Spremna beseda
(2010)
James Joyce represents one of the most significant novelists of the twentieth century and an adherent of the great tradition of humanistic ethics. The purpose of this paper is to critically examine, primarily in the light of humanistic ethics, the process of the artistic coming of age of the main character of Portrait, Stephen Dedalus. The basic principles of Humanism tend to view man in his physical and spiritual totality, believing that man’s fundamental aim is to >be man< and that the major prerequisite for achieving that aim is to be >man for himself<. Stephen Dedalus epitomizes Fromm’s type of man of productive character, in the sense that he gradually frees himself from the >nets< of Irish society represented in the form of constraints of nationality, family, and religion which he sees as threatening forces bent upon annihilating his own individuality. Stephen Dedalus manages to accomplish true affirmation of his individuality only through artistic vocation. Moreover, it could be argued that Stephen D. (Joyce himself) stands for the epitome of a genuine intellectual living in self-imposed exile and who is, according to the words of philosopher Julien Benda, a guardian and a bearer of independent thought who is loyal solely to truth.
Laudation for Noam Chomsky
(2010)
Attachment and the driving force of development: A critical discussion of empirical infant research
(2010)
Empirical infant research has led to an enormous expansion of our knowledge of the psychological functions of the infant. From a psychoanalytic perspective, however, it must be questioned whether this research has increased our knowledge of internal psychic life and helped answer the questions of what initiates and drives development. In the first part of this article, we argue that psychoanalysis must necessarily adopt a critical stance towards a scholarly ideal that rests on the positivist empirical tradition. Psychoanalysis has as its object unconscious processes that cannot be directly observed. In the following section, we take as our point of departure the project of attachment theory that Peter Fonagy and his colleagues have developed in an attempt to reconcile psychoanalysis with the empirical and experimental study of small children, and we demonstrate concretely the limitations of such a project vis-à-vis the exploration of the psychic reality of the child. Our line of reasoning continues to demonstrate how drive theory can be shaped so as to contain an object relations theoretical perspective – as has taken place in Jean Laplanche's reinterpretation of the theory of seduction – without abandoning the psychoanalytic theory of the drive and the unconscious.