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The Anatomy of Destructiveness

a reading: the necrophilous character read whole — destruction as a structure of character, and the biophilia that answers it.

The full post

← home · a reading of one book, with notes
Contents 11 sections
  1. 1. The book, and the debt it names
  2. 2. What the book is arguing against, in its own words
  3. 3. The two aggressions, and a word that is doing two jobs
  4. 4. Character as the third term — and the norm that comes with it
  5. 5. Necrophilia, at the book’s own scale
  6. 6. Biophilia, and the alternative
  7. 7. The three cases, and what a case is for here
  8. 8. Structure or disposition? The question this reading exists for
  9. 9. Counterweights, in the body
  10. 10. The negative finding: safeguard, metered pace, and no clinical referral
  11. Notes

Twelfth of the readings — the one psychology in the library that refuses both instinct and conditioning, and answers with a character structure that is formed, real, and the hardest thing this blog has had to place

Twelfth of the readings. The follower post found the follower to be a position rather than a personality, and warned that the instrument which would sort people is the instrument that fails; the Lucifer Effect post read the social psychology the blog had been running unnamed and found the study underneath it broken; Eichmann in Jerusalem took the blog’s most-quoted phrase back to its source and found a faculty where the blog had assumed a structure. This is the third book in that group, and the one the blog has never cited at all — a psychology that refuses the position-versus-personality split from the other side, argues that something inside the person is also real and describable, and would put it on a scale and count it.

Status. This post reads one source. The quotations are verbatim from a complete digital text of that edition, checked character for character against it and cited in the notes by chapter and section, because the text has no usable page flow; the reading of them is an inference, offered as one. The book’s thesis is not endorsed, and §8 and §9 are about why a reading of it cannot endorse it. The case material — Stalin, Himmler, Hitler — is reported as the book’s content and not adjudicated here, and no living person is diagnosed. Nothing here validates or disqualifies anyone’s experience, and nothing here is a checklist for recognising anybody. As everywhere: describe structures, diagnose no one.*

1. The book, and the debt it names

The Anatomy of Human Destructiveness is by Erich Fromm. The copyright page gives it exactly: first published by Holt, Rinehart and Winston, New York, 1973; the text follows the revised edition as Owl Book (Henry Holt and Company, New York) 1992; (c) 1973 by Erich Fromm, (c) 1992 by the Estate of Erich Fromm; this edition published in 2013 by Open Road Integrated Media; ISBN 978-1-4804-0193-8.1 The Contents gives the structure: Preface, Terminology, Introduction; Part I — Instinctivism, Behaviorism, Psychoanalysis (chs. 1-4); Part II — The Evidence Against the Instinctivist Thesis (chs. 5-8); Part III — The Varieties of Aggression and Destructiveness and Their Respective Conditions (chs. 9-13, ending with a chapter each on cruelty, on necrophilia, and on Hitler); an Appendix on Freud; and a closing Epilogue: On the Ambiguity of Hope.2

The text’s sections stand out of book order and its running heads are unreliable. That is why the citations below are by chapter and section, the way the other readings have handled damaged texts.2

Two facts belong before the reading. The blog has never cited him: a case-insensitive search for “Fromm” across the blog returns nothing, not one line, in any post.3 Arendt and Zimbardo bear on this reading; this is the third of the three.

And he is the hardest of them to place. The blog’s method has two standing forms. The first is describe structures, diagnose no one, which forbids the diagnosis of a person. The second is stronger: the blog has read predation as a position, in three registers — the levers are “positions rather than beliefs”,4 the follower is “a position, not a personality”,5 the machine’s reading “describes a position, not a type”.6 On that account the person is dissolved into the position: what makes the operation work is not what is in anybody’s head but where everybody stands.

Fromm is the serious psychological answer from the opposite side, and it is not naive. He is not saying people are born bad; he is saying that whatever is in the person is formed by conditions and by the person’s own response to them, that it is organised, that it persists, and that it can be described. What he names is neither an instinct nor a circumstance. It is a character structure — and the question of this reading is what the blog does with that.

2. What the book is arguing against, in its own words

Fromm names two opponents and refuses both. The first is the instinctivists — Lorenz’s On Aggression (1966), Ardrey, Morris, Eibl-Eibesfeldt. Their thesis:

“man’s aggressive behavior as manifested in war, crime, personal quarrels, and all kinds of destructive and sadistic behavior is due to a phylogenetically programmed, innate instinct which seeks for discharge and waits for the proper occasion to be expressed.”7

and his reading of why it sells is not flattering: “This theory of an innate aggressiveness easily becomes an ideology that helps to soothe the fear of what is to happen and to rationalize the sense of impotence.”7

The second is behaviourism — Skinner’s specifically. Fromm’s complaint is about a subject matter: “the subject matter of the dominant school in psychology became behavior, not the behaving man.”7 The two schools, he says, are both closed: “Both positions are ‘monoexplanatory,’ depending on dogmatic preconceptions.”7 Then the book’s sentence of scope: “This book affirms that there is another option, and examines the question of what it is.”7

What they have in common is the point, and it is where Fromm becomes interesting to this blog rather than merely useful. Chapter 3, “A Common Ground”, states the shared premise: both assume “that man has no psyche with its own structure and its own laws”, and both “exclude the person, the behaving man, from their field of vision.”8 Then the image, which is easy to mistake for rhetoric and is not:

“Whether man is the product of conditioning, or the product of animal evolution, he is exclusively determined by conditions outside himself; he has no part in his own life, no responsibility, and not even a trace of freedom. Man is a puppet, controlled by strings — instinct or conditioning.”8

The part of this the blog owes is not the thesis; it is the reflexivity. Fromm does not leave his opponents’ theories as theories. He reads eighteenth-century environmentalism as the revolutionary middle class’s theory of itself and nineteenth-century instinctivism as “the basic assumption of nineteenth-century capitalism” — a natural order proved by nature — with the twentieth century’s turn away from it explained by a change in the mode of control. Then he notes the asymmetry in the critics: he quotes the psychoanalyst Robert Waelder exposing the bias of the anti-instinctivists, and observes that Waelder “only sees the bias of the anti-instinctivists and not of those who share his own position.”8

That is the blog’s own kind of move, and Fromm makes it against both sides including his own — which is worth registering, because the rest of this post presses on the one place where he does not.

