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This volume is the first major expansion of the interpersonal theory of psychiatry since the death of Harry Stack Sullivan. The authors, who are husband and wife, are directors of the Sullivan Institute for Research in Psychoanalysis. In addition to drawing in a major way on Sullivan's formulations, the authors were influenced by the particular approach of Drs. Frieda Fromm-Reichman, Erich Fromm, and Clara Thompson. The central idea of this book is that the life history of any particular individual can only be understood by the quality of his relatedness with significant people. The therapist is the agent who will help catalyze or impede the forces within the individual towards growth. The authors delineate the elements which need affirmation in order for human capacities to be realized. The text is divided into five sections: the structure of personality, normal sequence in interpersonal growth, love and hate, diagnostic categories in interpersonal […]
Review Ahron Friedberg with Sandra Sherman. Psychotherapy and personal change: Two minds in a mirror
(2022)
[…] Erich Fromm's latest work is an ambitious attempt to synthesize psychoanalysis and ethics by grounding the norms of the latter in the integrated personality. The ethical agent is characterized by a >productive orientation< which permits him to realize his constructive potentialities in thought, work, and love. Virtue consists in recognizing his obligation to his mature self; vice, in denying his obligation and therefore >mutilating< his thwarted self. The good life finds itself validated not by authoritarian dogma or supernatural sanction but by man's constructive needs and aspirations as disclosed in the findings of psychology and anthropology. Fromm's position, therefore, allies him not only with those rationalists and humanists whose ethical orientation is anthropocentric in the best sense of the word but also with the modern naturalists who maintain that ethical judgments can be the subject matter of a scientific morality. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2021 APA, all rights reserved)
The author undertook to review critically both the theoretical and the empirical studies of anxiety and to synthesize them into a comprehensive framework that would take account of biological, psychological and cultural dimensions of anxiety. The selection of material included in the book is naturally determined, at least in part, by the viewpoint of the author, who has been strongly influenced by the writings of Goldstein, Horney, Sullivan, and Fromm. Since the book is not meant to be a handbook on anxiety, the pointing out of specific omissions does not seem necessary. The contributions that have been included are presented very adequately in their main outline, though not all of them in equal detail. The book certainly fulfills the function of a synopsis of much that is most significant in the modern thinking on anxiety, and will be very useful as such. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2022 APA, all rights reserved)