Erich Fromm Lecture 2021

Erich Fromm is known as a psychoanalyst and famous author. But what remains largely unknown is the trauma and tragedy his German-Jewish family endured in the Holocaust. Reading from his family’s Holocaust letters, Roger Frie will address the nature of this trauma and the questions of silence and historical responsibility. How might this unspoken chapter in Fromm’s life shape our understanding of his work? What does it mean for Roger Frie himself, a third-generation German, to share this history with Erich Fromm? And how do we relate to the traumatic horrors of the past in the face of our own turbulent reality and the rise of racism and anti-Semitism in the present?


Roger Frie is a DAAD Visiting Professor at the International Psychoanalytic University Berlin. He is Professor of Education at Simon Fraser University and Affiliate Professor of Psychiatry at the University of British Columbia, Vancouver. He is also Lecturer and Psychoanalytic Supervisor at the William Alanson White Institute and Associate Member of the Columbia University Seminar on Culture Memory in New York City. Roger Frie has published and lectured extensively on the themes of historical trauma, cultural memory, and human interaction and is most author of the award-winning book Not in My Family: German Memory and Responsibility After the Holocaust (Oxford University Press, 2017).