Erich Fromm argued in 1941 that most people mistake a borrowed self for their own.
In 1941, Erich Fromm published Escape from Freedom, in which he argued that the transition from medieval feudalism to modern capitalism had created a new kind of psychological crisis.1 Medieval people had limited freedom but a clear identity. Their place in the social order was fixed at birth. Modern people had unprecedented freedom but no stable identity to anchor it. The result was not liberation but anxiety.
Fromm described three mechanisms through which people escaped the burden of freedom: authoritarianism (submitting to or dominating others), destructiveness (eliminating the threatening world), and automaton conformity (unconsciously adopting the beliefs and behaviors prescribed by one's culture).2
It was the third mechanism that produced what Fromm called the pseudo self. Through automaton conformity, a person replaced their genuine thoughts, feelings, and desires with those absorbed from external authorities, parents, schools, employers, advertising, public opinion. The substitution happened so gradually and so completely that the person experienced the borrowed thoughts as their own.3
Fromm wrote that the inability to act spontaneously, to express what one genuinely feels and thinks, and the resulting necessity to present a pseudo self to others and oneself, are the root of the feeling of inferiority and weakness.4
The concept resonated beyond psychology. Pierre Bourdieu's habitus described a similar process through sociological rather than psychoanalytic language: dispositions absorbed so early and so deeply that they feel natural rather than conditioned. Both thinkers were describing the same phenomenon from different angles, the colonization of personal identity by external structures, and both argued that the most effective conditioning was the conditioning that rendered itself invisible.5
Fromm was born in Frankfurt in 1900, studied sociology and psychoanalysis, and fled Germany after the Nazis rose to power. He spent the rest of his career in the United States and Mexico. Escape from Freedom has remained in print for more than eighty years and has been translated into more than thirty languages.6