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Erich Fromm was one of the first psychoanalytic thinkers who was genuinely interested in Asian philosophies. In the first part of this article, I will show Fromm’s imago of Buddhism as a radical, nontheistic, and ethical philosophy >without God.< I will argue that Fromm made an important difference between the phenomenal ego and being that proves crucial for his understanding of psychoanalysis and his critique of modern society. I will also explore Fromm’s synthesis of Buddhist philosophy and psychoanalysis, and show the similarities and differences between them.
In this article we will explore three important themes: (1) Fromm's anti-objectivistic perspective which stands for the idea that the other Being should not become an object in analysis; (2) the central idea of the relatedness and the relational dimension in the psychotherapeutic practice; (3) in the last part we will analyze the existential-ontological level which is manifested in analysis. We will focus our attention on the different ways in which Fromm as a psychoanalytic thinker, social critic and humanist can help the therapists to include the existential and social dimension in the psychotherapeutic work.
James Joyce represents one of the most significant novelists of the twentieth century and an adherent of the great tradition of humanistic ethics. The purpose of this paper is to critically examine, primarily in the light of humanistic ethics, the process of the artistic coming of age of the main character of Portrait, Stephen Dedalus. The basic principles of Humanism tend to view man in his physical and spiritual totality, believing that man’s fundamental aim is to >be man< and that the major prerequisite for achieving that aim is to be >man for himself<. Stephen Dedalus epitomizes Fromm’s type of man of productive character, in the sense that he gradually frees himself from the >nets< of Irish society represented in the form of constraints of nationality, family, and religion which he sees as threatening forces bent upon annihilating his own individuality. Stephen Dedalus manages to accomplish true affirmation of his individuality only through artistic vocation. Moreover, it could be argued that Stephen D. (Joyce himself) stands for the epitome of a genuine intellectual living in self-imposed exile and who is, according to the words of philosopher Julien Benda, a guardian and a bearer of independent thought who is loyal solely to truth.
The subject of the analysis is the category of the inclusion as a process that does not only apply to people with special developmental or life needs, but also to social sciences, which as a result of the positivist research paradigm have divided and separated from each other. Meanwhile, human upbringing requires the inclusion of biophilic orientation towards life in all social sciences, whose achievements should be considered and applied to improve educational processes. The Author borrows inspiration from the typology of human attitudes of Erich Fromm, because it makes readers aware of the negative effects of necrophilia in interpersonal relationships. The Author analyses Fromm’s approach against the background of selected ideas of Polish pedagogical views.
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.
Business and economy use advertising to promote their products and to increase their profits. Political parties also try to win votes with the help of commercial propaganda. Every step of the way we are accompanied by advertising, our everyday life and our culture are shaped by it.This article asks how the permanent confrontation with advertising affects the recipients. What consequences does propaganda and manipulation have for people who are exposed to this constant influence? The phenomenon of the Homo oeconomicus is also examined in this context. The Homo economicus is primarily a person who consumes and subconsciously identifies with his or her consumption. He's addicted to consumption. Advertising determines the life of the Homo oeconomicus. The psychologist Erich Fromm already dealt with the phenomenon of exuberant materialism in his book >To have or to be< in the 20th century. This book in particular and his work in general are also presented in this article. Fromm propagated a >rational< consumption that focuses on the real needs of people. A separate chapter is dedicated to Edward Bernays, the nephew of Sigmund Freud, a pioneer of public relations, whose work >Propaganda< – his famous book from 1928, which is still surprisingly current – is presented. Gewista is an Austrian advertising company. This company is in the focus of this article because we can find its out-of-home commercials also in places that were previously free of advertising. That's why the story of Gewista is told and its product range will be presented.Using the example of Gewista there will be asked for the self-image and the foreign attributions of advertising companies. These companies offer a service they describe themselves as a form of communication. Therefore, the article also analyzes whether advertising can really be seen as a topic of communication theories.
