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Benign Aggression (Fromm)
(2017)
Malignant Aggression (Fromm)
(2017)
Several thinkers have expressed the view that the central nostrums of neoliberalism, including self-reliance, personal responsibility and individual risk, have become part of the >common sense< fabric of everyday life. My paper argues that Erich Fromm’s idea of social character offers a comprehensive and persuasive answer to this question. While some have sought the answer to this conundrum in Foucault’s notion of governmentality, I argue that, by itself, this answer is not sufficient. What is significant about the notion of social character, I claim, is that it manages to unify >top-down< approaches like governmentality focused on ideas and policy, with >bottom-up< approaches focused on how the insights of day to day experience are mediated through culture. Adapting this theory to neoliberalism, I argue, means that the >common sense< nature of neoliberalism, and the lack of a reckoning for its massive economic failure (as evidenced by the 2007 Great Recession), are explicable through the formation of a neoliberal social character, by means of which experiential processes align with cultural meanings and, subsequently, fuse with social expectations.
The fluidity, contradictions, and multiplicity of the neoliberal structures fragment the historical continuity of our culture. The signifying chain, which our culture serves, is shattered and hence there is a constant need to regain our lost identity. However, the massive concentration of the market economy dissuades us from achieving this end. Psychoanalytically, we regress into the pregenital stages of human development, which give rise to narcissistic traits. Social narcissism finds its expressions through the accumulation and possessions of lacuna of >images< and >appearances< that serve to cover existential issues in contemporary life. Reliance on surface reality, this modern-day psychopathology deadens our individual convictions on social and political issues, as well as our fidelity in emotional matters. As a consequence, we lose concern over things that might be equally or more important for the survival of our society—tradition.
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.
This is a review article of the following five recent studies on populism: 1) Ruth Wodak’s The Politics of Fear: What Right-Wing Populist Discourses Mean (Sage, 2015); 2) Benjamin Moffitt’s The Global Rise of Populism: Performance, Political Style and Representation (Stanford University Press, 2016); 3) Cas Mudde and Cristóbal Rovira Kaltwasser’s Populism: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford University Press, 2017); 4) Jan-Werner Müller’s What is Populism? (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016); and 5) John B. Judis’ The Populist Explosion: How the Great Recession Transformed American and European Politics (Columbia Global Reports, 2016). The review argues for a return to early Frankfurt School Critical Theory to address some of the shortcomings of these studies.
Nachwort
(2017)
Symbolic of what we have possessed, lost, and wish to remember, the arts can memorialize cultural experiences too telling for mere speech. Aided by art, design, and storytelling, the many millions of visitors to the National September 11 Memorial Museum are remembering together not just one or more individuals or local communities, but an entire world that no longer exists. This paper details the collaboration between exhibition designer, Tom Hennes of Thinc Design, and myself, a psychoanalytic psychologist, in the relational design of the museum. This process entailed use of parallel and intertwined perspectives on how to help visitors remember, commemorate, honor, educate, witness, and mourn in order to transform unspeakable destruction into a creative reconstruction of continuity and vitality. How a psychoanalytic consultation to a museum design team developed from applying a few theoretical principles to a more generalizable model will be illustrated with narrative accounts of key moments.
Geleitwort
(2017)
The arrival of a newborn baby confronts the parents with the loss of their own childhood and the process of mourning that this entails. In the case of a premature birth, where the often brutal experience of birth is followed by a forced separation of hospitalization, the situation is even more complicated, making it sometimes difficult for the mother to invest in the baby libidinally. The presence of a psychoanalyst working with the resuscitation team can facilitate the encounter with the parents, the baby, and the caretakers, and can, by >supposing a subject< in the baby, help to restore the bond between mother and child.
Maslow’s concept of self-actualization has been a bulwark of humanistic psychology for more than fifty years, and has increasingly gained international appeal beyond its original nexus within the United States. His description of the high-achieving characteristics of self-actualizing men and women has influenced theorists and practitioners in such fields as counseling, education, health care, management, and organizational psychology. Through these same decades, Maslow’s formulation has also been criticized as promoting a hyper-individualistic, even narcissistic, orientation to personality growth. Because Maslow by temperament and intellectual style expressed himself in an ever-evolving set of speeches and writings that were seldom explicit about interpersonal relations, his actual outlook on the social world of self-actualizers has remained elusive. The focus of this paper, therefore, is how Maslow depicted self-actualizing people with regard to five major interpersonal dimensions of life: friendship, romantic love, marriage and lasting intimacy, parenthood, and communal service. By pulling together Maslow’s comments primarily in his published works, and secondarily in his unpublished works-in-progress, it is possible to explicate his tacit viewpoint. Doing so will not only help dispel the misconception that Maslow depicted self-actualizers as loners or even hermits, but also guide future theory and research on personality growth.
