Let your mind start a journey through a strange new world. Leave all thoughts of the world you knew before. Let your soul take you where you long to be…Close your eyes let your spirit start to soar, and you’ll live as you’ve never lived before.

Erich Fromm

This passage taken as an idea for a meditation exercise still works for me. Though I now find the writing somewhat clumsy. (His rhythms just miss the mark, not as musical or poetic as I remembered.) Still, for half a century, I’ve kept to the basic idea of letting the spirit soar like a bird through space over and through a strange new world, different every time I imagine it. (Click on the photo above if you want to see the soaring element.)

Fromm was important in my early development as a reader, especially in the fifties and sixties. Thumbing through some of my old paperback copies now, his writing seems almost, but not quite, insipid. The Art of Loving seems too obvious when he gets it right, and horribly wrong when he doesn’t. Worst of all, I think he probably bears a lot of the responsibility for founding the ‘self help’ genre from which American readers seem unable to wean themselves. Shu Kuge informs me that, curiously, “The Art of Loving* has been a major best seller in Tokyo for the past year.

I would now class Fromm as a well read psychiatrist with a fair degree of common sense and a knack for presenting - for the “common man” - an easy read of some of the great writers of his time. He certainly introduced me to both Marx and Freud, writers who soared over the 20th century, though, God knows, no one reads them these days. And that’s a great shame. Of course, they’re strictly historical figures now and their master theories are quite rightly seen as quaint nonsense. Yet they remain brilliant thinkers and, for those who are historically minded, both have important things to say to the new millennium.

Freud’s interpretation of dreams and the unconscious mind is still fascinating to read although perhaps too literal in its particularities. The interesting thing is that recent neuro-psychological research indicates that he was on the right track. There is indeed a close link between those structures in the brain responsible for dreaming and those responsible for biological emotions and motivations.

Freud’s views on women were scandalously outdated almost as soon as he wrote them. They were controversial in his lifetime and completely rejected soon after. On the other hand, his 1935 letter on Homosexuality is magnificently succinct, and so remarkably modern that it could have been written yesterday.

Homosexuality is assuredly no advantage, but it is nothing to be ashamed of, no vice, no degradation; it cannot be classified as an illness; we consider it to be a variation of the sexual function . . . Many highly respectable individuals of ancient and modern times have been homosexuals, several of the greatest men among them. ( Plato, Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci, etc). It is a great injustice to persecute homosexuality as a crime –and a cruelty, too.

If you have never read Freud, I strongly recommend that you get ahold of an anthology of his writings. I remember with greatest affection his delightful volume Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious. His notion of the Freudian Slip is enough to secure his place in history: a verbal mistake which accidentally reveals a repressed emotion or belief, or as one comedian put it, “when you say one thing and mean your mother”.

What about Karl Marx? Well, he’s a bit of a grind, so if you read bits from Capital you may need the help of a guide like David Harvey or David McClellan. And of course read the Communist Manifesto, it’s short and easy and probably won’t get you into trouble nowadays. The Manifesto was written in 1848, the better part of two centuries ago, yet if you cast your eye down the page you will find issues relating to economic development with which we still haven’t come to terms.

The document identifies issues that, by any standard, are among the most important the world faces: the need of a constantly expanding market for products (don’t for one minute underestimate the importance of that one); the creation of enormous cities, subjecting the country to the rule of the towns; and the subjection of nature’s forces to man and machinery, transportation and communication, application of chemistry to industry and agriculture, clearing of whole continents for cultivation, canalization of rivers . . . Marx didn’t see these problems precisely as we do, but he saw them!

On second thought, maybe it would be better to forget Freud and Marx and certainly Fromm. But, I still recommend the meditation exercises.