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Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to construct a genealogy of therapeutic communities (TCs), with the espoused commitment to flattened hierarchies and democratic ideologies, the paper considers the lineage of the Frankfurt School of Social Research and its influence in setting a frame for TC ideology, with a particular focus on Herbert Marcuse and Erich Fromm. This genealogy provides further context to the contribution of two other key Frankfurters, Karl Mannheim and Michael Foulkes, who progressed therapeutic democracy in the UK and shaped the early days of the TC as a group-based treatment paradigm. Design/methodology/approach: Discourse analysis and collective biography based on biographical details, texts and witness accounts. Findings: The works of Marcuse and Fromm provide a hybrid psychosocial post-Freudian schemas that beckoned philosophic reconciliation between the state and the personal psyche culminating in new left psychoanalytic academic sectors. Erich Fromm's contribution is situated squarely in the clinical sphere in the USA dating from the 1930s after he fled from Germany and settled in the USA where he became a well-known lecturer at Chestnut Lodge during a time when it was developing its approach under the rubric of >milieu therapy<. Marcuse's influence on psychiatry is tracked through the development of ideas and writings emerging from his reading of Freud, finally intersecting with the emergence of TCs and anti-psychiatry when he delivered the keynote address at the Dialectics of Liberation Conference in London in 1967. Held at the height of the first generation of TCs, Joe Berke, R.D. Laing and colleagues considered Marcuse as someone to headline the Dialectics Conference because; >Marcuse was the Grandpapa of Flower Power< (Joe Berke said). Originality/value: A rapprochement between milieu therapy in the USA, influenced by Fromm and Marcuse and the European tradition of TCs, influenced by Mannheim and Foulkes is demonstrated. The Frankfurt Institute of Social Research can be seen as an ideological corner that transcends Atlantic divides, and provides a sturdy and lasting intellectual cornerstone for the history of ideas in the field of social psychiatry.
I have chosen, for the jubilee volume, my article >Freedom vs. Intolerance – Variations on the Theme of Supernatural Wives and Husbands<. It appeared in the volume entitled >We are all Indians< Violence – Intolerance – Literature, edited by Wojciech Kalaga and Tadeusz Sławek (Katowice 1990). This was a special time for all of us; today it is called the time of breakthrough, or transformation. The topic of my article, and most other articles contained in this volume, is connected with the problem of freedom and enslavement, which, bearing in mind the atmosphere of that period, was almost inevitable. Thus, the reader will find, in that article of mine, reflections concerning the so called positive and negative freedom, some thoughts about Erich Fromm’s book >The Fear of Freedom<. I used there also an old proverb, quoted in the writings of Sir Isaiah Berlin: >to be free is nothing, to become free is the very heaven<, a proverb that sounded very appropriate in the times when we all in Poland were regaining our lost freedom. The article itself is a heady mixture of threads and motifs taken from classical and modern philosophy, folktales, Biblical traditions and mythology, whereas the typical literary studies, or history of literature, are virtually absent there. This rather unconventional approach is, to some extent, typical of the style of academic discourse characteristic of the English studies as understood and practised in the University of Silesia at that time, that is in the 1980s and 1990s. This style was shaped, among other persons, by the, often indirect, influence of such personalities as Wojciech Kalaga, Tadeusz Sławek, Emanuel Prower, Tadeusz Rachwał, or, last but not least, Ewa Borkowska, who also contributed to the volume in question. Naturally, I am solely responsible for what I wrote in that article, which is a rather faithful reflection of my interests (and perhaps also obsessions) in that very memorable period of time.
