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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.
The author examines the role that the buying of commodities plays in the identity formation of the individual. He concludes that it is nowadays no longer the instrumental utility value but a psychical utility value that influences the decision to buy a commodity and that the psychical utility value can have different functions for consumers. In neurotically structured individuals, normal consuming can end in an identity extension where the individual identifies transitively unconscious scenes with those in advertisements, thus making these unconscious scenes conscious in their guise. When individuals are mainly narcissistically structured, an >identity of commodities< can be found, that is, a non-personal identity formation mediated by commodities in which the individuals identify reflexively with the scenic figures from Internet games, movies, television programs, and commercials.
The author examines different definitions and applications of the terms >psychic energy< and >libido.< With regard to the >psychic energy< terminology, he shows that its application and usage relate in particular to the perspective of Brenner and not to Freud's definition. He argues that Freud uses the term >psychic energy< as a synonym for >libido,< and not >libido< as a synonym for >psychic energy.< It is demonstrated that in Freud's view, up until 1914, >libido< relates to manifestations of bodily sexual tensions, and subsequently this term applies to the manifestations of sexual energy in the psychic field. The author rejects this change in terminology and also challenges Freud's attempt to use dynamic-economic considerations as an explanatory device for epistemological reasons. Freud's concept of energy is inconsistent with the meaning of energy as defined in the physical sciences, and whereas the metapsychological topographical, dynamic, and structural viewpoints have a solid foundation in the representational world to which the psychoanalytic process affords unique access, this is not true of the economic viewpoint. It is claimed that bodily tensions only exist in the representational world in the form of affects, so that, in the author's opinion, the economic viewpoint should be abandoned in favour of an affective one. In the context of the endeavour to obtain pleasure and avoid unpleasure adduced by Freud, this viewpoint focuses on the relationships between affects and the different elements of the representational world, thereby serving as the subject of metapsychological investigation.
In this paper, I outline a history of critical marketing studies. The argument put forward that marketing lacks any substantive critical edge is questioned. In surveying our history and finding extensive engagement with a variety of critical perspectives, I connect these with appropriate literature from non-marketing sources to flesh out an account of our critical marketing heritage. I devote considerable attention to the period 1940 to 1990, as this is the historical range of critical marketing literature that most scholars will be unfamiliar with, linking this through citation and discussion to more recently published work. In this way, this paper provides a guide to sources of literature that may have passed marketing scholars by because they violate our disciplinary demands for >recency< (Baker, 2001). As I document, critical marketing studies examines a variety of areas that represent consumer culture theory’s (CCT) >next frontier< if we accept Arnould and Thompson’s (2005) diagnosis. In opposition to Arnould and Thompson’s assertion, CCT’s new frontier, this paper contends, is a frontier that has long been of interest to critical marketing scholars whose work might usefully be re-examined.
The process of a de-territorialized or multilocal world productive system, which is more informational than industrial and more speculative than productive, has led to a crisis in social structures and the breakdown of identity referents that formerly had provided a sense of meaning to individual and social life. We are facing both a breakdown and a disarticulation of institutional and symbolic mediations from the past, and also a process of reorganization of differences and inequalities that are having a strong impact on identities. The individual and collective construction of subjectivity is acquiring multiple forms, some of them unexpected, others unprecedented. In what way does reality question psychoanalysis?
Erich Fromm and the Public Intellectual in Recent American History: An Interview with Larry Friedman
(2010)
Global warming – reality or fantasy? Certainly, global warming is a dystopia linked to other catastrophes in human history, such as the Flood and Noah's Ark. Noah's belief in God saved his life and the life of his family. In our time, we need to sustain our belief in the human capacity to cooperate and survive. This is a necessary background when thinking of the future and analysing the border between fantasy and reality, between fear and paranoia, and in the process in which a new worldview takes form.