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THESE WORDS, QUOTED FROM FROMM, better than any other words I know, express the essential truth about his own personality and life. They also express the ultimate aim of psychoanalysis—although we seldom come even close to it.
To be wholly awake and fully alive is not to have knowledge nor even to have love, but belongs to the mode of being, according to Fromm. In To Have or to Be he quotes Meister Eckhart: "Love has to do with desire and purpose, whereas knowledge is no particular thought, but rather it peels off all (coverings) and is disinterested and runs naked to God, until it touches him and grasps him." The way to being is penetration through the surface and insight into reality. In this direction of his thinking and inner experience Fromm no doubt belongs in the tradition of the mystics.
But the path of psychoanalysis is the path through selfknowledge, which is something much more concrete, because it goes the whole way back to our early experiences, feelings and needs.
Some time ago one of my patients said: "I feel I have a choice now and, that I have the responsibility to make choices—I can choose what I feel is more right or I can choose in the wrong direction. To free our patients for this choice is our task as psychoanalysts. Fromm has told us what the freedom to choose really means. Let me quote from The Heart of Man:
The argument for the view that man has no freedom to choose the better as against the worse is to some considerable extent based on the fact, that one looks usually at the last decision in a chain of events, and not at the first or second ones. … Our capacity to choose changes constantly with our practice of life. The longer we continue to make the wrong decisions, the more our heart hardens; the more often we make the right decision, the more our heart softens—or better perhaps becomes alive. … In fact, there is no such thing as