By Berta Loret de Mola (Mexico)

Sandra Buechler, Ph.D. is a Training and Supervising Analyst at the William Alanson White Institute. She is the author of Clinical Values: Emotions that Guide Psychoanalytic Treatment  (Analytic Press, 2004), Making a Difference in Patients’ Lives  (Routledge, 2008), which won the Gradiva Award, Still Practicing: The Heartaches and Joys of a Clinical Career  (Routledge, 2012), Understanding and Treating Patients in Clinical Psychoanalysis: Lessons from Literature  (Routledge, 2015), Psychoanalytic Reflections: Training and Practice  (IPBooks, 2017), Psychoanalytic Approaches to Problems in Living  (Routledge, 2019), and Poetic Dialogues  (IPBooks, 2021).

Berta Loret de Mola, Ph.D. in Psychoanalytic Clinic from Centro ELEIA, Master’s in Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy from the Asociación Psicoanalítica Mexicana. She is founder and coordinator of the Master’s in Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy at Universidad Marista de Mérida (Mexico) and a Board Member of IARPP. She is also editor and author of the book, La Pandemia en el Diván (The Pandemic on the Couch)  (Editorial Gedisa, 2023).

Sandra Buechler

Berta Loret de Mola

In this interview, Sandra Buechler shared her professional journey from becoming a clinical psychologist to developing her analytic practice, including her experiences with influential figures and the evolution of her writing style. The conversation explored various therapeutic concepts including the importance of values in treatment, the impact of nonverbal communication, and the challenges of working with patients who have different value systems, while emphasizing the role of empathy and emotional balance in clinical practice – all of this in relation to her last book, Erich Fromm: A Contemporary Introduction  (Routledge, 2025).

Sandra Buechler: First, thank you very much for your lovely introduction. I appreciate it very much. All my life I had thought I would be a writer, but when I was an undergraduate in college, at the end of my first year, I said to myself, ‘But how am I going to make a living? Wait a moment. There’s something missing here.’ And then just by accident, coincidentally, I attended a class that was taught just that day by a clinical psychologist, and he decided to talk to us about his cases. And I was fascinated. I was totally naive. I didn’t know anything about psychology or therapy or anything. Back in those days, we didn’t hear about it that much. And I came up to him at the end of class and I said, “Excuse me, do you get paid for that?” I said, “Because I would do it for free.” And he must have had a laugh about this innocent child. Then I started to take psychology courses, and I took a tutorial on the interpretation of dreams. I read it with a teacher. And that really got me interested.

I went to Adelphi University in New York for my Ph.D. I was working in hospitals, in very, very poor hospitals. This was during the Vietnam War in the United States. I worked with people who had lost their legs and their arms in Vietnam, and it was difficult work and very painful. And I was looking for someone, some theory, some ideas that could help me with these very chronic, psychotic patients. Some of them were not so chronic but were still very damaged by the war. And most analytic theory didn’t help me. Theories talked about neurotic patients in an outpatient clinic, but they didn’t talk about people who were really hurt and disturbed. And then I discovered Harry Stack Sullivan, who did write about that. I made a promise to myself that at some point I would go back for analytic training. And I also read Eric Fromm, and I felt very moved by his ideas. He was anti-Vietnam War. He was anti-nuclear proliferation. He was in my camp in terms of politics. And so, I thought, someday I’m going to go back to school and I’m going to go for analytic training where Harry Stack Sullivan and Eric Fromm were. And that’s the William Alanson White Institute. They were the two founders. And eight years later, I went back for analytic training to the White Institute. And so that’s how I got into it. It was first Sullivan and then Fromm, really.

Berta Loret de Mola: And talking about Fromm, I think that he, like other brilliant thinkers, was an integrator of disciplines, which in his time marginalized him from certain circles. How would you explain this resistance to multidisciplinary minds, and what lessons can we draw for contemporary thought?

Sandra Buechler: Well, that’s a very important question, I think. In the beginning of the interpersonal analytic school, started by Sullivan and Fromm, there was interdisciplinary thinking. The first volume of the journal Psychiatry had a paper on law, a paper on sociology, a paper on psychoanalysis, and a paper on psychology. It was very interdisciplinary. So we started out interdisciplinary. And then I think, as often happens, we have become more focused, at least on my experience in my country, on making money, on having credentials that were honored and known. And we got more focused on only our own theories, to fight other theories, to stand out. I think it’s a shame. It’s too bad. It’s not what Eric Fromm did. And it’s true that he paid for being so interdisciplinary, that the sociologists felt he was too psychoanalytic, the psychoanalysts felt he was too sociological.  He didn’t fully fit in one field, which I think is an advantage in terms of the breadth of his understanding. But it was a hardship for him to live with that. People want to be recognized. In fact, I tell a story. This story is very meaningful to me.