Body and meaning
(2007)
Psychoanalysis and psychoanalytic psychotherapy have evolved deeply over the past half century. This paper shows some the changes I have witnessed in them, and the challenges we face in this change of era, at the edge of the first quarter of the twenty-first century. Some the challenges are examined: knowing how to transmit in our daily practice the essential relationality of the human being; the relational essence of the process of change through psychotherapy; and a review of our contribution to our institutions being genuinely relational, that is, that we take more care of the space that the Other can inhabit than of preserving our own. We need hope: the hope to change and (again) be people, in connection with others, regaining confidence and being able to be ourself (to be ourselves with others). That is the meaning of our activity, what it is to be a psychoanalyst/psychotherapist today.
This paper explores the change processes that took place in a woman, an ex-prostitute, in the context of psychotherapeutic treatment over a period of over three years. The treatment took place within a relational psychotherapeutic setting influenced by the ideas formulated by Sándor Ferenczi regarding trauma, as well as by his intense involvement with and commitment to his patients, as expressed in his Clinical Diary of 1932 (Ferenczi, 1988). Zoe, the current patient, was a woman born in Latin America who emigrated to Spain at the age of 28 and became trapped, for nearly a decade, in a mesh of prostitution networks. She eventually entered regular psychotherapeutic treatment at the age of 39. Her change process is an example of the mutual influence between the factors of resilience that characterized her and the opportunity for co-creation that the treatment signifies. The marks of the intense traumatic burden of Zoe's history and the rays of sunlight and hope that she is currently experiencing become intermingled in the dreams evoked and brought to the treatment setting. Zoe's capacity for resilience and the potential for founding self-object relations, ethically implied, that therapists can offer construct a scenario that brings back to life the essence of Ferenczi from 1932.
The history of psychoanalysis has developed along two main routes: metapsychological (drive theory) and relational. So-called >relational psychoanalysis< derives from the convergence of several traditions – interpersonal and sociocultural (Sullivan, Fromm), object relations theory (Fairbairn), self psychology (Kohut), and intersubjective systems theory (Stolorow, Atwood, Orange) – enriched along many decades by a variety of strong contributions from Ferenczi to independent thinkers such as Bion, Winnicott, Bowlby, Pichon Rivière, W. and M. Baranger, J. Sandler, Ogden, and Bollas, among many others. Facing its main controversies in terms of theory, present psychoanalysis evolves between heuristic versus hermeneutic, intrapsychic versus intersubjective, fantasy versus trauma, conflict versus deficit, and drives versus motivational systems. Controversies in technique have also evolved from a neutrality and abstinence model to an optimal provision and frustration model experienced in mutuality but ethically balanced. This paper displays the main concepts of the relational perspective, in which intersubjectivity is both a constitutive frame for human beings and the essential way for change. Developments from infant research and neuroscience – and the deep social and cultural changes facing twenty-first century societies – promote a new scene for today's psychoanalysis in convergence with these relational proposals.
Acts of terrorism seem to never run out of Indonesia, from independence to the present day. Including the ideals of the establishment of an >Islamic State< that gave rise to a new wave of terrorism. The JAD group affiliated with ISIS clearly states that the Indonesian republic is thogut, so it is haram to be obedient to it, and they commit an act of terror some time ago. ISIS cleverly uses religious propositions to recruit new members. The verses of the Qur'an and the Sunnah of the Prophet became his legitimacy. The concept of Hijra, Necrophilia and millenarism became the main doctrine of the ISIS. ISIS uses this narrative to facilitate and call for action in Indonesia. Suicide bombing, police station attack carried out by sympathizers, either JAD members or lone wolf. ISIS also utilizes social media well, this facilitates the idea of necrophilia, millenarism of ISIS is practiced by its sympathizers. Through qualitative and text analysis and the idea approach, necrophilia from Erich Fromm and millenarism from Norman Cohn, and other narrative this research is intended to make counter narrative of ISIS, so that the emergence is the concept of biophilia and optimism against the times and build a better future.
