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Donald Trump and his followers who never waiver stand at 41.5% of the US population (Fivethirtyeight.com), the embodiment of a lust for power and fame and the minions who crave fulfillment through his arrogant and belligerent antics. Speaking from the mid-Twentieth century, Fromm offers a starting point for our discussion of the present day, centered on the social-psychological intersection where everyday people recreate the systems upon which they both depend, and which may very well destroy them.
Die Entstehungs- und Entwicklungsgeschichte der International Federation of Psychoanalytic Societies (IFPS) ist bisher nicht ausführlich und zusammenhängend beschrieben worden. Es handelt sich um eine internationale psychoanalytische Föderation, in der sich psychoana-lytische Ausbildungsinstitute und psychoanalytische Gesellschaften assoziiert haben, die nicht Mitglied in der großen, traditionsreichen International Psychoanalytical Association (IPA) werden konnten oder wollten. Meist hatte dies mit Ansichten und Haltungen zu tun, die von der >orthodoxen< und von der IPA definierten psychoanalytischen Lehrmeinung abwichen. Das Grundprinzip der IFPS war von Beginn an geprägt von Offenheit und Toleranz neuen psychoanalytischen Konzepten und Methoden gegenüber und von Nichteinmischung in die Ausbildungsfragen der einzelnen Mitgliedsinstitute. Die IFPS wird 1962 von international tätigen, aber allesamt deutschsprachigen Psychoanalytikern gegründet. Die erste Satzung der IFPS wird 1974 noch auf Deutsch formuliert. Inzwischen ist die Verständigungssprache zum Englischen gewechselt und es gehören der IFPS insgesamt 28 psychoanalytische Institute und Gesellschaften an, viele davon aus dem englisch- und spanischsprachigen Raum. In der vorliegenden Arbeit werden die Gründungsgeschichte der IFPS und die ersten 20 Jahre ihres Bestehens anhand von Archivmaterial nachvollzogen, das die Archivkommission der IFPS zusammengetragen hat. Zunächst geht es um die Vorgeschichte der Gründung, in der die Grundsätze der neuen internationalen Gemeinschaft bereits diskutiert und formuliert werden und in der erste Konflikte mit anderen psychoanalytischen Vereinigungen auftauchen. Dann werden die Gründer, ihre theoretischen Standpunkte und ihre Schwierigkeiten miteinander vorgestellt. Alle ein bis vier Jahre werden größere oder kleinere Tagungen durch die IFPS abgehalten. Diese Tagungen werden hinsichtlich ihres inhaltlichen und organisatorischen Rahmens dargestellt. Die Vorträge der ersten Tagungen werden in Auswahl in sechs Bänden veröffentlicht. Erst 1992 entsteht die vierteljährliche Zeitschrift der IFPS, das >International Forum of Psychoanalysis<. Die Entwicklungsgeschichte der IFPS zeigt die Struktur, den Charakter und die theoretischen Eigenheiten dieser Föderation. Im zweiten Teil der Arbeit werden die inhaltlichen Unterschiede zwischen der >orthodoxen< psychoanalytischen Lehre und den Lehren der >Dissidenten< der Psychoanalyse herausgearbeitet. Einige der >Dissidenten< waren Gedankengeber für die IFPS, einige waren und sind deren Mitglieder. Die Unterscheidung zwischen >orthodoxen< und >dissidenten< psychoanalytischen Theorien wird problematisiert und in Frage gestellt.
Realist scholars are increasingly turning their attention to Pierre Bourdieu's concept of habitus or dispositions as a way of theorizing thought and behaviour. In this article, the author offers a contribution, based on Erich Fromm's social psychology, to the realist theory of habitus. The author argues that while Bourdieu and Fromm both see the quest for meaning as the source of subjectivity in social life, Fromm goes further than Bourdieu in analysing the psychodynamic consequences of the acquisition of habitus. Fromm provides additional tools to understand the properties of habitus that emerge from its interaction with primary psychological needs. Principally, Fromm's work reveals an undertheorized set of emergent properties of habitus.
Prefacio
(2018)
Dialektische Psychologie. Adornos Rezeption der Psychoanalyse, Wiesbaden (Springer) 2018, 764 pp.
