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.
ALTHOUGH ERICH FROMM PUBLISHED 22 books and nearly 100 articles on psychoanalysis and related matters, he wrote little specifically on technique. He long planned to do so and had begun to write on this topic just before his death in 1980. He waited, I believe, because he felt that too strong a focus on methodology would not do justice to the vital spirit of the therapeutic engagement. At the same time, perhaps paradoxically, Fromm insisted that sound methodology was necessary for effective inquiry because of the complexity of the transactions; he strongly believed that there was a science of psychoanalysis and he taught this for some fifty years in seminars and supervision. It was my privilege to have studied with Erich Fromm and, later on, to know him in a more personal way; this paper is based on my own understanding and experience of the principles of psychoanalytic practice that Erich Fromm developed.
Although the analytic relationship by itself is not curative, since a psychoanalytic cure is based on overcoming repression and the distortions that arise from it, the establishment of a "productive relatedness" is primary in Fromm's approach to psychoanalysis.
As Fromm described this special relationship,
The analyst understands the patient only inasmuch as he experiences in himself all that the patient experiences; otherwise he will have only intellectual knowledge about the patient, but will never really know what the patient experiences, nor will he be able to convey to him that he shares and understands his (the patient's) experience. In this productive relatedness between analyst and patient, in the act of being fully engaged with the patient,