writer to remark the mechanization of death‐dealing in Vietnam and to note that the self‐destructiveness of drug addiction is not surprising in the youth of life‐denying culture.