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The fictional protagonist of the Lionel Shriver novel, >We need to talk about Kevin<, massacred nine classmates, his father and his sister with a bow and arrow. He murdered them just before he turned 16, to avoid being prosecuted as an adult. He spared the life of his mother, a kindred spirit, cold, arrogant, who would recognize the depth of his hatred and nihilism. Kevin's maternal grandfather was born in a concentration camp during the Armenian genocide. His mother, Eva, a tough, independent woman, loathed being pregnant and the process of giving birth. Kevin was a demanding baby and then a cruel child. Eva kept telling her husband that she found Kevin's malignity troubling, but he only wanted to see the charming, vulnerable side of the boy. Was Kevin born a sociopath or did he become one due to his experiences in utero and beyond? In this paper, I elucidate how temperamental features, inadequate parenting, transgenerational trauma, and oppressive gender relations created the perfect storm from which Kevin's personality developed. Finally, I will discuss how Eva and Kevin struggled to repair their relationship after the murders, and consider whether forgiveness and reconciliation are even possible after such a heinous act.
Erich Fromm was central to the Frankfurt Institute of Social Research under the direction of Max Horkheimer, but the works of each author, while handling at times similar issues, took different paths. The article’s aim is to analyze how Horkheimer’s anthropology, which would be of importance in Dialectic of Enlightenment, was built as the author embodied in his essays elements of Fromm’s social psychology, albeit overcoming some of its limitations, as well as suggesting new potentials of critique.
The author explores the relationship between Sándor Ferenczi and Sigmund Freud in the light of their correspondence. This allows us to see how Freud was able to offer and create for Ferenczi a >professional and personal home< that enabled the latter to find a much more meaningful and creative contact with himself. According to the author, this experience played an important role in Ferenczi’s later readiness to offer to and create with his patients a similar >psychoanalytic home.< As Freud was not able to share such clinical research work with Ferenczi, a conflict developed between them whose nature has occupied psychoanalysts ever since, and whose seeds can be found in the 1246 letters that they exchanged between January 1908 and May 1933. From this point of view, Ferenczi’s Clinical diary (written in 1932 and published only in 1985) can be seen as the continuation of the dialogue they had entertained for so many years, as well as Ferenczi’s attempt not to give up the “professional and personal home” that they had created together.
The International Federation of Psychoanalytic Societies (IFPS) was established in 1962. The first 20 years of the Federation were a time when psychoanalysis was divided into so-called liberal and orthodox factions. The (then orthodox) International Psychoanalytic Association (IPA) did not admit all psychoanalytic societies, and some societies did not want to join it. In the IFPS, non-IPA-psychoanalysts from Europe, the USA, and South and Middle America came together to discuss their new approaches to psychoanalysis and to find ways to better cope with their patients’ problems. At the beginning an informal organization of autonomous societies, the IFPS persisted for 12 years without a charter. The first three secretary generals came from the German Psychoanalytical Society and greatly influenced the first few years of the IFPS. The IFPS held several international conferences, and new psychoanalytic societies became members. In 1977, after the VIth Forum in Berlin, the IFPS fell into an identity crisis. The conflicts centered on the assumption of responsibility, the authority of the members, and how to understand the aim and sense of the organization. This article deals with the theoretical background of the early IFPS and the development of its self-concept.
The concept of resignation carries widely divergent meanings in the cultural contexts of Western and Eastern experiences. Whereas the Western perspective of resignation implies a negative, impoverished state of self-assertion, the Eastern perspective contains wider and more complex meanings, among which is that resignation is a virtue to be cultivated. Using the writings of the Nobel Prize winner in Literature Yasunari Kawabata, akirame, the Eastern, specifically Japanese, concept of resignation, will be examined for its multilayered psychological and cultural meanings. In addition, from Kawabata’s writing and biographical information, I demonstrate how the Western psychoanalytic concept of Oedipal conflict relates to and manifests in the Eastern psychology of resignation, bridging both Eastern and Western cultures to elucidate underlying, universal human conflicts.
