Individuation in Analytic Relatedness

In this Article, I examine certain aspects of the relationship between the process of individuation and the analytic work. I begin with a commitment to the idea that the process of individuation is central. The viewpoint from which I set out is that of Erich Fromm's radical humanism.

I encounter various problems in the course of my inquiry. Some of these, including transference, countertransference, and relativism versus a belief in universal aspects of human nature, I take as themes to be investigated in turn in the humanist perspective. To clarify the viewpoint adopted here it is not always enough to set forth Fromm's thought. Sometimes it needs to be explicated, if not indeed interpreted.

I believe I must present here, preliminarily, a theoretic question regarding the general framing of Frommian psychoanalytic thought. Fromm says that he is “like a pupil and translator of Freud” (Evans, 1966, p. 59). In The Legacy of Erich Fromm, Daniel Burston (1991) classifies psychoanalysts in three groups, depending on their relationship to Freud: “loyal opposition,” “dissident fringe,” and “cryptorevisionists.” He places Fromm in the loyal opposition, together with Groddeck, Ferenczi, Karen Horney (in her early writings), Fairbairn, Guntrip, and others.

In an interview with Evans (1966) and in The Crisis of Psychoanalysis (1970), Fromm declares his links of friendship and collaboration with Karen Horney, Clara Thompson, and Harry Stack Sullivan, but is careful to distinguish his theoretic positions from those of his friends. Yet many of his other statements in both the theoretic and clinical fields are clearly inspired by interpersonal thinking. Consider the following:

There is nothing in the patient which I do not have in me. And only inasmuch as I can muster within myself those experiences which the patient is telling me about, either explicitly or implicitly, only if they arouse and echo within myself, can I know what the patient is talking about. Then something very strange