Erich Fromm and the Making and Unmaking of the Sociocultural

This paper addresses issues of continuity and discontinuity regarding the role of the sociocultural in psychoanalysis. Starting with Freud's and Fromm's ideas on social change, the author discusses the dynamics whereby psychoanalytic culture gradually encouraged a process of delinking the psyche from the social. This disengagement from the sociocultural has encouraged dissociative mechanisms and social narcissism. Using a case study the author shows the importance of recapturing formulations that stress an analytic "Social Third."