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ERICH FROMM WAS THE MOST FULLY alive and awake man I have ever met or can imagine. These qualities were contagious. To be truly with him one felt fully alive and awake.
As a teenager in 1941, I had read his book, Escape From Freedom, and I found an orientation to Man and Life. The book also helped explain the barbaric holocaust we had all witnessed, and how the sadist needed the masochist, as much as the reverse, to achieve what Fromm, way back then, called "symbiosis." I was determined to leave Canada and study with this man at the White Institute. To my shock, in 1951, I found he had moved to Mexico. But this cloud had a silver lining: he would then come back to New York City 3–4 months each year and I arranged to work with him in intensive supervision—two hour sessions, four times a week for four years.
If I ask why the supervision with Fromm would lift my spirits so high, it has undoubtedly to do with the fact that Fromm saw each supervisory and analytic session as a dramatic search for truth. He was above all a truth-seeker who knew that an essential part of an analysis was to shed sham and illusion.
His face would brighten with expectation when he asked, "What are this man's passions?" Moreover, in almost every supervisory session,