Roger Frie, "Edge of Catastrophe: Erich Fromm, Fascism and the Holocaust" (Oxford UP, 2024)
New Books in PsychoanalysisShow Notes
Erich Fromm, the prominent twentieth-century public intellectual and psychoanalyst, was recognized for his courageous stand against fascism, racism, and human destructiveness. Until now, however, little has been known about the extent to which Fromm's personal experience of Nazi Germany and the Holocaust shaped his outlook and work.In Edge of Catastrophe: Erich Fromm, Fascism and the Holocaust (Oxford 2024), Roger Frie introduces for the first time the unpublished Holocaust correspondence in Fromm's family. The letters provide insight into Fromm's life as a German-Jewish refugee and help us to understand the effect of Nazi Germany's racial terror on Fromm and his German-Jewish family. In the aftermath of the genocide, Fromm returned again and again to the themes of responsibility, social justice, and human solidarity, yet without revealing his own experience. As this book powerfully shows, Fromm's social, political, and psychological writings take on new meaning in light of the traumas and tragedies that he and his family experienced.The image of Fromm that emerges from this book enriches our understanding of what it means to be both a social critic and practicing psychologist. In light of the racial hatred and antisemitism we see today, Frie demonstrates that a politics of engagement and a psychology of well-being go hand in hand. Frie suggests that there is much to be learned from the urgency in Fromm's writings as we seek to respond to the social crises and the renewed threat of fascism in our present age.
Roger Frie is Professor of Psychoanalysis and Education at the University of Vienna in Austria, Affiliate Professor of Psychiatry at the University of British Columbia, and Professor Emeritus at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver, Canada. He is also Faculty and Supervisor at the William Alanson White Institute of Psychiatry, Psychoanalysis and Psychology, and the NYU Postdoctoral Program in Psychotherapy and Psychoanalysis, and associate member of the Columbia University Seminar on Cultural Memory in New York.
He is a clinical psychologist and psychoanalyst in private practice as well as a trained historian and social philosopher and brings both of these perspectives to bear in his publications. He is author most recently Wounds of Silence: Legacies of Genocide and Racial Violence (Oxford 2026), Edge of Catastrophe: Erich Fromm, Fascism and the Holocaust (Oxford 2024) and Not in My Family: German Memory and Responsibility after the Holocaust (Oxford 2017). His most recent edited book is Culture, Politics and Race in the Making of Interpersonal Psychoanalysis (Routledge, 2022, with Pascal Sauvayre). He is additionally co-editor of Contemporary Psychoanalysis.
Your host for this episode, Ben Greenberg, PsyD is a psychoanalytic psychologist and founding director of both the Center for Dynamic Practice (CFDP) in Santa Fe, NM and Southwestern Alliance for Psychoanalytic Psychology (SWAPP). A disabled former symphony French hornist and musical pedagogue, Ben has published several scientific papers among other written media, and is currently working on several manuscripts.
Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/psychoanalysis
More from New Books in Psychoanalysis
“For Laplanche we are constantly and radically de-centered, always adrift so to speak in terms of a center.” - Dominque Scarfone
As the popular jazz standard tells us, “comes love, nothing can be done”, or can it? Galit Atlas begs to differ in her most recent book Come Closer: Childhood Wounds, Adult Love, and the Secrets of Emotional Intimacy, which describes six kinds of emotional styles, as we might call them, made manifest when we are young. Atlas, whose work has endeavored to sexualize the Relational School, here turns an eye both keen and wistful, towards love.
Psychoanalysing Mind-Body Narratives Through Beckett and Artaud: The Trauma of the Body (Routledge, 2026) provides an epistemology of the body as it relates to subjectivity through an analysis of selected works of Antonin Artaud and Samuel Beckett. Presented in three parts, the book explores a fundamental premise: that there is a traumatic and alienating dimension to embodiment that resists expression within representational systems and is core to the being of any subject. In Part One, The Epistemology of the Body, Meehan O'Callaghan approaches a theory of the body as traumatic by framing it as a question, a gap in knowledge through the lens of psychoanalysis and theatre studies. Part Two, The Body of Drama, is devoted to a study of the body in the works of Beckett and Artaud from the perspective of psychoanalysis. Part Three, The Body Between Being and Non-Being, provides a deeper exploration of how the interrogation of the body opens onto a question of being and uses the insights gained from the dialectical encounter of psychoanalysis with the specific works of Beckett and Artaud to apply them to contemporary and scholarly issues of the body. Psychoanalysing Mind-Body Narratives through Beckett and Artaud will be essential reading for psychoanalysts in practice and in training, and for academics and scholars of Lacanian studies, psychoanalytic studies, the body, disability studies, and literary and theatre studies.
This material and theoretical history of seriality shows it to be the dominant form of culture since its inception within 19th-century print culture, as both a media structure and a psychic one.
A collection of reported stories that explore the relationship between mothers and daughters, from Rachel Aviv, the finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in Feature Writing for her work in The New Yorker.