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THIS IS A SIGNIFICANT PAPER, even an important one. It touches upon topics that are essential to the understanding of psychoanalytic theory and method, as well as of patients' responses to psychoanalytic treatment. It puts forward some areas of Fromm's agreement and disagreement with Freud, and heralds ideas and attitudes that have become familiar to psychoanalysts and psychotherapists in the quarter century since Fromm delivered his address.
There is value in assuming an historical perspective to the work of any profession. It can be useful and refreshing to examine a contribution from someone, in this case Erich Fromm, who has made an idiosyncratic contribution to psychoanalysis.
I will go through the paper and comment upon some of its content, at the same time bringing forward what I take to be the significance of the ideas expressed.
Fromm puts forward what he takes to be the essence of psychoanalytic treatment, and joins Freud in seeing it as "a method