Erich Fromm recognized the dangers of narcissism

Your own thoughts, feelings and fantasies are indispensable, especially in times of crisis. It should not be left to calculating machines when it comes to problems of human survival.

From the beginning, the thinking of Fromm, who holds a doctorate in sociology and psychoanalyst, was focused on the question of what influence external living conditions have on people.

Man and his relationships

Fromm focuses on the human species’ need for connection: in order to survive psychologically, people must be related. Relationship experiences therefore play a crucial role in the formation of psychological structures. Fromm called such memory or neural network formations “character”. The social character is reflected in the “social character”, which represents the “glue” of a society. It allows people to strive with desire and passion for what a particular society needs for its own functioning.

At the heart of Fromm’s thinking is therefore the question of whether socially generated aspirations are beneficial or detrimental to the well-being of the individual and the common good. Long before Adorno in 1930, he provided a first test of the subject with an empirical study of authoritarian character. This strives to exercise dominance (active) and to want to be submissive (passive). Fromm also used him to explain the political developments in Germany. Fromm, who emigrated to New York in 1934, analyzed German National Socialism in his 1941 book The fear of freedom published.

Self-idealization while devaluing others

Would Fromm interpret current legal-political developments as a return of authoritarianism? – Far from it, even if the social and political science mainstream seems to be convinced of this.

Fromm would first confirm that authoritarian systems dominate in countries such as Russia, China, North Korea or in clan-dominated states such as Saudi Arabia, which can still be found as residuals in some former socialist states. However, Fromm would explain the crisis development of democracy in the USA, Western Europe and some other countries with a narcissistic social character formation. He recognized this as early as the 1960s. For Fromm, narcissism always means self-idealization and simultaneous devaluation of everything that does not reflect or complement one’s own fantasized greatness.

A distinction must be made between two manifestations: In the form of narcissism that we are quite familiar with, individual people fantasize themselves as great. At the same time, they deny everything within themselves that contradicts this greatness and project it onto others in order to fight it there. Fromm’s really new insight has to do with the passive form: In this form, many people identify with a fantastically imaginative person, group – such as a nation, “race” -, idea, company or organization in order to be able to experience themselves as valuable and effective.

Processes of change and threats such as climate, wars, nuclear armament, terrorism, autocracies instead of democracies and the “disempowerment” of people through AI lead to the polycrisis manifesting itself in an identity crisis that is accompanied by feelings of powerlessness, fear, insecurity, insignificance or homelessness.

Group narcissistic fantasies of grandeur

In order not to have to feel such feelings, more and more people are fleeing into group narcissistic fantasies of grandeur such as “Make America Great Again”, “Brexit”, “Rassemblement National”, “Grande Nation”, “Germany for the Germans”. The consequences are the loss of positive interest in others and increased violence against anyone who doubts or even criticizes their own greatness.

Not subjugating but annihilating violence is the characteristic of narcissism. It destroys democracies, divides society and needs enemy images onto which its own deficits are projected in order to combat them. Such narcissistic dynamics of the exercise of power must first be recognized. Countering it requires that we learn again to accept limits, to name and reduce devaluation dynamics and to have targeted experiences of self-efficacy.

But our self-efficacy relies on exercising our own mental abilities, and Fromm saw this threatened 50 years ago. The promises of computing machines that are mentally superior to humans not only devalue one’s own thinking, feeling and imagining, but also lead to these abilities “atrophying”. Your own thinking is increasingly giving way to what you have previously thought. Your own feelings increasingly become sentimental empathy, and your own fantasizing becomes more and more silent in the face of the “fantastic” offers.

Not that Fromm was at war with the technology. On the contrary, he used it himself with enthusiasm, but as a tool. He realized that such computing machines lead to people being controlled by technology instead of controlling technology.

In 1968, Fromm, borrowing a term from Norbert Wiener, warned of the “cybernetic human,” which refers to humans controlled by artificial intelligence. Because every psychodynamic psychology is based on the formation of internal structures that make something like the experience of autonomy, freedom, relatedness, interest, activity or self-efficacy possible.

The effectiveness of these structural formations depends on the practice of one’s own thinking, feeling and imagining. If not, the corresponding synapse formations atrophy like muscles that are no longer used. There is an existential dependence on technology.

Fromm would ask today whether we even notice this loss and whether we manage to develop and visit “mental booths” in which we still experience ourselves as creative. And he would write a “wake-up call” similar to that of his book To have or to be would be similar. His aim is not to become dependent on the possessions and benefits of technology, but rather to specifically practice one’s own mental powers.