In today’s world characterized by changed systems of values and materialism, pedagogy should emphasize education for a positive self-image, especially in the contemporary school, whose educational goals are freedom, independence and individuality. This theoretical analysis provides a review of research on the importance and relationship of positive self-image with other factors, such as social skills and academic achievement. Simultaneously, the methods and procedures by which teachers can foster a student’s positive self-image are displayed. Although the degree of positive self-thinking is for the most part formed in interaction with other people, it is extremely important to raise students’ awareness about their own internal strengths as well as their possibility of choice. The education of a positive self-image can be considered a part of >positive pedagogy< or >positive education< which focuses on traditional skills and happiness, but also joy – fervor that accompanies being (Fromm, 2004, p. 130)
In 1950, Elihu Katz submitted his MA thesis called >The Happiness Game – A Content Analysis of Radio Fan Mail< at Columbia University. It was supervised by Leo Löwenthal, and drew on recently published work by Paul Lazarsfeld, Robert Merton, and Erich Fromm. The topic for the thesis came from Löwenthal, who, as Katz now recalls, was then preparing to become Director of Research for Voice of America. Somehow, he obtained from CBS, perhaps through Lazarsfeld, several thousand letters sent in to the network during the early months of 1948. He was interested in letters sent by listeners in anticipation of such mail landing on his desk in his new position. The letters were sorted into different bundles and assigned to various graduate students for analysis. It was a happy chance that the bundle assigned to Katz were letters sent in by listeners (overwhelmingly female) in response to a request from a popular radio broadcaster of the day, Ted Malone. Malone asked regular listeners to his daytime show to note whenever they felt happy across the whole of February 1948 (a leap-year) and, at the end of the month, to send him a letter telling of their happiest day. Over two thousand letters were received, and from this, a sample of 236 letters was selected and submitted to a careful content analysis which formed the substance of the thesis. Immediately following this, Katz entered the doctoral program in the Department of Sociology and began to work with Lazarsfeld, a collaboration which culminated in Katz’s work on the Decatur survey material that Lazarsfeld had commissioned in 1943. It became his doctoral thesis and was published as >Personal Influence< (1955), co-authored by Katz and Lazarsfeld – a landmark in American sociological literature.
The following >note from the field< is based off of first-hand observations and experiences had while living and working as an affiliated professor at a Chinese university. Noting the well-known political restrictions existing in China, the piece argues that against dominant Western narratives depicting a lack of freedom within China, there ostensibly appear spaces offering levels of emotional and interactional freedoms greater than what one can experience in the West. This argument is framed within the thought of Western intellectuals such as David Riesman, Erich Fromm, C. Wright Mills and Stjepan Mestrovic, and is advanced by considering the vast historical and cultural changes in recent Chinese history that have created an anomic condition in regards to newly emerging spaces made possible by vast wealth acquisition in the last several decades.
In the article problems connected with possibilities of analyzing human behavior in context of propensities were discussed. Main focus was put on differences in propensities with respect to sex, also in context of E. Fromm’s personality theory. Methodological issues related to propensities were presented. Definition of propensity and methods of measuring propensities were also proposed. In empirical example differences in propensity to smoke cigarettes and propensity to drink alcohol with respect to sex in Polish voivodeships in year 2004 were estimated. Also, econometric models explaining that kind of propensities were introduced.
The aim of this short contribution is to present a summary of the decision problem within the profession of the pedagogue, and the fundamental role of the abduction (>απαγωγή<, retroduction) process in its proper context, in professional practice of the pedagogue, as in all professional practice involving the social and professional pedagogy. Pedagogy is a field for reflection, application and commitment or engagement to education. Moreover, pedagogy is establishing itself as a profession, the profession of the pedagogist (not of the educator, who is a different figure), in the socio-health, intellectual, cultural and aid profession field, even in spite of heavy delays and failures of the Italian laws and the resistance of professional groups related but already recognized both by law and by society. The so-called >pedagogical interlocution< is a paradigmatic form of the professional pedagogical practice. Decision in professional pedagogy, properly speaking, must be reached by the interlocutor(s), who must debate and develop it, with the aid of the professional pedagogue. Abduction is not a valid syllogism: it concerns a possible example of a general case or of a rule, who's the actual pertinence to this general case or this rule is mediated by the professional or expert assumptions. The professional approach of the pedagogue, from methodological point of view, is casuistic (case based) and situational as a form of aid given to the person, alternative and other than to the statistical-operational methodology that addresses rather to populations composed of individuals. Cases of general interest in professional pedagogy can be labeled as >casuistries< or >case study< categories. A good collection of casuistries-case study categories is provided by Erich Fromm, concerning the problems of family education; and by Viktor E. Frankl in his search for sense, Lebenssinn or λόγος. A further range of examples of categories based on case studies which can be dealt with a pedagogical professional methodology are the life and studies orientation problems. A fourth class of examples, applicable differently but methodologically similar, offers to us the autogenic training, particularly the choice of the propositional formula, called and eventually repeated both in the opening and in the closure, which must be adapted to the particular case of each single person; and this can be considered a specific pedagogical competence as the gradual training to the technique proposed by Johannes Heinrich Schultz reveals to be. Professional pedagogy, by this way, can make an important and an authentic and specific contribution to general discussion about decision in the social, human and cultural sciences (or Human-, Sozial-, Geisteswissenschaften).
