The Legacy of Erich Fromm, Cambridge (Mass.) and London (Harvard University Press) 1991, 260 p.
(1991)
This paper addresses the integration of community psychology and psychoanalytic theory through an exploration of transference-countertransference interactions and enactments that occurred in the context of a community intervention. The author, a team member during a four-year community revitalization intervention in South Central Los Angeles, calls this approach community analysis and offers a way to conceptualize the transference-countertransference themes that developed there in the interactive patterns between community residents and the intervention staff. Examples are given to illustrate how the interactive patterns represented deeply entrenched transference dilemmas that residents enacted with external power sources, including the intervention team, and how this understanding provided necessary leverage for growth and change in the community.
A Profile of Erich Fromm
(1991)
A biography of German psychoanalyst Erich FROMM, beginning with the influence of an intensive Jewish religious education, which was an admixture of philosophy, mysticism, socialism, psychoanalysis, and traditional rabbinical wisdom. It is argued that this early training is evidenced in FROMM's assertion that character can change throughout life, and that prevailing social character has a profound impact on the developing individual, regardless of family idiosyncracies or misfortunes. FROMM typified a Jewish synthesis of rationalism, mysticism, and love of tradition, combined with a prophetic element of radical protest. Also discussed are his progression through religious and sociological doctoral studies and analytic training from Freud loyalists. It is contended that FROMM emerged from the turbulent 1930s and 1940s to become one of the most prolific psychoanalytic authors of the twentieth century, and that his impact on the humanities and social sciences 1950-1970s is unparalleled. Alleged weaknesses in FROMM's work that suggest drawbacks for the clinician are discussed, including the complexities created by his deliberate policy of making minimal use of case histories and clinical vignettes, his tendency toward overstatement, inconsistency in his emphasis on the cultural and economic determinants of mental disturbance, and his purported reversion to a pre-Freudian psychology.