Erich Fromm and Postmodernism

Although my experience with Fromm was limited to being a student both in my doctoral and postdoctoral studies, his writings and presence have been a strong influence in my early career. In addition to reading most of his writings, I had the opportunity to present patients to him in both settings. In my graduate days I also had a number of opportunities to speak with him on a number of issues since he was readily available in his office hours. He was very direct and clear in his positions and could be quite challenging, if not critical, if he disagreed. He was very European in his intellectual discussions. I found him and his work appealing on several grounds. In addition to revising some of the classical analysis positions on character traits, he challenged the authoritarianism and the institutionalization of psychoanalysis. He also was a primary force in relating, through his use of Marx's ideas, personality characteristics and functioning to the socioeconomic conditions of society. He also emphasized that psychological maturity is related to ethics and values. While there has been some renewed interest in Fromm, he has largely been neglected in the past years. I believe this is in part due to the conservative nature of political and intellectual ideas in recent years, but also because postmodernist thinking may be essentially—but not totally—inconsistent with Fromm. There may be an inherent difficulty in comparing Fromm's ideas to postmodernism and its use in psychoanalysis since the two are of different time periods. I am primarily concerned with exploring selected concepts from Fromm which, if not a forerunner of postmodernism in psychoanalysis,