Norbert Elias, Erich Fromm, and Theodor Adorno all crossed paths at the University of Frankfurt in the pivotal period of the early 1930s, all were haunted by Nazism, and each produced remarkable chapters in the social psychology of authoritarianism. Adorno’s (co-authored) >The Authoritarian Personality< (1950) was the most influential, but perhaps only at the cost of downplaying or hiding underlying theoretical and political interests during a period of significant professional constraints. Currently none of these contributions enjoys much attention, despite enduring academic, political, and national security interests in understanding the origins and nature of popular political ideologies characterized by uncritical submission to militant and intolerant politics. This chapter surveys the neglected social psychologies of authoritarianism offered by Elias and Fromm and offers comparisons and contrasts between these two contributions, and also the more famous publication: >The Authoritarian Personality<. Elias’s >The Germans< is revealed to have many overlooked and lasting virtues, especially its abilities to avoid troubling reifications and to offer insights that more easily transcend the particular traditions of psychoanalysis, Marxism, and positivism.
Rand’s triadic model is particularly germane to understanding Fitzgerald’s Bernice Bobs Her Hair. I will discuss Fitzgerald’s characters, their worlds, and beliefs in terms of the conflicts between the three types of people: >Being,< >Having,< and >Doing.< I will also explain why Fitzgerald presents his characters the way he does and examine how Rand’s theory influences his narrative point of view.
The research questions of the article are: What takes place in the professional cooperative work of including children with special needs in kindergartens and in counteracting exclusive process? How are views on children and ethics expressed through practice and in reflections on practice among the staff in kindergarten? What constitutes >pedagogical presence<, >attentive love< and children's participation in developing pedagogical practice? A common understanding of these concepts are highlighted by Fromm's understanding of >being-mode< and >having-mode< as different modes of orientation toward ourselves and the world. The article draws on critical social theory on preschool education and is based on empiric findings from ethnographic studies in two kindergartens. While planning and regulating the practice according to a biased view on >what children need< earlier were main topic in the kindergartens studied, now concentration on listening to and >reading< the children is focused, and thus expansion of the interests and questions the children themselves bring in is facilitated. The new practice can be seen as a resistance movement against the growth of an instrumental and technical approach to preschool education the last years.
Resulting from the prevalence of hedonistic egoism within the youth culture and the media targeted to this demographic, this essay offers a brief discussion of hedonistic egoism absent in much of contemporary ethics. Analyzing Fred Feldman’s pure hedonism as discussed in >Pleasure and the Good Life: Concerning the Nature, Varieties, and Plausibility of Hedonism<, hedonistic egoism is defined as an extension of Feldmanian pure hedonism. Discussing the use of hedonistic egoism in modern society by certain societal groups, especially adolescents and young adults, as a means to seek freedom from certain societal authorities such as the law, or at least portions of it, the differences between negative and positive freedom are explored using Erich Fromm’s >Escape from Freedom<. It is then argued that when hedonistic egoism is used by individuals to seek freedom, whether it be negative or positive, certain paradoxes arise. Firstly, negative freedom, if existent, will exist merely psychology while, secondly, so far that pleasure and pain act as new authorities and egoism is present, positive freedom becomes an impossibility.
