Preface to the 1965 edition
Preface to the first edition

Chapter 1 Freedom—A Psychological Problem?

Chapter 2: The Emergence of the Individual and the Polysemy of Freedom

Chapter 3: Freedom in the Reformation Era

1.
Medieval setting and Renaissance
2.
Reformation era

Chapter 4: Two Aspects of Freedom from a Modern Perspective

Chapter 5: The Mechanism of Escape

1.
authoritarianism
2.
destructiveness
3.
automaton-like compliance

Chapter 6: The Psychology of Nazism

Chapter 7 Freedom and Democracy

1.
The illusion of individuality
2.
Freedom and spontaneity

Appendix: Personality and Social Processes

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Translator's Note
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Escape from Freedom: A Precise and Fluent Translation, Now in a New Design

Erich Fromm, a philosopher and psychologist who is beloved by countless readers for his works such as To Have or to Be and The Art of Loving, has been translated accurately and fluently into English by translator Seok-hee Kim.
As is widely known, "Escape from Freedom" is Erich Fromm's masterpiece, published in over 30 countries and selling over 5 million copies worldwide.
The first official Korean-language contracted edition, the translation of 『Escape from Freedom』 by Humanist Publishing, which was first published in July 2012, was praised for best capturing the voice and spirit of Erich Fromm and has become a steady seller in the humanities field.
This book is a re-cover edition of the previously published translation of "Escape from Freedom," with a new format and cover design. It aims to present a new version of this classic of our time, beloved for 80 years, to readers.

A powerful insight into the mental state of modern people

"Escape from Freedom" is a book that analyzes the phenomenon of human anxiety that arose from the collapse of medieval society.
Although medieval society was full of dangers, people felt protected and safe within it.
After hundreds of years of hard work, humans have succeeded in amassing material wealth they never dreamed of.
Humanity has built democratic societies throughout the world and has recently succeeded in defending itself against new attempts at totalitarianism.
However, what Erich Fromm, the author of “Escape from Freedom,” analyzes and shows is that modern people are still anxious.
Anxious humans are tempted to surrender their freedom to all sorts of tyrants, or to become small cogs in a machine, living in luxury, but becoming automatons rather than free beings.

Two roads

Freedom brought independence and rationality to modern people, but on the other hand, it isolated the individual and made him an anxious and helpless being.
In that world, everyone and everything was instrumentalized, and he became part of a machine he had created with his own hands.
He thinks, feels, and wants what he believes he should think, feel, and want.
In this very process he loses his own self, but all true security of a free individual must be based on that self.
To escape isolation, an individual must either escape the heavy burden of freedom and return to dependence and submission, or move toward the realization of positive freedom based on human independence and individuality.
By one of these paths he can advance to 'positive freedom', can relate naturally to the outside world, truly expressing his emotional, sensory and intellectual capacities in love and work, and thus become one again with humanity, nature and himself, without giving up the independence and originality of his individual self.

Another path open to him is to step back, to give up his freedom, and to try to overcome his loneliness by eliminating the gap that has arisen between his individual self and the world.
This second path does not reintegrate him with the world in the same way as before he was united as an 'individual'.
Because the separation between him and the world is something that can never be reversed.
This second way is the way out of an unbearable situation.
If that situation continues for a long time, it becomes impossible to survive, so you escape from it.
What characterizes this second path, therefore, is its obsessive nature.
Another characteristic is the complete abandonment of individuality and the true nature of the self.
Humans are no longer the masters of the world they created.
On the contrary, the world created by man became his master.

Approaching the question of freedom from a psychological perspective

The psychological position that Fromm takes is also called neo-Freudianism or left Freudianism.
Simply put, neo-Freudianism is sociologicalized Freudianism.
Freud assumed libido to be a fundamental drive rooted in biology and sexual desire, but neo-Freudianism overcomes Freud's pansexualism, which covers everything up as sexuality, by assuming that it is a drive or desire that is formed within social human relationships.
Through this overcoming, it was possible to fully utilize Freud's brilliant insight while also overcoming Freud's social reactionary nature.

What is the force that moves history?

According to Fromm, it is socio-economic conditions, ideology, and finally 'social character'.
The great appeal of this book lies in its new presentation of the concept of social character.
This is discussed in detail in the appendix, 'Personality and Social Process', but please note that it cites three giant thinkers: Marx, Max Weber, and Freud.
Needless to say, it was Marx who thought of socio-economic factors as the ultimate or especially powerful factor driving history, it was Weber who thought of ideological factors, and it was Freud who thought of the fundamental drives deep within human beings (from which the concepts of individuality and social character arise).
Fromm does not assert that any one of these is the decisive final factor.
But what Fromm particularly wanted to draw attention to was the role of social character in history, along with socio-economic factors and ideology.

Analyzing the Psychological Aspects of Freedom

The point of the problem is that since the Renaissance and the Reformation, the principle of freedom, which has liberated humans from traditional bondage, and the negative aspects that have left humans feeling lonely and helpless have been intertwined.
As a result, humans, unable to bear the burden of freedom, actively seek totalitarian ideologies like Nazism.
So, where freedom becomes a heavy burden, even in democratic societies, there exist psychological hotbeds of Nazism and fascism.

What Fromm is saying about the fate of modern man is something that even we, who live in a society that is neither sufficiently democratic nor sufficiently mechanistic, can fully understand.
In a society that is not sufficiently democratic, the 'democracy' imposed from above will become more uniform, and in a society that is not sufficiently mechanistic, the barely functioning machines will emit more unpleasant toxins.
The hypnotic state of modern people, especially promoted by the mass media, is a common phenomenon regardless of East or West.
Therefore, the question of whether freedom is given and whether freedom can be used meaningfully naturally becomes a major challenge.