Laudation for Noam Chomsky
(2010)
Erich Fromm is highly regarded in the Chinese academic field. This preliminary paper reports the major findings of an extensive data gathering project in China that gives us a basic outline of the trends in the reception of Fromm. We conducted several literature searches between June 2012 and May 2013 using different online databases, mostly China Knowledge Resource Integrated Database KNS (CNKI). This paper offers a categorization of the more than 800 contributions of Chinese authors, discusses the most important results, compares Fromm's very extensive reception in China to other countries and makes suggestions for future projects. While we initially expected Fromm to be invoked for criticism of Western capitalism, his views on how to cope with >the predicaments of modern man< are mostly used to underpin critical comments on mismanagement in China itself. In this way Fromm is used as a source of inspiration and creativity in theoretical matters as well as in practical questions, and also to comment on the spiritual and emotional development of the individual in modern China. There are, furthermore, extensive Chinese debates on Fromm’s concepts of >social character<, >the nature of man<, >escape from freedom<, >alienation<, >Marxism as humanism< and >the art of love< and there is an interesting reception of Fromm's concepts of psychoanalysis and social psychology in literature and art studies. Fromm’s humanistic and humanistic-ethical contributions are particularly appreciated with reference to their importance for theory and practice – even though there is a fair amount of criticism of Fromm in China as well.
Pathology of Imprisonment
(1972)
On Erich Fromm
(1959)
Attachment and the driving force of development: A critical discussion of empirical infant research
(2010)
Empirical infant research has led to an enormous expansion of our knowledge of the psychological functions of the infant. From a psychoanalytic perspective, however, it must be questioned whether this research has increased our knowledge of internal psychic life and helped answer the questions of what initiates and drives development. In the first part of this article, we argue that psychoanalysis must necessarily adopt a critical stance towards a scholarly ideal that rests on the positivist empirical tradition. Psychoanalysis has as its object unconscious processes that cannot be directly observed. In the following section, we take as our point of departure the project of attachment theory that Peter Fonagy and his colleagues have developed in an attempt to reconcile psychoanalysis with the empirical and experimental study of small children, and we demonstrate concretely the limitations of such a project vis-à-vis the exploration of the psychic reality of the child. Our line of reasoning continues to demonstrate how drive theory can be shaped so as to contain an object relations theoretical perspective – as has taken place in Jean Laplanche's reinterpretation of the theory of seduction – without abandoning the psychoanalytic theory of the drive and the unconscious.
The author discusses Ferenczi's theory of femininity in terms both of its orientation to Freud's constructivist view on the same subject and its intimate connections with his own phylogenetic speculations. She underlines the significance of Ferenczi's assumptions about the universality of the ?trend of maternal regression? and its determining role in genital sexual union. Due to the absence of a ?real? penis in women, Ferenczi postulates that female development is marked by a whole series of regressive moves and renunciations, from urethrality to anality (i.e. from activity to passivity), the ?abandonmentγ of the clitoris in favour of the vagina, and a regressive secondarynarcisstic cathexis of the entire body. The author criticizes Ferenczi's reduction of woman to the ?mother? function and relates this view to recent femininity theories emanating from the French school of psychoanalysis, which follow him in this respect. There is a brief discussion of the author's own approach to establishing a theory of femininity. She situates her theses in the framework of the tensions obtaining between Ferenczi's unsatisfactory theory of femininity as a ?defective? condition and his bold and laudable attempt to provide Freudian metapsychology with a biological foundation.
The authors note a contradiction between empirical findings and the dismissive conclusion of the German Federal Ministry for Family Affairs, Senior Citizens, Women and Youth (FMFASWY) that the treatment of children in early day care will not affect their relationship to their mother or entail any serious damage for their future. They use this contradiction as an opportunity to discuss the social function of early childhood socialization in day care. They come to the impression that the FMFASWY, in its assessment of research on day-care centers, was also intuitively guided by sociopolitical interests insofar as the emergence of a social character satisfying current social requirements is favored more by primary socialization in day care than in families.
