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THIS UNPUBLISHED PAPER BY ERICH FROMM is presented for publication to mark the tenth anniversary of the author's death and the ninetieth anniversary of his birth. It is the edited version of a talk given by Fromm on September 25, 1964, to the Harry Stack Sullivan Society, the candidates group at the William Alanson White Institute in New York.1 (see page 581)
Many points in the paper deserve attention. I shall only point out a few. To begin with, it is one of the few contributions by Fromm concerning psychoanalytic technique. In particular, the case history which is briefly outlined in it is a rarity in Fromm's work.
A second point is the emphasis on constitutional factors. On the one hand, when Fromm speaks of potentials at birth which are distorted by later experience, he seems to be describing the dialectic between "true" and "false self, " in advance of Winnicott's published discussion on the subject. On the other hand, when Fromm refers to constitutional factors, in order to explain the different effects of similar environmental circumstances, he seems to underestimate the protective effect of alternate interpersonal experience, the importance of which has been demonstrated by recent empirical research (see, for example, Rutter, M. [1985] Resilience