On Freud he is neither disciple nor prosecutor. He keeps the Freud who found the passions and drops the Freud who explained them: “I had been deeply impressed by his concept that the striving for life and the striving for destruction were the two most fundamental forces within man; but I could not reconcile myself to Freud’s theoretical explanation.”9 What he shifts is the ground of explanation — “from Freud’s physiological to a sociobiological and historical principle”7 — and the Appendix at the back of the book is the fullest statement of what he keeps and drops.

3. The two aggressions, and a word that is doing two jobs

The book’s first distinction is the one everything else rests on:

“We must distinguish in man two entirely different kinds of aggression. The first, which he shares with all animals, is a phylogenetically programmed impulse to attack (or to flee) when vital interests are threatened. This defensive, ‘benign’ aggression is in the service of the survival of the individual and the species, is biologically adaptive, and ceases when the threat has ceased to exist. The other type, ‘malignant’ aggression, i.e., cruelty and destructiveness, is specific to the human species and virtually absent in most mammals; it is not phylogenetically programmed and not biologically adaptive; it has no purpose, and its satisfaction is lustful.”7

Three clauses are load-bearing. Virtually absent in most mammals obliges the four empirical chapters of Part II. Not phylogenetically programmed is the direct denial of Lorenz. And “it has no purpose, and its satisfaction is lustful” should stop a reader of this blog, because the blog’s account of predation is entirely instrumental — a lever works whether or not anyone enjoys it, and the position that exploits is described precisely so that motive never has to be invoked. Fromm’s malignant aggression is the opposite: purposeless by his own definition, and therefore sensible only as a claim about a person.

The species claim follows unhedged — “he is the only primate that kills and tortures members of his own species without any reason, either biological or economic, and who feels satisfaction in doing so”7 — and then the empirical thesis: human groups differ too much for innateness to explain it, destructiveness correlates with social structure, “and (3) the degree of destructiveness increases with the increased development of civilization, rather than the opposite.”7

And the disciplinary move, which the blog already runs without knowing whose it is. The book opens with a short section called Terminology, and it is a refusal to keep using a word that is doing two jobs. Once “aggression” covers a man defending his life, a robber killing for money and a sadist torturing a prisoner, “there is no hope of understanding their ‘cause’; they have no common cause because they are entirely different phenomena.”10 He then sets out Lorenz’s argument as a syllogism and lets it stand:

“The word ‘aggression’ serves conveniently as a bridge to connect biologically adaptive aggression (which is not evil) with human destructiveness which indeed is evil. The core of this kind of ‘reasoning’ is: Biologically adaptive aggression = innate Destructiveness and cruelty = aggression Ergo: Destructiveness and cruelty = innate. Q.E.D.”10

His own rule follows: “aggression” is reserved for defensive, reactive aggression, and “destructiveness and cruelty” for “the specifically human propensity to destroy and to crave for absolute control”.10 The blog’s own post on the word “cult” makes exactly this argument, and it should be said plainly that the blog did not invent that discipline and did not arrive at it alone; Fromm is running it here, five decades earlier, on a word that was doing more damage.11

One collision of vocabulary needs flagging. Fromm uses predation for a biological feeding mode, in a section headed “Predation and Aggression”: predatory animals “comprise the families of cats, hyenas, wolves, and bears”; “The predatory instinct is not one of defense, common to all animals, but of food-finding”; and his conclusion, the opposite of Ardrey’s famous title, is that “man is phylogenetically a nonpredatory animal.”12 The blog’s predation is not that. It is the name for a position in a structure, and it is explicitly not a claim about appetite, species or biology.4 The words are the same and share nothing; a reading that let them be confused would end up arguing that the blog had called its operators cats.

4. Character as the third term — and the norm that comes with it

Between instinct and conditioning Fromm inserts a third thing, and it is the book’s actual subject:

“The distinction between benign-defensive and malignant-destructive aggression calls for a further and more fundamental distinction, that between instinct and character” — the text’s own footnote digit falls here — “or more precisely, between drives rooted in man’s physiological needs (organic drives) and those specifically human passions rooted in his character (‘character-rooted, or human passions’).”7

He says what character is for: it is “man’s ‘second nature,’ the substitute for his poorly developed instincts”, and the character-rooted passions “are answers to ‘existential needs,’ which in turn are rooted in the very conditions of human existence.”7 Instincts answer physiological needs; character answers needs that arise from being the kind of creature that has to make sense of having been born. It is a category of explanation, not a metaphor: “Instincts are a purely natural category, while the character-rooted passions are a sociobiological, historical category.”7

Chapter 10’s section “Character Structure” gives the fullest statement, and then an example chosen to be unremarkable:

“Character is the specific structure in which human energy is organized in the pursuit of man’s goals; it motivates behavior according to its dominant goals: a person acts ‘instinctively,’ we say, in accordance with his character. To use Heraclitus’s phrase, character is man’s fate.”13

“The miser does not ponder whether he should save or spend; he is driven to save and to hoard”.13 The structure is not something a person consults; it is what makes their conduct look to them like nature. The existential account explains why anyone would choose the destructive answer: “The need for effectiveness can be answered by love, productive work — or by sadism and destructiveness”, and “Man seeks for drama and excitement; when he cannot get satisfaction on a higher level, he creates for himself the drama of destruction.”7 Destructiveness here is a solution to a problem, and a cheap one — “for destruction all that is necessary is strong arms, or a knife, or a gun.”9

The formation story is what does the work against innatism, and Fromm tells it as a sliding scale:

“the individual begins life with certain qualities that dispose him to go in certain directions, but his personality is still malleable enough to allow the character to develop in many different directions within the given framework. Every step in life narrows down the number of possible future outcomes. … Eventually, the freedom to change becomes so minimal that only a miracle would seem capable of effecting a change.”14

That answers both opponents at once. Against the instinctivists: what starts early is a set of dispositions to develop, not a programme. Against the behaviourists: there is something there, and it accumulates — which is why later events must be more violent than earlier ones to move it. He names the social half of the mechanism too, and coins a term for it: “social character”, the process by which “each form of society (or social class) needs to use human energy in the specific manner necessary for the functioning of that particular society.”13

And here is the thing the blog has to mark, because it is where a structure becomes a verdict. The same chapter that describes character as formed also carries a norm, stated as a premise:

“The position taken here assumes that man has an immanent goal, that man’s biological constitution is the source of norms for living. He has the possibility for full development and growth, provided the external conditions that are given are conducive to this aim.”13

From that premise fall the two syndromes — the “life-furthering” and the “life-thwarting” — the vocabulary of “a crippled, stunted man”, and the claim that necrophilia is “the outcome of unlived life, of the failure to arrive at a certain stage beyond narcissism and indifference.”9 He knows how this will be heard: “It is truly astonishing that this view should be considered ‘idealistic’ or ‘unscientific’ by so many who would not dream of questioning the relation between constitution and norms in regard to physical development and health.”13

The blog cannot run that premise — not because it is falsifiable, but because it is a norm, and a norm is what turns a description into a ranking. That is the risk, and it is in the book rather than in its reception. What keeps it from being fatal is that Fromm spends the rest of the chapter qualifying it; §9 collects those qualifications.

