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Benign Aggression (Fromm)
(2017)
Malignant Aggression (Fromm)
(2017)
Several thinkers have expressed the view that the central nostrums of neoliberalism, including self-reliance, personal responsibility and individual risk, have become part of the >common sense< fabric of everyday life. My paper argues that Erich Fromm’s idea of social character offers a comprehensive and persuasive answer to this question. While some have sought the answer to this conundrum in Foucault’s notion of governmentality, I argue that, by itself, this answer is not sufficient. What is significant about the notion of social character, I claim, is that it manages to unify >top-down< approaches like governmentality focused on ideas and policy, with >bottom-up< approaches focused on how the insights of day to day experience are mediated through culture. Adapting this theory to neoliberalism, I argue, means that the >common sense< nature of neoliberalism, and the lack of a reckoning for its massive economic failure (as evidenced by the 2007 Great Recession), are explicable through the formation of a neoliberal social character, by means of which experiential processes align with cultural meanings and, subsequently, fuse with social expectations.
The fluidity, contradictions, and multiplicity of the neoliberal structures fragment the historical continuity of our culture. The signifying chain, which our culture serves, is shattered and hence there is a constant need to regain our lost identity. However, the massive concentration of the market economy dissuades us from achieving this end. Psychoanalytically, we regress into the pregenital stages of human development, which give rise to narcissistic traits. Social narcissism finds its expressions through the accumulation and possessions of lacuna of >images< and >appearances< that serve to cover existential issues in contemporary life. Reliance on surface reality, this modern-day psychopathology deadens our individual convictions on social and political issues, as well as our fidelity in emotional matters. As a consequence, we lose concern over things that might be equally or more important for the survival of our society—tradition.
Freud has always used his growing psychoanalytic understanding to address world events such as World War I as well as human psychology. The unbelievable death toll between 1914 to 1918 led Freud to attempt for the explanation and understanding of violence, conflict and destruction. He has placed greater importance to human aggression. Freud has revised many key aspects of his theory about aggression. He has dropped the idea of self-preservation drive and instead focuses on his new dual classification of two instinctual theories in both of which aggression played a significant part. He continued to develop his theory toward a more sophisticated picture of psychoanalytic view of human aggression. This paper aims to investigate the causes of aggression by probing into two different perspectives: Psychoanalysis and neo-Freudian analysis as well as social learning theory. This article specifically focuses on postulating psychoanalytic spectrum of aggression from Freudian and neo-Freudian point of views. It also attempts to examine the differences and similarities between and within these perspectives in search for answer to the main question >what are the causes of the human aggression?< In the first part of the paper, after the definition of aggression, it entails a close look to psychoanalytic approach and compare and contrast the psychoanalytic ideas within the paradigm. The second part focuses on neo-Freudian psycho-analysis of the aggression. The third section emphasizes Bandura’s social learning theory. The last section gives a summary of all perspectives.
This is a review article of the following five recent studies on populism: 1) Ruth Wodak’s The Politics of Fear: What Right-Wing Populist Discourses Mean (Sage, 2015); 2) Benjamin Moffitt’s The Global Rise of Populism: Performance, Political Style and Representation (Stanford University Press, 2016); 3) Cas Mudde and Cristóbal Rovira Kaltwasser’s Populism: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford University Press, 2017); 4) Jan-Werner Müller’s What is Populism? (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016); and 5) John B. Judis’ The Populist Explosion: How the Great Recession Transformed American and European Politics (Columbia Global Reports, 2016). The review argues for a return to early Frankfurt School Critical Theory to address some of the shortcomings of these studies.