Tributes

I MET ERICH FROMM IN 1943 half a year after my arrival in the United States, as a result of my fourteen year old son giving me Escape from Freedom. Reading this book made me determined to study with Fromm. He was teaching at that time at the Washington School of Psychiatry in the Murray Hill Hotel. The lectures were fascinating and I approached Erich after one of them, wanting to clarify certain aspects of his comments. We pursued the conversation for hours and the tone of the friendship that was established that evening lasted for years. For him, friendship included the sharing of common interests, deep loyalty and also humor. At the end of our first conversation, Erich suggested another meeting the following Friday, but as he stressed, "Five o'clock American time, not Russian time." Whatever the topic we touched upon over the years, we explored its full meaning and importance to us, picking up where we left off at our last meeting, so that his move to Mexico later did not interfere with the continuity of our relationship.

I had been sharing some of Erich's opinions before I met him. Both of us had been trying to come to terms with certain problems concerning psychoanalysis, particularly the conventionality in the orthodox approach and the replacement of the effort to understand the world of the patient with stereotyped interpretations. The problem of the absence of a live approach was familiar to me and I was happy that he could express the total concept of his thinking about this so well and convincingly, things that few people had touched upon previously. Let me quote his own words from an interview from the German newspaper Die Zeit, March 21, 1980:

As a student, I remained a good Freudian. True, my doubts increased but I graduated from the very orthodox Berlin Psychoanalytic Institute … and during the following five or six years, my analyses adhered strictly to what I had learned. I expected to hear from the patient that which was in accordance with