5. Necrophilia, at the book’s own scale

Chapter 12 is the famous one, and the blog’s job is to report it as the book states it — including where the book goes too far.

Provenance first, because it is not Freud’s. Fromm took the word from a speech. In 1936, at the University of Salamanca, the Nationalist general Millan Astray’s motto — “Long live death!” — was shouted from the hall, and the rector, Miguel de Unamuno, answered him, naming the thing:

“The term ‘necrophilous,’ to denote a character trait rather than a perverse act in the traditional sense, was used by the Spanish philosopher Miguel de Unamuno in 1936”9

and then, in a footnote in the book’s own voice: “I adopted the use of the term from Unamuno and have been studying the phenomenon of character-rooted necrophilia since about 1961.”9 The move from the older, clinical sense — acts with a corpse — to a character trait is his, and he says so. He says where his data came from too, without dressing it up: “My theoretical concepts were gained mainly by observation of persons in analysis.”9

The definition is one sentence, and it is the sentence to argue with:

“Necrophilia in the characterological sense can be described as the passionate attraction to all that is dead, decayed, putrid, sickly; it is the passion to transform that which is alive into something unalive; to destroy for the sake of destruction; the exclusive interest in all that is purely mechanical. It is the passion to tear apart living structures.”9

Note what is in it and what is not. There is no violence in the definition. Order, control and the mechanical — the three things a reader of this blog would expect in a description of a predatory frame — are there, and they are there as the opposite of life, not as methods. And the last clause gives the book its shape: the passion is to tear apart living structures. His biophilia will be “structures rather than summations” (§6). The axis is not good against bad. It is living organisation against its dismemberment.

What the character does, in the book’s catalogue, is a list rather than a syndrome, and its ordinariness is deliberate: the conviction “that the only way to solve a problem or a conflict is by force and violence”, with force — “as Simone Weil said, ‘the power to transform a man into a corpse’” — as “the first and the last solution for everything”, and the queen’s answer in Alice in Wonderland, “off with their heads!”;9 a marked interest in sickness and death, the obituaries read first; and the relation to time and property, compressed into three clauses: “Briefly, things rule man; having rules being; the dead rule the living.”9

The language section is where the blog’s own material sits closest. Fromm’s finding is that “the language of the necrophilous person is characterized by the predominant use of words referring to destruction and to feces and toilets”, and his evidence is a questionnaire answer: asked about women’s use of lipstick and make-up, a majority answered in the prevailing ideology — “It is bourgeois”, “unnatural”, “not hygienic” — while a minority answered “It is poisonous” or “It makes women look like whores”, and “almost invariably, the respondents who used these words showed a destructive trend in most other answers.”9 Whether a questionnaire about cosmetics can carry that is not something this reading can settle; what is worth noting is that it is a finding about diction as a symptom — the same surface the blog’s posts on loaded vocabulary work on, reached from underneath rather than from outside.

Chapter 12’s most interesting structure is a derivation, and also its weakest joint. Fromm derives necrophilia from the anal character — “necrophilia can be described as the malignant form of the anal character”9 — and then hedges the neatness himself: “But the connections are by no means so neat.” He goes further and notices that the type he built it from is disappearing, so that “the character of the new type of man does not seem to fit into any of the older categories”, and proposes a marketing character for whom everything, even his smiles, is a commodity.9

And then the sentence the blog has no analogue for. Writing about what mechanised killing does to the killer, Fromm says the technicalisation of destruction removes “the full affective recognition of what one is doing”, and then:

“Once this process has been fully established there is no limit to destructiveness because nobody destroys: one only serves the machine for programmed — hence, apparently rational — purposes.”9

Nobody destroys: one only serves the machine. That is the blog’s own description of a position, written by an author who does not believe positions are enough. It is ambiguous in a productive way: it can mean the person has been replaced by a function, or that the person’s passion has been routed through a function so that it no longer has to be felt. Fromm notices the ambiguity and raises it against his own thesis — whether contemporary technical man “is not motivated by a passion for destruction, but would be more properly described as a totally alienated man whose dominant orientation is cerebral … who has become, in a characterological sense, an automaton, but not a destroyer?”9 His answer includes the book’s most quoted image of modern necrophilia, and it is not a corpse: “Its symbols are now clean, shining machines; men are not attracted to smelly toilets, but to structures of aluminum and glass.”9

6. Biophilia, and the alternative

The opposite orientation arrives late and briefly, at the end of chapter 12:

“Biophilia is the passionate love of life and of all that is alive; it is the wish to further growth, whether in a person, a plant, an idea, or a social group.”9

Two clauses in the list that follows are gifts to a blog whose subject is structures. The biophilous person “wants to be more rather than to have more … He loves the adventure of living more than he does certainty”, and then: “He sees the whole rather than only the parts, structures rather than summations.”9 That is Fromm, in 1973, in nine words: a structure is not the sum of its parts, and seeing it is a capacity rather than a method.

The book then declares an ethics in the same voice, and is honest that it is one. “Biophilic ethics have their own principle of good and evil. Good is all that serves life; evil is all that serves death.”9 That is a definition, not a measurement — which is the least a reader can ask of a norm, and it is still a norm; §9 returns to it.

The relation to Freud is the technical point. Fromm does not say the two orientations are equal forces, and it is on this that he departs from the death-instinct theory: “in Freud’s concept both tendencies have equal rank, as it were, both being biologically given. Biophilia, on the other hand, is understood to refer to a biologically normal impulse, while necrophilia is understood as a psychopathological phenomenon.”9 So the asymmetry is his contribution: one is what the organism is for, the other is what happens when it is stunted. Hence the sentence that gives the book its moral shape:

“Destructiveness is not parallel to, but the alternative to biophilia. Love of life or love of the dead is the fundamental alternative that confronts every human being. … Man is biologically endowed with the capacity for biophilia, but psychologically he has the potential for necrophilia as an alternative solution.”9

and the mechanism by which the alternative gets chosen, which is the closest the book comes to the blog’s account of how easy a frame is to enter: “If man cannot create anything or move anybody, if he cannot break out of the prison of his total narcissism and isolation, he can escape the unbearable sense of vital impotence and nothingness only by affirming himself in the act of destruction of the life that he is unable to create.”9

The counterweight belongs here rather than at the end, because this is the passage the book’s whole normative apparatus is built on: an alternative available to every human being, a capacity that is given and a pathology that is a failure to arrive. It is a complete moral psychology — the strongest thing in the book — and the blog will not take it, because taking it means holding a specification of what a person is for, and the first thing the blog’s discipline forbids is a specification against which a person can be measured. What the blog can take is the structure of the claim: one orientation is not the negation of the other but its substitute, chosen when the first is unavailable, and cheap.

