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If aborigines have been presented in literature/film as fearing that their Souls might be captured and destroyed by photographers, one might wonder how the dead would respond to biographers with their sharp pens. Lives are lived in, perhaps, a two hour moving frame—the unfolding present—without regard for how these frames may later be cut and combined on some film editor's floor. Many who visit our offices, indeed, seek us out because they cannot remain in that frame due to their dread of the future or their ruing of the past; perhaps, it is that film editor whom they fear.
The biographer (clinicians, too) must choose the set of variables that collectively paint a picture of one who struggled with his or her attempt to make sense of standing erect on the surface of this planet. Erich Fromm, excommunicated from the mainstream but perhaps the most read of all psychoanalysts, made his choices, as we all do, stochastically. That is, he chose “next steps”—moment to moment and with partial information—based on where he was at any given moment and not on an imagined completed biography. Thus is the lived life. Lawrence Friedman, preeminent biographer and scholar, had choices to make, as well, and rather than opting to focus on a small number of such variables in Fromm's life, he chose to write about “The Lives of Erich Fromm” and how those lives intercalated with each other. And by so doing, Friedman simultaneously charted a history of a major sector of the Political Left—as Fromm filled a space few others did in that World, just as he did in the World of Psychoanalysis.
Friedman carried no illusion of a unitary self into this weave of a singular fabric that were the many threads of Fromm's life. Fromm was an Orthodox Jew and, later, a Secular Jew or maybe a Buddhist. He studied the Lubavitcher Rebbe's Likutei Amarim (also, called Tanya—Friedman thought mistakenly that these were different works) and the Talmud and was steeped in Freud's Psychoanalysis and Marx's Economic Th