When I was about to write my first book, in the year 2000. I wanted my first book to be published by the Analytic Press, which was then a very, very meaningful thing for me to be published by them. And Don Stern connected me with the managing editor, Paul Stepansky. I was hoping that he would agree to publish my first book. And he did. But he said, “Look, Sandra, I want you to write that first book in Freudian analytic jargon.” And I didn’t know what to say. I wanted him to like me, and I wanted him to publish my book, but I had to differ with him. I said, “Why would you want that? I would think we’d sell more books if I spoke in plain English.” And he said, “I want you to be respected, and the only way you’ll be respected is if you talk in the jargon, and after that, you can write however you want.” And I didn’t say anything, but I told myself, I’m not doing that, and that’s not the way I write. I wrote Clinical Values, and I wrote it in my way of writing, which is not in jargon, and he accepted it. He was extremely helpful. I think once he saw what I was doing, he was okay with it.

Berta Loret de Mola: I didn’t know him, but I have read him, and I admire him and I love his writing.

Sandra Buechler: That started me off writing about values and particularly the values of the sense of purpose that we need to feel that treatment can enrich lives, our own life and other people’s lives. And the whole idea of integrity, of wholeness, that we should live our values, that we shouldn’t just speak our values or think about our values. But we should live in a consistent, holistic way our values. And that, of course, brought me closer to Eric Fromm, because that really is who he was. And that is a form of activism in a way, considering that whatever you believe in is how you should treat other people, it is how you should treat yourself, how you should treat the earth, it’s how you should treat everyone, the animals, everything in your life. So that’s a form of activism.

Berta Loret de Mola: You said that you wrote about the values of a sense of purpose. This reminds me that Fromm considers that living with purpose is crucial for mental health.

Sandra Buechler: Yeah, that’s right.

Berta Loret de Mola: Could you share another purpose that has guided your life?

Sandra Buechler: Well, my own personal treatments as a patient made me have more choices in my life, made me more conscious of myself, helped me. I feel more positive about life, and that certainly has played a role in everything, my life and my work. I’ve wanted to give that to other people, what I got from treatment, and I’ve had several treatments.

Berta Loret de Mola: How many did you have?

Sandra Buechler: Well, I had two long-term treatments. One when I was in graduate school, before analytic training. My first therapist was an analyst at NYU. And my second was an analyst at the William Alanson White Institute. And then I had a few short-term, you know, just help with the issue kind of treatments that were much less extensive, but very helpful. But that first treatment really made a difference in my life. I was very certain that I wanted to try to help other people in that way. That certainly played a role. Values also have to do with kindness, which is something that I wrote about in the first book, the way that kindness can play a role in treatment. And it’s very high-value to me. I don’t think there’s a lot written about it. I tried to find things when I was writing that chapter, and I couldn’t. There are certainly many moments that could be described as kind, but the word kind doesn’t occur very much. So that’s another value.

Berta Loret de Mola: Yes, as Daniel Stern says, patients never remember an interpretation, but they always remember that moment when the analysts were human and kind.

Sandra Buechler: I used to ask people at the end of a treatment, “What stands out for you, what we did, what we didn’t do?” And one woman who I’d seen for more than 10 years said to me, that what really had an impact was that day that it was raining and she didn’t have an umbrella, and I lent mine. And at the first moment I thought, ‘God, I went through all this training, I could have lent her an umbrella without it.’ But then I thought, no, she’s right. I understand what she means, that it wasn’t just that one moment that she experienced me as being kind to her, and that was really what had an impact on her. And I really agree with Daniel Stern. Eric Fromm said that patients are not coming for an interpretation. They’re coming for an experience.

Berta Loret de Mola: And that’s the point I wanted to discuss with you next. Fromm privileged live experience with patients over abstract ideas.

Sandra Buechler: Right.

Berta Loret de Mola: It reminds me of Ogden’s distinction between epistemological and ontological psychoanalysis. Could you share your perspective on how this live experience transformed both patients and analysts?

