This is first-rate. Although an admirer of Freud, Fromm places him on his couch, and, for lack of a better phrase, he tears him to shreds. Combing through Freud's published and unpublished work (including his voluminous correspondence) Fromm finds a hopelessly ego-centric, selfish, insecure, authoritarian, dictatorial, anti-woman, anti-man, sexually inhibited, emotionally distant, obsessively antagonistic and querulous, self-messianic, elitist. Freud had dreams of unriddling the secrets of humanity. For him, psychoanalysis was that answer. Bent on conquering and ruling the scientific world, Freud turned psychoanalysis into a quasi-religious movement. He chained his admittedly important discoveries to his own person, giving no freedom to his colleagues to revise his fundamental theses (unless of course he initiated the revision). Freud's creativity and scientific thirst for truth was eventually replaced by dogma, ritual, and idolization. Although critical of the extremity of certain aspects of Victorian culture, including the harshness of excessive sexual repression, for the most part Freud celebrated that culture as the glorious result of instinctual/sexual frustration, where mutually profitable exchange constituted the essence of social coherence.
By focusing solely on the individual's unconscious, and by restricting the basis of human life to libido-strivings/pleasure principle/death instinct, Freud failed to develop a sociological or historical awareness. He failed also, according to Fromm, to understand that an individual often represses those thoughts and feelings which are incompatible with the prevailing social patterns, since not conforming to those patterns often creates severe anxiety. The individual represses not only evolutionary/biological impulses, but also the historically contingent patterns that happen to operate in a given culture. Thus, understanding the unconscious of the individual necessitates the critical analysis of society.
Freud's other shortcomings, and his intellectual breakthroughs, are noted in my review of Fromm's other book on Freud, Greatness and Limitations of Freud's Thought