In search of the Human: The trauma of modernity and the >instrumental reason< of the persecutors
(2019)
This article takes the clinical notion of trauma as a historiographic criterion for understanding modernity and its mythologies. If the rewriting of the term trauma – at the intersection of psychoanalysis and neurobiology, cultural anthropology and philosophy of the mind – is the hallmark of contemporaneity, it is quite acceptable to see the Shoah as a radical historical and epistemological watershed. Never before had such a highly productive bureaucratic-industrial system been designed and implemented for the devastation of the very idea of humanity. Auschwitz was, in the most radical ways, the liminal space between Human and Inhuman. It lay right at the cutting edge of the abyss that the executioner shares with his victim – the annihilation of humanity. This essay crosses a question that has always characterized the social construction of subjectivity: the perimeter of the Human, and the interrelationships between identity, alterity, and recognition.
This paper presents a report on our psychoanalytic investigation of cultural folktales, myths, and fables, in which we study, primarily, the extent to which such narratives lurk behind contemporary representations of men and women. Our aim is to identify the multiple narrative structures that form the core plots and storylines of these tales. Following Roland Barthes’ work on mythologies, we want to decode the tales’ ideological components by deciphering the axiomatic assumptions these tales make about the nature of perceived social reality. This represents an attempt to study a mind that is derived from the text. More specifically, we study narratives whose storylines revolve around the struggle between men and women in order to identify the culture’s core concerns about and preoccupations with the relationship between the sexes. We believe that cultural myths or folktales are a royal road to a nation’s collective conscience, and include gendered patterns of defenses, obsessions, fears, and paranoia.
The author attempts to understand the kamikaze attacks during World War II as a phenomenon that crossed a border into the systemic use of suicide attacks. The author first presents two historical precursors before World War II: the Seinan (Southwest) War in 1877; and an event in 1932 known as the Three Suicide-Bombing Heroes. To examine the process leading to kamikaze, the author offers two examples: a scene in which a suicide attack was proposed to pilots; and a story of a general, Oenishi, who has been identified as a person responsible for the campaign. In the discussion, the author employs psychoanalytic arguments on chosen trauma and apocalyptic order to see kamikaze as sharing a common psychology with other warfare. He then focuses on the previous debate over the normality of suicide attackers and argues for the importance of finding a role for positive value in the psychological processes. He concludes that kamikaze was realized through multiple mechanisms and ended up crossing the border to unconventional attack. He closes the paper by suggesting we should make efforts to keep the positive feedback in response to suicide attacks under a certain threshold in order to avoid reinforcing the spiral.
The present paper is an expansion of the author’s discussion of Harold Blum’s seminal presentation >Hate and its vicissitudes< in Prague in 2017. It aims at an elaboration of various aspects of hate and hatred as a complex dynamic intrapsychic and relational affective-cognitive state, alloyed, in different ways, with aggression and love. In this context, various theoretical perspectives concerning the multifaceted relation between hate, love, and sexuality, and hate and destructive aggression, and transformations between them, including the first study of neurobiological correlates of hate, will be raised and explored. Implication on destruction as well as psychic structuring, adaptation and creativity are also considered. The clinical vignettes illustrates the relevance of multiple theoretical conceptualizations in contemporary psychoanalytic practice.
Part I of this paper discussed various dynamic aspects of hate in the individual developmental and clinical context. Part II, also an expansion of the author’s discussion of Harold Blum’s presentation on >Hate and its vicissitudes< in Prague in 2017, examines the theme of hate as a multidimensional dynamic group phenomenon. The paper uses various theoretical perspectives to focus on group unconscious processes and the group-specific dynamic of regression leading to an activation of primitive ego operations, unleashing destructive aggression as well as creative mobilization. Also considered are the implications in terms of destruction, adaptation, and creativity, in relation to group unconscious dynamic processes and intergenerationally trasmitted trauma and posttraumatic developments.
The following essay is a modified version of an invited presentation given in Florence, Italy in May 2017. It builds on and extends some of the previous psychoanalytic and multidisciplinary studies of Dante’s >Divine Comedy< as a >psychoanalysis of the Middle Ages< that greatly contributed to the incipient changes of the cultural episteme. The paper will explore and elaborate the continued relevance of Dantian proto-psychoanalytic insight into the complex role of regression, destruction, transgression, and conflict in generating growth, expansion, and creativity, and the ways in which ethics and erotics intertwine in a complex path towards unity, within the context of his multivocal presubjective, intrasubjective, and intersubjective inquiry leading to psychic reorganization. The liminal nature of Dante’s poetry, extending the symbolic and representational range in a way unprecedented in the vernacular literature of his time, vivifying and representing what is traditionally thought of as beyond representation, will also be considered in terms of its relevance to the contemporary psychoanalytic discourse.
