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ACLINICAL EXAMPLE MAY ILLUSTRATE one facet of Erich Fromm's influence on analytic practice. Suppose that an attractive and educated thirty-eight-year-old woman consults an analyst because of concern and confusion about her own tendency to threaten her relationship with her husband and her children. Call her Emily. The husband is a personable, rising corporate executive to whom Emily has been married for fourteen years. Warm and generous to her and to their two pre-teen daughters, he consistently encourages Emily's ambivalent efforts to be recognized as a serious poet. For her part, she frankly admits that she resents what she experiences as his intense involvement in his own career. Emily realizes that she hampers his goals by refusing more than token social participation with his colleagues and their wives.
Not only the husband but the daughters, too, are upset increasingly by her curt, critical responses to his expressed desires and opinions. What precipitated Emily's decision to seek treatment was anticipation of their impending vacation alone with each other. From past holidays she knows that intensified contact heightens her sense of her husband as almost intolerably vapid. In genuine distress, she reveals her fear that her attitude may be destructive, since he has done so well in his work and is so widely valued by others.
From a Frommian perspective, the analyst might question whether the patient's self-blame is simply a matter of learned and assumed female masochism, or whether, perhaps, she also is intuitively disturbed by the value commitments of her family life. Is her confused acerbity a device to escape an inner sense that the emotional needs of the entire family are being violated by a marketing