7. The three cases, and what a case is for here

Part III contains four clinical case studies of named historical figures — Stalin (“a Clinical Case of Nonsexual Sadism”), Himmler (“a Clinical Case of Anal-Hoarding Sadism”), and Hitler (“a Clinical Case of Necrophilia”), the central exhibit.

The method is stated in three moves. An “analytic psychobiographical study” asks two questions: the driving forces that motivate a person, and “the conditions — internal and external — responsible for the development of these specific passions (character traits).”14 The evidence base is deliberately not behavioural: “the analysis of dreams, unintended behavior, gestures, language, and behavior that is rationally not fully explainable permits one to form a picture of the essential and mostly unconscious passions (‘X-ray approach’).”14 And the point of the exercise is the one the blog must not lose:

“The question raised in this book is not concerned with behavior, but with character. … the question is not whether Hitler behaved destructively, but whether he was motivated by an intense passion to destroy, a passion for destruction that was part of his character, this has to be proven, not taken for granted.”14

with the premise underneath it: “destructive actions are not necessarily manifestations of a destructive, necrophilous character.”14 He argues it by counter-example — Napoleon, and the many commanders who ordered destruction — and the argument is genuinely strong. A general who sacrifices his soldiers for ambition is not thereby in love with death.

This is the load-bearing collision with the blog. The blog’s rule is that you read the position and never the motive, because the motive is what cannot be read and what a description becomes when it is misused. Fromm’s method is the exact inverse: conduct tells you almost nothing, “the question raised in this book is not concerned with behavior”, and the work is to reconstruct the motive from dreams, slips, gestures and the pattern of a life. Both accept that destructiveness is real; they disagree about what a description is of — a place somebody stands, or a structure somebody has. Nothing here resolves that; §8 and §9 are about how far it can be carried.

What he does with the evidence is best seen in the section on repression, because it is a real argument. Hitler, he says, repressed the awareness of his destructiveness by rationalising every order as defensive, and then by reaction formation — the mechanism in which a person denies a drive “by developing traits that are exactly the opposite.”14 His examples are vegetarianism, begun after the suicide of Geli Raubal, and a phobia of corpses that kept Hitler from the front: “In my opinion this phobic reaction to seeing corpses is a defense reaction against the awareness of his own destructiveness. As long as he only gave and signed orders, he had only spoken and written.”14 He had only spoken and written — the same observation the blog’s posts make about the operator who never touches anybody, arrived at from the opposite direction, through a psychology of motive.

He is scrupulous about his sources, too: “Maser, though a historian, is often unreliable in the use of his sources”, “Smith is by far the most objective and reliable source for Hitler’s youth”,14 and Speer’s recollections recur as “A. Speer, personal communication.” He refuses the madness verdict: “in conventional terms Hitler was not a psychotic man, in dynamic, interpersonal terms he was a very sick man”,14 and the labelling question is answered with a passage his own profession has to sit under — “the questionable value of psychiatric labels … in the last analysis what we are dealing with are interpersonal processes that defy such labels.”14

And then the thing the blog has to record, because it is the book’s own sentence and not a reading imposed on it. The chapter closes by stating its purpose:

“I had still another aim: that of pointing to the main fallacy which prevents people from recognizing potential Hitlers before they have shown their true faces. This fallacy lies in the belief that a thoroughly destructive and evil man must be a devil — and look his part … as long as one believes that the evil man wears horns, one will not discover an evil man.”14

followed by an estimate offered as an estimate — “even if one would estimate that such persons formed 10 percent of our population, there are enough of them to be very dangerous if they attain influence and power” — and the line “there are probably hundreds of Hitlers among us who would come forth if their historical hour arrived.”14

That is a detection programme. It is offered in good faith, and it is exactly the move the blog’s rule exists to prevent: the step from this is how a structure works to here is how to recognise a person.11 The book’s counterweight sits in the paragraph just before it — “But even the most evil man is human and calls for our compassion”, and “clinical analysis must not be used to obscure the moral problem of evil”14 — but it is a counterweight, not a refusal. The blog will take the first half of Fromm’s closing pages and leave the second.

8. Structure or disposition? The question this reading exists for

The question, plainly. The blog says describe structures, not dispositions. Fromm says the destructive thing is a character structure. Is that a structure, which the blog may describe, or a disposition, which the blog’s discipline refuses to sort by?

The answer this reading reaches is that it is both, and the blog’s rule was never about the first half of that sentence. Four steps.

One: in form it is a structure, and the term is not loose. It is organised (“the specific structure in which human energy is organized in the pursuit of man’s goals”),13 enduring (“character is man’s fate”),13 formed rather than given (“the malignant forms of aggression, on the other hand — sadism and necrophilia — are not innate”),15 and continuous rather than typological: “only a relatively small minority are completely necrophilous” and “there is no fixed border between the necrophilous and the biophilous orientation.”9 “The destructive character” names a dominance, not a membership. The blog’s structures are outside the person — a frame, an environment, a position — and Fromm supplies the case for a structure inside one, at the same level of description.

Two: in behaviour it is unmistakably a disposition, and Fromm says so with the old vocabulary. The sadistic character “looks as if he fitted the hydraulic model of a dammed-up instinct”,8 and the reason it looks that way is that a character is a propensity to act when the occasion comes: “In a person with a sadistic character, a sadistic impulse is constantly active, waiting only for a proper situation and a fitting rationalization to be acted out.”13 Then the sentence that decides it:

“But only people with a sadistic character wait for the opportunity to behave sadistically, just as people with a loving character wait for the opportunity to express their love.”8

That is a disposition — the thing that makes a pattern of occasions intelligible, and precisely the kind of claim the blog’s phrase warns against. So the rule is either wrong, or it was never about this.

