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MANY YEARS AGO I HAD THE privilege of being in supervision with Dr. Erich Fromm. After an hour of my presentation of work with a patient, Dr. Fromm commented with mild impatience, but evident exasperation, something to the effect that I should stop trying to show him how learned, perceptive and astute I was. He suggested that since I was spending what he called my "hardearned money" for his counsel, I would profit by showing him my errors, my misjudgments, and my problems with the case. In effect, he said that I would learn more were I to share with him my difficulties, my inaccuracies, my awkwardness, and my failures.
He said that it seemed that I was fairly good at what I did, and that there was clearly no need for me to impress him. It had been assumed I could become intimate with patients and participate in this profession, since I had been accepted by our Institute and, he noted, it was self-evident that I was considered apt since I would not be in supervision with him were I not. He had been asked by the Institute's training committee to write a report on my work, and, alas, since he had thought of me as a graduate analyst, he had taken no notes. This was, of course, reassuring.
Then Dr. Fromm made a remark which I did not fully appreciate at that time. I am not quoting his phrasing exactly, but what follows is based on his rhetoric as I remember it.
He said that my errors, my failures and my understanding of them, and their rectification, were the keys to learning what the process of analysis is about—they were the keys to "union."
I recall that the word "union" was one of Dr. Fromm's favorites. As I understood him at the time, it referred not only to the aspirations, achievements and satisfactions of organized labor—and