Reich and Fromm on Needs and Social Character

Erich Fromm was one of those who undertook the project of supplementing Marxist theory with Freudian principles in order to explain how it is that individuals are inducted into the roles that the capitalist system structures for them. It is true, after all, that classical Marxism had paid little attention to the question of individual psychology. The discovery of Marx’s early writings showed that he had a fairly well-developed theory of human nature, but one that lent itself to this level of explanation or an account of individual motivation as such. Freud, on the other hand, had produced a materialist and a causal theory according to which all cultural phenomena were related to specific needs in the individual. Wilhelm Reich was, it seems, the first to realise the mutual possibilities of a synthesis of Marxian and Freudian principles. 1 As he points out, Marx, for all that he was, from The German Ideology on, insistent that the principles on which materialism is based should be empirical ones, still had a very metaphysical concept of human nature. The view of man’s characteristic attributes that Marx set out in the early writings was in terms of man’s immanent power to break the hold of environmental conditions, and not an argument for bondage to the processes of material determinism. If, in the later writings, he refers to this image of man less, he still does not develop a theory of psychic conditioning.