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- 2013 (113) (remove)
Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to construct a genealogy of therapeutic communities (TCs), with the espoused commitment to flattened hierarchies and democratic ideologies, the paper considers the lineage of the Frankfurt School of Social Research and its influence in setting a frame for TC ideology, with a particular focus on Herbert Marcuse and Erich Fromm. This genealogy provides further context to the contribution of two other key Frankfurters, Karl Mannheim and Michael Foulkes, who progressed therapeutic democracy in the UK and shaped the early days of the TC as a group-based treatment paradigm. Design/methodology/approach: Discourse analysis and collective biography based on biographical details, texts and witness accounts. Findings: The works of Marcuse and Fromm provide a hybrid psychosocial post-Freudian schemas that beckoned philosophic reconciliation between the state and the personal psyche culminating in new left psychoanalytic academic sectors. Erich Fromm's contribution is situated squarely in the clinical sphere in the USA dating from the 1930s after he fled from Germany and settled in the USA where he became a well-known lecturer at Chestnut Lodge during a time when it was developing its approach under the rubric of >milieu therapy<. Marcuse's influence on psychiatry is tracked through the development of ideas and writings emerging from his reading of Freud, finally intersecting with the emergence of TCs and anti-psychiatry when he delivered the keynote address at the Dialectics of Liberation Conference in London in 1967. Held at the height of the first generation of TCs, Joe Berke, R.D. Laing and colleagues considered Marcuse as someone to headline the Dialectics Conference because; >Marcuse was the Grandpapa of Flower Power< (Joe Berke said). Originality/value: A rapprochement between milieu therapy in the USA, influenced by Fromm and Marcuse and the European tradition of TCs, influenced by Mannheim and Foulkes is demonstrated. The Frankfurt Institute of Social Research can be seen as an ideological corner that transcends Atlantic divides, and provides a sturdy and lasting intellectual cornerstone for the history of ideas in the field of social psychiatry.
Music has the uncanny potential to transport its listeners to normally inaccessible realms of the psyche. Grounded in an object relations perspective informed by the burgeoning neo-monistic philosophical discipline of somaesthetics, it is suggested that the synthesis of conscious (necessarily explicit), unconscious (potentially explicit), and nonconscious (necessarily implicit) elements comprises a more utilitarian concept of the psychic essence of an individual: the >foundational self.< This foundational self, or the >spiritual self,< represents the irreducible and ultimately unformulatable core of human experience that results from the dialectical fusion of true-self object relations with concomitant developmentally primitive psychosomatic self states. It is argued that certain types of so-called >sacred music< – music whose form aligns with implicit affective registries that are filtered through intrapsychic constellations of true self object relations – act as perhaps the most potent catalyst in facilitating experiences of spirituality. The phonological qualities of sacred music share the same spectrum of transitional space in which the foundational self enjoys its fullest expression. Sacred music possesses the ability to dissolve explicit representational boundaries in service of achieving symbolic interpersonal fusion with the foundational self, in so doing facilitating a blissfully ego-boundless sensation of unio mystica.
Afterword: Apollo’s chariot
(2013)
The theory of social character developed by Erich Fromm asserts that the significance of experience is intimately linked to the material conditions under which persons, located in a specific economic system, live. The shared character traits thus correspond to the social role that these persons play. In the case of women, existing literature does not focus on their function as reproducers of the work force within the family, although this is a generalized function and additional to out-of-home work. This function has a transcendent importance to the development and emotional health of children, as has been established in longitudinal research of attachment theory.
This study explores Mexican mothers’ shared character traits, a systematized appraisal of their attitudes towards their lives and their children, their states of mind, and the quality of care they provide as well as their relationship to attachment patterns of their infants; some come from urban Middle, Middle-upper and Upper-class families and others from Poor in-digenous peasant families.
The fundamental focus is on the woman’s participation inside the family, although it does not exclude the possibility that some of these mothers handle not only the care giving and housework but also work outside of the home (the "double shift”). It concludes that the daily material conditions of existence are closely related to shared character traits and that these are in turn related to patterns of attachment in their infants, their sensitivity in the treatment of their babies, and the results of their Adult Attachment Interviews. Women have been the sup-port and pillar of subsistence for urban populations as well as the most poor and disadvan-taged communities. This role played by women is as widespread as undocumented in litera-ture.
Complex dynamics of forgiveness: Psychological, interpersonal, and psychotherapeutic implications
(2013)
The distinctive correlates of forgiveness are studied and analyzed in this paper. It is concluded that superficial and hasty forms of forgiveness might have a harmful impact on self-respect, self-concepts, self-complexity, and authenticity. Even deep forgiveness might not completely free the individual from negative side-effects, and there is some doubt whether complete forgiveness is possible. The paper also examines what place forgiveness should have in therapeutic settings and how it could be practiced in an accurate and safe manner.