Erich Fromm
Erich Fromm invites the patient into his office and asks them to sit down and talk. “Just say whatever comes into your mind,” he says. Erich doesn’t make demands. Society makes enough of those. The patient—without realising it—is trying to meet these very expectations, selling themselves on the “personality market” which pays a high price for some attributes (wealth, humour, good looks, intelligence) and nothing for certain others.
When Erich meets a patient, he puts these values out of his mind. Then he does something radical: he listens. Not the way Freud did—not in an impassive manner. He listens with his heart. He listens with the totality of his being—good and bad—because he knows the human experience encapsulates both things, and that to deny this is to deny life itself. “Everything is in me,” Erich once wrote. “I am a little child, I am a grown up. I am a murderer and I am a