In his path-breaking analysis of the formation of an ideological >white< self-consciousness among American workers in the nineteenth century, David Roediger relies on a theoretical synthesis of historical materialism and psychoanalysis. This paper explores the parallels in methodology and content between Roediger’s work and the critical theory of Max Horkheimer, Erich Fromm, and Herbert Marcuse, which was also based on a synthesis of Marx and Freud. The paper seeks to place Roediger’s arguments in a broader theoretical context and to highlight the ongoing relevance of early Frankfurt School critical theory to contemporary discussions in critical race theory.
Erich Fromm analyzed how man is divided in his sense of true self. This division within forces him to cling to abstract and concrete entities outside of himself and Fromm calls this >transference< which he, after all, borrowed from Freud. This transferring of man’s individuality to outside forces brings temporary relief to his experience of powerlessness and loneliness. The transference makes man acquire a masochistic character wherein he submits himself to outside irrational forces that perpetually dehumanize him. This is the reason why his ethics is a struggle to bring back the power of man within, nursing his potentialities to change himself and transform his world. Ethics, for Fromm, is a form of normativity which leads man into freedom to fully actualize his own sense of self.
Converging Self - Other Awareness: Erich Fromm and Paulo Freire on Transcending the Fear of Freedom
(2013)
Different theoretical perspectives have been developed within the psychology framework for the analysis of the authoritarian phenomenon. They constituted some of the background lines of what would afterwards be considered as the field of Political psychology. The first approach takes place in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century’s, along with group psychology, where authoritarianism is studied as an emergent behavior of crowds. Subsequently, developments in authoritarian personality suggest a change in the analysis axes by studying the phenomenon in an intra-individual way. A third perspective arises with the cognitive approach, represented by the concept of dogmatism, which emphasized the study of beliefs and the way in which individuals defend them. Parallel to this approach, advances in the field of Experimental Psychology on obedience, account for the situation in the authoritarian phenomenon. Later on, the study of authoritarian personality is taken up once more with the concept of right-wing authoritarianism, which is defined as the individual differences in the covariation of three attitudinal clusters (authoritarian submission, authoritarian aggression and conventionalism). Finally, the most recent perspective for the study of the phenomenon suggests rethinking rightwing authoritarianism as an intergroup phenomenon, since its three attitudinal clusters account for a group phenomenon, plus a personality trait. The main objective of this paper is to critically review each of the six perspectives which have approached the study of authoritarianism as psycho-political phenomena, showing its peculiarities as well as its differences so as to finally consider which of those are still acceptable alternatives for the interpretation of this phenomenon.
The atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki represent a historical break that can be understood from a social psychological position as a collective trauma of the >generic identity<. The >peaceful use of nuclear power< served as an >integration ideology of the 1950s< and corroborated the worldwide denial of nuclear danger. Not until the ecology and peace movement of the 1970s and 80s did a fundamental criticism of both the peaceful and the military use of nuclear power take shape. These initiatives, which were critical for growth, had a particularly strong, influential, and lasting effect in West Germany as the movements that were critical for expansion received here additional impetus from the confrontation with National Socialism and with the Holocaust's >breach of civilization.< The author described these psychohistorical processes as early as 1986 in an article in an issue of psychosozial on the topic of >Nach Tschernobyl – regiert wieder das Vergessen?< (>After Chernobyl – does oblivion rule again?<). The considerations outlined back then are taken up again under the shadow of Fukushima, and pursued from the social psychological perspective.
This article deals with the six German-Jewish psychoanalysts who fled from Nazi Germany to the Netherlands in the 1930s. Watermann and Landauer perished in the German concentration camps. Levy-Suhl survived the German occupation of the Netherlands but died soon after. Reik went on to the USA before World War II. Lampl and Keilson lived and worked in the Netherlands for the rest of their lives.
