244 Part II Psychodynamic Theories
Psychotherapy
Fromm was trained as an orthodox Freudian analyst but became bored with stan-
dard analytic techniques. “With time I came to see that my boredom stemmed
from the fact that I was not in touch with the life of my patients” (Fromm, 1986,
p. 106). He then evolved his own system of therapy, which he called humanistic
psychoanalysis. Compared with Freud, Fromm was much more concerned with
the interpersonal aspects of a therapeutic encounter. He believed that the aim of
therapy is for patients to come to know themselves. Without knowledge of our-
selves, we cannot know any other person or thing.
Fromm believed that patients come to therapy seeking satisfaction of their
basic human needs—relatedness, transcendence, rootedness, a sense of identity,
and a frame of orientation. Therefore, therapy should be built on a personal rela-
tionship between therapist and patient. Because accurate communication is essen-
tial to therapeutic growth, the therapist must relate “as one human being to another
with utter concentration and utter sincerity” (Fromm, 1963, p. 184). In this spirit
of relatedness, the patient will once again feel at one with another person. Although
transference and even countertransference may exist within this relationship, the
important point is that two real human beings are involved with one another.
As part of his attempt to achieve shared communication, Fromm asked
patients to reveal their dreams. He believed that dreams, as well as fairy tales and
myths, are expressed in symbolic language—the only universal language humans
have developed (Fromm, 1951). Because dreams have meaning beyond the indi-
vidual dreamer, Fromm would ask for the patient’s associations to the dream mate-
rial. Not all dream symbols, however, are universal; some are accidental and
depend on the dreamer’s mood before going to sleep; others are regional or national
and depend on climate, geography, and dialect. Many symbols have several mean-
ings because of the variety of experiences that are connected with them. For exam-
ple, fire may symbolize warmth and home to some people but death and
destruction to others. Similarly, the sun may represent a threat to desert people,
but growth and life to people in cold climates.
Fromm (1963) believed that therapists should not try to be too scientific in
understanding a patient. Only with the attitude of relatedness can another person
be truly understood. The therapist should not view the patient as an illness or a
thing but as a person with the same human needs that all people possess.Fromm’s Methods of Investigation
Fromm gathered data on human personality from many sources, including psycho-
therapy, cultural anthropology, and psychohistory. In this section, we look briefly
at his anthropological study of life in a Mexican village and his psychobiographi-
cal analysis of Adolf Hitler.Social Character in a Mexican Village
Beginning in the late 1950s and extending into the mid-1960s, Fromm and a group
of psychologists, psychoanalysts, anthropologists, physicians, and statisticians studied