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- 2002 (424) (remove)
Fromm viewed intrapsychic dynamic processes as having their origin in a generalized organic life force that gets transformed into psychic energy called passions. He is acknowledged as one of the most original, creative writers of the mid-20th century whose fertile mind and humanistic sensibilities synthesized the domains of psychoanalysis, social philosophy, and politics. His unyielding belief that the development of the individual psyche is inseparable from its two-way interaction with a lived relational and cultural context presaged the evolution of the relational perspective in psychoanalysis, and his concept of passions foreshadowed contemporary neuroscientific theories of affect and its role in intrapsychic life and self-identity formation. Damasio’s theory of emotions is reviewed as a specific example of the current revamping of psychoanalytic theory as bottom-up information processing, that is, the integrating and synthesyzing of affective experience and memory (preverbal mentalization) as fueling the creation of a narrative self. Fromm’s discussions of dissociation are linked both to Damasio’s core self experiences and to Bromberg’s conceptualization of psychoanalysis of dissociative experience as a process of >standing in the spaces.< And finally, Fromm’s descriptions of psychoanalysis as an art are linked to Schon’s action-oriented theory of practical knowledge.
Trauma Lives in Speech
(2002)
The author approaches the topic through infant observation. At the age of eight months the baby moves in the borderland between the physical and the symbolic. When the baby hurts herself, she needs the mother's arms to protect her: at the same time, her budding spoken symbol >mama< is comforting in itself, it carries the memory of the mother's arms. Can speech – tone of voice, rhythm, pauses – and the moments of loss, absence, the losing of self also be intertwined? The author discusses the question of how trauma starts to live in speech through two patients. She talks about >a silent language< which speaks in between the words and sentences – changes the rhythm of speech, makes lose words, tears a hole in speech. This >silent language< talks about trauma, reaches for its very essence – a bodily experience and meaning to the wholeness/ disruption of self.