Nowadays, violence appears in various forms in Brazil. From an agricultural country, Brazil became rapidly industrialized, which resulted in large rural exodus and explosion of population density in major cities. Brazil faces today a great social and economic disparity, added to endemic corruption of government, nepotism and lack of social planning. The roots of such violence can be found in our archaic heritage that has been forming Brazilian identity since its early days. The interest of former colonizers was to extract wealth, without regarding the establishment of a nation. This exploitation has been always done by force and violence, with the slave labor of native Indians and imported black people. As a state Brazil was exposed to the primal father’s law, and to the absence of a symbolic father, who could have provided his people with a more stable identity, only given by the paternal law. Is it possible to reframe archaic heritage, rebuilding the missing father image without resorting to a false savior of the fatherland? Is it possible to construct a more equitable society that could propitiate true conditions of citizenship in order to make every citizen, to the extent possible, the protagonist of his own history?
Oedipus goes to the opera: Psychoanalytic inquiry in Enescu’s >Œdipe< and Stravinsky’s >Oedipus Rex<
(2019)
Psychoanalytic inquiry into operas based on the life of Oedipus may provide further knowledge on the Oedipus complex. Therefore, we chose to analyze Enescu’s >Œdipe< and Stravinsky’s >Oedipus Rex<. Two distinct methodologies were used in our study. The first explored the concept of free association through musical themes in the operas. The second involved the comparative study of the Oedipus myth in order to provide a deeper understanding of Oedipus’s character. We observed that Oedipus displayed symptoms of his complex through the traits of aggressiveness and arrogance. Moreover, we noticed that Oedipus was compelled by the necessity of finding out who his real parents were and by unconsciously accomplishing the prophecy. Oedipus assumed the responsibility to free the Thebans from plague. Yet, it was too late, for the feared part of the prophecy was already accomplished. He provided a wrong answer to the Sphinx and then received the most severe punishment, one that would have ostracism as its outcome. It was, however, not too late for Oedipus to finally discover who his real parents were. Nevertheless, afraid of losing his place as King of Thebes, he investigated the plague’s causes. This resulted in his aggression as he resisted discovering >where babies come from.<
Ein selbstbestimmtes Leben zu führen, das sich von keinen äußeren und inneren Vorgaben einschränken lässt, gleichzeitig aber hohe Ansprüche an Selbstoptimierung und Selbstverwirklichung zu realisieren versucht, zeichnet vermehrt das Leben von vor allem jungen Menschen aus, die therapeutische Hilfe suchen. Was bringt sie dazu, ihr Leben so einzurichten, dass sie sich mit Grenzen und Selbstbegrenzungen so schwer tun und sich nicht mit weniger begnügen können? Der folgende Beitrag fragt anhand der Psychoanalytischen Sozialpsychologie Erich Fromms nach den Ursachen für die Entwicklung eines neuen Sozialcharakters, der sich die digitale Technik und die elektronischen Medien zunutze macht, um selbstbestimmt, ungebunden und ohne Rücksicht auf Vorgaben und Maßgaben Wirklichkeit neu, anders und besser zu ‘schaffen und dabei vor der eigenen Persönlichkeit nicht Halt macht. Der Fokus der Ausführungen liegt dabei nicht auf den sich daraus ergebenden klinischen Fragen, sondern auf den pathogenen Auswirkungen dieser Sozialcharakterbildung in den Psychen der Vielen. Die Frage der Unersättlichkeit - des Nicht- genug-bekommen-Könnens — ist so alt wie die Menschheit. Sie wurde traditionell vor allem unter dem Begriff der Gier erörtert, und zwar einer Gier, bei der man trotz Befriedigung nicht satt wird. Dass man Hunger hat und deshalb eine Gier spürt, ist etwas sehr Natürliches; dass man die Gier befriedigt und sich dennoch unersättlich erlebt, verweist auf eine charakterologische Gier und bedarf einer psychologischen Erklärung.
Anknüpfend an das Tagungsthema >Lust auf Zukunft trotz Sorge und Zweifel< wird versucht, von der Sozial-Psychoanalyse Erich Fromms her die Lust auf Zukunft mit Fromms Konzept der Biophilie zu begründen. Dabei wird die Lust auf Zukunft psychologisch als die dem menschlichen Leben inhärente primäre Tendenz begriffen, die konstruktiven Lebensmöglichkeiten zur Entfaltung zu bringen. Diese primäre Tendenz kann aber durch psychische Anpassungsleistungen an bestimmte wirtschaftliche und gesellschaftliche Erfordernisse geschwächt werden. Dies wird an den von Fromm analysierten Sozial-Charakterorientierungen sowie an dem vom Autor beschriebenen ich-orientierten Charakter verdeutlicht.
