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The editors of this book state their purpose to be “By lifting Fromm's contribution to psychoanalysis from obscurity, we hope to demonstrate the relevance of Fromm's distinctive voice to the ongoing psychoanalytic dialogue” (pp. 8-9). The book itself contains a series of presentations that the editors obscurely label a “culmination of the Erich Fromm International Symposium” (p. xi), held May 6-8, 1994 at the Washington School of Psychiatry. One of the participants in this symposium was Ann-Louise Silver, M.D., the distinguished president of our academy, but she is not quoted in the book nor does her name appear in the index.
On the first reading of this book, I was impressed with two factors. I had always admired Erich Fromm's work as an excellent example of Marxist humanism, and rather idealized him as a benign, very socially conscious author. It appears from a variety of papers in this volume that he was more of a combination of a humanist and a dogmatic messiah, which in my opinion destroyed his effectiveness as a psychoanalyst. Also, I had always thought of Fromm as a neo-Freudian in the company of such brilliant innovators as Rado, Horney, Sullivan, and many others. Reading the essays in this book make it clear that Fromm did not practice psychoanalysis as we know it, but rather a form of relationship therapy in which the principle activity of the therapist was a kind of preaching to the patient along with encouragement and exhortation, more akin to the “third force” psychologies that were in vogue in the 1960s. My inclination was not to review the book at all, but on a second reading I decided that Fromm's prodigious output and the various merits of the volume under review made it deserving of at least some comment, and perhaps some controversy, in our journal.
Fromm never delivered the promised detailed volume on the technique and practice of “psychoanalysis” as he conceived of it, and because of that the editors point out, “clinicians have to make a sustained