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Erich Fromm combined doctoral training in social psychology with decades of active psychoanalytic practice and teaching. His work emphasized ethics, insight, strength of character and ways to mitigate the darker side of human nature. Fromm's books, including Man for Himself (1947), The Sane Society (1955), The Art of Loving (1956), The Anatomy of Human Destructiveness (1973) and To Have or To Be? (1976), were widely popular during his lifetime and remain applicable today.
The Clinical Erich Fromm: Personal Accounts and Papers , part of a series on Contemporary Psychoanalytic Studies, fills a historical gap concerning Fromm's practice as a psychoanalyst. The book was meticulously edited by Funk who worked closely with Fromm and is “sole proprietor” of the Fromm archives in Tuebingen, Germany. Twenty-three notable contributors include Ralph Crowley, Marianne Horney Eckardt, Charles Feldstein, Anne Gourevich, Gérard Khoury, Michael Maccoby, Salvador Millán, Jorge Silva Garcia, Rainer Funk and, posthumously, Fromm himself. The book is extensively referenced and contains a brief biography of each author. Chapters are grouped into four sections, “Erich Fromm on Therapeutic Practice,” “Relationship as Direct Meeting,” “Practice in the Mirror of Supervision” and “Reminiscences.” Funk's introduction and a foreword by Roger Frie attest to the richness of Fromm's insights and place them in context. Because Fromm's life was complex, it was helpful to consult a biography (see Funk, 2003).
Erich Fromm was born on March 23, 1900 in Frankfurt Am Main to an Orthodox Jewish family that was notable for Talmudic scholars. He was raised as an only child in a cosmopolitan home, attended the University of Heidelberg as a young man and studied under famous academics such as Karl Jasper and Alfred Weber. His dissertation concerned the