When Worlds Collide: Sociology, Disciplinary Nightmares, and Fromm's Revision of Freud

Abstract

After decades of neglect, sociology is experiencing a revival of interest in psychoanalytic insights, and Erich Fromm's work is uniquely valuable for encouraging dialogue between the two fields. A recipient of a PhD in sociology as a young man in the 1920s, Fromm was a prominent psychoanalytic theorist and clinician, as well as a social researcher and public intellectual in the 1930s, up to his death in 1980. After a historical account of the relative neglect of Fromm in both disciplines, this paper examines the place of his psychoanalytic theory within sociology today as a way of discussing sociology's complicated relationship to psychoanalysis and the insights each field can offer the other.