Erich Fromm: The Sabbath
The Sabbath Erich Fromm (1927a) Translation from the German by Susan Kassouf
Unlike his other pieces written in German, Erich Fromm never attempted later to make this first psychoanalytic publication from 1927 also available in English. There appear to be primarily two reasons for this: Fromm wrote the essay »The Sabbath« out of an outright enthusiasm for Freud’s drive theory. Fromm applied Freud’s theories of the incestuous Oedipal struggle within the individual and, by projection, in the history of humankind to the religious and cultural phenomenon of the Sabbath rest. Just three years later in the essay The Dogma of Christ, Fromm was himself sharply critical of such an application of psychoanalysis to religious phenomena, because it did not take the actual historical practice of life as its starting point for a psychoanalytic interpretation of religious phenomena. We can therefore assume that Fromm’s own psychoanalytic method and theory deterred him from translating this 1927 interpretation of the Sabbath rest into English. This did not prevent Fromm, however, from grappling anew with the Jewish commandment of the Sabbath rest. In his 1951 book The Forgotten Language (1951a, pp. 241–249), Fromm interprets the symbolic language of rituals in the section »The Sabbath Ritual,« without referring to the earlier essay from 1927. The idea that the Sabbath ritual symbolizes the union between man and nature is crucial here, too, yet the rituals are not linked with sacrificial parricide and sin offering, but rather with man’s existential situation: »The Sabbath symbolizes a state of union between man and nature and between man and man. By not working – that is to say, by not participating in the process of natural and social change – man is free from the chains of time, although only for one day a week.« (Ibid., p. 245.) Fromm returns to this idea in his 1966 book You Shall Be as Gods (1966a, pp. 193–201). It is thus primarily for reasons of biography and scholarly history that the 1927 essay, translated by Susan Kassouf, is being published now in English. The
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