With growing inequality, the American dream is becoming less effective as a collective myth. With its focus on material success, competition and self-reliance, the intensified diffusion of neoliberal scripts of the self is leading the uppermiddle class toward a mental health crisis while the working class and lowincome groups do not have the resources needed to live the dream. African Americans, Latinos and undocumented immigrants, who are presumed to lack self-reliance, face more rigid boundaries. One possible way forward is broadening cultural membership by promoting new narratives of hope centered on a plurality of criteria of worth, ‘ordinary universalism’ and destigmatizing stigmatized groups.
This article intends to propose a basis for a reflection on how separation mechanisms, both intrapsychic and social, may, by a normal identification process, be comparable in traumatic situations to true forms of violence. According to the theories of Benedetti and Peciccia (1996), a symbiotic Self and a separate Self are continuously present, integrated development lines of the Self, even though they are never fully conscious. Conversely, in the structure of the psychotic Self, a deintegration is inferred between the symbiotic and the separate states of the Self, of which the patient is painstakingly conscious. In light of significant psychoanalytic theories relating to the anxiety of separation, we aim to interpret this symbiosis and separation through the history of Michele, a psychotic young man from a Camorrist family, who was currently hospitalized in a psychiatric facility. The article intends to investigate the separation imposed by the clan, and the even deeper one, inferred from the significant separations experienced within the family circle. Furthermore, we will also outline our therapeutic method and the use of progressive mirror drawing, a psychotherapeutic technique which can be used with patients suffering from different pathologies that compromise verbalization, such as psychosis.
This paper presents a case of >trauma by omission< as a product of the attachment process. The absence of intimate and specific recognition and response by the caretaker of a child can create, by their omission, a >freeze< version of the fight/flight/freeze trauma response. The frozen moments, then dissociated, can become confusion and paralysis at the cusp of adulthood. This state is illustrated in the case below of a 23-year-old Chinese woman being treated by a 29-year-old Chinese male psychoanalytic fellow. The role of cultural context in >omission< is highlighted regarding development and treatment, which is taking place in a Communist society with a recent violent history of extinguishing individuality, modifying how attachment and individuation are expressed. A relational/interpersonal treatment orientation is applied and advocated at this intersection of individual and social realities. This paper contributes to attachment theory by raising awareness of how its many forms and outcomes may or may not be deemed healthy and functional.
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.
Kapitalistische Landnahme. Marx, das Expansionsparadoxon und der Charme einer neuen Rebellion
(2019)
Begrüßung und Einführung
(2019)
Begrüßung
(2019)
Begrüßung und Einführung
(2019)
Die Realität des Strafvollzugs aus der Sicht von Berufsanfängern im Vollzugs- und Verwal-tungsdienst
(2019)
Our meta-analytic review investigates how employee participation in democratic enterprises is related to psychological outcomes. We gathered 60 studies through a systematic literature search of quantitative field studies (published between January 1970 and May 2017) and extracted 138 effect sizes related to three indicators of organisational democracy (OD) and 15 psychological outcomes. The overall findings suggest that employees’ individually perceived participation in organisational decision making (IPD) had a stronger relation to job satisfaction (ρ = .25), job involvement/work motivation (ρ = .36), prosocial work behaviours (ρ = .24), civic and democratic behaviours (ρ = .21) and perceived supportive climate (ρ = .44) than the other two OD indicators: structurally anchored employee participation (SAEP) and employee participation in collective ownership (EO). This was not the case for valuebased commitment: the relations of SAEP (ρ = .40), EO (ρ = .34), and IPD (ρ = .46) with commitment were nearly equal. Mediation analyses indicated that IPD partially mediated most of the effects of SAEP and EO on the outcomes mentioned. The cross-sectional database and a small number of studies for some of the outcomes are the main limitations of this study.
