Fromm

The proprietor, an old bald headed guy with thick plastic rim glasses, asked me to put a price on each of three antique carpentry planes. I stood and stared at them awhile and then walked out of the shop.

But I digress. Somehow this psychoanalyst fellow seemed kind of familiar. That evening in my room I got out my Erich Fromn books. I had read a number of his works and he had some influence on me. His books were very big in the fifties and early sixties. And there was his picture on the back cover of one of them. Same guy. A further correlation occurred about a month later, when I mentioned this incident to someone who told me he had been in town about that time, from New York attending a conference.

Actually I didn't pay all that much attention to this man or his question at the time, or ever for that matter, except briefly for who he probably was. But the question certainly was a valid one. Truth is I didn't know what I wanted to do at the time. But I also realized his question was probably larger than that. "Some of us are trying ... I am doing something. Many of us are trying. Many of us are doing things." This would indicate the doing of something in terms of larger social implications. Which was easy for him to say since he was world recognized. S'pose he could do something. Not so easy for the anonymous Joe. And although I found things to do for myself personally, finding a larger societal something would not be such an easy task. But in one respect Mr. Fromm was right-on. He identified the question that I would become intellectually engaged for a lifetime. Now that's a psychoanalyst - big time.

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