Can the Subaltern Speak?
(1993)
A challenge is offered to the characterization of psychoanalysis as suffering from potentially fatal epistemic flaws and needing to ground itself in the language of hermeneutics, neuropsychology, or infant observation in order to survive. Psychoanalytic truth is neither made up nor discovered. Psychoanalytic propositions are true in the important sense of being the most useful statements we can make right now about the nature and functioning of the human unconscious. Psychoanalytic theories evolve through rational critical discourse just as theories evolve in all fields of science and scholarship.
The hermeneutic turn in psychoanalysis may be less a move toward soft science than an attempt to address certain failures in the classical tradition. The latter has failed to convert Freud's many metaphors into anything like responsible science it has been unable to give up its fascination with Freud and move on to other thinkers and other points of view it has been unable to find an answer to the problem of secrecy and privileged access to clinical data under the heavy hand of theory, it has all but eliminated research from the psychoanalytic enterprise and finally, it has been unable to find a home for the Roshomon effect and the fact that almost everything worth looking at has at least two sides. Above all, psychoanalysis needs to recognize that our theory is often the projection of either our Zeitgeist or our personal history. Until we can make room for the problem of subjectivity in our theory-building, we will never be able to separate the singer from the song.
An analysis of the contribution of Max Weber and the early critical theorists (eg, Erich FROMM and Max Horkheimer) to the development of empirical social psychology. Unlike rationalists, for whom rational action is axiomatic, Weber and his successors realized that social actors may be deeply ambivalent in their impulses. They were led to this realization by concern about the uncertain loyalties of contemporary social classes. Indeed, Max Weber's seminal and still-neglected research on the psychology of rural east Prussian laborers gave empirical survey research its first fateful stimulus and led to a succession of later studies by Marie Bernays, Adolf Levenstein, and others. Perhaps the most notable was a survey of the working class in Weimar Germany, 1929-1931, carried out by FROMM and Horkheimer. Results of this survey led the authors to realize that even avowed democrats may be unconsciously ambivalent about democracy, with an admixture of democratic and authoritarian tendencies. This realization led to a cycle of important studies culminating in Theodor W. Adorno's, R. N. Sanford's, Else Frenkel-Brunswick's, and Daniel J. Levinson's The Authoritarian Personality (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1950), which even its detractors agree was a major intellectual and technical milestone in the history of empirical social psychology.
The Stranger
(1993)
The author develops the thesis that transference can only be properly understood as representing a transferred burden. Wherever the burden, by means of the symptoms it causes, succeeds in finding readiness in a fellow human being to share the predicament, therapy ensues in form of exceptional vicarious solidarity. Thus transfer is transformed into transference. Therapy, then, amounts to a second, a dialogical reception. This means reconnection of the ties, once lost, with a common human responsibility with regard to the challenges and potentialities of individual and social life contained in the burden. This constitutes the human ground, and the only ground, on which any methodical skills and theory formations carry real human weight.
An underlying premise of this paper is that human beings actively and purposefully impose meanings on their experiences of psychic injury and that these meanings then have important implications for character development. Specifically, the paper examines how individuals, in defensive reaction to psychic injury, may repress their >impossible-to-fulfill< wishes, only to find those wishes eventually reborn as needs. In this way, a person's oppressive cruelty to his own wishes gives rise to resentment, indignation, and entitlement, which, in turn, fuel the experience of need. While wish implicitly communicates a request to receive from another, need, with its vicissitudes of demand and urgency, may do violence to the free social discourse of giving and receiving. The interpersonal field of give-and-take may be so constrained by the circular compulsivity of mandated giving and entitled needfulness that it is emptied of any spontaneous desire. The differential impact of communicating needs and wishes on the wider social contract – of which psychotherapy is an influential constituent – is then addressed. The paper then discusses how need and entitlement may be manifested in the transference along a passivity-activity dimension and thus illuminate the theme of responsibility for the treatment. Finally, the view of need as an entitled demand for gratification is contrasted with a view of need as a fervent wish for recognition in conjunction with the process of mourning. Mourning is viewed as a process of reintegrating impossible-to-fulfill wishes for >what could have been< and relinquishing the necessity of their fulfillment.