Sandra Buechler: Yes, I think the thing that affects people more than anything else in a treatment hour is the choices that you make. So, for example, a patient makes a slip of the tongue. He meant – I’m thinking of a particular person in a moment – he meant to say his wife, and instead he said his mother. We don’t have to say much about what that would mean, but the point is I chose not to point it out. And it’s that choice that matters. Because I thought to myself very quickly in that moment, this is an issue that’s going to come up again. It’s not like this will be my only chance to point that out. I will humiliate him. I’ll embarrass him if I point it out. Why should I do that?

It’s those moments that your values really show themselves in the choices you make about what to focus on. And as you make those choices, you express yourself, your values, what matters more than something else. It’s that, what makes the biggest difference. And the reason for that is that most of the time, this level of interaction is not conscious, usually to either person. Most of the time you’re making choices about what matters. You can’t possibly focus on everything that happens in a session, even in a minute of a session. So you’re making choices that are not conscious to either one of you. And that has a bigger impact because it’s not conscious, the two of you don’t have a chance to really discuss it. It affects the patient on a nonverbal, deep level, the way you are with them, the choices you make, the choices you don’t make, the way you treat silence. All these things have a tremendous impact because they’re never made conscious, usually. And so, they have a deeper impact on both people.

Berta Loret de Mola: You make me think that maybe, for the first time, the patient felt in front of another human being a different way – that he was respected, that he was recognized – and that made him feel something perhaps for the first time in his life.

Sandra Buechler: Well, that’s the point. The way I have always expressed it is that contrast teaches. Trying to put it in as few words as possible because I think that has more meaning.  Contrast teaches. In other words, Edgar Levinson, who was one of my teachers, always used to say that the last one to know about water is a fish.

Berta Loret de Mola: Yes, and you talk about that, in your book Clinical Values when you say that we must make the familiar strange and strange familiar.

Sandra Buechler: I use that concept a lot because people come and say, ‘Oh, this is the way I relate with my mother.’ And you say, ‘Really?’ And just by having different values, by expressing them in these little ways, you’re contrasting. As you said, it might be the first time this person has experienced someone being this way to them. And this man’s mother – the one I mentioned before who said mother instead of wife – she loved to shame him. So, by being different from that, I was silently pointing out to him that he always expected people to be like his mother. I wasn’t saying the words, “Now, I’m not going to shame you, which is different from the way your mother was.” I didn’t say those words. They wouldn’t really mean much. But the experience of my being different is what had an impact.

Berta Loret de Mola: Talking about differences – at the beginning of the book, you emphasize the need for determination to embrace differences of all kinds. In practice, why do you think it’s so difficult for us, both in the consulting room and in life, to tolerate and value what is different from us?

Sandra Buechler: That’s such an important question, most especially right now, I think, certainly in my own country, it’s a big issue. Well, I would agree with Eric Fromm, who says that there is such a thing as group narcissism. I’ll speak for myself, and I’ll speak for my country. We, right now, get a sense of our importance, of our being valuable, of being good, from our belonging to this group and not that group, our belonging to this country, our belonging to the right or the left, politically, we get an infusion of narcissism, of self-worth from our group identification. So anything that is the opposite, we must reject it, and this is one of the reasons that Eric Fromm was so worried about any kind of patriotism. He was afraid of it. He felt that it was part of what caused world wars, and his experience was terrible. Affected by World War I and World War II, he was very worried about atomic wars and very worried about human beings wiping ourselves out, basically. That’s one of the reasons that reading Fromm now is still reading someone who’s talking about the present, not just the past.

Berta Loret de Mola: It leads me to a particular thing that moved me, a passage where you speak of the need to love and forgive anyway. In a world full of resentment, what role does this ethical imperative play in psychic healing, to love and forgive anyway?

Sandra Buechler: It’s tremendously important to me, certainly, and what it’s come down to for me personally is loving life itself anyway, despite all. Eventually everything is taken away from us, our own life, people that we’ve loved, abilities, and functioning qualities of our own bodies. Everything gets taken, and so the question becomes, how do you love life anyway, despite everything that it takes from you, and this is on top of what all of us have experienced with a loving partner, a child, a parent, a friend. Despite all the things that could be reasons not to love, we get many opportunities to learn how to love anyway, and I think it’s very healing to forgive, to love anyway. I think there is peace in accepting life, ourselves and others and loving anyway. It’s hard sometimes.