The German pilot Andreas Lubitz, who intentionally crashed a plane with 149 passengers, killing all on board including himself, had been a patient in psychiatric and psychotherapeutic consultations. This paper deals with the legal and psychoanalytic consequences of this action, including terminological issues concerning terrorism.
Discussion of papers by Siri Gullestad, Klaus Hoffmann, and Manya Steinkoler, on the lone terrorist
(2017)
Individual, unique motivations played a major role in the acts committed by the three terrorists under discussion. The circumstances leading to the terrorist’s attack can, in each case, be understood with respect to a pattern of reciprocal violations of expectations of living in a safe, predictable world. Seeking help for severe depression, suicidality, coupled with an inability to contain the rage engendered by these experiences, led to an increasing propensity in these men for eruptive aggression. In one case, experiences of feeling dominated by an unpredictable mother who was rejecting and seductive were not accorded central significance. In another case, having profound feelings of his being on the cusp of violence go unrecognized preceded the terrorist act. In a third case, having faint feelings of wanting to live unrecognized, whereas only suicidal impulses were considered to be of significance, failed to stem the violence. To what extent the failure of mental health professionals to assess the precarious psychological organization of these three men, as well as to recognize what resources were still intact, is only open to speculation. Although recognizing the potential for violence more directly may not have prevented their violent act, it also did nothing to diminish the likelihood.
Decades of psychoanalytic developmental studies on children one year of age and under point to the need for maternal soothing when the infant is crying. Contrary to behavioral theorists who recommend letting the infant >cry it out,< data from analytically informed researchers of very different orientations converge on the conclusion that rocking, feeding, and/or verbal soothing by the mothering figure are requisite to set the stage for good mental health during the rest of the child’s development.
Mentalization defines the capacity to attribute mental states such as desires and beliefs to others and to understand that these can differ from our own. Such a capacity can be compromised in several psychiatric conditions and is the main target of many types of psychotherapy. Here we propose a theoretic model in which mentalization is achieved through a process we have termed >alphabetization< of the emotions. In this model, the patient–analyst relationship is observed within the analytic field so that all the communications of the patient and/or the analyst can be considered as >dreams< narrating the emotional >climate< of the field itself. Both the analyst and the patient contribute to the generation of the >climate,< and the analyst’s role is to promote the patient’s capacity to convert the unknown sensations into >dreams< or stories so as to make the emotional experience symbolized and meaningful.
The initiator of the conference and (together with Sophie de Mijolla-Mellor) conference co-chair, Harold Blum, introduces the objectives of the interdisciplinary and psychoanalytic conference on >Parent–Infant Disturbance: Theory and Therapy.< In the epilogue, the author brings up the coincident Paris terrorist attack of November 13, 2015 – the first day of this two-day conference.
The mother’s intrapsychic mental representation of her infant begins before pregnancy and is modified during pregnancy and thereafter. Parents have conscious expectations and unconscious fantasies about their infant, which are all too often not consistent with reality. Early intervention in infant–parent disturbances is important for repair of the relationship and prevention of later pathogenic development. A clinical example of a mother’s unconscious ambivalent mental representations of her infant is presented.
On the need to be beguiled
(2017)
This paper presents the view that the >need to be beguiled< is a fundamental experiential dimension immanent within the drive organization of the human psyche. It is argued that, as an expression of the >feminine,< inherent in the constitutional bisexuality of the psyche, this need makes itself felt from the very beginning of any mother–infant interaction. It seems to function as a sine qua non element for the establishment of early object relationships and for the reception and incorporation of perceptual and psychic stimuli arriving from without. Developmentally, this need finds expression in a variety of relational manifestations, that is, creative acceptance, receptivity, and surrender at one end of the spectrum, all the way to abusive masochism at the other. The position and vicissitudes of this dynamic within the psychoanalytic condition are examined with some thoroughness.
