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I am pleased to respond to Harold Davis's insightful article on Fromm and postmodernism. Like Harold, I believe that Fromm's work merits discussion in the contemporary psychoanalytic context and is of direct relevance to the current debate over postmodernism. My discussion will essentially take up where Harold's article ended.
At first glance, the juxtaposition of Fromm and postmodernism may seem rather odd. Fromm, after all, died in 1980, and to my knowledge never directly addressed the growing postmodernist movement in his last years. Indeed, a colleague told me that he offered to address students protesting at Columbia University in 1968 but was rebuffed (Nat Stockhammer, personal communication). The 1968 student protests are often linked with the emergence of postmodernism. The students, however, apparently had no interest in hearing what he—or anyone of his age group—had to say. Yet, as Harold points out, Fromm and the existential-phenomenological tradition with which he was often allied have direct relevance for the current debate over postmodernism in psychoanalysis. I will examine both of these topics in turn.
Fromm may seem like a largely forgotten figure today. He was a founder of the William Alanson White Institute of Psychiatry, Psychoanalysis, and Psychology, a sociologist turned psychoanalyst, a writer of books that sold well, but someone who perhaps never fully made his mark on the practice of psychoanalysis. And yet?