Three: it was never about this, and the blog’s own best material already proves it. The follower post runs the blog’s most careful piece of psychology, and its finding is a two-term model: “A latent disposition, plus a condition, produces the behaviour”, and “The environment does not create the follower. It decides whether the predisposition is expressed.”5 That is Fromm’s model in different words, arrived at through Stenner’s research rather than psychoanalysis. The blog has therefore never held that nothing in a person is real; it has held that a description of a person is not a sorting device — that a type becomes harm at the step from “this is what coercion looks like” to “therefore this person cannot choose”.11 The rule’s force is about what a description may be used for, and about which level of description survives contact with the evidence. It is not a claim that persons are empty.

Four: and this is the correction, and it runs from the blog towards Fromm’s side of the ledger. The blog has argued that the person is dissolved into the position, and that a lever works whether or not anyone enjoys it. Fromm supplies the mechanism the blog has been missing, and it runs one level down:

“the power through which one group exploits and keeps down another tends to generate sadism in the controlling group, even though there will be many individual exceptions.”16

Read as the blog would read it, that is a structural claim: the position forms the person who occupies it. The blog’s account of a predatory frame describes a place and the levers it supplies; Fromm’s adds that the place is inhabited long enough to leave a shape, and that the shape is what makes the operation repeatable — a discovered frame can be rebuilt by the next occupant, an operator who has become exploitative cannot easily be talked out of it. And his prediction is one the blog’s model already makes:

“A person whose character is sadistic will be essentially harmless in an antisadistic society; he will be considered to be suffering from an illness.”16

Take away the condition and the disposition does not express — which is the follower post again, with a clinical case behind it. And note the harder clause, in the Introduction, which is where the blog’s hope about what text can do gets its ceiling: “Unless this happens he can be domesticated, but he cannot be cured.”7

What the blog therefore owes, stated as the correction it is. The blog has described predation as a position and dissolved the person into it; Fromm’s case is that the position also forms the person, and that the formed character — not the position alone — is what makes an exploitative structure durable, repeatable and transferable. The blog may describe that, because it is a structure and not a verdict, provided it keeps three conditions the book itself supplies: formed and not innate; continuous and not binary; and formed by life-conditions rather than given. And it must refuse a fourth step that the book itself takes — from describing the structure to identifying the person, which is the recognition programme of §7. Fromm, not this blog, is the one who wrote that “Even the most sadistic and destructive man is human, as human as the saint” and that he “can also be called a man who took the wrong way in search of his salvation.”7 Those two sentences are the blog’s rule in Fromm’s register, and they are the reason his framework can be taken without the programme.

9. Counterweights, in the body

Five, and each is a thing this reading would be wrong to leave out.

First, the book’s own hedges are substantial, and they are why it is not a typology. Chapter 12’s methodological section opens with the rule any diagnostic use must start from: “The presence of one or two traits is insufficient for the diagnosis of a necrophilous character”, and continues that it is “not necessary to find all characteristically necrophilous features together”, that most people are the blend, and that “there are as many combinations as there are individuals.”9 Chapter 11 says it in the moral register: “it would be a dangerous oversimplification if I were to classify people into only two groups: the sadist devils and the nonsadistic saints”, and “What matters is the intensity of the sadistic passion within the character structure of a given person.”16

Second, the instruments are named and not validated, and the numbers are judgements. The clinical evidence is “observation of persons in analysis”; the other instruments are a fixed questionnaire designed with Michael Maccoby, applied to “six very different populations (as to class, race, and education)”, and “projective tests like the Rorschach inkblot test”, which “Maccoby has used … with satisfactory results.”9 The population figure is quoted from Maccoby’s paper and its own verb is “we judge”: “we judge that about 10 to 15 per cent of the samples interviewed would be dominantly necrophilous.”9 The 10 per cent in the Hitler chapter is introduced as an estimate — “even if one would estimate”.14 The blog’s standing requirement of its own mechanism claims is that somebody else can run them. Nothing here can be run by a reader: no published instrument with a false-positive rate in this text, no inter-rater figure, and a central type diagnosed by the interpretation of dreams and diction. That does not make it false; it makes it a clinical inference, and a reading must say so.

Third, the place where the book argues with itself is real and does not fully close. The objection Fromm raises at the end of the technique section — that modern technical man may be “an automaton, but not a destroyer” — is answered by extending the theory, not by testing it.9 Its own author posed the strongest counter-example available and answered it with a new category. That is legitimate theoretical work and it is not evidence.

Fourth, the norm, and this is the gap the blog cannot paper over. “Good is all that serves life; evil is all that serves death” is declared as the principle of a biophilic ethics, and “man’s biological constitution is the source of norms for living” is assumed as a premise.913 Fromm is straightforward that these are ethics and premises rather than findings, and that candour is why the framework can be read without being adopted. But a norm at the centre of a character theory is exactly how a description becomes a verdict: once “a man who took the wrong way in search of his salvation” is a category, some descriptions of people acquire the force of a judgement about how well they have been a person. The blog describes structures; it has no standing to say what a life is for, and where a source’s account of destructiveness rests on that, the source is reported and the norm is left where it is.

A fifth counterweight, and it is the one the blog owes itself rather than the book: what actually works is the weakest part of the book. Its prescription for malignant aggression is social, not clinical — the malignant forms “are not innate; hence, they can be substantially reduced when the socioeconomic conditions are replaced by conditions that are favorable to the full development of man’s genuine needs and capacities”15 — and its closing pages argue for a “humanist radicalism” that goes “to the roots”.15 There is no clinical route in the book for the person already inside a collapse, no account of what to do tomorrow, and no placement of the check anywhere a reader can reach it. The blog’s own safety material is doing work this book does not attempt, and a reading that called Fromm’s remedy sufficient would be trading a description for a promise.17

10. The negative finding: safeguard, metered pace, and no clinical referral

The series reports the presence or absence of a safeguard, a metered pace and a clinical referral as search results, scoped to the text of this edition. This book’s results are unusual: it is written by a clinician, in the first person, out of decades of practice, and it offers its reader no clinical destination at all.18

“Safeguard” occurs zero times. The only near hit is “safeguarding”, once, inside a passage from another author’s neurophysiology about food, family and territory. There is no instruction to a reader anywhere in the book, no stopping rule, no fence.

“Pace” occurs zero times as a word. Thirty occurrences of the letters, every one of them the tail of “space”. There is no metered practice here to have a pace, which is the same finding as the other readings in a different register: the only thing the book asks a reader to do is read a study.

