1977e-e
Erich Fromm
To Have Or to Be? - That s the Question
Interview with Giovanna Maria Pace
This interview with Giovanna Maria Pace was published only in an Italian
translation under the title Erich Fromm - avere o essere?..questo e il
problema, in: La Repubblica, Roma (La Repubblica Libri) (26. / 27. 06.
1977), p. 12. The following text ist the original English verbatim transcript of
the interview given in English. Numbers in {brackets} indicate the next page
of the typoscript. - Copyright © 1977 by Erich Fromm; Copyright © 2004
by The Literary Estate of Erich Fromm, Ursrainer Ring 24, D-72076
Tuebingen, Germany, E-mail: frommfunk[at-symbol]aol.com.
Giovanna Maria Pace:
Locarno - In an apartment invaded by the clear light of the lake and by the noise
of the railway below, Erich Fromm, the greatest exponent of post-Freudian
thought, spends the latter part of his life writing one book after another. Seventy
seven years old, he does not abandon the pen. In Italy he has just had printed
To Have or To Be? (Mondadori, 300 pages, 4000 lire), already sold out in the
first edition, while he is about to finish a very long book on Freud. In the book
Fromm proposes to separate that of the thought of the great master which is
original and everlasting from that which is instead limited and transitory, that
which is influenced by the bourgeois prejudices of Vienna at the beginning of the
century and from the tabus of the patriarchale and male-dominated family from
which the founder of psychoanalysis came.
After having explained in The Art of Loving how love is not entirely that in-
stinctive and elementary practice that one thinks, but an exercise in intelligence,
patience and also faith, Fromm maintains in To Have Or to Be? that capitalist
society is reaching its end. The nuclear arms race, ecological ruin, terrorism, the
economic collapse all spring, according to Fromm, from the cult of having and
from the disregard of being. {02}
Fromm there is no substantial difference between the capitalist industrialism
of the Western world and the bureaucratic industrialism of the socialist world: oth
are built on the principle of possession, both believe that they make the citizen
happy, making him an ever more insatiable consumer. The critique of the capital-
ist system that takes up the first part of To Have Or to Be? brings to mind the
75-year-old Herbert Marcuse, another German fugitive from Nazi Germany now
in the United States.
First Interview:
Giovanna Maria Pace: Professor Fromm, what influence has American culture
had on your thought?
Erich Fromm: I have learnt to appreciate the clarity of English language. Ger-
mans love the ambiguous word, verbal assonances as ends in themselves,
vague concepts. Anglosaxons are more clear...
Giovanna Maria Pace: If you had to give yourself an ideololical label, what would
you choose?
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Erich Fromm: I would define myself as a Marxian, and that means of course also
as a humanist.
Giovanna Maria Pace: But in To Have Or to Be? you maintain that to reach the
mode of being man needs religion. Marx said instead that religion is the opium of
the people...
Erich Fromm: This Marxian sentence, repeated to the point of boredom, is misin-
terpreted. In reality Marx was a religious man.
Giovanna Maria Pace: How would you explain this sentence then?
Erich Fromm: In his condemnation Marx referred to institutionalized {03} religion,
that has precisely the function of anesthetizing men till they do not notice the in-
justice of which they are the perpetrators and the victims. Organized religion is in
substance a mystification, a means of hiding the wickedness of the social sys-
tem. If the Christian principles of love, equality, and freedom were really prac-
ticed instead of only preached, there would be no need for a special institution
(the church) to take care of those principles. For Marx it is socialist society which
realizes concretely the religious principles of equality, brotherly love, and free-
dom.
Giovanna Maria Pace: A religiosity without God?
Erich Fromm: Yes. For Marx what counts is man. He is the root of everything;
while for capitalism, the aim are things, profit, and man is only a means to gain
them. As an authentically religious individual, Marx could not be other than
against religion.
Giovanna Maria Pace: Professor Fromm, during your life have you known people
who have achieved the being mode of existence?
Erich Fromm: Yes.
Giovanna Maria Pace: Can you name someone?
Erich Fromm: I think of Marx, Pope John XXIII or Rosa Luxemburg.1 But it would
be useless to look at a list of illustrious names. For the most part, biophiliacs,
lovers of life, are found among simple people, without pretensions.
Giovanna Maria Pace: And the intellectuals?
Erich Fromm: Intellectuals are hindered on the way to being, by their {04} narcis-
sism. Politics and religious leaders by their egotism. As you see, the list is soon
exhausted. For the rest, a Jewish legend says that the world rests on 36 just
men: only thirty six, but their moral strength is immense.
Giovanna Maria Pace: And you, Professor, have you reached the mode of being?
Erich Fromm: I am getting there. The journey is not finished, even it is coming to
an end.
1
Fromms first answer was: Albert Schweitzer, for example. And then my Hebrew teach-
ers in Heidelberg and Frankfurt, when I was twenty years old.