The authors examine the influence that psychoanalysts’ economic situation has on the current state of psychoanalysis, particularly focusing on the situation in Germany and employing a perspective afforded by Marxian commodity analysis. Their analysis brings them to conclude that, in psychoanalysis, the suspension of truth value, the tolerance shown towards contradictory concepts, the lack of conceptual criticism, and the exclusion of sociocritical issues seem to be effects of psychoanalysts’ interest in realizing the exchange value of their psychoanalytic treatment and their accompanying lesser interest towards its use value.
The author summarizes the problems inherent in nomological approaches examining the efficacy of psychoanalysis as a form of treatment. He argues that nomologically oriented research operates with assumptions lacking empirical foundation and, moreover, that studies of this type merely give the impression of the effectiveness of psychoanalytic therapies while overlooking the specificity of the psychoanalytic method. He suggests that research into psychoanalytic treatments should not be subjected to a nomological conception of science, and that structural analysis of treatment courses should be examined and systematized within the frame of psychoanalytic treatment theory relative to their outcome. Given this approach, and provided that the theory of treatment is based on conceptual common ground, such studies would enable a prognostic conclusion that psychoanalytic treatments are successful, providing that the sequences generalized in the treatment theory do actually take place in treatments that take patients’ individuality into account.
Psychoanalysis as a natural science: Reconsidering Freud's >scientistic self-misunderstanding<
(2016)
This paper centres on Habermas's judgement that when Freud assesses psychoanalysis as a natural science, this constitutes a scientific self-misunderstanding. The author discusses Brenner's conviction that Freud's view is not a misunderstanding but is true for psychoanalysis and rejects his conclusion. In the author's view, Freud's assessment of psychoanalysis must be seen as a misunderstanding whose basis lies in its subject. Unconscious figures assert themselves under the repetition compulsion in the same manner as natural laws, each of which asserts itself beyond individual consciousness. It was the discovery of the unconscious that led Freud to conceive of psychoanalysis as a natural science and it seems that this conception is rooted in the structural identity between unconscious and natural processes. Freud's misunderstanding of pseudo-nature as nature seems to be indebted to his energy concept. As it is impossible to deduce psychic energies and their distribution by means of the psychoanalytic method, this being dependent on language, the author recommends replacing the economic metapsychological viewpoint by an affective one. The author goes on further to discuss the object of psychoanalytic investigation, the psychoanalytic method used to acquire knowledge, and the function held by metapsychology.
The author examines the role that the buying of commodities plays in the identity formation of the individual. He concludes that it is nowadays no longer the instrumental utility value but a psychical utility value that influences the decision to buy a commodity and that the psychical utility value can have different functions for consumers. In neurotically structured individuals, normal consuming can end in an identity extension where the individual identifies transitively unconscious scenes with those in advertisements, thus making these unconscious scenes conscious in their guise. When individuals are mainly narcissistically structured, an >identity of commodities< can be found, that is, a non-personal identity formation mediated by commodities in which the individuals identify reflexively with the scenic figures from Internet games, movies, television programs, and commercials.
The author examines different definitions and applications of the terms >psychic energy< and >libido.< With regard to the >psychic energy< terminology, he shows that its application and usage relate in particular to the perspective of Brenner and not to Freud's definition. He argues that Freud uses the term >psychic energy< as a synonym for >libido,< and not >libido< as a synonym for >psychic energy.< It is demonstrated that in Freud's view, up until 1914, >libido< relates to manifestations of bodily sexual tensions, and subsequently this term applies to the manifestations of sexual energy in the psychic field. The author rejects this change in terminology and also challenges Freud's attempt to use dynamic-economic considerations as an explanatory device for epistemological reasons. Freud's concept of energy is inconsistent with the meaning of energy as defined in the physical sciences, and whereas the metapsychological topographical, dynamic, and structural viewpoints have a solid foundation in the representational world to which the psychoanalytic process affords unique access, this is not true of the economic viewpoint. It is claimed that bodily tensions only exist in the representational world in the form of affects, so that, in the author's opinion, the economic viewpoint should be abandoned in favour of an affective one. In the context of the endeavour to obtain pleasure and avoid unpleasure adduced by Freud, this viewpoint focuses on the relationships between affects and the different elements of the representational world, thereby serving as the subject of metapsychological investigation.
