A Historical Note on Erich Fromm: 1955

DURING THE 1950's, AFTER DR. FROMM moved to Mexico, he would come to New York at regular intervals to teach at the White Institute. I worked twice with him in individual supervision in daily two-hour sessions for one week, and attended some of his public lectures as well as his lecture-seminars, arranged by the Institute.

For that supervision I chose to present to him a patient who had been in psychoanalysis for three years. I wish to describe a particular phase of my experience with him because it remained for me the most unforgettable thing that happened between us. It belongs on the record as a fact about his work that often escapes the notice it deserves. As a direct reflection of the system of beliefs, values, and ideals presumably shot through our success-oriented culture, we are too deeply conditioned to look for the so-called bottom line—that is to say, for the product rather than the process, or for the goal rather than the path.

In the interpretation of that psychoanalytic therapy, I was working quite self-consciously from a perspective that was at once humanist, interpersonal, and characterological. In the analysis of transference material I worked toward understanding aspects of the patient's problems from the standpoint of their genesis and function in his total personality, in addition to noting their unfolding relation to mine. That perspective was, at the time, in lively ferment at the Institute. Its members were diversely engrossed in the development and application of the social and cultural approach to the analysis of transference and resistance. They were just beginning to consider the analysis of countertransference and counterresistance, and anxiety and counteranxiety, as equally critical definitions of empirical psychoanalytic inquiry. Or so I then thought. I soon learned otherwise.

I had originally selected for presentation a particular phase of the three-year duration of the case because I felt it would make for a