(2018)
Patients contribute to analytic endeavors through a knowledge of their own unique ways of organizing their experience, of building an intersubjective space with significant others, of the type of life that they consider worth living, and primarily of their specific passions and yearnings. The more that therapists allow the patients’ unique self-knowledge to influence their therapeutic perceptions and decisions, the further they will advance patients’ status as co-experts working together with the therapist to create and formulate new, richer knowledge. In the present article, it is suggested that one of the main reasons why patients’ self-knowledge is excluded from the therapeutic dialogue is that the persuasive power of the therapists’ rich and deep knowledge challenges the patients’ self-authority. Through an illustrative vignette, therapists are recommended to use a metacommunication intervention to restore the balance that has been undermined between the therapist’s authority and the patient’s self-authority.
Analytic therapy enables patients to relive and repair failures to promote their mentalization by parental figures. However, therapists also fail temporarily to provide the patients with a growth-promoting environment when their patterns of reflexivity on the patients’ experience are undermined. These temporary failures create new opportunities for therapists to access unformulated knowledge about their patients’ experiences and enrich their reflexivity on them, and for the patients to promote their ability to hold themselves in their own minds.
The 50-minute hour is a feature of psychoanalytic work that is most commonly discussed in the context of case reports. This paper examines it as a concept. The author starts by describing the origin of the 50-minute hour and its development as an element of the psychoanalytic setting or framework. Next, he considers the significance of the clock as a relational factor in the session and reflects on the alienness of the time of day to the unconscious, and the consequences of this alienness. He then uses a clinical example to illustrate the phenomenon of the stretching effect of time in analytic sessions. Finally, the author demonstrates how cleverly the 50-minute hour excises the time needed for unconscious processes from our accelerated present; he shows that it challenges the social convention of time, and has a structuring effect in that it >times< psychic processes.
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.
Die Produktion der Zukunft
(2018)
Posing the question of the possibility of transference at the moment of a decompensation, the author proposes rethinking the psychiatric concept of >unmotivated laughter< in light of psychoanalytic experience, taking a case study as a point of departure. In the present research, the intention is to understand the rule of laughter outside the conception of the joke (Witz), by tracing the trajectory of the conceptualization of laughter from Freudian to Lacanian psychoanalysis. This review is needed in order to understand an experience of interpretation of laughter at the time of a decompensation in the schizophrenia of an adolescent, in which (un)motivated laughter formed a symptom. >Jouissance-laughter< necessitates changing the psychiatric understanding of laughter in schizophrenia, where its motivation is not what is comical in the here-and-now. In this laughter, the humorous or comic response of the clinician becomes an interpretation. Published online: 18 Apr 2018.
One of the perennial questions in Shakespeare studies concerns what Coleridge called the >motiveless malignity< of Iago. Instead of looking at Iago as an individual, however, I will argue that he is best understood as a representation of the >social character< of early modern bourgeois man. Iago’s denial of spiritual values and his mercenary nature can be understood in this light. Fromm’s theses concerning the interconnections among anal libido, the death instinct, malignant aggression, and necrophilia all find support in Shake-speare’s supreme villain.
This paper examines how clinicians can arrive at effective therapeutic action by means other than spoken language. The paper presents a view that resonating affective states promote intimacy in the therapeutic encounter and is in fact a vital part of the curative process of psychotherapy. This emotional interchange supplements traditional notions of insight by adding an aspect of an >embodied self< who knows. A clinical case that demonstrates this view is presented and discussed.
This paper presents Fromm’s (1900–1980) ap-proach to religion and religiosity, in light of Hermann Cohen (1842–1918) thought. Despite differences in their thought, Cohen and Fromm share some things in common. Their critique of culture is based on a unique definition of das Individuum, the human condition. They demon-strate a cautious approach to modernity and progress.
This paper presents Fromm’s (1900–1980) ap-proach to religion and religiosity, in light of Hermann Cohen (1842–1918) thought. Despite differences in their thought, Cohen and Fromm share some things in common. Their critique of culture is based on a unique definition of das Individuum, the human condition. They demon-strate a cautious approach to modernity and progress.
In proposing a refounding of psychoanalysis within a humanist perspective, the author suggests a comparison between Elie Wiesel’s discussion of concepts such as witnessing, testimony, and memory as redemption, and Sandor Ferenczi’s idea of the therapist as >benevolent and useful witness,< who, thanks to his/her true empathic and committed participation, in contrast to Freud’s neutrality, enables the patient to achieve real awareness of the split parts within him- or herself, as well as an integration of the fragmentation due to trauma. Against >indifference,< the practice of connectedness, responsibility, memory, love, and forgiveness as true elaboration of trauma and >going beyond< are proposed as tools towards a >persistence of the human< in a world of increasing dehumanization.
