The Legacy of Erich Fromm

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“Psychoanalysis, when it is not hidden away as dogma, is genuinely pluralistic and democratic, in a way that Fromm appreciated, because it encourages us to take seriously those things we are inclined to dismiss. For that reason, The Legacy of Erich Fromm is a timely book, since Fromm’s work has virtually disappeared from intelligent consideration… The man who emerges from between the pages of this book is a vividly complicated man, indeed an extraordinary man.”—Adam Phillips, The New Republic

“Best-selling author, sociologist, and psychoanalyst Erich Fromm deserves to be better known by psychoanalysts in the United States… Like many others of his generation, this transplanted German-Jewish thinker has been often misunderstood and is now threatened with oblivion. Burston has set himself a task to rescue Fromm from such a fate, to clear up the misunderstandings, and to locate him in relation to the diverse intellectual sources on which he drew. Burston leads the reader on a detailed journey through 19th- and 20th-century intellectual history, a discussion that includes the ideas of such thinkers as J. J. Bachofen, the sociologists Marx and Weber, the early Freudian dissidents Reich, Horney, and Thompson, and existentialists like Buber and Scheler. His book is an intelligent, lucid, and highly readable intellectual biography of Erich Fromm, a highly commendable work of humanistic scholarship.”—Zvi Lothane, M.D, Psychoanalytic Books

“This first full-scale intellectual biography of Fromm is respectful but objective, and is particularly valuable for its presentation of the political, economic, social, and intellectual contexts out of which and into which Fromm wrote. This is a book about a legacy received as well as contributed… A timely historical resource and a stimulus for reflecting on the close ties among humanism, existentialism, Buber, Marx, Weber, the recent resurgence of object-relations and self-psychology, and our contemporary choices as citizens.”—Choice