Fromm, “The Social Determinants of Psychoanalytic Therapy” (1935) (V)

In the remainder (159-164) of “Social Determinants,” Fromm relates the contributions of two “representatives” of the “oppositional attitude” — opposed, that is, both to “Freud and his closest circle” and, by extension, to the dominant norms of liberal-bourgeois society. Georg Groddeck and, to a much greater degreee, Sándor Ferenczi, introduced innovations into analytic technique which rectify just the difficulties identified in the the last entry.

Fromm devotes relatively space to Groddeck, who “despised science” and so “scarcely expressed himself in systematic theoretical form” (159) — a fact which purportedly compromises the value of his “half scientific, half novelistic books” (159) for the program of articulating and defending an alternative standpoint. Even there, though, and especially in the “importance of his personality” to those who knew him, one is struck by a “totally different attitude towards sexual morality and towards all the other taboos of bourgeois society” (159), someone who “lacks the hidden prudery so typical of Freud” (159), and whose well-documented “attitude towards the patient” was “full of humanity and genuine friendliness” (159). Finally, though, Groddeck’s main significance to psychoanalysis consisted for Fromm in his influence on “the scientific development of Ferenczi” (159).

Fromm now examines this development in some depth. He begins by suggesting that, tragically, Ferenczi “lived under the influence of Freud and Groddeck, and lacked the strength to choose between them” (159). This paralysis was based partly in Ferenczi’s “kind but…soft and anxious” temperament, but also in an understandable fear of Freud’s intellectual intolerance of deviations from orthodoxy. (The latter notoriously expelled “oppositional” thinkers from the psychoanalytic ranks.) For these reasons, Ferenczi would only cautiously and cryptically express his “productive imagination,” his recognition of the “inadequacies of the Freudian technique,” as well as his own theoretical and practical innovations. Ferenczi’s “fear of openly opposing Freud,” writes Fromm, “made him hide the antagonism among assurances of his loyalty” (159).

Yet the crux of Ferencz’s’s deviation, the “requirement of showing the patient a certain amount of love,” which to Fromm’s ears, and perhaps to ours, “sounds almost self-evident” (159) — this innovation, despite his caution and equivocations, eventually did antagonize Freud and the psychoanalytic mainstream. Just this “theme,” however, expressed by Ferenczi in countless variations, promises to remedy the insufficiencies of an analytic situation defined by “tolerance” — a fraught value, we have seen, which undermines the very “ends” at which analysis officially aims. Thus Ferenczi, in a number of these variations, emphasizes the following analytic desiderata:

1. “how decisively important it is for the patient that he feels absolutely certain of the unconditional sympathy of the analyst” (160)

2. that a successful analysis demands that “the patient has lost his fear of the analyst” (160)

3. that — in the words of Ferenczi’s essay on the “Elasticity of Psychoanalytic Technique” — “only real empathy helps “ (160), a “more than christian humility” (160)

4. that the “fate of the ‘super-ego’ in analysis” is, optimally, its “complete dissolution” (160)

5. that the analyst must exchange the “schoolmasterly” attitude of cool detachment — “didactic and pedantic” (161) — for one with “humble-minded” and egalitarian qualities

6. that we accordingly achieve distance from, and skepticism about, certain classical “techniques,” if and when they fail to advance this program, or even obstruct it, for instance, “compel[ling] the patient to lie down while the analyst sat behind him out of sight” (161), refusing to treat patients who cannot pay, and adhering strictly to the length of sessions

7. Even going so far as to depose — or at least qualify — the analytic “principle of frustration” (161) with the “principle of indulgence” (161)

Again, in each of these ways, Fromm subtly implies, Ferenczi simply drew the logical implications from an “almost self-evident” premise, namely, that in order to most effectively assist the patient in reaching the traditional goals of therapy — overcoming resistance, relaxing repression, making the unconscious conscious — the analyst must meet “the requirement of showing the patient a certain amount of love” (159). There is in all of this an inescapable analogy, I think, between Ferenczi’s circumscription of Freudian orthodoxy’s authority, on the one hand, and the supersession of Judaism’s “Old Law” of Justice by Christianity’s “New Law” of Love.

I would like to conclude these reflections by asking: what are we to make of Fromm’s own position on these matters? Is he arguing — as he sometimes seems to be arguing — that analysis should embody “tolerance” exclusively in its objective, neutral, value-free, and “naturalistic” sense — refraining from any moral judgment whatsoever, in order simply to understand the patient’s mind as a natural process? — hence that the analyst should extinguish the other pole, the condescending “mildness of judgment,” which continues to harbor unexamined taboos that should merely be exacted as painlessly as possible?

This interpretation would, I think, seriously distort Fromm’s position — his recommendations vis-à-vis the analytic attitude — which undoubtedly contains a specific morality of its own. Nor, I imagine, would Fromm deny having some morality in store. The aim he proposes for analysis is not to extinguish the “mildness” pole of tolerance in favor of a purified neutrality. Indeed, he appears rather to believe that such a purified neutrality is neither possible nor desirable, and that, historically, it has been an ideological smoke-screen invariably concealing some morality or another.