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.
Author Jerry Fromm is a time traveller, who accompanies the reader from the past, across the present, and into the future. This is the vital element that frames psychoanalytic engagement. It is not only described but is made available, through the sheer humanity and deep responsiveness of the author, as he tries to make sense of untold trauma, that both begs, yet avoids being told. But how much of our curiosity for truth about traumatic experience can we allow to travel into conscious feeling and thinking? This approach echoes Thomas Ogden's description of the significance of dreamwork in psychoanalysis, in “dreaming undreamt dreams and interrupted cries” (Ogden, 2005). It demonstrates the tools of the trade of clinician, group, and organisational consultant and profound engagement with society in exploring the fascinating possibility that there can be links between these apparently quite distinct domains of enquiry and engagement.
This might suggest that the author works to his own individual distinct agenda and approach. Nothing could be further from the truth. This book is by a leader in our systems psychodynamic field. Yet essentially, he positions himself as a representative of an organisational endeavour with a long history
Contact: Richard Morgan-Jones, email:
of engagement not just with mental illness amongst a population of treatment-resistant patients, but of the psychoanalytic and therapeutic community regime of which he was director at the Austen Riggs psychiatric hospital in Massachusetts, USA. Here the inspiration of founding fathers including, notably, Erik Erikson, includes the study of societal and international issues through the Erikson Institute of which Fromm is a distinguished faculty member and a former director.
Beyond the Austen Riggs Center the author has contributed widely to our field through staffing and directing group relations conferences, being a past president of the International Society for the Psychoanalyti