Presents overview of Erich FROMM's theory of human development with special emphasis on the origin of basic human needs, reciprocal interaction between these needs, and sociocultural structures that mold social character. Describes different types of social character in terms of socioeconomic structures that produce them. Describes features of good society and specifies implications for counselors.
Bericht einer Selbstanalyse
(1993)
Discourse on the West
(1993)
Power as Knowledge
(1993)
The Looking-Glass Self
(1993)
The Colored Woman's Office
(1993)
The Spirit of Modern Europe
(1993)
The Patriarchal Family
(1993)
Youth and American ldlentity
(1993)
In his closing address to the IFPS Conference on the theme >Psychoanalysis between conformity and opposition<, held in Munich in 1992, the author emphasizes the importance of the psychoanalytical training system in promoting a sense of responsibility on the part of the psychoanalyst. He bases his discussion on Winnicott's concept of the capacity for concern, and concludes that the current training system runs counter to the goal of encouraging a sense of responsibility in psychoanalysts. In this, the author confirms criticism currently being expressed in Germany whereby this situation is a consequence of the incorporation of personal development processes, including the training analysis, within the educational programme used by the training institutions. He sees the reason for the failure to implement changes in the training system as an unconscious need on the part of analysts in training for intimacy, a need which coincides with the need of the institutions involved to maintain their power.
This paper presents vignettes of a case from the city of Rio de Janeiro in which temporality appears as a fundamental issue. Severe difficulties in validating the past and integrating past, present and future reveal pertinent questions on time and the ideal function in the contemporary world. The author underlines the relevance of such questioning for the practice of psychoanalysis today.
Out of Our Minds
(1993)
The contingencies in life histories of one male and two female patients of their wish to engage in new techniques for fertility and procreation are explored. Remarkable denial strategies defending narcissistic vulnerabilities were found in all cases. Although they are in fact quite stressful and at best moderately succesful the new medical-technical solutions can acquire magic qualities warding off unresolved conflicts around omnipotence and gender differentiation. In the treatment-process transference undergoes distinct shifts in quality, intensity as well as object when oedipal and pre-oedipal conflicts tend to be acted out with the administering physician. As to the fate of the psychic development of children begotten in these new forms of procreation and parenting, e.g. lesbian couples, much is yet unclear; though complex and fluid defenses coloured by denial and magical qualities towards the father introject have been observed.
Sociology and Social Facts
(1993)
Suicide and Modernity
(1993)
The Sociological Imagination
(1993)
Länger leben trotz Medien
(1993)
Some salient features of a Sullivanian perspective are given as a background for a discussion of the case of Anna. Lived experience is mentioned as of equal importance as fantasy. Technically, analytic inquiry in the form of questions is stressed. In his review of the case presentation, the author observes that too much emphasis is given to content, compared to form. He notes that the therapist does not report key transference and non-transference interactions with the patient and further suggests that the patient still has significant narcissistic problems. He suggests that it is time to confront the patient with her characterological ways of relating to the analyst.
Das freie Kind
(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.
E Pluribus Unum?
(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.
The Stranger
(1993)
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.
Can the Subaltern Speak?
(1993)
Vorbemerkung
(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.
The Yellow Wallpaper
(1993)
Women and Economics
(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)