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With their book Psychoanalytic perspectives on migration and exile (1989), L. Grinberg and R. Grinberg (1984) opened up a new clinical field, which had been neglected for a long time in the psychoanalytic community, although Freud’s multilinguistic competence had greatly contributed to the creation of psychoanalysis. With their book The Babel of the unconscious, Jacqueline Amati Mehler, Simona Argentieri, and Jorge Canestri were able to confirm the hypothesis that it is possible to help multilingual patients to integrate the different aspects of their self which are bound to their mother tongue and to their foreign tongue(s), and thus to allow them to develop a new identity. The author, who has been a psychoanalyst in Munich since 1999, works every day with his Italian patients in this new clinical field, that is in their common mother tongue and at the two levels of their old Italian and their new German identity. Through the detailed presentation of a clinical case, he furthermore shows how, on the one hand, the migration creates a new space in which therapy actually becomes possible, and on the other hand, not only therapy, but also the kind of relationship developed by the patients to their >new country< plays a decisive role in the whole process. Such a frame proved to be particularly good for the emergence, revisitation, and reelaboration of the transgenerational trauma around which the case of Penelope is centered. The author further assumes that the theme of >migration and identity< is becoming more and more important in our globalized world, with clinical consequences whose elaboration requires a specific cultural and technical preparation.
In 1929, Wilhelm Reich lectured on >Psychoanalysis as a natural science< before the Communist Academy in Moscow; he was the only Freudian-trained Central European psychoanalyst to do so. That same year, his article >Dialectical materialism and psychoanalysis< was published in the Academy's journal, Under the Banner of Marxism, in both Moscow and Berlin. By this time, Reich's involvement with political activism aligned with the Austrian Communist Party was increasing, while simultaneously psychoanalysis in the Soviet Union was in decline. Our paper places these events in their proper historical context and includes a discussion of the various attempts to determine the compatibility of psychoanalysis and Marxism. We offer analyses of both the article, >Dialectical materialism and psychoanalysis,< and the lecture, >Psychoanalysis as a natural science,< and the reactions to both by Reich's Russian critics. We show the ways in which responses to his lecture foreshadow what becomes the standard Soviet assessment of psychoanalysis. As an appendix to this paper, we provide the first English translation of the Russian account of his lecture, as published in the Herald of the Communist Academy.
The psychoanalytic movement is experiencing a serious crisis: its scientific consensus, social standing, and impact on practice in mental health have all been steadily declining over the last decades. This unfortunate process has been variously explained in terms of prevailing hedonistic social values, the political influence of drug companies, and cuts in health-related expenditures. Following a suggestion by Garza Guerrero, we rather believe that the sources of the contemporary crisis in psychoanalysis are to be searched for within its own development and current social and cultural life. Specifically, we think psychoanalysis has failed to bring the revolutionary contribution of interpersonal and intersubjective paradigms to its fuller consequences. Here, we review five core dimensions in which such failure is particularly apparent: (1) an unwitting reliance on the medical model of mental illness; (2) an ontological, concrete understanding of unconscious processes; (3) a manifest failure to fully appreciate the role of extratransference relationships in the patient’s life; (4) a naive and idealized view of the psychoanalyst’s person and role; and (5) a marginal awareness of the impact of group-level unconscious phenomena on the social life of psychoanalytic institutions.
This paper tries to outline two different ways of thinking about the concept of negative liberty. On the one hand, one can think of negative liberty in the external view that is entitled the external negative liberty in this paper. Here, human being is free if no one stops him/her from doing whatever s/he may want to do. On the other hand, one can think of negative liberty in the internal sense that is entitled the internal negative freedom by the researcher. In this view, human being realizes him/ herself as a person who exists separately from others but s/he does not have his or her own identity. For this purpose, after analyzing of two approaches through a two prominent thinkers’ standpoints including Isaiah Berlin and Erich Fromm, this question is going to be answered; what negative liberty is based on the two new perspectives, the external and internal perspectives.
In this article we will explore the postmodern conception of the >death< of the subject and the fol-lowing postmodern philosophical premises: the critique of the master narratives, the critique of metaphysics, the deconstruction of foundationalism, and the critique of the Enlightenment notion of the autonomous and free subject. In the central part of the article we will explore the limitations of the postmodern philosophy and introduce Fromm’s notion of the birth of the self in the time-history continuum. Contrary to the postmodern philosophy, we will insist on Fromm’s non-essentialist notion of being as a paradox and on the notion of the human agency which is crucial for the psychoanalytic (therapeutic) work and a personal transformation.
In this article, I claim that humor can be a form of social pathology. In opposition to the general humor-affirmative atmosphere, I develop the critical tradition of humor research, and suggest that there is a darker side to fun and laughter. Using insights from Henri Bergson’s theory about laughter and Erich Fromm’s critical social thinking, I formulate a novel theoretical combination which opens up fruitful perspectives on contemporary humor and its social nature. This empirically motivated conceptual position helps us to understand the role and function of humor and laughter. My conclusion is that parts of the contemporary humor catalogue reflect collective destructive and even death-orientated tendencies. The main argument is that if humor is not in line with humanistic values and is not based on a life-orientated worldview, it is in danger of becoming pathological.