Vorbemerkung
(1993)
E Pluribus Unum?
(1993)
Although Theodor W. Adorno, Else Frenkel-Brunswick, Daniel J. Levinson, and R. Nevitt Stanford promised to later review the theoretical contributions that guided their work when they published The Authoritarian Personality in 1950, this was never done. Nor have any of the 1,200+ subsequent studies on authoritarianism focused explicitly on the theoretical ideas that resulted in the nine subsyndromes introduced in the original study: conventionalism, authoritarian submission, authoritarian aggression, antiintraception, superstition and stereotype, power and toughness, destructiveness and cynicism, projectivity, and concern with sex. Assessed here, therefore, are the theoretical and methodological contributions that were eventually incorporated into the classical conception of authoritarianism, particularly those of Erich FROMM, who had been working on a similar concept since the late 1920s.
Reply to the Commentaries
(1993)
Länger leben trotz Medien
(1993)
Coloquio con Rainer Funk
(1993)
Mögliche Gründe für die Ausklammerung der ethischen Dimension und damit des Bösen in der Psychotherapie werden erörtert. Die Vorstellungen des Psychoanalytikers E. FROMM und des Philosophen P. Ricoeur, die sich explizit mit dieser Problematik auseinandersetzten, werden dargelegt. Im Ergebnis wird festgehalten, dass eine sinnvolle Ausklammerung des Bösen durchaus als weise Selbstbeschränkung verstanden werden kann, eine völlige Ausblendung jedoch als Ausdruck anmassender Überschätzung der Möglichkeiten von Psychotherapie zu bewerten ist.
Angst vor der Angst
(1993)
Auf den Phallus kommt es an
(1993)
The Yellow Wallpaper
(1993)
Women and Economics
(1993)
Mind and Brain in the 1990s
(1993)
Der Charakter der Wirtschaft
(1993)
Zur Frage nach der analytischen Brauchbarkeit des Begriffs >Gesellschafts-Charakter< bei Erich Fromm
(1993)
>The Analytic Usefulness of the >Social Character< Concept in Erich Fromm’s Thought<: It is a weakness of traditional social research that it is able, at best, to supply accurate descriptions of the social status quo, but is quite at a loss to undertake any serious prognostication worth the name. Erich Fromm, with his theoretical analysis of >social character<, has developed an approach which might just allow us to predict social developments in the making. First, the author shows how the theory of an >authoritarian character<, originally propounded by Erich Fromm in his worker and employee investigations at the end of the twenties, was subsequently expanded and refined by him. By the time Fromm had finished, he possessed a highly differentiated theory of social character. For a researcher to critically scrutinize his own hypotheses is a rare enough undertaking. But just that was what Erich Fromm undertook to do after his relocation to Mexico – by conducting, for this express purpose, a comprehensive case study of a Mexican village. There the great estates had been broken up barely 40 years earlier, at the time of the Revolution, and the land redistributed to the peasants. Fromm wanted to know which expressions of social character would turn out to be readily adaptable and which would prove intractable. The questioning modalities developed by Fromm involving use of an interpretive questionnaire, and especially his methods of interpretation in terms of the biophilia/ necrophilia polarity, were painstaking in the extreme. That is why final publication of the protocolled findings took until 1970 to complete, thirteen years after the start of planning. Apart from the high qualitative and qualificational demands made on interviewers and analysts, the greatest difficulty probably lay in the ease with which related categories could be confused. Notwithstanding, the concept of social character proved an uncommonly fruitful theoretical approach for carrying out studies into a group’s mindsets and ethical qualities.
Das freie Kind
(1993)