Terrorism is a worldwide phenomenon, as the >Global terrorism index< reveals. The aim of terrorism is to take command over our feelings and our imagination to compel us to change our ways of life and release a clash between civilizations. In my discussion, I will concentrate on identity, an individual’s feeling of being unique, having a coherent self while at the same time being part of a large group. My intention is to link the concept of identity to affects and thinking and the loss of reality-testing when the group is dominated by schizo-paranoid anxiety. Two lines of thought stand out in my discussion of terrorism – the power of identity and the search for meaning – both of which are affected by globalization, the rise of a network society, and disenchantment with the world.
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 >Sleeping memories< (2017), French writer Patrick Modiano confronts the past and his memories in a different way compared with his previous novels, as he keeps trying to revisit and reprocess them. In this book he adds a new method, the dreaming revision of memories, especially traumatic ones, turning to the work of Marquis d’Hervey de Saint-Denys, >Les rêves et les moyens de les diriger: Observations pratiques.< I would suggest that in this way he dreams undreamt traumas, thereby transforming them. In doing so, Modiano meets Thomas Ogden’s art of psychoanalysis.
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.
Erich Fromm’s analysis of >pathological normalcy< offers promising social-theoretical resources to help transcend the contemporary, >domesticated<, diagnosis of social pathologies. This article commences by briefly tracing the numerous limitations of the current orthodoxy, epitomised by the recognition-cognitive >pathologies of recognition< approach. A sympathetic reconstruction of Erich Fromm’s diagnosis of pathological normalcy is then presented as a promising palliative. The strengths of Fromm’s social-theoretical framework are then outlined: Fromm’s scholarship presents a structure through which objectively inadequate and contradictory social conditions can be diagnosed, while emphasizing their important connections to the social-psychological pathologies which sustain them. The efficacy of Fromm’s approach is then defended against post-modern and social-constructivist critiques. This article thus supports the rehabilitation of Fromm’s work within the sociological mainstream as an important antidote to the ‘domesticated’ framing of social pathology which continues to dominate contemporary scholarship.
This essay explores the psychoanalytic sanitarium (Therapeutikum) directed by Frieda Fromm-Reichmann and Erich Fromm in Heidelberg from 1924 to 1928. The Therapeutikum aimed to combine adherence to Jewish ritual with psychoanalytic practice and radical politics for a group of GermanJews who were rethinking their Orthodox backgrounds in light of new intellectual and political currents and modern sensibilities. Visitors to the sanitarium included many leading German-Jewish thinkers, and Heidelberg’s proximity to Frankfurt placed the Therapeutikum in the orbit of the Institute for Social Research and near a major hub in the renaissance of Jewish learning then occurring. At the centre of the article is a discussion of essays by Fromm-Reichmann and Fromm that subjected Jewish ritual (kashrut and shabbat) to psychoanalytic investigation. Appearing in Imago in 1927, the articles marked the two writers’ public break with Orthodox Judaism. This essay argues that the Imago articles marked a crucial moment in the political, intellectual, and religious history of German Jewry. Even if the Fromms’ synthesis of Freudianism, radical politics, andJudaism was conceptually shaky, their sanitarium illustrates the centrality of psychoanalysisças a sensibility, a hermeneutic and above all away of creating social and communal bondsçto a generation of GermanJews navigating the challenges of German and Jewish modernity.
Trauma is the subject of increasing attention in contemporary psychoanalysis. Its complexities will be explored in a clinical case, emphasizing traumatic experience and unconscious conflict across developmental phases. The patient, a young adult white man began analysis complaining of anxiety and depression. Born to adolescent parents, he had experienced infantile stress and childhood traumatic illness. Needy, greedy, and dependent, he was gratified by the frequency and intimacy of psychoanalysis. Genetic interpretation and reconstruction were particularly important in the analytic process. Analytic progress with attenuation of unconscious conflict and developmental transformation proved enduring after termination.
Review Jonathan Sklar: Dark times. Psychoanalytic perspectives on politics, history and mourning
(2019)
The vacuum of kidnapping
(2019)
All forms of kidnapping are presented in this paper, as is their psychodynamic underpinning affecting human behavior: abduction with or without ransom, political kidnapping, kidnapping by well-organized criminal groups, human trafficking and governmental kidnapping, which all highlight the important crises in the major decline in ethics and values. Apathy, fear, and insecurity lead to an increase in dependencies on substances, psychosomatic problems, and depression, which result from the suffering of this >vacuum of kidnapping.< The author wonders, >Has right to live in peace been kidnapped?<
A client who wants his story to be made into a case history presents for psychoanalysis. An artist all his adult life, he expresses his sexual trauma through his art. His more recent artistic output is in the form of avant-garde video montages. The analysis stalls, becalmed by a failure to understand a circumcision event, a punishment for sexual expression. If Ferenczi and the Budapest school model learning from therapeutic errors, freedom of thought, sincerity, and experimentation, then this case history illustrates those. Real sexual trauma and a real circumcision event are entangled with fantasy and art in attempts to come to terms with them. The circumcision event was better understood with multiple readings of Carlo Bonomi’s work, which became part of the analysis. The wider Ferenczi community also became part of the story of the analysis, and in a kind of mutuality the analysis wants to make a contribution to that body of knowledge.
