Reprint / Nachdruck
The author discusses his recollection of Erich Fromm's views on psychoanalytic work with patients, including the author's treatment of a patient. The remembrance involves Fromm's clinical thinking on social character and the social unconscious, and its relevance to present-day clinical work. The author presents, in detail, his treatment of a 37-year old successful woman which addresses certain of today's clinical views on gender differences that resonate and differ with Fromm's thinking on the treatment of the marketing personality.
On the subject of countertransference we attempt to establish a line of continuity between Freud's own expression >blind spot< and Fromm's idea of >counterattitude<. It is pointed out that both expressed the idea of the analyst's unconscious as an >instrument< for understanding the patient's unconscious. It follows that the decision to openly use or not to use countertransference in analysis also depends on the concept we have of it and on its extent. The psy-choanalyst's real and illusory values and his convictions with regard to human nature influence the countertransference and the analytic relationship. Analytic listening itself may be distorted by it. We must be highly aware of this to avoid enclosing what the patient says in a theoretic scheme. What is needed, there-fore, is an open theoretic scheme, more oriented towards understanding than in-terpretation. Aspects of analytic communication and of the relationship between language, thought and insight are examined. A humanistic point of view is as-sumed in distinguishing between the transferral and the real plane, and the rea-sons behind the legitimacy of such a distinction are expounded.