Erich Fromm

His theories about mythology and religion examined by Stefan Stenudd

My text on Erich Fromm is quite extensive, so I divided it into seven web pages. This is the first one, the introduction. Links to the other web pages follow below.

Archetypes of Mythology

by Stefan Stenudd
This book examines Jungian theories on myth and religion, from Carl G. Jung to Jordan B. Peterson. Click the image to see the book at Amazon (paid link).

Psychoanalysis of Mythology

by Stefan Stenudd
This book examines Freudian theories on myth and religion, from Sigmund Freud to Erich Fromm. Click the image to see the book at Amazon (paid link).

Introduction

Erich Fromm (1900-1980) was born in Germany to Jewish parents. He studied sociology and later psychoanalysis, opening a clinic in 1927. As the Nazi party got into power, he moved to USA in 1934, and stayed there for the remainder of his life. He never met Sigmund Freud, nor is any correspondence between them known.

His understanding of psychology was at first admittedly Freudian, but later deviated from Freud's principles on certain aspects. His main perspective was social psychology, although to him — and as he understood it, to Freud — it would be impossible to separate it from individual psychology. He stated in 1930, while still faithful to the Freudian perspective:

Freud emphasized that there is no individual psychology of man isolated from his social environment, because an isolated man does not exist.^[1]

As can be seen in the following, Fromm wrote extensively and repeatedly about religion, almost exclusively referring to the Bible and Christianity. His ideas about myths and fairy tales are presented in the book The Forgotten Language, which is also discussed here.

Notes

Erich Fromm, The Dogma of Christ, and Other Essays on Religion, Psychology, and Culture, Greenwich Connecticut 1963, p. 15. The German original of the essay "The Dogma of Christ" is from 1930, translated by James Luther Adams. Fromm intentionally left it unchanged in the 1963 publication. ↑

Erich Fromm on Myth and Religion

Freudians on Myth and Religion

This text is an excerpt from my book Psychoanalysis of Mythology: Freudian Theories on Myth and Religion Examined from 2022. The excerpt was published on this website in February, 2026.

© Stefan Stenudd 2022, 2026