March 23, 1900

Erich Fromm (March 23, 1900 to March 18, 1980) is labeled a sociologist and a psychoanalyst in the history of Freudian thought. According to one website on this history, Fromm's significance is stated this way:

Today, Erich Fromm is widely regarded as one of the most important psychoanalysts of the 20th century. While Freud had an early influence on him, Fromm later became part of a group known as the neo-Freudians which included ... Carl Jung. Fromm was critical of many of Freud's ideas including the Oedipus complex, the life and death instincts and the libido theory. Fromm believed that society and culture also played a significant role in individual human development....Of his own work, Fromm would later explain, "I wanted to understand the laws that govern the life of the individual man, and the laws of society-that is, of men in their social existence."

Erich Fromm's German and Jewish background formed much of his biography:

He went on to study sociology at the University of Heidelberg, earning his doctorate in 1922 under the supervision of Alfred Weber. In 1924, he began studying psychoanalysis at the University of Frankfurt before moving to the Berlin Institute of Psychoanalysis. In 1926, he married Freida Reichmann, a women ten years his senior who had once been Fromm's own psychoanalyst. The marriage dissolved after four years....

Fromm helped found the Frankfurt Psychoanalytic Institute, where he lectured from 1929 to 1932. After the Nazi's rose to power, the Institute was moved to Geneva, Switzerland and later to the United States at Columbia University...

After moving to the United States, Fromm taught at a number of schools including the New School for Social Research, Columbia and Yale. His criticisms of Sigmund Freud's theories began to put him at odds with other psychoanalysts, and in 1944 the New York Psychoanalytic Institute suspended him from supervising students for this reason...

Fromm would find constructive milieus later in Mexico, and finally he finished a circle by settling in Switzerland, after decades in non-German populations.

Apparently, too, the Fromm family included felines. In their descriptions regarding Fromm's relations with orthodox Freudians, we found this setting the authors Mauricio Cortina, and ‎Michael Maccoby sketched  in their book, A Prophetic Analyst: Erich Fromm's Contributions to Psychoanalysis (1996):

Fromm's wife...sat in on our interviews (and I seem to remember cats wandering around)

Erich Fromm, in Man for Himself, (1947) came perhaps as close as he could to answering certain questions: "Man’s main task in life is to give birth to himself, to become what he potentially is. The most important product of his effort is his own personality."