The author investigates conversion, the process by which psychic contents are transformed into bodily symptoms. The author concludes that this process cannot be explained by libido theory or by assuming the existence of a psychic energy. He argues that although Freud was convinced that >the leap from a mental process to a somatic innervation … can never be fully comprehensible to us,< this process is, nonetheless, comprehensible in terms of Freud's own conceptualisation. To understand this process, one must take the characteristics of the primary process to which the >replacement of external by psychical reality< belongs as radical as his thesis of a hallucinatory wish fulfilment. This thesis includes not only the hallucinatory satisfaction of instinctual wishes, but also the hallucinatory satisfaction of the desire to avoid unpleasure, which is understood as a process by which the internal conditions of this affect are displaced from the presentational world into perceptions via conversion.
This is a study of the social character of managers and staff at the U.S. ACTION Agency. The context of the study was a joint union-management work improvement program that took place in the U.S. ACTION Agency from 1977-80. The author, with others from the Harvard Project on Technology, Work and Character, was contracted by ACTION, to be a third-party researcher-consultant for the program. The methods of this study include in-depth interviews with 30 people, both managers and staff. The instrument for these interviews was an >interpretive questionnaire< originally developed by Erich FROMM to elicit both ethnographic and characterological information. Additional data were gathered through dialogues with individuals and office groups, and through participant observation. The findings of this study include a typology of five social character types at ACTION headquarters: sociable idealists, craftsman-idealists, political idealists, technical administrators and diplomat-administrators. The study discusses their adaptations to the organization of work, and how people of different social character types interact with each other around the work tasks, both productively and unproductively. This research demonstrates the importance of understanding local meanings, values, and motivations when planning organizational change. It is an example of using social character theory and participant research as significant methods for achieving such understanding.The theoretical framework for interpretation is Erich FROMM's theory of social character as adapted by Michael Maccoby for use in organizational change projects. FROMM's theory develops a typology of shared character syndromes functionally related to the socioeconomic and cultural environment; Maccoby develops empirical typologies of adaptations to work in each work setting, conceptualized and named through >participant research< with the people studied. Participant research creates new knowledge that can stimulate and support change in the workplace.
The concept of countertransference has a long history in psychoanalysis. This paper sketches the phenomenon referred to by countertransference and the development of the concept, from being signs of disturbance in the analyst to an important road to knowledge about the patient's inner life. The complexity of the questions discussed today – how to understand the concepts of neutrality, abstinence, and empathy; the relative subjective mutuality and symmetry of the analytic situation; the analyst's enactments and self-disclosure of feelings – reflects the complexity of the contemporary view of the patient–analyst relationship. In conclusion, the author presents a model illustrating the disturbing and informative aspects of countertransference together with the conceptual relationship between countertransference on the one hand and empathy and projective identification on the other. Finally, by differentiating between intuitive and irrational levels of functioning, an integrated model for countertransference is presented, synthesising the essence of the concept as it is used today.