Taking Freud's >Beyond the pleasure principle< as a case in point, the author draws attention to how Freud had a tendency to develop different theories simultaneously and to neglect to state how they were related to each other. The theory of traumatic neurosis, which he explains by both the theory of the two egos and the theory of the mental apparatus and the energies at work within it, is cited as an example. Similarly, Freud's definition of the death instinct is also not reconcilable with his previous definition of the instinctual drives. A third example is that of Eros, important parts of whose definition are at variance with Freud's previously formulated definition of the sexual drives. In none of these cases, the author argues, did Freud replace the >old< theory >with the >new< one. He simply retained the old theory and added the new one, without integrating them.
The journal >Psyche – Zeitschrift für Psychoanalyse und ihre Anwedungen<: A historical overview
(2013)
The author presents a historical overview of the evolution of the German journal Psyche, starting from its foundation by Alexander Mitscherlich, Felix Schottlaender, and Hans Kunz in 1946. After the gradual reorientation of Psyche in the direction of being a purely psychoanalytic journal, Mitscherlich became its sole editor in 1969. In the 1980s, Psyche played a central role in the discussion and working-through of the German analysts' involvement in the National Socialist Regime. In 1997, Werner Bohleber followed Margarete Mitscherlich as editor-in-chief. Psyche, the only monthly psychoanalytic journal in the world, keeps not only documenting, but also shaping the main developments taking place in our field, on both a national and an international level. As far as the last 20 years are concerned, the journal has also played a central role in the debate conducted in and outside Germany in terms of empirical research in psychoanalysis and the dialogue with the neurosciences.
Globalization
(2013)
This paper aims to present the body as a possible psychic retreat in the face of annihilation anxiety. The sensations produced on the body seem to be a preferable place of psychic retreat in the patient's efforts to assuage her tormented intrapsychic reality. In such cases, unconscious phantasies are experienced mostly on the bodily level because of their intensity and primitive nature. Accordingly, self- and object representations tend to reside in the body and are accessible via the body. In this regard, bodily sensations offer a sense of continuity and cohesion, and allow for the further psychic elaboration of the unconscious conflicts.
The long term perspective
(2013)
Postmodernity
(2013)
Since the concept of imaginative elaboration of body functioning, which is essential to Winnicott's idea of psyche-soma, has rarely been investigated up to now, this article sets out to do this and tries to pursue the meaning and articulation of that concept in the corpus of Winnicott's theory. In this way, it contributes to bringing the body to the core of psychoanalytical theory.
This article probes psychoanalytic theory regarding the repercussions of traumatic experiences in memory function. Both memory and trauma are fundamental to psychoanalysis and lead to the psyche's constitution as well as to its limits. The relationship between trauma and memory, based mainly on an aspect beyond the pleasure principle, points toward a function at the limits of the psychic, something between the body and the psyche, between perception and representation – all of which is responsible for psychic differentiation. Trauma has been associated with death drive dynamics and automatic anxiety, which constantly require a prior link to the establishment of the pleasure principle. When there is no possibility of linking and transcribing an event, its effects are negative, that is, it causes narcissistic damage. Ferenczi considers the object's role to be the determinant as far as an event's traumatic fate is concerned. When the object cannot accommodate the subject's needs or assign some meaning to the traumatic experience, introjection and psychic inscription are interrupted. We suggest that the lack of intersubjective recognition occasions the nonrepresentation and the meaninglessness that emerge as corporeal acts during psychoanalytic treatment.