There is no clinical referral at all. “Referral” zero; “informed consent” zero; “clinic” and “clinician” zero. The clinical vocabulary is present and enormous — “clinical” 45 times, almost always the book’s own adjective for its own method — and the rest is practitioner vocabulary with the reader left outside it: “therapy” 12, “psychotherapy” 2, “therapist” 2, both inside a reported case history, “patient” 24. “Psychiatry” 8, “psychiatrist(s)” 8, “psychiatric” 5, and most of those are in the Bibliography, in footnotes thanking colleagues, or in the book’s own argument about the value of labels. “Doctor” 3: twice the physician who treated Hitler’s mother, once Himmler admonishing the SS physician-in-chief. “Hospital” 4: a place a defendant might be sent instead of prison, sampling (“hospital inmates”), the Stalin passage, and one case history.

What the book has instead is the reverse of a safeguard, and this is the finding. Chapter 12’s methodological section asks, as the sixth of its numbered questions, “would it not be of great social and political significance to know what percentage of the population can be considered to be predominantly necrophilous or predominantly biophilous”, and calls for an adequate sample studied by a method that would “permit us to recognize the driving and largely unconscious forces behind manifest behavior and opinions.”9 The same section names the dangerous class: “severely necrophilous persons are very dangerous. They are the haters, the racists, those in favor of war, bloodshed, and destruction”, and they “become the executioners, terrorists, torturers”, while the less intense ones “are necessary for the existence of a terror regime because they form a solid basis, although not necessarily a majority, for it to gain and hold power.”9

It is not simply a gap, and the difference is worth stating exactly. This is the first subject in the series that offers a check on its own instrument: one or two traits are insufficient, not all features are required, only a small minority are complete cases, there is no fixed border. That is a real check, and no earlier reading’s source has supplied one at this level of care. What the book does not have is any check on a reader — and what it reaches for instead is a survey and a list of who is dangerous, which is the thing the blog’s discipline exists to refuse.

Notes

Marking: a reading. Documented — the book’s identity, edition and provenance, verbatim from the edition’s copyright page (Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1973; the Owl Book revised text of 1992; the 2013 Open Road edition, ISBN 978-1-4804-0193-8); the text’s shape and its out-of-book-order sections; the Contents-derived structure; every quotation, checked character for character against it and cited by chapter and section; the counts in §10, which are search results over the text of this edition; and the check in §1, which is a count over the blog’s own posts. Reported as the book’s own content and not adjudicated: the instinctivist and behaviourist theses as Fromm states them, the two-aggression distinction, the character-structure account and its norm, necrophilia and biophilia, and the three clinical cases — Stalin, Himmler and Hitler — including the Hitler chapter’s method, its sources and their stated reliability, its reaction-formation arguments, and its closing recognition programme, quoted as the book’s own purpose and refused as a procedure here. Inference, offered as one: that Fromm’s character is a structure at the level of the person and simultaneously a disposition in the blog’s sense (§8); that the blog’s rule has always been about the use of a description rather than about whether anything in a person is real, an inference from the follower post’s own two-term model (§8); and that the position forms the occupant, which is the correction the blog owes and which is drawn from one sentence of chapter 11 and one of chapter 12. Not adopted: the book’s norm (“man’s biological constitution is the source of norms for living”), its biophilic ethics as a standard for measuring a life, its diagnosis of named persons, and its programme for recognising potential destroyers. No living person is diagnosed here and no reader is assessed; nothing in this post validates, disqualifies or restricts anyone’s experience or conduct. Restorations inside quoted matter, all reported rather than tidied: “controlled” for the text’s “controllers” (ch. 3); “Hitlers” for the text’s “Hitters” (ch. 13); “would be dominantly necrophilous” for the text’s “would he dominantly” and “wants to be more” for “wants to he more” (ch. 12); the text’s small-capital openings (“A N ANALYTIC”) are quoted in normal case, and a stray footnote digit that breaks the instinct/character sentence in the Introduction is marked at the point where it falls (§4). Its typographic quotes are rendered here as straight ASCII quotes, its closed-up em dashes spaced out, and the syllogism in §3, which the text prints as one continuous sentence, is set out on three lines with its wording unchanged.

  1. The edition’s copyright page: “All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. … First published by Holt, Rinehart and Winston, New York, 1973. The text follows the revised edition as Owl Book, (Henry Holt and Company, New York) 1992. (c) 1973 by Erich Fromm (c) 1992 by the Estate of Erich Fromm cover design by Angela Goddard 978-1-4804-0193-8 This edition published in 2013 by Open Road Integrated Media 180 Varick Street New York, NY 10014 www.openroadmedia.com”. The text also carries a short biography at the back (“Erich Fromm (1900-1980) was a German-American psychoanalyst, sociolo[gist]…”), which is the Open Road edition’s own apparatus and not part of the book.↩︎

  2. The text. Read from a complete digital text of that edition, following the revised Owl Book text of 1992 (Open Road Integrated Media, 2013, ISBN 978-1-4804-0193-8). Every quotation was located and checked character for character against it. Its sections stand out of book order — the text opens in the top of chapter 13 and places the Contents page near the end — and its running heads are unreliable, so every citation in this post is by chapter and section.↩︎

  3. The count. A case-insensitive search for “Fromm” across every post on the blog (and the home page) returns zero hits. The three books arrived together as a group; Arendt and Zimbardo bear on this reading, and this is the third of the three.↩︎

  4. The costume post §1 and §7: the levers found across the case studies are “positions rather than beliefs”, and the mysticism is “a costume rather than the mechanism”. Its standing rule — “levers without the collapse mechanism are power, not predation” — is the blog’s own line, not Fromm’s, and §3’s note on the two senses of “predation” exists so that this reading cannot blur them.↩︎

  5. The follower post §4 and §5, quoting Stenner’s The Authoritarian Dynamic (2005) on the difference between a fundamental predisposition and a latent one, and stating the two-term model: “A latent disposition, plus a condition, produces the behaviour.”; “The environment does not create the follower. It decides whether the predisposition is expressed.” The post’s title states the rule from the other side: “The follower is a position, not a personality — and the instrument that would sort people is the one that fails.”↩︎