Relational and field theories have much in common, despite divergent foundations. In this paper, several areas of divergence are selected, including the structure of the field as a relational matrix or as an unconscious joint fantasy of the couple; the fate and form of insight; and the nature of the unconscious as relational or ubiquitous. Differences in cognitive and attentional sets are identified and linked to different modes of insight. Using a clinical vignette, these divergences will be illustrated with an attempt to compare and contrast the two approaches through a discussion of how each lens highlights, expands, or forecloses different features of the analytic process. A mode of conceiving the unconscious as unstructured and multiple in potential is offered to reconcile divergent assumptions in therapeutic action. A consideration of Sandor Ferenczi’s clinical emphasis on relaxed technique, elasticity, and especially mutuality suggests that he would have been a field theorist were he among us today.
The infant observation presented in this paper was conducted weekly for two years. Through an extensive use of clinical vignettes and personal and theoretical considerations, this article aims to highlight that both harmonies and pauses, as well as interruptions and dissonances, can be present in early interactive exchanges, forming the fabric of a relational piece of music that is not always as harmonious as might be desirable. The role of the father in moderating problematic interactions between the mother and her child is also examined.
Theodor W. Adorno's mature thought can be characterized by the attempt to articulate what he calls a >new categorical imperative after Auschwitz.< By this, Adorno means that theory and praxis must be organized in such a way that the Holocaust does not repeat itself. This article argues that Sándor Ferenczi’s metapsychology is key to understanding Adorno’s attempt to rethink the nature of precisely such a new categorical imperative. One of the key themes of Adorno’s entire corpus is the problem of the “identification with the aggressor” – an idea that originates with Ferenzci rather than, as is commonly thought, Anna Freud. The Ferenczian dimension of Adorno’s thinking becomes particularly clear in Adorno’s thoughts on the question of freedom. In this context, Adorno engages in a psychoanalytically informed critique of the philosophy of freedom and a speculative philosophical critique of psychoanalysis. The fashioning of a >new categorical imperative< after Auschwitz entails a form of education directed towards a new form of Mündigkeit, one oriented towards contradiction, resistance, and a steadfast refusal to >identify with the aggressor.<
Spanish parliament recently issued a new law offering Spanish nationality to Sephardic Jews who so desired and could demonstrate a basic knowledge of the Spanish language and culture. This law attempted to redress a five-centuries-old injustice and was expected to unleash both criticism and praise. Surprisingly, reactions in the public or the press were minimal or absent. Reasons for this are explored through a qualitative study with focus groups, which showed ideas that can be grouped into four main categories: ignorance, justice, distrust, and fear. It is hypothesized that the predominantly silent response to the new law might be due to the fact that it touches on an extremely sensible issue: the historically fragmented Spanish identity. A position of negation is constructed, to avoid deep anxieties related to the fragile core of a collective identity built from many >others< forced to the refuge of an introspection that protects them from the conviction of not fulfiling the ideal identity status, known by all but reached by none. All those >others< have mixed their bloods with the Old Christians along the centuries, possibly transmitting a profound insecurity about their personal and collective identity that might contribute to understanding current social reactions.
The birth of a child strongly influences the way in which we adults perceive life and, therefore, our inner world. This birth, or rather the expectation of it, initiates in the father a complex process, the paternal function. Despite being a common experience, there are many open questions regarding its development and its impact on the new father. We reflect here on paternal function and explore conscious and unconscious fantasies of the man facing new-found fatherhood. We propose that a kind of pre-Oedipal process has already begun during pregnancy. The new being’s mere existence inside the womb generates an exclusionary force that sets the father’s ambivalent feelings in motion. The overwhelming certainty of motherhood and the generation of the mother–fetus bubble develops in parallel with the uncertainty of the father, immersed in inner conflicts regarding what his relationship with the mother–child couple is and will be. He rapidly experiences how the child’s presence makes him an excluded third party, always longing to fully occupy the place he once enjoyed beside the mother. The baby enters a world where father’s strong ambivalence is already in place, facilitating and setting in motion a full development of the Oedipal process. Finally, some considerations are outlined on the potential influence of this complex ambivalence in large group reactions and the need to be remembered that humans have displayed since ancient historical times.
