You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
In her paper, Dr. Gojman correctly places Fromm in what Greenberg and Mitchell (1) call the relational tradition in psychoanalysis. She also points out that Fromm recognized the importance of the analyst's participation in the relationship, and claimed the need to examine the analyst's position in the social world.
In the first case report, the patient, Pablo, comes from a very deprived background characterized by the dominance of a disturbed mother and the virtual absence of father figures. The patient eventually interrupted treatment. In a dream the analyst had shortly before the interruption, he and the supervisor are admiring the landscape and are unable to communicate with Pablo, who eventually leaves the scene. Dr. Gojman suggests that the dream shows the reluctance of analyst and supervisor to confront the patient's traumatic experiences because these experiences belong to a lower socio-economic level, whilst they prefer to enjoy the more civilized pleasures of their own class.
Dr. Gojman very rightly points out that, by eliciting this unsympathetic attitude in the analyst and the supervisor, and by finally discontinuing treatment, Pablo reproduced his experience of distance and rejection from males. The fact that the analyst takes on a negative role from the patient's past experience has been called “enactment” in recent years. If recognized in time, its acknowledgement by the analyst can provide a powerful therapeutic experience. If it goes unrecognized, of course, it can lead to a negative outcome.
At this point my interpretation differs somewhat from Dr. Gojman's. She seems to ascribe the analyst's blindness entirely to class differences. In my opinion, the patient was actively seeking to reproduce his traumatic experiences. To achieve this aim, he made use of what admittedly may have been the analyst's distaste for traumatic experiences, which were defensively projected onto the lower classes. Similarly, in the second case, the patient made use of the analy