The Erich Fromm Study Center hosts the annual Erich Fromm Lecture at the IPU Berlin. This year's speaker is Prof. Neil McLaughlin, Professor in the Department of Sociology at McMaster University (Canada).

Erich Fromm was the most important public psychoanalyst of the 20th century because of his best-selling books starting with Escape from Freedom (1941). In the age of the paperback before the invention of the internet and social media, Fromm popularized the Freudian perspective with best selling political but also psychoanalytic books such as Psychoanalysis and Religion (1950), The Forgotten Language (1951) and Sigmund Freud's Mission (1959). Fromm was a great public psychoanalysis, however, because he was both a student of and critic of Freud and his movement.

This presentation will tell the story of Fromm's public psychoanalytic career and discuss how public psychoanalytic life has been transformed by new technology and our polarized politics. We will conclude by making the case that the example of Fromm's public intellectual work is a more valuable model to build on than contemporary public psychosocial thinkers such as Jordan Peterson, Gabor Mate and Avgi Saketopoulou.