This paper addresses issues of continuity and discontinuity regarding the role of the socio-cultural in psychoanalysis. Starting with Freud and Fromm’s ideas on social change, the author discussed a dynamics whereby psychoanalytic culture gradually encouraged a process of delinking the psyche from the social. This disengagement from the socio-cultural has encouraged dissociative mechanisms and social narcissism. Using a case study the author shows the importance of recapturing formulations that stress an analytic >Social Third.<
Abstract: In this paper, I discuss Fromm’s theories of individual and social change within the therapeutic context. I don’t know of any psychoanalyst who was able to integrate so-ciological thinking with clinical practice and conceptualization the way Fromm did in the early part of the century. On the surface, these two approaches seem incompatible – at least in their methodologies – yet they complemented each other, as Erich Fromm (1929a; 1944a) and Rainer Funk (2018) have demonstrated so clearly. My presentation today is an exercise in microanalysis rather than a broad theoretical discussion about psychic and social change. I want to show how Fromm’s theoretical framework and clinical experience have shaped my own work. First, I explore Fromm’s originality and discuss ways in which he has been personally marginalized and intellectually isolated as a pseudo-psychoanalyst. Then, I examine the overlap of psychoanalytic approaches as they related to the concept of social Third. Finally, I present fragments of a case to show how Fromm’s theoretical and clinical ideas have influenced my own work.