There is nothing more fitting, the author believes, than for psychoanalysts to help our nations better understand the identity struggle that he believes underlies the radicalization process of radical Islamists. This identity struggle is a very deep one. At its core, it concerns what an individual Muslim feels about his or her bonds to the nation-state and what single cause in their life they are willing to die for. In this article, this struggle is characterized as theo-political and Islamo-national. In order to understand this better as psychoanalysts, the importance of the personal narrative – this sense of how an individual’s identity fits and meshes with the world around them – is stressed. To that end, this article will first given an introduction to the author and his family, and then bring readers to the Arab Awakening, which began in 2011. Dr. Slavin’s paper on Tunisia has highlighted so many of the elements of the changes that transformed Tunisia and some of the substrate that led to that evolution; this article provides the context both regionally and, more importantly, within the Muslim consciousness. The author describes the lens through which he was raised in Wisconsin as a devout Muslim and the son of Syrian political refugees. This then overlays an understanding of what was really happening across the revolutions of the Arab Awakening against tyranny and in the global consciousness of individual Muslims.
Vor einem Wiedererstarken des Faschismus hat bereits Bertolt Brecht gewarnt: >Der Schoß ist fruchtbar noch, aus dem das kroch.< Aber was ist dieser >Schoß<? Die bemerkenswerten Antworten, die Wilhelm Reich auf diese Frage gab, werden bis heute fast durchgängig ignoriert, auch in Politik, Faschismus- und Rechtsextremismusforschung. Das ist bitter, weil Reich es anders verdient hätte. Wichtiger ist jedoch: Ohne diese Antworten endlich ebenfalls zu berücksichtigen, dürfte es weder eine Chance geben, die internationale „braune Renaissance“ zu verstehen noch ihr wirkungsvoll entgegenzutreten. Das Buch verbindet knappe biografische Informationen zu Reich und seiner >Massenpsychologie< mit Antworten auf Fragen wie: Was war bzw. ist die wichtigste psychosoziale Basis politischer >Rechts<-Entwicklungen – früher und heute? Welche Auswirkungen hat autoritär-entfremdende Sozialisierung für das Zustandekommen von Destruktion, Rassismus und Krieg? Welche Rolle spielen psychische Faktoren für das Aufrechterhalten patriarchalisch-kapitalistisch-neoliberaler Systeme und für das mögliche Revolutionieren dieser Systeme? Welche Menschen- und Weltbilder können als Voraussetzung zum konstruktiven Handeln dienen?
In their introductory remarks, the guest editors, themselves presenters at the conference >Parent–Infant Disturbance: Theory and Therapy,< introduce the philosophy and methodology underlying this interdisciplinary psychoanalytic conference and outline the multiple dimensions of the issue at hand, as they are addressed by the individual contributions to this volume. The paper concludes with a remembrance of and dedication to the victims of the Paris terrorist attack of November 13, 2015.
The paper presents a developmental and dynamic multitheoretical overview of many dimensions of attachment-related processes activated under the conditions of maternal depression. The clinical vignette (from the analytic practice of Eva D. Papiasvili) of reconstructive anaytic work with an adult patient illustrates the profound impact of maternal depression on precocious early differentiation between the attachment styles, of the depressed parent and the substitute caregiver, at the root of early >counterdependent< self-sufficiency. Through reconstructive interpretive work, first with enactments and then dreams, pertaining to not-remembered, represented, or symbolized events of earliest infancy, the patient is able to make a series of developmentally transformative symbolic leaps, restoring the capacity for intimacy, hope, trust, and pleasure. This breaks the intergenerational mother–daughter transmission of postpartum depression and related problematic attachment.
The tripod of terrorism
(2017)
Violent attacks against innocent civilians occurring on an everyday and global basis have intensified the discourse on terrorism. However, like pornography, terrorism seems readily recognizable but hard to define. The designation is applied to the destructive acts of religious zealots, mentally unstable individuals, terror-inducing despots, separatist militia, and, at times, even legitimate freedom fighters. Ordinary language fails to define terrorism’s nosological circumference and is itself defiled in the process. While acknowledging this denotational conundrum, this paper will propose that the origins of the current mayhem by the radicalized few reside in three geopolitical realms. These include the long shadow of colonialism, the hypocrisy and violence of certain Western foreign policies, and some fundamental problems in the societies that form the crucible of such rage. As a result, ameliorative strategies need to be directed at (and require the collaboration of) all three parties at the root of this tragic and bloody scenario.