I present and analyse here the phenomenon of a specific language that was spoken within the walls of a maximum security prison in the south-east of England between 2006 and 2007. In doing so, I look at the adolescent who becomes an offender, and how his language is thereby altered, here exploring language in groups and drawing on Freud and Bion, as well as the sociological contributions of Emery, Goffman and Messerschmidt, and the linguistic contribution of Teresa Labov. Examining the social structures that the language enforced, I examine my own role within and outside the prisoners' language, and explore what the prisoners learned from me and my language, and vice versa. I explore the nature of learning a language inside a prison, and examine the need for a homogeneity of language and the social adhesive in the language used. I look at my experience of one-to-one teaching versus group teaching: specifically, the differences in language used by the prisoners in these different scenarios, and try to determine to what extent language comes from outside influences and what to extent it forms and permutates inside. Using actual examples, I argue that despite the exuberance and inventiveness of the language, its usage follows Freud's >“Beyond the pleasure principle,< in that there is an attempt to reduce excitation. Finally, I regard prison language as a psychic retreat, drawing on the work of Steiner, Meltzer, Emanuel, and Leader (among others); and I ask questions not only about the prisoners, but also about the function of learning inside a prison itself, while regarding the language used as a depressive defence. No identifying reference to any single prisoner, or any specific crime, has been included in these pages. The people and the place that are alluded to throughout have been rendered anonymous.
Complex dynamics of forgiveness: Psychological, interpersonal, and psychotherapeutic implications
(2013)
The distinctive correlates of forgiveness are studied and analyzed in this paper. It is concluded that superficial and hasty forms of forgiveness might have a harmful impact on self-respect, self-concepts, self-complexity, and authenticity. Even deep forgiveness might not completely free the individual from negative side-effects, and there is some doubt whether complete forgiveness is possible. The paper also examines what place forgiveness should have in therapeutic settings and how it could be practiced in an accurate and safe manner.
The intention of the author is to further the knowledge on pain, based on a review of the concept of psychic pain as found in Freud, Klein, Bion, and French authors, with the objective of clarifying as far as possible the nature and vicissitudes of pain. After this review, the author describes a case in which she proposes that psychic pain is made up of three essential elements: the first is the overflowing of great quantities that cannot be contained; the second is an intense and immediate defense to protect the psychic apparatus from destruction; and the third is the >return of the foreclosed.< At the end of the paper, the author makes her final, subjective considerations.
The author discusses countertransference in relation to the impact of training institutions on the therapist as a person. The author claims that therapist's feelings and experiences determine the diagnosis of the personality. It is neither the behavior nor the psychopathological phenomena, which have a diagnostic value, but how the relationship is experienced in terms of the therapist's feelings. The author speaks about the problems connected to of “as if” personalities as a starting point. This concept originated with the psychopathological studies of Helene Deutsch, who associated it with schizophrenia. Later, Paul Roazen transported the concept to the social dimension of politics and to the personality of politicians. In this article, the author treats the “as if” personalities as a concept of unification, in contrast to current attempts to fragment diagnostic personality disorders, as in many psychoanalytic concepts in relation to the medicalization of psychoanalysis. Some clinical vignettes are briefly presented in order to sharpen this focus.
Afterword: Apollo’s chariot
(2013)
On psychic reality and neutrality: Empathy and the work of construction in countertransference
(2013)
The clinical challenges faced in encountering patients who do not fit the standard treatment of Oedipus conflicts clearly show the limitations of the interpretative method, thus making indispensable the study of clinical concepts and techniques as a way to broaden the psychoanalytic horizons. In order to analyse the different psychopathological problems resistant to traditional clinical approaches, it is necessary to reorganise the technique on the basis of a better understanding of the ways in which subjectivity is rooted in early psychic constitution. In this way, empathy becomes important as a clinical tool. The use of empathy must be understood as a decisive factor in handling clinical cases and situations in which the treatment encounters obstacles that restrict the power of the analyst's verbal interventions.In this case, can we say that the use of empathy interferes directly with and changes the position of the concept of psychic reality? Moreover, as we use empathy, can we also say that the concept of neutrality is transformed, without being abandoned? The intention of this paper is to discuss these questions using clinical material taken from the analysis of borderline clinical cases and situations.
Homecoming
(2013)
Philosophical and literary perspectives are combined with psychoanalytic ones in an attempt to provide a comprehensive conceptualization of the theme of homecoming. The concepts of home and homecoming are presented as symbolic representations of fundamental psychical functions, and their vicissitudes as subjective manifestations of basic psychic organizations. The hypothesis is put forward that the ability, or lack thereof, to work through the process of mourning of a lost object colors the evolution and outcome of any reckoning with such a notion and what it stands for. Literary sources are used to supplement and explicate psychoanalytic understandings regarding how the concept of homecoming is being made use of, within unconscious dynamics observed in a number of analytic cases.