Berta Loret de Mola: And it is the reason why we may take the risk sometimes of exposing ourselves to abuse from others.

Sandra Buechler: Yes.

Berta Loret de Mola: Because people sometimes confuse that kindness with weakness.

Sandra Buechler: Yes.

Berta Loret de Mola: That line between loving and forgiving anyway could be dangerous. It’s not about masochism. And tolerating harm is simply not acceptable.

Sandra Buechler: Well, of course, masochism is not just allowing it but enjoying it.

Berta Loret de Mola: A very important difference.

Sandra Buechler: Yes. But it’s true that some people will read forgiving as not only weakness but sometimes inviting them to abuse again. It happens more with women who were abused by their husbands physically, emotionally, and they openly said, if I forgive him, he’ll do it again. And it’s true. Some people read forgiveness or kindness as a weakness. That’s wrong, and we shouldn’t go along with it. It is not weakness. It’s a strength to be able to forgive and to be able to love. But it can be misread that way. And with those people we can feel as though there is danger in it.

Berta Loret de Mola: And I think we must face that and say that it doesn’t mean we’re weak. There’s this common saying with people like that: you can stay in my heart, but not in my life.

Sandra Buechler: Well, that’s true, too. We don’t want anyone and everyone in our lives, and we have to make those judgments and decisions and stand up for them. And there have been times, not just personally, but there have been a few people, for instance, clinically that I didn’t work with, for example. I do think that a clinician should have a choice. We should choose to work with the people we work with. And one of the things that when I was doing a lot of supervision for institutes and privately, many times a candidate would come and say they didn’t feel they were a good match with a certain patient that the institute sent to them, but they felt they had to work with that person because the institute sent that person to them. And I said, no, that’s not the way I think about it. You should not have someone in your life if you don’t want them there. It’s not a good match. And in the long run, it won’t work out well. So, it’s not good.

Berta Loret de Mola: Neither of you will grow in that relationship.

Sandra Buechler: Yes. Because the relationship is based on some appreciation of each other. Even in situations where maybe you’re angry with each other or whatever, but there has to be some level of appreciation.

Berta Loret de Mola: Returning to something more specific from your book, you illustrate the dilemma of being versus having. You describe the case of a patient who says she wants to find a ‘10’ – a successful, handsome, wealthy man. When we’re faced with a desire that prioritizes having over being, how do you work with your own countertransference?

Sometimes a patient comes in suffering because he carries the memory of his mother being tortured in Buenos Aires during that terrible period … and then the next patient walks in crying deeply because she doesn’t have money for a new dress (and she has a lot). And I find myself thinking, ‘Oh my God… is this what she’s suffering over? ’

Sandra Buechler: Is that a matter of suffering? Yeah.

Berta Loret de Mola: And it’s very difficult sometimes to empathize with them.

Sandra Buechler: Well, I’m reminded of a time, and I think it’s similar. In one session, I was told by my patient that she had a recurrence of cancer, and we had hoped so much that she would stay cancer free. And then the next patient was very outraged and upset because of the way a salesperson in Macy’s had not waited on her first. Fortunately, she was on the couch. I remember feeling like I want to throw something. I wanted to say, ‘Can’t you understand how lucky you are that you’re healthy?’ But what I feel about moments like that is that I can’t do very much in that session. I have to accept that I can’t always be at my best, and I wasn’t at my best at that hour. I would make a note to myself about what happened, but I didn’t say very much. I thought, ‘Okay, I will deal with this in another session. I can’t do it today.’

Berta Loret de Mola: This is our limitation.

Sandra Buechler: With the patient who wanted a 10, that was different because she was very young, and I think that helped in some way for me. And I found her, in addition to that value system that to me is problematic, there were other things about her that were very sweet and very charming and very lovely. And I could really like her as a person and want to help her as a person. Those two things were sitting side by side, but they didn’t erase each other. I liked her. I found her funny and very sweet. It was this value system that was, for me, not a good value system, which I think she got from her parents and her social class situation. And so, I just had to live with the fact that I had both feelings and felt like I could eventually communicate to her what I thought was wrong with her value system. And the way I remember I approached that was I tried to help her have empathy for the man that she was rejecting because he wasn’t a 10. So, I tried to get her to inhabit, be inside what it would be like to be that man and be rejected because he’s not perfect in some way. And I think eventually that had an impact. I don’t remember exactly what happened, but I remember thinking to myself, I’ve got to help her have empathy.

