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The Exchange between Jay Frankel (1998 a, b) and Irwin Hirsh (1998) in this journal has raised many questions concerning the influence of the founding members of the William Alanson White Institute on contemporary interpersonal and relational psychoanalysis. In the exchange and in ensuing commentary, Fromm's clinical approach has been described by Frankel as authoritative, direct, confrontational, and focusing on the here and now at the expense of analyzing the significance of past experience. Hirsh notes that Fromm appealed to the patient's sense of realism and vitality, in order to mobilize a sense of urgency. Joining this exchange, Mitchell (1999) believes Fromm had a strong bias toward seeing dependence as regressive and pathological. All three authors acknowledge Fromm's important contribution to relational approaches by his emphasis on authenticity and honesty in psychoanalytic work.
Fromm did not leave a comprehensive statement of his clinical approach. This has made it difficult for new generations of interpersonal and relational analysts to properly assess his clinical contributions. In our edited book, A Prophetic Analyst: Erich Fromm's Contributions to Psychoanalysis (1996), Michael Maccoby and I have attempted to evaluate Fromm's theoretical and clinical contributions with the hindsight of almost twenty years.
For Fromm, the goal of psychoanalysis is to expand the ground of human freedom by making the unconscious conscious. Fromm thought Freud's discovery of the dynamic unconscious was his greatest contribution