This paper highlights the relevance of Erich Fromm’s concepts of social character and social change to offer a more nuanced understanding of the neo-liberal inter-generational traumatic legacy of loss of stable work, changing worker gendered identity, disrupted affect, community engagement and historical memory within a global context of insecure labour and emerging neoliberal forms of social character in the aftermath of massive redundancies and unemployment experienced recently in some post-industrial working class communities in the UK.
This paper explores psychosocially young unemployed men’s resistance to work they describe as ‘embarrassing’ and ‘feminine’. The context is the closure of a steelworks in a town in the South Wales valleys, in which their resistance is mediated by father–son relationships that dictate what counts as proper manly work. In this study, young men, as well as their mothers and (where possible) their fathers, were interviewed. The interviews reveal a community suffering the effects of intergenerational trauma and riven with complex feelings about masculinity and femininity. These feelings are projected onto the young men, who feel bullied and shamed by their families, peers and others in the community because they are unable to find gender-appropriate work. The implications of these findings for un-derstanding youth male unemployment are considered.
This paper explores psychosocially the intergenerational transmission of aspects of working-class masculinities through the shaming, embarrassment, and bullying of young unemployed men, when faced with taking up service work they describe as >embarrassing< and >feminine.< The context is the closure of a steelworks in a town in the South Wales valleys, in which the men's resistance to service work is mediated by father–son relationships that dictate what counts as proper manly work. In this study, young men, as well as their mothers and (where possible) their fathers, were interviewed. The interviews reveal a community suffering the effects of intergenerational trauma and riven with complex feelings about masculinity and femininity. These feelings are projected onto the young men, who feel bullied and shamed by their families, peers, and others in the community because they are unable to find gender-appropriate work. The implications of these findings for understandings of youth male unemployment are considered.
This paper presents a brief reflection of some aspects of previous qualitative research, carried out by the author, on an exploratory study of the negotiation of male to gay male emotional needs within a Frommian clinical approach. In particular, Erich Fromm's notions of >central relatedness< as well >mature love< are also discussed in an attempt to link the role of such notions as part of a developing clinical analytic work with gay men. Part of the research findings showed that whilst for gay men issues of central relatedness and love are of paramount importance, in practice, their most common practical approach to negotiate their emotional needs was actually through >friendships< and >friendliness< as a key relational paradigm that enabled them negotiate their emotional needs with other men. The implications of the salience of connecting Fromm's contributions to clinical analytic work to further develop clinical work with gay men and sexual diversity in general are also emphasized.