  6. The machine has no reading §4: “the person described in §4 is a position, not a type”.↩︎

  7. Introduction: Instincts and Human Passions. “man’s aggressive behavior as manifested in war, crime, personal quarrels, and all kinds of destructive and sadistic behavior is due to a phylogenetically programmed, innate instinct which seeks for discharge and waits for the proper occasion to be expressed.”; “This theory of an innate aggressiveness easily becomes an ideology that helps to soothe the fear of what is to happen and to rationalize the sense of impotence.”; “the subject matter of the dominant school in psychology became behavior, not the behaving man”; “Both positions are ‘monoexplanatory,’ depending on dogmatic preconceptions”; “This book affirms that there is another option, and examines the question of what it is.”; the two aggressions; “he is the only primate that kills and tortures members of his own species without any reason, either biological or economic, and who feels satisfaction in doing so.”; “the degree of destructiveness increases with the increased development of civilization, rather than the opposite.”; “The distinction between benign-defensive and malignant-destructive aggression calls for a further and more fundamental distinction, that between instinct and character” (the text’s footnote digit 3 falls inside the phrase); “or more precisely, between drives rooted in man’s physiological needs (organic drives) and those specifically human passions rooted in his character (‘character-rooted, or human passions’).”; “character is man’s ‘second nature,’ the substitute for his poorly developed instincts”; “are answers to ‘existential needs,’ which in turn are rooted in the very conditions of human existence.”; “The need for effectiveness can be answered by love, productive work — or by sadism and destructiveness.”; “Instincts are a purely natural category, while the character-rooted passions are a sociobiological, historical category.”; “We thus shift the principle of explanation of human passions from Freud’s physiological to a sociobiological and historical principle.”; “Man seeks for drama and excitement; when he cannot get satisfaction on a higher level, he creates for himself the drama of destruction.”; “Unless this happens he can be domesticated, but he cannot be cured.”; “Even the most sadistic and destructive man is human, as human as the saint.”; “can also be called a man who took the wrong way in search of his salvation.”.↩︎

  8. Chapter 3, “Instinctivism and Behaviorism: Their Differences and Similarities”. “that man has no psyche with its own structure and its own laws”; “They both exclude the person, the behaving man, from their field of vision.”; “Whether man is the product of conditioning, or the product of animal evolution, he is exclusively determined by conditions outside himself; he has no part in his own life, no responsibility, and not even a trace of freedom. Man is a puppet, controlled by strings — instinct or conditioning.” (the text reads “controllers” for “controlled”, restored here); “the basic assumption of nineteenth-century capitalism”; “it is nevertheless noteworthy that he only sees the bias of the anti-instinctivists and not of those who share his own position.” (in “The Political and Social Background of Both Theories”); “looks as if he fitted the hydraulic model of a dammed-up instinct”; “But only people with a sadistic character wait for the opportunity to behave sadistically, just as people with a loving character wait for the opportunity to express their love.”.↩︎

  9. Chapter 12, “Malignant Aggression: Necrophilia”. In “The Necrophilous Character”: “The term ‘necrophilous,’ to denote a character trait rather than a perverse act in the traditional sense, was used by the Spanish philosopher Miguel de Unamuno in 1936”; “I adopted the use of the term from Unamuno and have been studying the phenomenon of character-rooted necrophilia since about 1961.”; “My theoretical concepts were gained mainly by observation of persons in analysis.”; the definition; “the conviction that the only way to solve a problem or a conflict is by force and violence.”; “the power to transform a man into a corpse” and “off with their heads!”; “Briefly, things rule man; having rules being; the dead rule the living.”; “The language of the necrophilous person is characterized by the predominant use of words referring to destruction and to feces and toilets.”; the questionnaire answer (“It is bourgeois”, “unnatural”, “not hygienic”; “It is poisonous”, “It makes women look like whores”) and “almost invariably, the respondents who used these words showed a destructive trend in most other answers.”; “we judge that about 10 to 15 per cent of the samples interviewed would be dominantly necrophilous” (the text reads “would he dominantly”, reversing “be”; restored here). In “The Connection Between Necrophilia and the Worship of Technique”: “the full affective recognition of what one is doing”; “Once this process has been fully established there is no limit to destructiveness because nobody destroys: one only serves the machine for programmed — hence, apparently rational — purposes.”; “is not motivated by a passion for destruction, but would be more properly described as a totally alienated man whose dominant orientation is cerebral”; “who has become, in a characterological sense, an automaton, but not a destroyer?”; “the connections are by no means so neat”; “necrophilia can be described as the malignant form of the anal character.”; “the anal character that was typical of the nineteenth-century middle class is becoming increasingly less frequent among the sector of the population that is fully integrated into the economically most advanced forms of production.”; “the character of the new type of man does not seem to fit into any of the older categories.”; “Its symbols are now clean, shining machines; men are not attracted to smelly toilets, but to structures of aluminum and glass.”. In “The Relation of Freud’s Life and Death Instincts to Biophilia and Necrophilia”: “Biophilia is the passionate love of life and of all that is alive; it is the wish to further growth, whether in a person, a plant, an idea, or a social group.”; “He sees the whole rather than only the parts, structures rather than summations.”; “Biophilic ethics have their own principle of good and evil. Good is all that serves life; evil is all that serves death.”; “in Freud’s concept both tendencies have equal rank, as it were, both being biologically given. Biophilia, on the other hand, is understood to refer to a biologically normal impulse, while necrophilia is understood as a psychopathological phenomenon.”; “Destructiveness is not parallel to, but the alternative to biophilia. Love of life or love of the dead is the fundamental alternative that confronts every human being.”; “Man is biologically endowed with the capacity for biophilia, but psychologically he has the potential for necrophilia as an alternative solution.”; “If man cannot create anything or move anybody…”; “the outcome of unlived life, of the failure to arrive at a certain stage beyond narcissism and indifference”; “for destruction all that is necessary is strong arms, or a knife, or a gun.”. In “Clinical-Methodological Principles”: “The presence of one or two traits is insufficient for the diagnosis of a necrophilous character.”; “not necessary to find all characteristically necrophilous features together”; “only a relatively small minority are completely necrophilous”; “Consequently there is no fixed border between the necrophilous and the biophilous orientation. As with most other character traits, there are as many combinations as there are individuals.”; “The use of projective tests like the Rorschach inkblot test.”; “Maccoby has used” “… with satisfactory results.”; “severely necrophilous persons are very dangerous. They are the haters, the racists, those in favor of war, bloodshed, and destruction.”; “become the executioners, terrorists, torturers”; “are necessary for the existence of a terror regime because they form a solid basis, although not necessarily a majority, for it to gain and hold power.”; the population-survey passage and “permit us to recognize the driving and largely unconscious forces behind manifest behavior and opinions”. “six very different populations (as to class, race, and education)”.↩︎

  10. Terminology. “there is no hope of understanding their ‘cause’; they have no common cause because they are entirely different phenomena”; the syllogism passage, quoted in full in the text (printed there as one continuous sentence, with the line breaks added here and no wording changed); “In this book I have used the term ‘aggression’ for defensive, reactive aggression … but call ‘destructiveness’ and ‘cruelty’ the specifically human propensity to destroy and to crave for absolute control (‘malignant aggression’).”.↩︎