2
Second Interview:
The following text seems to have been part of the interview with Giovanna Maria
Pace and is delivered in the file together with the one just presented. The original
text seems to be a written paper by Fromm which was secondarily brought into
the fashion of an interview.
Giovanna Maria Pace: One of the points on which the thought of Erich Fromm dif-
fers most profoundly from that of Sigmund Freud is the theory of dreams. What
does the divergence consist in?
Erich Fromm: Freud assumes that every dream represents the satisfaction of a
desire and in the last analysis, of a sexual desire that has its roots in infancy.
That makes the interpretation of dreams extremely simple: it deals in substance
with discovering what unconscious desires, distorted but recognizable, are hid-
den in the dream. Instead, for me the dream is a mixture of thoughts and sensa-
tions that man has when he is asleep, a mental state relatively protected from the
constant noise that society makes.
The state of sleep is a state of freedom in which man is not occupied with the
manipulation of the outside world. When an individual is awake, almost all he
does and says is inspired by the model of behavior that the society imposes,
even without his being aware of it. In the sleeping state, instead, one is much
more oneself, even if society never ceases to intervene.
At this point a question arises. If one admits that the influence of the outside
world is essentially beneficial, the lack of such influence during sleep would tend
to diminish the value of our dream activity so as to render it inferior to the mental
activity that takes place when we are awake, when we are exposed to these
beneficial influences of surrounding reality. But how can one say that the influ-
ence of reality is exclusively beneficial. Could it not also be damaging, and could
its absence not give access {02} to qualities superior to those that we have when
awake?
Many students of dreams, from Plato to Freud, hold that the sleeping person,
deprived of contact with the outside world, regresses temporarily to an irrational
primitive mental state. And this regression would then be the essential feature of
the state of sleep and thus of unconscious activity. In this view the dream would
have to be the expression of our most irrational and primitive impulses; and it is
almost too easy to explain our disregard of dreams by the shame that we experi-
ence for these irrational and criminal impulses that we express when we avoid
the control of society.
The important question is to see if such an interpretation is entirely right and
true, or if instead the negative elements of society s influence do not explain the
paradoxical fact that in our dreams we are certainly less rational and less fair
than when awake but at the same time we are more intelligent, wiser, more able
to judge than when we are awake. The fact is that the culture does not have only
positive effects on our intellectual and moral functions but also negative effects.
Modern man is assailed on every side and almost without interruption by noise--
of the radio, of television, of headlines, of advertising and of the cinema--of which
the greatest part, far from enlightening the mind, blunts and stultifies it.
Finally one arrives at this: the state of sleep has an ambiguous function; in
sleep, the lack of contact with the culture brings out the worst and also the best in
us. {03} I believe that it is not possible to state it in the abstract, but case by case.
In fifty years activity as an analyst I have witnessed again and again that a
dreamer after having met a personage regarded by all as influential and good,
saw him again in a dream with a different face. The dreamer saw him for instance
with a cruel mouth and a hard face. The person was telling someone that he has
3
succeeded in robbing a widow, and he was laughing about it. And the dreamer
had a sense of horror.
How does one interpret this dream? Perhaps the subject was jealous of the
fame and reputation of the person? Or instead, in the dream he has been able to
discern the true identity? In successive sessions and with the help of other testi-
monies the dreamer succeeded in determining that this last was the true interpre-
tation. Awake the noise of public opinion that insisted on the fame of the person
had prevented my patient from announcing his true feelings regarding the person
who stood before him. Only later, after having had the dream, had the subject
remembered the fleeting sense of distrust experienced during the meeting. In the
dream, sheltered from the noise, the subject expressed a judgment much more
on the mark than that manifested in wakefulness.
For Freud, the manifest dream, that is that which we remember after waking,
is like a code message, that can be interpreted, provided the right key is avail-
able, for example the method of free association. According to me Freud did not
notice that {04} the dream expresses the inner experiences in a symbolic form,
resembling in that, poetry or other art forms. Consequently, Freud did not under-
stand that the dream is a highly creative act, written in the universal language of
symbolism, and only secondarily does censorship distort those parts that the sub-
ject refuses to accept even in sleep.
Jung was not right when he said that the unconscious message is always
written clearly and so there is no need to seek to discover the distortions, be-
cause one must recognize that many dreams are more or less distortions. From
my personal experience I can conclude that many dreams are clearly written but
there are some in which one meets distortions to decipher. And it is really in
knowing when one must prefer the one or the other approach, or a combination
of the two, that remains one of the important elements of the art of dream inter-
pretation.
Copyright © 1977 by Erich Fromm
Copyright © 2004 by The Literary Estate of Erich Fromm
Ursrainer Ring 24, D-72076 Tuebingen, Germany
E-mail: frommfunk[at-symbol]aol.com.
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