The boundary concept has been central to discussions on ethics and psychoanalysis over the past few decades. The main distinction has been between less malignant boundary crossings and more harmful violations. More recently, the concept has been criticized as not discriminating between technique and ethics. The author argues that these problems are connected to the way the boundary concept is defined. He suggests that it is specified to indicate a delimitation of an analytic area of conduct. In an analogous manner, an area of ethical conduct is framed by a boundary between ethical and unethical actions in the treatment situation. The analytic area has a narrower limitation than ethics and a stricter articulation of its concept of attitude; not all unanalytic actions are unethical. This simple model of interpersonally specified boundaries allows us to discriminate between different kinds of transgression in analytic work. In addition to violations and crossings, a third instance is described denoting a transgression of the analytic but not the ethical boundary. These can be called boundary stretchings, and are either intended or unintended deviations of method. The slippery slope mechanism of ethical misconduct is an imminent risk if boundary stretchings are ignored and not subject to scrutiny and analysis.
During the first twenty years that Freud spent creating his theory, he assumed that most of the functions responsible for creating mental-thought structures were organized according to two different forms or principles of thought. He called these forms >primary process< and >secondary process<. The >secondary process< is identified with rational thinking and the ego, and it is easy to follow the changes that this concept underwent in the works of Freud that followed. The concept of >primary process<, on the other hand, disappeared from his later works with no explanation. This article traces the changes that the >primary process< underwent in Freud's thinking and examines the connection between his analytical technique and his research method. A close study of the changes that the >primary process< underwent reveals that Freud's developmental thought process included concepts whose directional changes may be termed >regressive<.
Supervisors who wish to meet their supervisees’ needs to grow as clinicians will encounter two paradoxical knowledge-related needs of supervisees. On one pole of this paradox is their need to assimilate new knowledge into their existing clinical knowledge; on the other pole is their need for acknowledgement, validation, and formulation of their unique experiential and unarticulated knowledge. Meeting this need helps the supervisees to balance regressive states and painful gaps between their own and their supervisors’ knowledge, which might put the supervisory relationship at risk.
Therapists’ quest for constructing meaning systems of their patients’ experiences progresses in cycles. These cycles consist of: (1) efforts to achieve closures, propelled by the depressive position with its concomitant judgments, resolutions, and decisiveness, and (2) efforts to dissolve closures, propelled by the schizo-paranoid position, searching anxiously and excitedly for new ways to construct meaning. By struggling to facilitate their supervisees’ cycles of achieving and dissolving closures, supervisors help them to grow as clinicians. Supervisees usually welcome the supervisors’ help in constructing meaning systems and achieving closures. They become wary, however, when their supervisors suggest that they dismantle these systems and dissolve their closures because these suggestions undermine their self-assurance as well as their sense of morality, both nourished by the depressive position. Several approaches are suggested for supervisors to facilitate their supervisees’ efforts to dissolve closures.
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.
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.
The centrality of the supervisory relationship to the professional development of supervisees may encourage dependency needs and regressive wishes. This process may undermine the delicate balance in supervision between an optimal didactic tension and an atmosphere of calmness and security. The present paper advises supervisors to take into account the gap in power and interests between their supervisees and themselves, and the temptation that may arise within them to use their supervisees' regression in order to avoid resistance. Such awareness will help them make controlled and appropriate use of such analytic powers and maintain the balance between supervisees' >regressive selves< and >mature selves.< In addition, a perception of supervisory relations as a space of mutual alternating regressive states is offered as an important aspect of supervisor–supervisee communication.
Analytic writers have studied existential anxiety or annihilation anxiety, emanating from traumatic disruptions to people’s sense of going-on-being, reminders of their finitude, and facing a chaotic reality, and suggested that they can endure this anxiety by being with and living through it together with another person. The literature suggests that to be with patients who experience such anxiety, therapists need to indulge >narcissistically< in their own memories and fantasies of similar experiences, and, in parallel to the patients, enter transient regressive states. Sometimes, however, therapists are faced with a chaotic analytic reality that arouses existential anxiety in themselves, and seek to share it with their supervisors who, by experiencing parallel regressive states, can identify with their supervisees and grasp their experiences. Supervisors who consistently fail to be with their supervisees at such moments and persist in offering them new constructions of therapeutic materials might strengthen the supervisees’ defensive operations and disrupt their development as therapists.
