The German Genius

Frankfurt in 1902, Erik Erikson was abandoned by his Danish father and brought up by his Jewish stepfather. Taunted at school as a “Jew” yet treated suspiciously at his local synagogue because of his blond Danish looks, he was uncertain of his identity from an early age, and this may have shaped his work. He taught art at a school in Vienna and was drawn into a circle that included Anna Freud, who analyzed him. He moved to America after Hitler invaded Austria, his way smoothed by the analyst Hanns Sachs, who helped him secure a position at the Harvard Medical School and Massachusetts General Hospital as a child analyst. There he encountered Margaret Mead, Ruth Benedict, Gregory Bateson, and Kurt Lewin. 11 His anthropologist friends suggested that some of the generalizations he was prone to make about childhood did not apply across all cultures and so, acting on these criticisms, he visited a Sioux reservation in South Dakota, where he observed child-rearing practices. These inquiries led to his groundbreaking book Childhood and Society , written after he had moved to California (via Yale) and in which introduced his concepts of “ego identity” and “identity crisis.” 12 He compared Americans with Germans, placing the appeal of Nazism in the cradle of the German family, where the son was set against the father, unlike in America, where fathers and sons “are friends,” united against the wife-mother who “incarnates” social authority. This was why one’s occupation was so important to Americans, he said—it was the American way of overcoming the dominance of the mother. 13
    Bruno Bettelheim arrived in 1939 after a traumatic year in Dachau and Buchenwald. He had studied philosophy and psychology in Vienna under Karl Bühler, though he too was influenced by Anna Freud. He found work at the University of Chicago and soon became the director of the university’s school for disturbed children. His best-known books are The Informed Heart (1960), The Empty Fortress (1967), and The Uses of Enchantment (1976). In these works he drew on his treatments of disturbed children, but also on his experience of concentration camps and, as a Jew, of being a victim of anti-Semitism. 14 The books were thus an amalgam of clinical detail, contemporary history, and social criticism, his main argument being that modern mass society fails to take account of the unconscious and nonrational aspects of our make-up and that this leads people into either the extremes of crime, cruelty, and brutality, or else into ill health—mental and physical—suicide, or other forms of self-harm. He even thought the mentally ill had no place in American society—a chill echo of Nazi Germany. 15 The autistic child, for example, cannot “reach” adulthood, but is “held back by its own prison guards,” Bettelheim going so far as to identify the autistic child's parents with Nazi guards. 16 In The Uses of Enchantment he examined children’s classic fairy tales, concluding that they introduce children to the sometimes harsh world of adult reality, that they too have an unconscious aspect, the symbols of which help us understand the problems of children growing up. 17
    Erich Fromm probably enjoyed the largest readership among the lay (non–psychoanalytically trained) public. Born in 1900 in Frankfurt am Main, he was brought up in a strict Orthodox Jewish tradition and studied with, among others, Gershom Scholem. Fromm himself planned to become a rabbi but, while studying philosophy, sociology, and psychology at Frankfurt, and then at Heidelberg, he was drawn to what Scholem called the “torapeutic” sanatorium, a clinic where the psychoanalyst Frieda Reichmann combined teachings of the Torah with Freudian therapy. 18 Fromm did more than study with Reichmann—he married her, before associating, as we saw in an earlier chapter, with Adorno and Horkheimer at the Frankfurt Institute for Social Research. He moved to America in 1938 along with most of the other members of the institute.
    His most famous book, Escape from Freedom , appeared in 1941 and it too may be seen as an attempt to marry Marx with Freud. Accepting the theory of the “oral,” “anal,” and “genital” stages of human development, and combining that with the concept of “social character” built up by Wilhelm Reich and Otto Fenichel—Marxist psychoanalysts he had met in Berlin—Fromm argued that, contrary to what Freud said, character was partly determined by