  11. The label post §4 and §5: “a category that does harm — including to the people it is meant to protect. Why this series names mechanisms instead”, and its finding that a description becomes harm at the step from “this is what coercion looks like” to “therefore this person cannot choose”. The same step is what §7 of this post finds in Fromm’s own closing pages, at the scale of a population rather than a person.↩︎

  12. Chapter 5, “Neurophysiology”, its section “Predation and Aggression”. “they comprise the families of cats, hyenas, wolves, and bears.”; “The predatory instinct is not one of defense, common to all animals, but of food-finding, common to certain animal species that are morphologically equipped for this task.”; “man is phylogenetically a nonpredatory animal, and hence this aggression, as far as its neurophysiological roots are concerned, is not of the predatory type.”.↩︎

  13. Chapter 10, “Malignant Aggression: Premises”. In “Character Structure”: “Character is the specific structure in which human energy is organized in the pursuit of man’s goals; it motivates behavior according to its dominant goals”; “To use Heraclitus’s phrase, character is man’s fate.”; “The miser does not ponder whether he should save or spend; he is driven to save and to hoard”; “In a person with a sadistic character, a sadistic impulse is constantly active, waiting only for a proper situation and a fitting rationalization to be acted out.”; “each form of society (or social class) needs to use human energy in the specific manner necessary for the functioning of that particular society”. In “Conditions for the Development of Character-Rooted Passions”: “the average person is a blend of both syndromes”. In “Social Conditions”: “according to it, man is a blank sheet of paper on which the culture writes its text.”; “The position taken here assumes that man has an immanent goal, that man’s biological constitution is the source of norms for living.”; “a crippled, stunted man”; “It is truly astonishing that this view should be considered ‘idealistic’ or ‘unscientific’ by so many…”.↩︎

  14. Chapter 13, “Malignant Aggression: Adolf Hitler, a Clinical Case of Necrophilia”. “An analytic psychobiographical study aims at answering two questions…” (133; the text opens “A N ANALYTIC PSYCHOBIOGRAPHICAL”, its small capitals run together); “the analysis of dreams, unintended behavior, gestures, language, and behavior that is rationally not fully explainable permits one to form a picture of the essential and mostly unconscious passions (‘X-ray approach’).”; “classic analysts assume that character development is finished around the age of five or six years”; the sliding-scale passage and “Eventually, the freedom to change becomes so minimal that only a miracle would seem capable of effecting a change.”. In “A Comment on Methodology”: “destructive actions are not necessarily manifestations of a destructive, necrophilous character.”; “The question raised in this book is not concerned with behavior, but with character.”; “the question is not whether Hitler behaved destructively, but whether he was motivated by an intense passion to destroy…”. In “Repression of Destructiveness”: “by developing traits that are exactly the opposite.”; “In my opinion this phobic reaction to seeing corpses is a defense reaction against the awareness of his own destructiveness. As long as he only gave and signed orders, he had only spoken and written.”. In the closing section the Contents lists as “Defects of Will and Realism”: “Maser, though a historian, is often unreliable in the use of his sources.” and “Smith is by far the most objective and reliable source for Hitler’s youth.”, both in the chapter’s note 1; “in conventional terms Hitler was not a psychotic man, in dynamic, interpersonal terms he was a very sick man”; “the questionable value of psychiatric labels”; “in the last analysis what we are dealing with are interpersonal processes that defy such labels.”; “clinical analysis must not be used to obscure the moral problem of evil.”; “But even the most evil man is human and calls for our compassion.”; “I had still another aim: that of pointing to the main fallacy which prevents people from recognizing potential Hitlers before they have shown their true faces.”; “as long as one believes that the evil man wears horns, one will not discover an evil man.”; “even if one would estimate that such persons formed 10 percent of our population, there are enough of them to be very dangerous if they attain influence and power”; “there are probably hundreds of Hitlers among us who would come forth if their historical hour arrived.” (the text reads “Hitters” there, restored).↩︎

  15. Epilogue: On the Ambiguity of Hope. “The malignant forms of aggression, on the other hand — sadism and necrophilia — are not innate; hence, they can be substantially reduced when the socioeconomic conditions are replaced by conditions that are favorable to the full development of man’s genuine needs and capacities”; “humanist radicalism goes to the roots”.↩︎

  16. Chapter 11, “Malignant Aggression: Cruelty and Destructiveness”. In “The Nature of Sadism”: “the core of sadism, common to all its manifestations, is the passion to have absolute and unrestricted control over a living being, whether an animal, a child, a man, or a woman.”; “it would be a dangerous oversimplification if I were to classify people into only two groups: the sadist devils and the nonsadistic saints.”; “What matters is the intensity of the sadistic passion within the character structure of a given person.”. In “Conditions That Generate Sadism”: “the power through which one group exploits and keeps down another tends to generate sadism in the controlling group, even though there will be many individual exceptions.”; “A person whose character is sadistic will be essentially harmless in an antisadistic society; he will be considered to be suffering from an illness.”.↩︎

  17. The safeguards §1 and its convergence section, which reads the traditions’ own canonical codes against the mechanism and against what the clinical literature has independently arrived at. The comparison in §9 is narrow and should be read narrowly: Fromm’s remedy is a change in socioeconomic conditions and he was writing in 1973; the point is that a book this long about destructiveness contains no route for a reader who is already inside it.↩︎

  18. Absence and presence reported as search results, scoped to the text of this edition. Case-insensitive, whole-word counts over the text of this edition: “safeguard” 0, “safeguards” 0, “safeguarding” 1; “pace” 0 (“pace” as a substring occurs 30 times, every one of them inside “space”); “referral” 0; “informed consent” 0; “consent” 4 (historical, political and biographical passages, political passages); “clinic” 0 and “clinician” 0; “clinical” 45; “therapy” 12; “psychotherapy” 2; “therapist” 2; “psychiatry” 8; “psychiatrist” 3 and “psychiatrists” 5; “psychiatric” 5; “physician” 12; “doctor” 3; “hospital” 4; “diagnosis” 17; “cure” 5, “cured” 2. The two “therapist” hits are both inside the reported analysis of a necrophilous case; the three “doctor” hits are Dr Bloch, who treated Hitler’s mother, twice, and Himmler’s letter to the SS physician Grawitz. No hit in the text places a reader in front of a clinician, and none of them is a referral.↩︎