Berta Loret de Mola: With my patient that didn’t have money for another dress, I told her: “You are suffering very much, and it’s a real suffering, but you are very spoiled child.” And she laughed.

Sandra Buechler: I think that’s great.

Berta Loret de Mola: And when she came back and she wanted to cry for these insignificant things, she said, “I know that I am spoiled, but I want this or that.” I’m suffering.

Sandra Buechler: That’s interesting, because Fromm said, and I agree with him, that when there’s a basic good relationship, you can say almost anything. I mean, in other words, the patient knows that you have a good heart. And she knows that you’re trying to help her. And knowing all that, it allows her to hear it. And to say to herself, okay, that’s not what I was hoping she would say. And she can see herself in a different way.

Berta Loret de Mola: Maybe now she can place her suffering differently, looking at it from another perspective.

Sandra Buechler: Well, that’s the perspective. That’s very helpful. The contrast teaches that by seeing that there’s another way to evaluate the situation, she realizes how she was evaluating it, which was, you’re very spoiled. And that there are bigger things that people suffer. But you see, when I’m in that situation, I have to be aware of my own aggression. Because it’s not just that I want to inform her. It’s that I want to hit her. You know, I want to say to her, you know, people have leukemia, their children have leukemia.  Can you contrast that with your dress problem? But I stopped myself from doing that.  Because I know that it has not only helpfulness, but it’s also aggression that I’m tempted to unleash on her. And I don’t want to do that, at least not without thinking about it. So I step back a little, and I say to myself, I’m going to say what I feel, but not aggressively.

Berta Loret de Mola: Yes, and sometimes I think that an apparently superficial suffering really has another level of suffering, of maternal care, a sense of self-esteem, of shame, something different.

Sandra Buechle: And that helps, yes. It is our job to try to understand what this suffering really is about. And to ask the patient. My second analyst would always ask this kind of question, if this wasn’t about the dress, what would it be about? Trying to help the person see that this is a bigger issue.

Berta Loret de Mola: Could you explain Fromm’s compelling distinction between the necrophilic and biophilic character orientations?

Sandra Buechler: It’s a difference between the biophilia, the love of life, loving what is spontaneous, alive, different, growing, and the necrophilia, which is love of what is dead.  It’s not love of death. That’s an important distinction in Fromm. It’s the love of what is dead.   It could be sometimes technological. It could be … literally, wanting everything to be familiar and the same, not alive, not spontaneous, not real, in a sense. And it’s a different orientation to life. It’s a different set of priorities. It’s a different outlook. And obviously, Fromm was in favor of biophilia and love of life. He would say repeatedly, choose life. He was always quoting that from the Bible. Choose life. Choose aliveness, basically.

Berta Loret de Mola: And does this connect with the experience of being rather than having?

Sandra Buechler: That’s a good point. He had different languages for basically a similar thing. The having and being was a later language. To Have or to Be was a later book, but is very much the same issue, as I understand.

Berta Loret de Mola: Do we love only things and technology, or do we prefer living with others – exchanging and loving?

Sandra Buechler: And surprised by them, loving to be surprised, to have something happen that you didn’t expect. That’s a lot.

Berta Loret de Mola: Which brings me to your suggestion that one form of evil in our time is our indifference to the suffering of others – we look away to avoid confronting our own pain. What can you tell us about this?

Sandra Buechler: Well, I wrote a paper, “Empathy with Strangers,” where I was exploring my own difficulty looking at suffering, and I was exploring some of the sources of that defensiveness, and one thing I feel is that it’s hard to live in New York City without looking at suffering, because the suffering is all around. There are homeless people living on the streets a block from me right now, and they’re spread out on the sidewalk with a sign saying, “Please give me food,” and if you look at them all the time, it’s very hard. It connects with whatever hunger you’ve had in your own life, whatever deprivation. Whatever suffering, and you can’t really 24 hours a day look at that, you know, it’s too painful. So, I visually look away from it, but then how does that affect me when I’m reading the newspaper and I’m reading about suffering? Do I then defensively avoid empathizing with the people who are hungry, the people who are being shot at in the world? If I visually avoid suffering, do I also in my mind, in my ideas, avoid people’s suffering?

Berta Loret de Mola: And I think the answer is yes.