I examined a better therapeutic approach for addressing the heart-rending emotional state of a client exposed to serious traumatic experiences during early childhood without experiencing affect attunement from surrounding adults. The clinical case describes a woman in her early 20s who had lost her memory of past sexual abuse by her father. She visited an on-campus student counseling room complaining of feeling she was >not herself.< This paper focuses on intersubjective exchanges involving moments when her traumatic experiences were about to be revived during weekly face-to-face psychoanalytic psychotherapy. I took note of the joint attention that developed between us concerning my attunement with her painful emotional experiences. We eventually shared subjective affective states fostered within a safe mental space. Using this as a starting point, we traced the process by which she came to accept the painful memories and associated experiences surrounding the heart-wrenching affect that she had had no choice but to >shroud in darkness,< as well as accepting her feelings of reality. I made use of knowledge from infant research shedding light on how two people can instantly mutually influence their actions and behaviors, and explored, in great detail, what sort of implicit relatedness had developed between us.
This discussion explores and compares the explicit interpersonal method of psychoanalysis of Harry Stack Sullivan and the implicit and until now insufficiently recognized interpersonal method of Sigmund Freud. Interpersonal means interaction via expression of feelings, emotions, and actions, gestures of body and face, and words. The centrality of emotions as motives and movers or action suggests redefining psychic reality as emotional reality. While Freud did not have the word >interpersonal,< invented by Sullivan, he nevertheless acted as an interpersonal psychotherapist both in his prepsychoanalytic period and, thereafter, from his beginnings as a psychoanalyst in 1893. The other purpose of this paper is to promote a new era of collaboration and cross-fertilization between the IPA and other psychoanalytic authors and organizations.
The Art oft Leading. The Significance of Personality and Character in the Choice of Business Leaders
(2018)
Here, I attempt to formulate some thoughts about the past, present, and future of psychoanalysis and its institutions in Germany. To do this, I have employed my varied experience as a supervisor and consultant to many such psychoanalytic institutes over the past several years. Themes discussed include the history of psychoanalysis in postwar Germany, the organizational structure of German psychoanalytic institutes, and their cultures in regard to group and organizational dynamics, and political and economic aspects. Finally, I add brief thoughts about the future, taking into account recent developments relating to planned changes in laws governing psychotherapy in Germany. Further, I attempt to analyze and comment on: coming to terms with the past; how to begin after the >Zero Hour<; the form of organization of psychoanalytic institutes in Germany; missing patients and missing candidates; constructive debate and hurting people’s feelings; the lack of >detoxification< and >recycling< of the poisonous remains of psychoanalytic processes; and the future of psychoanalytic institutions in Germany. I end with an example of a typical primary task used in conducting large groups in the institutes in which I worked, and include an anonymized table listing individual interventions, their duration, and frequency. These should provide an idea of my way of working, and an overview of the dimensions of the task.
This paper studies the interaction of the clinical theories of two major British theorists, Melanie Klein and Donald Winnicott. Through three clinical examples, we see how the >Klein-Winnicott dialectic< operates in a significantly developmental fashion to advance and fulfill clinical work. Winnicott’s >object survival< is looked at in developmental conjunction with Klein’s >mourning< as a primary clinical and developmental process. This interaction also captures the essence of working with the aggression of a self that has been traumatically disrupted within its early development. This paper demonstrates how such work leads to the assimilation and grieving of primal object loss, evolving into a >developmental mourning process.< This developmental mourning includes the working-through of an >abandonment depression< in the character-disordered patient. A clinical example in a 1989 essay on >psychic pain< by Betty Joseph is used to set up the clinical challenge of going beyond the symptomatic clinging behavior of developmental arrest, into full psychic birth as a separate other, an Other who can relate to an Other. Conclusively, the subjective visceral affect noted and monitored in its clinical dimensions here is that of human >heartache,< which can also include regret.
Begrüßung und Einführung
(2018)
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.
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.
Begruessung
(2018)
This article addresses both the rewards and the daunting complexities of teaching psychoanalysis to undergraduates in the USA, where the idea of a university as a site for the cultivation of the life of the mind is under siege. The essay recommends a close critical reading of key Freudian texts, the establishment of a classroom atmosphere of trust, genuine respect for expectable student skepticism, and the capacity to wait as dystonic ideas gradually take hold and reveal their worth. Speed, a ubiquitous feature and a questionable desideratum of twenty-first century US culture, as well as facile cleverness, a desideratum within academia, tell against the psychoanalytic process, which is long, slow, halting, laborious, and painful, but a process that can, at best, open what has heretofore been sealed.
