Erich Fromm, a Rediscovered Legacy

The XI IFPS Forum held last May in New York was dedicated to the memory of Erich Fromm, who was born in Frankfurt a hundred years ago and died in Switzerland in 1980. As the report of the Forum, published in this same issue, shows, several of the panels and many of the papers presented specifically dealt with the contemporary relevance of both his personal and culturally and socially highly sophisticated version of psychoanalysis and of his clinical work. The aim of this editorial is to place this monographic issue of International Forum of Psychoanalysis in the stream of publications, which followed upon his death and to outline and comment on the various contributions. Together with the editorial committee of this journal I share the opinion that Fromm's work needs and deserves to be restored to the centre of contemporary psychoanalysis and this is the reason behind dedicating a monographic issue to Fromm. This issue is of course also a tribute to one of the founders of IFPS, and we count on the possibility that it will give our members an opportunity to critically re-evaluate their identity in the light of his work. In other words, to rediscover both his legacy and what holds us together as a federation of psychoanalytic societies.

As a matter of fact, it took me many years to succeed in accomplishing at least the first of the above operations—i.e. to understand Fromm's relevance for my own clinical practice. As many of my colleagues, I had read much by Fromm as a high-school student, i.e. not only the highly readable book The Art of Loving (1956), but also, for example, such a critical reassessment of the Western cultural heritage as Beyond the Chains of Illusion. My Encounter with Marx and Freud (1962). Not to mention Fromm's critique of the heartless rationality of our technological age, expressed in the book The Revolution of Hope. Toward a Humanized Technology (1968). It was only in March 1990, when attending the congress organized in Heidelberg by Rainer Fun