Unresolved loss and unresolved trauma in adult mothers, and the commonly disorganized attachment pattern developed by their infants, have been repeatedly reported in longitudinal research literature as a crucial correlate or precedent of severe pathology. We describe and illustrate how unresolved loss and unresolved trauma are manifested in verbatim-transcribed language and how they are to be detected, so that psychoanalysts and clinicians in general are able to distinguish them and understand how such >states of mind< evidence the process of fragmentation they involve. We follow each example with a resolved transcript so it can be contrasted with a nonresolved case. We then describe excerpts of a taped >disorganized infant< – an example of infants who are usually babies of unresolved mothers, as shown during the Adult Attachment Interview. The analyst’s ability to identify and understand these >states of mind< and the subsequent sensitive reflection on the transcendental role of primary traumatic relations, which are involved in fear and the destructive dynamics of mental fragmentation – as seen in empirical research on attachment – can facilitate a resourceful integrative analytic scrutiny of the processes gone through by patients, and encourage the discovery of alternatives for working through the disturbing experience.
Triangularity in separation
(2019)
Traditional psychoanalytic literature tends to present issues of separation as a two-person dilemma. Current understanding, however, seems to challenge that view. The recent realization that there is no such thing as a baby, but only a mother-and-baby unit, has opened the way to the further understanding that there is no such thing as a mother-and-baby unit >extra-context<. In other words, there is always a father in the background – be he real or phantasized. Separation, therefore, cannot but be conceptualized as involving a triangle. It should never be forgotten that Oedipus’s own life history starts with a separation initiated by a father and acquiesced with by a mother. The aim of this paper is to present some thoughts on the Oedipal (i.e., triangular) dimension of separation.
Flaubert claimed mastery in matters of style in the French language as well as in the psychological sciences. Mastery in both areas is on clear display in the writing of Madame Bovary. Our heroine presents as a new kind of personality, namely as someone who depends greatly on sensory experience in order to maintain her emotional equilibrium. So, when under stress, she can only find some kind of soothing comfort in her perfumes, silks, and cashmeres. This dynamic pattern leaves her at a disadvantage when tasked with higher level life requirements – such as the payment of bills, the very thing that, in the end, causes her ruin. Dynamically, failures of memory and the resulting fragmentation of experience leave her with a precarious sense of self. For our heroine, there is little ability to link present experience to the past and therefore no possibility of metaphoric or symbolic thinking; in other words, she is condemned to repeat. Flaubert felt that Madame Bovary would only have original value as the sum of his psychological understandings. Further, he hoped his psychological work, often hidden under the form, would be deeply felt by the reader, as it was by him.
The world is regularly confronted by occurrences of mass violence wherein specific groups of a population are brutally killed, raped, and tortured by another group that considers its own behavior morally justifiable. There are social, economic, and political crises that lead to the scapegoating of one group designated as the enemy. It represents a mental instrument that validates dehumanizing the chosen enemy and gives >meaning< to the extermination of dangerous >elements< as part of a battle between good and evil. In the case of suicide bombers and terrorists, sacrifice and devotion to the ideology that promises martyrdom and support for sacred ideals are requirements. Some researchers talk about the personality of the torturer, particularly about how some childrearing practices annihilate children’s sense of self by teaching them to be obedient to authority. Others talk about the role of moral disengagement and the role of specialized military training. Psychoanalytic thinkers emphasize that the key mechanisms at work in these atrocities are splitting, paranoid projections, projective identification, sadomasochistic forces, strong mechanisms of negation and dissociation, and an extremely weak social identity. Those who commit evil acts seldom perceive their actions as evil. This paper focuses on the social influences that lead to dehumanizing and blaming the >other,< and childrearing practices that influence the creation of the genocidal mentality.