This article describes a psychoanalyst's personal experience in an international and interdisciplinary social trauma research network. Crises and conflicts are understood as an integral feature of such a collaboration. Using the self-reflective capacity of the psychoanalyst may help to turn them into a new perspective. Crossing disciplinary borders, reconnecting to the field of academic research, might prove to be a rather rewarding step.
Contemplating spiritual experience: Winnicott's potential space, Tibetan bardo, and liminality
(2018)
In this paper, ways of contemplating and accommodating the unfamiliar, especially the >other< of spiritual experience, are considered. Some concepts from psychoanalysis, such as Winnicott's >potential space< and his notion of >holding,< are helpful in comprehending spiritual experiences that can easily be misunderstood, or >flattened out< to use Bion's phrase. Interesting and rather remarkable confluences in these concepts from psychoanalysis and from Tibetan Buddhism (bardo) and cultural anthropology (liminality) are considered in their functions of both enabling and comprehending these extraordinary and often life-enhancing experiences.
Identity theft
(2018)
Psychoanalysis has almost disappeared from the curricula of most American universities, which I illustrate by the case of the department of psychology at my own university, Harvard. Courses on psychoanalysis are very rare there and it is mostly seen as a part of history of psychology and not as a set of ideas that can be useful nowadays. Personality models developed by Freud or Melanie Klein, as well as many more contemporary psychoanalysts, are, however, still very relevant for the humanities. This is particularly the case for Shakespeare studies and I am trying to show that despite the fact that psychoanalysis can enrich this field, less and less students show interest in it or are willing to admit that they themselves may have unconscious reactions. I focus on the usefullness of the concept of projective identification and propose the thesis that is another name for the activities of theater, and indeed for theater itself.
Die Bedeutung der Liebe im Werk von Erich Fromm. Daniela Schmid im Interview mit Dr. Rainer Funk
(2018)
Vorwort des Herausgebers
(2018)
If psychoanalysis is to avoid total marginalization, something has to be changed in the way future generations are prepared for working with patients and doing research. Reformation of psychoanalytic education may easily be the crucial issue when it comes to the survival of psychoanalysis. Its current organizational scheme has been criticized for various reasons, and various models of its structure have been proposed. I advocate a model that would combine the best features of the university education (training in clinical skills together with philosophy of science and research methodology) with personal analysis as part of psychoanalytic institutes. Although universities can remedy some of the problems of psychoanalytic institutions, they cannot contain the subjective experience of being analyzed.
I describe my collaboration with Giovanni over the span of almost 15 years during which time we developed a multimotivational model that built on attachment theory and explored some of its clinical implications. I mention the many ways Giovanni influenced my thinking, and provide a few personal stories about Giovanni that give a sense of his generous, warm and creative nature. Throughout the article I describe how I developed some of the ideas we worked on together to provide a broad evolutionary and developmental outlook on human nature. We had planned to write a book together on this ambitious project, but personal circumstances got in the way.
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.
This paper posits that an infusion of psychoanalytic concepts into the teaching of sociology in undergraduate liberal arts curricula offers a route to expanding students’ understanding of how self and society are entwined in a condition of mutual crisis in contemporary society. We argue that the liberatory project at the core of the liberal arts is served well by linking the critical perspectives found in these two disciplines. We provide as specific examples from our own teaching: (1) a demonstration of how Freud’s concept of neurosis has an affinity with Marx’s concept of alienation; and (2) a discussion of how the torture sequence in Orwell’s 1984 presents an inversion of a psychoanalytic treatment through which the power of propaganda is illuminated. We conclude that teaching the two disciplines in tandem helps students grasp how the self is a socially constructed entity and how the orthodoxies of neurosis and social control are available for critique and change.
This paper applies the theoretical framework of Fromm’s humanistic psychology to examine the reported content of North Korean defectors’ dreams during sleep and considers what the psychological data suggests about the defectors’ past social experience in authoritarian North Korea and their present social situation as adults learning to adjust to a new life in neo-liberal South Korea.