Rock-A-Bye Baby
(2017)
How can some classical Freudian concepts such as defense, transference, infantile sexuality, and the role of the body ego and superego in the first year of life be applied to help the analyst working with parent–infant dyads? The case of a newborn that could not look at her mother, who did not feel empathy towards this child conceived as a result of an egg donation, was understood using Winnicott’s notion of early superego and the lack of libidinal pleasure. The notion of defenses towards primitive anxiety and the role of unconscious maternal functioning were helpful in helping the child as well as the parents to regulate their interactions.
This article brings Erich Fromm and Theodor W. Adorno back into dialogue by discussing the cultural phenomena of humor and laughter based on their theoretical writings. I argue that what is typically considered socially critical humor, like offensive jokes or harsh satire, often fails to meet the preconditions of criticism in the light of Adorno’s and Fromm’s thinking. Humor, to be socially critical, has to be life-affirmative and non-positional, and it has to challenge the limits of humor. It is also claimed that in this scope, humor cannot be instrumental.
Begrüßung
(2017)
Worte des Dankes
(2017)
This paper addresses issues of continuity and discontinuity regarding the role of the socio-cultural in psychoanalysis. Starting with Freud and Fromm’s ideas on social change, the author discussed a dynamics whereby psychoanalytic culture gradually encouraged a process of delinking the psyche from the social. This disengagement from the socio-cultural has encouraged dissociative mechanisms and social narcissism. Using a case study the author shows the importance of recapturing formulations that stress an analytic >Social Third.<
Corporate Responsibility in Zeiten der Globalisierung: Herausforderungen an die Unternehmensethik
(2017)
The goal of this paper is to emphasize the early consequences of pre-Oedipal maternal deprivation, addressing the theories and techniques of the pioneers of child psychoanalysis. Even when these theories differ in their understanding and conceptualization of child psychopathology, their common denominator is that they believe in the importance of the infant’s early experiences of life and the necessary physical and emotional constancy of the mother–infant dyad. This paper approaches the different theories using three clinical vignettes. Through the synthesis of the psychoanalytic therapeutic process of a four-year-old boy, we can see how the conflicts and symptoms evolved and resolved in the course of five years of treatment, during which the boy’s behavior and productivity changed, allowing the treatment to come to an end. This boy was able to work through his traumatic separation experience in analysis, and to develop more mature defense mechanisms that led him toward a better adjustment to his environment. We can conclude that the early interruption of maternal care led to serious symptoms in this child’s behavior and mental organization. If these difficulties had not been addressed in time, the symptoms would have gone on to become severe.
Witch-mother is which? The potential role of the analyst in facilitating authentic motherhood
(2017)
This paper explores challenges in the treatment of women suffering from disturbances in maternal identification. A review of the psychoanalytic and developmental literature focuses on the frequent finding of early-onset mother–daughter relational disturbance involving maternal narcissistic fragility and exaggerated dependency needs, intergenerational trauma, and related psychopathology including mutual affect dysregulation. A case example of a young woman with a severe anxiety disorder is presented and discussed to illustrate the challenges to the traditional psychoanalytic technique. This patient avoided pregnancy into her late thirties and entered analysis with feelings of inauthenticity, characterological masochism, and a >secret mission< to unmask the witch recurring in her dreams. Through an elaborate working-through of negative maternal transference, the analyst and patient saw through the birth of the patient’s authentic self, a new approach to her career, her relationships with men, and her anticipation of the birth of a child by the sixth year of treatment. The author posits that psychoanalytic technique benefits from contemporary, attachment, and trauma research that supports the analyst’s playing a more active role in approaching, co-regulating, tolerating, and integrating avoided affects and memory traces that are associated with early-onset relational disturbances worsened by the effects of violence, maltreatment, and loss.
Prefazione
(2017)
Behind an intrusive mother’s view of her actual child lies a disproportionate, hidden desire to revive an ideal relationship with a perfect mother. The resulting image of an idealized child then becomes a strategic aspect of the mother’s own identity, representing an idealized figure from her own past. As the mother’s idealization is disturbed by the reality of the child, the mother experiences the situation between herself and the baby as >pathological,< that is, disruptive to her. She then attempts to repair the idealization by resisting any change in the status of her relationship to her child, even as the child grows older. Her rigidity in this regard necessarily excludes a paternal presence that could challenge or change the mother–infant idealized dyad. The mother’s orientation is also contradictory to, and acts as a resistance to, psychoanalytic therapeutic interventions, which aim at any >change.<