Erich Fromm als Psychotherapeut

Erich Fromm (1900?C1980) was a co-founder of the Frankfurt Psychoanalytic Institute and the William Alanson White Institute in New York and finally he founded a training institute of his own in Mexico. However, he never intended to create a therapeutic school of his own. Furthermore, he published hardly anything about the so-called psychoanalytic techniques. All the more informative is the report of Ruth Lesser about her supervisions with Fromm. She describes how Fromm reacted to the presented cases, what kind of a role repression, resistance, transference and countertransference play in the therapeutic relationship and how strongly interested he was in the socially shaped unconscious intentions of the patient. The straightforwardness of the intervention style of Fromm is impressively described both in his empathy and in his confrontation with the unconscious reality. In the last part of the article Fromm??s understanding of the psychoanalytic situation is reflected and the characteristics of his psychoanalytic treatment method are outlined.