One of the most controversial members of the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society and Freud’s intimate for many years, Reich is known not only for his seminal contributions to therapeutic and social psychoanalysis in his 1933 classic Character analysis, but also for his notoriety as a discoverer of an energy he named orgone. This paper is devoted to Reich the psychoanalytic sociologist and reformer, with special prominence given to his other, now somewhat forgotten, 1933 book >The mass psychology of Fascism<.
Anknüpfend an eine Mitarbeiterbefragung bei BNP Paribas Personal Investors Deutschland wird aufgezeigt, dass Diskurse um New Work auch in einem großen Konzernverbund ein wichtiger Antreiber für die Gestaltung von Wandlungsprozessen sind und motivierend in Verbindung mit Aufbruchsstimmung wirken können. Gleichzeitig gilt es, auf bewährten Grundsätzen von Unternehmensführung und Teamarbeit aufzubauen und die Möglichkeiten von New Work nicht zu idealisieren. Partizipation und Mitbestimmung sind wichtig, aber nur auf der Grundlage transparenter Entscheidungswege, einer durch Wertschätzung geprägten Organisationskultur und durch qualitativ hochwertige Arbeitsbeziehungen effizient.
Following in Hannah Arendt’s steps, this paper addresses the author’s definition of terrorism mostly from a psychoanalytical point of view and focuses further on the clinical implications related to the different thoughts on terrorism of a number of psychoanalysts. Some clinical vignettes, from individual as well as group psychotherapy, show how deep the reverberation of our way of thinking about terrorism can be in our work as psychoanalysts, particularly in regard to the integration of the destructive aspects of the personality and of the Self, and above all in cases with a history of traumatic attachment. Indeed, the psychoanalyst can actually remain embedded inside the patient's dissociative dynamics, and the treatment can fall into a painful impasse, allowing mutilated, torn, dead, and dissociated aspects to be left outside the conscious and the Self. The result of this kind of situation is a stiffening of the personality and a mortification of the whole Self.
Descendants of terror
(2019)
The aim of this paper is to approach transgenerational transmission aspects of the traumatic experience of terror in the large social group. The author makes use of the notion of chosen trauma, coined by Vamik Volkan, which shows how specific mental representations of a traumatizing historical event, shared by the large group, can be transmitted to descendants and eventually used by them as a linking factor of their large group. The above issues, along with the importance of reversal of helplessness and of inability to mourn, are discussed; relevant clinical material focusing on the interplay between large-group and individual transmission is presented.
Making films can be a lifeline, an aid to going on living when (we feel) the world around us has disappeared. Looking, showing that there’s a >there there,< recording the present moment and thereby preserving it, can, for a time, make us not feel the nothingness within us. But the rescue that comes from making a film is always provisional. Why? Because every film has an end. Because if there are no more films to make, if there is nothing that deserves to be looked at (the worst case scenario), going on living will have exhausted itself, and taking one’s own life (if indeed there was a life to take) may seem the only option. Chantal Akerman’s >No Home Movie< – a film recording the slow death of her mother in her Brussels apartment – is this worst case scenario. A moving record of the psychic devastation that comes about when we, slowly but surely, lose the one object worth looking at. Panic, depression, hopelessness, and a fierce determination to go where the disappeared object went. To this last home where nothing no longer moves.
Fromm was one of the first psychoanalysts to deal with the crisis of civilization. His ideas about human nature, the social character and the social unconscious, the pathology of normalcy and the ideal of productivity are important. Fromm criticizes industrialism for its unrealizable promises of freedom and happiness, which correspond to an ideology of growth and progress. The satisfaction of >false< needs and desires does not lead to human well-being.
Fromm's Contribution to the Analysis and Critique of the Ongoing Rise of Right-Wing Movements
(2019)
One of the most important political changes in Europe, the USA and beyond is the growth of nationalistic parties and authoritarian structures within states. This contribution aims to demonstrate how a Frommian perspective on basic psychological needs, asynchronicity and alienation could contribute to a social-psychological understanding of nationalistic trends. At the end of the paper, we present some conclusions drawn from this social-psychological point of view concerning the development of a sane society.
The work of Erich Fromm is often overlooked in contemporary feminist thought. Yet important areas of relevance—his critiques of symbiotic love and sadomasochism, advocacy of mutual recognition, and objections to patriarchal presumptions in Freud’s work—render Fromm’s thought useful for feminists. Disadvantages adhere in Fromm’s ideas too, including sexist language and biologically-tinged maternalism. However, this paper reinterprets these problems to advocate for rediscovering both Fromm’s feminist and humanist aspirations.