Sandra Buechler: Avoiding looking at people who are suffering leads to avoiding thinking about people who are suffering, recognizing them psychologically, really looking at it. I think it’s very hard to do, perhaps, especially in a place like New York, where you really see a lot of it. You can’t go anywhere without seeing suffering. I think there are places in the world where you have less visual confrontation with suffering, though it’s still there, obviously. I think each of us has to think about what can limit, and especially clinicians, because, of course, we hear suffering all the time. We must think about what our own defenses are. Why are they there? What are they doing to defend us from?

Berta Loret de Mola: I think it’s different for each of us – the kind and degree of suffering we can bear varies from person to person.

Sandra Buechler: And we ourselves are different in different times of our life. If we are suffering ourselves in a certain way in that period, that may be a time when we can’t face other people’s suffering as much, we’re human beings and we have limitations. I’ve never actually written much about, but I’ve thought about how I was a different clinician at the age of 70 versus at the age of 30. And what should that mean about referring patients? What should that mean about our own relationship with our work because we are not the same at different stages of our lives – we are not the same people, nor the same clinicians.

Berta Loret de Mola: I agree. Early in my career, I worked with psychotic children. But after becoming a mother, I no longer wanted to continue that work – it had become too emotionally difficult for me.

Sandra Buechler: Well, that’s a great example. And when I was young, I worked with all kinds of children in the child guidance agency. I worked in these mental hospitals, a state hospital and two veterans’ hospitals. Forty years later, I don’t think I could have done that work. It took a lot of stamina and energy because I worked in a child guidance agency. I saw as many as 16 sessions in the day. Some were psychotic, some were acting out, some were depressed or troubled in some way, but it was very demanding work. We’re different in different periods of our life.

Berta Loret de Mola: Could you tell us how Fromm understands alienation in contemporary society?

Sandra Buechler: It’s a very crucial question, because for Fromm, alienation is what will allow us to let go of life, to get into a war, to let climate change happen without trying to do something about it. Alienation is like a kind of projection of our own powers onto another. So if I’m alienated from my own strengths, and I see them in a political figure, then the only way I can contact those strengths is by contacting that political figure.

Berta Loret de Mola: So I’m alienated from who I am and what I have within me.

Sandra Buechler: And I see it only in this figure who I then have to believe in and follow with great loyalty because that figure must change the world, not me. So you’re alienated really from your own functioning and your own power. And that is very dangerous. For Fromm it’s what could lead to total disaster.

Berta Loret de Mola: Yes, that’s great, it’s one of Fromm’s most compelling ideas, and it feels incredibly relevant today.

Sandra Buechler: Yes.

Berta Loret de Mola: I’d like to end by inviting you to talk a bit about a concept that appears throughout all your books – emotional balance.

Sandra Buechler: I think it’s very worthwhile to have this in mind. Thank you for the question. Emotional balance is a concept I first learned about in the 1970s while doing emotional research with Carroll Izard. We focused on the first two years of life, studying each emotion as it emerged on the faces of babies during that period. I learned from him the idea that joy, curiosity, love can balance pain, anger, sorrow, and fear. Unless we have a balance, we cannot function. We can succumb to depression. We can become unable to act in the world. And so, it’s always been very important to me not to just look at the negative, what someone comes in with, what they’re sorrowing about, what they’re upset about, what they’re angry about, what they’re guilty about, what they’re ashamed about. But also, is joy missing?

Berta Loret de Mola: And sometimes anger is missing.

Sandra Buechler: Is assertion missing?  Which can be considered a cousin of anger in a sense, related. If we can assert ourselves, we’re connecting with what we’re angry about, what we want changed. An emotion can be missing, could be positive, could be negative, could be both. But when you look at a person, when someone comes in, it’s much freer to be able to look at what’s missing and not just what’s present. It’s helpful to think about it that way. What happened to this person’s curiosity? Roy Schafer talked about the analytic attitude. I think the analytic attitude is important for both participants. And ultimately, I think it’s a form of curiosity. If you can look at your experience and not just be having it, be looking at it while you’re having it, you’re curious about it. And it changes life. To be able to look at what you’re like. Why am I feeling that way right now? It unleashes the power of curiosity.

Berta Loret de Mola: Emotional balance is a very important concept for clinicians.

Dear Sandra, I guess we are running out of time. Thank you once again for this invaluable opportunity to converse and learn from you. I am certain that, like all your books, this book about Erich Fromm will enrich, move, and invite clinicians to read more, feel more, and experiment more with their patients.

Sandra Buechler: Thank you for the beautiful experience. Thank you very much.