The Problem a Phoenician Merchant, a Medieval Monk, and You Have in Common, According to Erich Fromm

According to Erich Fromm, a primitive caveman, an Egyptian peasant, a Phoenician merchant, a Roman soldier, a medieval monk, a Japanese samurai, and a modern office worker have, at bottom, exactly the same problem.

In The Art of Loving (1956), psychoanalyst Erich Fromm argues that all of human history can be read as a long series of attempts to answer a single question.

Not a political or economic one, but an existential one: how to stop feeling separate from the rest of the world.

A problem that hasn’t changed in thousands of years

Fromm is literal in his list. He writes that the problem is “the same for primitive man living in caves, for the nomad taking care of his flocks, for the peasant in Egypt, the Phoenician trader, the Roman soldier, the medieval monk, the Japanese samurai, the contemporary clerk and factory hand.”

The reason he groups such different figures together (separated by thousands of miles and thousands of years) is that, for Fromm, they all share the same starting condition: awareness of oneself as a separate being, aware of one’s own solitude, fragility, and eventual death.

That awareness, he writes, generates an anxiety so intense that no human culture has been able to fully ignore it.

Three historical ways of soothing that anxiety

Fromm describes several responses humanity has tried throughout its history. None of them, in his theory, fully solves the problem, but all of them ease, for a while, the sense of being alone:

• Orgiastic states. Trance rituals, sometimes aided by drugs, practiced communally by many primitive cultures. As long as they’re practiced collectively and are socially accepted, Fromm writes, they don’t generate guilt; when an isolated individual seeks the same thing on their own in a culture that no longer practices those rituals (through alcohol or drugs, for instance), the result tends to be guilt and an even greater sense of separateness once the effect wears off.
• Conformity with the group. Adapting to the customs, ideas, and appearance of a larger collective, until you feel you belong to something that transcends your own person.
• Creative work. A carpenter making a table, a painter painting a picture, or a farmer sowing a field merge, during that process, with the material they’re working on.

”Civis romanus sum”: the pride of belonging

To illustrate the second solution, conformity with the group, Fromm draws on a specific historical fact.

Even the Roman with the fewest resources, he writes, felt proud to be able to say civis romanus sum (“I am a Roman citizen”). All of Rome (its army, its law, its territory) became a kind of extended family, a home much bigger than one’s own house.

Fromm draws a direct line from that Roman pride to much more recent phenomena: identification with a nation, with an organized religion, or, in the consumer society he himself observed in the mid-twentieth century, with fashion and the trends of the moment.

He cites, almost ironically, an advertising slogan of his time, “it’s different,” as proof of how much people need to feel different when, at bottom, almost no one is very different at all.

Why none of these solutions is enough, for Fromm

The three strategies share a limit, according to his analysis:

• Orgiastic union is intense but transient: it lasts as long as the ritual, the substance, or the trance does.
• Group conformity is lasting but shallow: it soothes the anxiety without demanding too much, but also without offering too much.
• Creative work unites the person with their material, not with another person.

None of the three, Fromm points out, achieves full interpersonal union: fusion with another human being that, at the same time, respects both people’s individuality. That full union is, in his theory, the only thing he properly calls mature love. Everything else is, in his words, “partial answers to the problem of existence.”

The fourth way out: merging with someone

There is one more answer that Fromm sets apart from the other three because it does seek another person, but in the wrong way: symbiotic union. In its passive form, one person submits, becomes part of someone stronger who decides for them and spares them the burden of being a separate individual. In its active form, one person dominates, absorbs the other into themselves and turns them into an extension of their own self. Fromm describes this in the psychoanalytic terms of his time, as masochism and sadism, but the idea is clear without them: each pole needs the other, and neither keeps its integrity.

It’s the answer most easily mistaken for love, because it’s lived intensely and with the feeling of being unable to be without the other. The distinction Fromm draws is sharp: in mature love two people become one and yet remain two. In symbiosis, at least one of them stops being someone in their own right. That boundary reappears in today’s psychology under other names, such as emotional dependency.

What later research has measured

Fromm wrote from psychoanalysis and philosophy, without experiments. Several of his intuitions, however, have since been studied with data:

• The need to belong. Baumeister and Leary (1995) reviewed the available evidence and proposed that the need to form and maintain stable bonds is a fundamental human motivation: people form ties easily, resist breaking them, and suffer intensely when they break. It’s the empirical version of Fromm’s starting point.
• Conformity. Solomon Asch’s experiments (1956), in which many people went along with a visibly wrong answer so as not to stand out from the group, showed how powerful group pressure is. A meta-analysis by Bond and Smith (1996), covering 133 studies in 17 countries, found that conformity in this kind of task had declined in the United States since the 1950s and was higher in more collectivist cultures. The group “solution” Fromm described therefore varies with the era and the culture.
• Creative work. What Fromm describes as merging with the material resembles the flow studied by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi (1990): absorption in a demanding task in which self-awareness and the sense of time fall away.
• The cost of separateness. The meta-analysis by Holt-Lunstad, Smith, and Layton (2010), with 148 studies and more than 300,000 participants, found that people with stronger social relationships were about 50% more likely to survive over the period studied. Fromm’s “separation anxiety” was a philosophical thesis; isolation also has a measurable cost.

A reading from the distance of 1956

The Art of Loving is an essay of its time and is best read that way. Its central premise (that all of human history answers a single anxiety) is a philosophical thesis that can’t be tested. Fromm’s “man” is the masculine universal of the period, and his historical panorama, from caveman to clerk, blends very different cultures without data on how people actually lived. What remains valuable is the question he raises, not his answer taken as a law.

What changes and what doesn’t

What’s striking about Fromm’s list (the caveman, the peasant, the merchant, the soldier, the monk, the samurai, the office worker) is that none of them solved the problem better than the others simply by living in a more “advanced” era.

The tools changed: the tribal ritual became a weekend of partying, Roman citizenship became national or brand identity, the artisan’s workshop became the modern office.

What didn’t change, according to Fromm, was the underlying question.

That continuity is perhaps the most uncomfortable part of his theory: it doesn’t promise the problem will disappear with material progress.

What it does argue is that, of all the answers humanity has tried throughout its history, only one (love understood as care, respect, responsibility, and knowledge toward another person, also covered in the parable of Jonah) aims directly at the center of the problem, instead of going around it.

Sources

• Fromm, E. (1956). The Art of Loving. Harper & Brothers.
• Baumeister, R. F. and Leary, M. R. (1995). The need to belong: Desire for interpersonal attachments as a fundamental human motivation. Psychological Bulletin, 117(3), 497-529. https://doi.org/10.1037/0033-2909.117.3.497
• Asch, S. E. (1956). Studies of independence and conformity: I. A minority of one against a unanimous majority. Psychological Monographs: General and Applied, 70(9), 1-70. https://doi.org/10.1037/h0093718
• Bond, R. and Smith, P. B. (1996). Culture and conformity: A meta-analysis of studies using Asch’s (1952b, 1956) line judgment task. Psychological Bulletin, 119(1), 111-137. https://doi.org/10.1037/0033-2909.119.1.111
• Csikszentmihalyi, M. (1990). Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience. Harper & Row.
• Holt-Lunstad, J., Smith, T. B. and Layton, J. B. (2010). Social relationships and mortality risk: A meta-analytic review. PLoS Medicine, 7(7), e1000316. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pmed.1000316