This text is intended as a contribution to the study of the profound mutual relations between architecture and psychoanalysis. Architecture creates representations that conceal unconscious forms of thought; psychoanalysis helps to explain the meanings of these representations – forms of construction and forms of the psyche. The multifaceted work of psychoanalyst Christopher Bollas – his thoughts on the relationships between psychoanalysis and architecture, on the vitality of objects, on the creative implications of the Oedipal relationship – serves as a critical and decisive instrument for the authors’ inquiry. The issue of the >vitality of objects< as described by Bollas also concerns – but only in part – the architectural >object.< One modern form of architecture with an inordinate capacity empathy has to be Louis Kahn’s. Kahn’s youngest son , Nathaniel, lost his father when he was still a child and hardly had a chance to get to know him. After becoming an adult and an established film-maker, he managed to recover his father in two ways: by discovering him in his works, with their powerful affective impact; and by drawing from those very works of his father to enhance his own creative process in his filmic art. As it turns out, it is this very process that has allowed for an emblematically positive resolution of the Oedipal relationship.
The postmodern university is experiencing a legitimation crisis because of a deepening and corrosive mistrust of all forms of authority; even those that are intended to benefit students by enabling them to >think critically<, or to deepen and improve their knowledge and skills. Some of the problem is rooted in prevailing cultural and economic trends, but others inhere in the nature of postmodernism itself; especially the postmodern claim that truth itself is non-existent or simply unattainable or unavailable, even at the best of times. Unlike earlier generations of critical theorists, who believed that >the truth shall make you free<, postmodern theorists, following Nietzsche, claim that the very idea of truth is moot, if not entirely obsolete. But absent a commitment to a search for truth, the entire structure of the university itself begins to crumble.
This paper explores how Sullivan's interpersonal theory can be applied clinically and illustrates this with a clinical case. It considers the emotional impact, on the clinician, of a Sullivanian point of view. Each theoretical orientation equips the analyst differently. Sullivanian technique impacts the analyst's focus, feelings of competence, and hopefulness. Although each theory emphasizes different aspects of the clinical material, this paper suggests that there is a set of clinical values that inspire the work of all analysts, regardless of orientation.
Here we introduce the dissertation program PSAID (Postgraduate Studies for the Advancement of Individual Dissertations), conducted at the International Psychoanalytic University in Berlin, Germany. We tell stories about our experience: about a wish to sum up in a dissertation after long years of clinical practice what has been learnt in diving deeply into human experience; about the fear of losing one’s identity when something new is to be learned, either planning a research study or conducting an interview that has not clinical but research-driven orientations; about the >biography of theory< – what motivates therapists to make a choice between psychoanalysis or cognitive-behavioral therapy; about how the experience of listening changes when you do not hear a voice but read a transcript and understand how many details allude to a relationship and influence your perception and thinking; about the experience of seeing a voice visualized on an audiogram; about summing up certain characteristics of >situations< in the consulting room. We propose not only to distinguish >online/offline< research, but to include >situationism< as a third concept.
This paper follows up Bion’s development, focusing its attention on Cogitations in particular and suggesting that it can be read as a sort of new >Clinical Diary< à la Ferenczi. The authors, showing us both the link between the writings of the London Bion and those of the American one, stress the dramatic change that took place in his theoretical and technical position around about 1967, when he crossed the Atlantic for working and teaching in North and Latin America, and gradually arrived to formulate a kind of listening more authentically centered on his own thoughts and emotions and those of the patient during the analytic encounter.
Psychoanalysis and academia: Psychoanalysis at the crossroads between exact and human sciences
(2018)
It is proposed that the mental health crisis in >developed< societies is largely due to the fact that psychology is heavily based upon an exact science model academically, and upon a medical model clinically. Indeed, these models favor an apperception of mental pathologies as essential entities with a biological etiology, and this reification facilitates a process of nonimplication of the sufferer as concerns his condition. The progress in brain sciences holds the promise of acknowledging psychology as an autonomous discipline, properly describing mental logics, which are constrained, but not determined, by brain characteristics; moreover, mental logical operations mandatorily need content from the contingent history of the subject's life to become instantiated. Psychology, then, is at the interface between an exact science and a human science epistemology. Consequently, we need psychologists and clinicians in the field of mental health who can apply a particularized approach to mental distress, who can deal with the personal feeling of nonmastery, who can base their clinical thinking on the patient's story, and who thereby systematically stay away from any essentializing temptation, while simultaneously being aware that the theoretical framework they operate from is embedded in a continuous scientific dialogue. Psychoanalysis is at that crossroads.