Developmental Perspectives in Fromm's Psychoanalysis: A Response to Biancoli

Fromm's clinical approach has been transmitted largely through the oral tradition. He was always disinclined to commit to writing schematic principles for fear that they would be reified through the dogmatic religiosity of accolytes. This aspect of Fromm's corpus contrasts with the breadth of his writing as a social—rather than clinical—psychologist, which consists of almost two dozen books, some of them perennial bestsellers and fixtures on college reading lists (i.e., Fromm, 1941, 1947, 1951, 1955, 1956, 1961, 1962). Biancoli suggests that Fromm's core belief that “each individual is unique, each analytic relationship is unique, and this uniqueness is a value that might be harmed by the standardized application of rigid rules” (p. 609) is the reason he never wrote a book on psychoanalytic technique. In this sense, Fromm believed that the codification of psychoanalytic technique risked alienating clinical practice from the fundamental concern with uniqueness and individuality.

Beyond this (as a perhaps deeper and more personal motive), I suspect that Fromm' quite deliberate and intentional emancipation from his personal and professional roots in orthodox Judaism and orthodox Freudianism left him deeply suspicious of the dangers of ideas becoming systematized as the objects of idolatrous worship (Kwawer, 2000). As a consequence of this idiosyncratic inclination of Fromm's, those who speak with conviction and authority about his psychoanalytic technique do so either on the basis of first-hand encounters with Fromm as students, analysands, or supervisees (Kwawer, 1975, 1991; Landis, 1981; Tauber, 1959) or do so inferentially on the basis of a shared understanding of the basic tenets of his developmental and clinical theories.

Fromm's emphasis on the cultural shaping of personality and his insistence on the relatedness of human beings as a core aspect of the state of human nature locates his psychoanalytic thinking clearly within the