Children construct their inner worlds by internalizing real and imagined aspects of their parental figures and their families as whole objects with their relational configurations. These familial configurations are often evoked in the context of communities that, similarly to families, struggle to preserve and advance their unity and collective values, interests, and symbols. Supervisees acknowledge their internalized familial relational configurations when they explore their countertransferences and their transferential responses to the analytic community. Understanding these transferences in supervision may facilitate the process of assimilating the analytic community into supervisees’ professional selves. Moreover, the supervisors represent and mediate both the community’s balanced and flexible relational therapeutic positions and its complexities. These positions might provide the supervisees with new group-object experiences and change their defensively organized rigid familial relational configurations, thereby further integrating the supervisees’ professional selves as well as strengthening the analytic community.
To maintain complex civilisation within planetary boundaries, we must secure a whole >system of systems< transformation of our activities. In this article, based on the lecture notes for my keynote speech at the International Conference on Critical and Radical Humanist Work and Organizational Psychology, I explore the ethical dimensions of making organisations that can help us improve our collective decision-making and at the same time become persons whose acting and being is consistent with the sustainability imperative. I outline a human capability for ethical organising which is directed towards making organisations that generate life-value, or those resources by which we cultivate the relational and material conditions for stewarding and sustaining all living beings and things. The >value of meaningfulness< and >mutuality as an organising principle< afford conversion factors for translating our general >will to form< into a human capability for ethically desirable organising. Meaningful work provides action contexts for people to discover, protect and develop values that matter to them. The moral value of meaningfulness is also productive for breaking into vicious cycles of corporate alienation that prevent the emergence of organisations as collective moral agents, characterised by integrity and empathy. I conclude that we need a fresh democratic dispensation – one that covers our associational life across all fields of endeavour.
This article aims to be an intervention into the recent discussions on the importance anxiety and ontological security in the study of International Relations (IR) (Kinvall and Mitzen, 2020; Hom and Steele, 2020; Rumelili, 2020). The paper poses an alternative critical starting point based on the Marxist concept of alienation. Marx’s work on alienation continued in historical materialist traditions such as in Lukács’ (1971) analysis reification has a lot to offer to the discussions on emotions and anxiety and the development of a politically relevant critical theory of IR. My purpose is to draw attention to the potential of Marxist social theory and particularly the concept of alienation in contributing to the development of an emancipatory critical IR theory. Most of the recent discussions on anxiety remain at an abstract level. The recent existential accounts of anxiety and ontological insecurity have subjectivist and idealist conceptions failing to account for the structures of power and domination in capitalist society. However, Marx’s concept of alienation deals with the consequences of power and domination in a more historically specific way (Sayers 2011, 1) providing the basis for a more meaningful social critique oriented to human emancipation.
This paper aims at the presentation of ethical and political grounds of the pedagogy of asylum, which, in its assumptions, refers to concepts of such thinkers as Emmanuel Levinas, Erich Fromm, George Steiner, Hannah Arendt, Michael Walzer, Avishai Margalit, Jacques Derrida and Janusz Korczak. Utopia of hospitality, presented in its basic assumptions, constitutes a look at the social life, life of individuals and communities, as concentrated in asylums, while its author thinks that it forms an answer to modern challenges to Western democracies, education and politics in the >Age of Migration<.
Fromm's last interview
(1980)
To describe how a number of personality theories and other general theories of behavior have incorporated the concept of creativity, 3 main streams of psy-chological thought--psychoanalytic, humanistic, and behavioristic--are reviewed. In the psychoanalytic framework, the ideas of Freud, Jung, O. Rank, E. Kris, and L. S. Kubie are summarized. In the humanistic area, the ideas of A. Adler, H. A. Murray, A. Maslow, C. R. Rogers, G. Kelly, and E. FROMM regarding the creative process are summarized. A common theme is derived from the behavioristic position that creative behavior is learned and may be explained in stimulus-response terms.
Restructuring Psychoanalysis
(1985)