Maternal and paternal love

Via Erich Fromm and others

AS an adult, Fromm became steeped 1n the work of the nineteenth-century Swiss Lutheran jurist Johann Iacob Bachofen, whose 1861 book Mother Right and the Origins of Religion provided the first challenge to the prevailing orthodoxy that patriarchal society represented a natural state of affairs and thereby validated capitalism, oppression and male hegemony, as Fromm’s biographer Lawrence Friedman argues. Reading Bachofen also encouraged Fromm to reflect that the mother-child bond was the root of social life and that in a matriarchal society there was no strife, conflict or even private property, reflections that were decisive for his developing socialist humanism. In Bachofen’s description of matriarchal societies they functioned as what Fromm called ‘primitive socialist democracies: in which sociability, generosity, tenderness, religiosity and egalitarianism prevailed. 

But then something terrible happened. According to Fromm’s extrapolation of Bachofen, patriarchy was unleashed by women. Women invented monogamous marriages to free themselves from the irksomeness of multiple partners and unbridled sensual demands. Soon patriarchal societies emerged in which men fought for domination over women and the needy. Where maternal love for the newborn had been free and unconditional, and thus enhanced the child’s self-confidence, in patriarchy fatherly love was contingent on the fulfillment of duties, and as the child came up short in this regard he became psychically insecure. Rationality, private property abstract juridical concepts and the power of the state replaced matriarchal society’s priorities of sensuality, emotion, pleasure and happiness. As a result, society became fraught with conflict, emotionally repressed and guilt ridden. 

The German sociologist Max Weber’s 1904 book The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism recapitulated much of Bachofen’s perspective. For Weber, the Protestant work ethic was what made capitalism possible. For him Protestantism provided the conditions under which many in northern Europe could set up their own enterprises and accumulate wealth for investment. The result was the growth of modern capitalism and rapid industrialisation in several northern European countries. But the increasing technological developments that took place in capitalist societies alienated worker from nature and served to subjugate the weak. The guilt-hobbled son of patriarchal culture who could never quite measure up to his father’s wishes became as it were emblematic of the nature of the capitalist societies that emerged in Europe his guilt, alienation, self-alienation, propensity for conflict and emotional repression all useful fuels that ensured the efficient running of capitalism. 

With patriarchy the Oedipal struggle between father and son emerged. In The Art of Loving, Fromm wrote: ‘When private property came into existence, and when private property could be inherited by one of his sons, father began to look to that son to whom he could leave his property.' As a result, argued Fromm, fatherly love, unlike motherly love, is conditional and it has a negative and a positive aspect: 

The negative aspect is the very fact that fatherly love has to be deserved, that it can be lost if one does not do what is expected. In the nature of fatherly love lies the fact that obedience becomes the main virtue, that disobedience is the main sin and its punishment the withdrawal of fatherly love. The positive side is equally important. Since his love is conditioned, I can do something to acquire it, I can work for it; his love is not outside my control as motherly love is.

But this aspect is only positive for those raised under the spirit of capitalism according to the Protestant work ethic. For them, fatherly love was a wage that could be earned through work. To refuse to work for that love was to break the contract of one’s employment. To yearn instead for the paradise of unconditional motherly love was inimical to the zeitgeist, against the patriarchal law, the stuff of utopian dreaming. Its not a surprise that two members of the Frankfurt School, Fromm and Adorno dreamed of such a utopia. 

and

During the heyday of the family, the father represented the authority of society to the child, and puberty was inevitable conflict between these two. Today, however, the child stands face to face with society and the conflict is resolved before it even arises. The world is so possessed by the power of what is and the efforts of adjustment to it, that the adolescent’s rebellion, which once fought the father because his practices contradicted his own ideology, can no longer crop up.

Viewed thus, the patriarchal father who had once been a servant of the Protestant capitalist state, ensuring its values were instilled in the coming generation, was no longer necessary. Father and family had been the gatekeepers to capitalist culture, rather like the way in which monastic scribes had power because they had a monopoly on transmitting the word of God. But just as the advent of printing made the scribes obsolete, so the rise of totalitarian society made the father’s power and the family institution redundant. Thus, the Oedipal struggles that Freud saw as natural facts about human society could be given a use-by date. Erich Fromm had suspected that the Oedipal struggle had a beginning, and now Horkheimer was positing its end. ‘Since Freud the relation between father and son has been reversed: he wrote. ‘The child not the father stands for reality. The awe which the Hitler youth enjoys from his parents is but the political expression of a universal state of affairs? These melancholy, regretful, very nearly conservative thoughts were taken up by Adorno a few years later in Minima Moralia, written to celebrate Horkeimer’s fiftieth birthday on 14 February 1945, at a time when both men and the Institute for Social Research itself were in American exile. In an early section of the book, he wrote: ‘Our relationship to parents is beginning to undergo a sad, shadowy transformation. Through their economic impotence they have lost their awesomeness. Once we rebelled against their insistence on the reality principle, the sobriety forever prone to become wrath against those less ready to renounce.’That remark recalls the guilt of the wretched son in Kafka’s The Judgment, hoping for his father’s potency to return (if not quite recalling the Kafkaesque nightmare that ensues when his hope is fulfilled). 

The reality principle invoked here by Adorno was defined by Freud in his Civilisation and its Discontents in opposition to the pleasure principle. The latter, Freud thought, is what guides us through childhood we follow our id in satisfying our urges for pleasure. The reality principle is the adult corrective to this youthful indulgence, the force of the ego that ensures we behave in ways that are socially acceptable and that therefore involves the renunciation or repression Adorno describes. Freud envisaged civilisation involving an increasing repression from which there seems to be no escape. As we will see, Marcuse responded to this pessimism in his 1955 book Eros and Civilisation: A Philosophical Inquiry into Freud, arguing that liberation entailed a freeing up of the repressed pleasure principle. For Marcuse, in an analysis that married Marx and Freud, freeing up the pleasure principle meant undermining the reality principle. ‘Men do not live their own lives but perform pre-established functions: he wrote. ‘While they work, they do not fulfill their own needs and faculties but work in alienation.’

But Marcuse’s cocktail of Marx and Freud was for the future, as one theoretical underpinning of the libidinous sixties’ radical rebellion against repressive straight society -in other words ‘the Man’, or the as with parental impotence, an impotence brought about by the undermining of the social role of the family in collectivist societies in general and Nazi Germany in particular.