Continuing Education Course

Erich Fromm (1900–1980) earned a PhD in sociology from Heidelberg, trained in psychoanalysis in Berlin, and was a key Frankfurt School theorist. A German Jew, he fled Nazi Germany in 1934, settling in New York, where he co-founded the William Alanson White Institute. His 20+books, including The Art of Loving, have sold over 50 million copies worldwide. Despite his popularity, Fromm is largely overlooked in mainstream psychoanalysis. His Freudo-Marxian “psychoanalytic social psychology” offers powerful insights into today’s crises, including neofascism. This course explores core concepts such as “social character” (how individuals internalize societal demands) and the “social unconscious” (shared repression that masks societal contradictions), which together create the “pathology of normalcy.”  We will also examine Fromm’s views on religion, including Zen Buddhism, as well as his concempt of "social narcissism" (malignant satisfaction that distorts reality and fosters factionalism) and his therapeutic stance of "central relatedness" (a special kind of attunement with the patient that facilitated de-repression).

Learning Objectives

• Participants will be able to describe the attachment environment that leads to Secure, Insecure Avoidant, Insecure Preoccupied, and Disorganized attachment in infancy.
• In a psychotherapy encounter the learner will be able to recognize cues that suggest a particular attachment pattern. This will provide a basis for hypothesizing about the client’s developmental environment and their expectations for attachment relationships.
• The learner will become attuned to and recognize when the client’s report to them is disorganized, incoherent, difficult to follow, or missing orienting information from the client, because in those moments the client has lost the capacity to mentalize the therapist, as suggestive of dissociative experiences in the client which reflect the traumatic nature of the material (see the Adult Attachment Inventory).