You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
This book is surprising because it is not just a summary of Erich Fromm's life or work, but an experience of Fromm as refracted through Sandra Buechler's subjectivity. Make no mistake, it is not a conventional biography. The reader expecting such a book will come away disappointed. But as a relational love letter to Fromm, the book stands out. Through author associations and memories, Buechler attempts the more ambitious task of offering a “personal expression” of Fromm's influence on her own “theoretical framework, clinical practice and core beliefs as a human being” (p. 5).
Buechler quotes from Fromm's lucid and elegant prose, which she then uses as a launchpad to discuss various arenas of clinical life. Buechler offers a very readable product, sprinkled with quotable aphorisms by Fromm and herself, that doubles as an introduction to therapy writ large. She offers, for example, observations on love such as: “I think of love as always loving anyway, since there are always reasons not to love someone” (p. 62). And mentorship: “Just as some sculptors describe finding the sculpture in the stone (rather than imposing it on the stone), I think it is part of the task of the mentor and mentee to ‘find’ the professional in the student” (p. 108).
I found myself meditating on what Fromm would have thought of this kind of book. Might he bristle at the liberties she took? Indeed, at times I felt the book tilted so heavily into Buechler's subjectivity that Fromm got pushed into the background, and at times disappeared. Perhaps a title such as “Fromm and Me” or “What I Learned from Fromm” might have better framed this reading experience and made the departures from Fromm feel less stark. On the other hand, this book is singular and could only have been written by Buechler. For the reader interested in a comprehensive biographical portrait, the reader can turn to Lawrence Friedman's (2014) The Lives of Erich Fromm. And the reader seeking exegeses of Fromm's concepts can turn to the