This paper addresses the notion of irrationality and madness, as they are understood within the psychoanalytic framework. By highlighting their similarities and differences, as well as by emphasizing the crucial defensive position that manifest psychosis holds in the midst of all this, an attempt is being made to delineate the links between the conjectured earliest interaction that the infant has with its environment and the burgeoning conscious rational mind. Winnicott's conceptualizations around fear of breakdown, disintegration, the environment-mother, and therapeutic regression are utilized to form a bridge between the theoretical understanding of madness and the clinical applications of this understanding, as illustrated by a clinical vignette.
This paper explores psychosocially young unemployed men’s resistance to work they describe as ‘embarrassing’ and ‘feminine’. The context is the closure of a steelworks in a town in the South Wales valleys, in which their resistance is mediated by father–son relationships that dictate what counts as proper manly work. In this study, young men, as well as their mothers and (where possible) their fathers, were interviewed. The interviews reveal a community suffering the effects of intergenerational trauma and riven with complex feelings about masculinity and femininity. These feelings are projected onto the young men, who feel bullied and shamed by their families, peers and others in the community because they are unable to find gender-appropriate work. The implications of these findings for un-derstanding youth male unemployment are considered.
Postmodern social theory
(2013)
Freud's attitude toward philosophers and philosophy in published works was consistently hostile. This paper aims to show that Freud's persistently hostile attitude toward philosophers and philosophy was the result of ambivalence. On the one hand, it is explicable by his reaction to the resistance on the part of philosophers toward his innovative notion of “unconscious” and by his embrace of Comtean progressivism. On the other hand, it is explicable by his proclivities toward speculative thought, without the net of empirical data, and by his often unacknowledged borrowings from philosophers, old and new.
Neurosciences have experienced tremendous development in the last decades. Research on genetics, structural and functional neuroimaging advance at a frantic pace. At the same time, psychoanalysis as a whole has been in decline, reflected in a reduced influence on culture, academia and mental health. However, there are some optimistic signals pointing to a slow but steady recovery. Three factors among others have contributed to this changing situation: interest in personality disorders, attachment theory and links to neuroscience. The approach to neuroscience has been especially contested among us, and some colleagues distrust these advances and take refuge in more familiar approaches to clinical work and research. There are also colleagues who maintain a naive view of neuroscience, expecting confirmations it can never provide. Some interesting ideas in psychoanalysis today come from projects involving neuroscience – or at least taking advantage of a research methodology more usually applied to natural sciences, and overcoming the methodological problems often found in traditional psychoanalytical papers. This rediscovery of nature and science in psychoanalysis should be considered not as a deviation from our core field, but rather as a return to the attitude of discovery and risk-taking our discipline once showed, and lost.
The theory of social character developed by Erich Fromm asserts that the significance of experience is intimately linked to the material conditions under which persons, located in a specific economic system, live. The shared character traits thus correspond to the social role that these persons play. In the case of women, existing literature does not focus on their function as reproducers of the work force within the family, although this is a generalized function and additional to out-of-home work. This function has a transcendent importance to the development and emotional health of children, as has been established in longitudinal research of attachment theory.
This study explores Mexican mothers’ shared character traits, a systematized appraisal of their attitudes towards their lives and their children, their states of mind, and the quality of care they provide as well as their relationship to attachment patterns of their infants; some come from urban Middle, Middle-upper and Upper-class families and others from Poor in-digenous peasant families.
The fundamental focus is on the woman’s participation inside the family, although it does not exclude the possibility that some of these mothers handle not only the care giving and housework but also work outside of the home (the "double shift”). It concludes that the daily material conditions of existence are closely related to shared character traits and that these are in turn related to patterns of attachment in their infants, their sensitivity in the treatment of their babies, and the results of their Adult Attachment Interviews. Women have been the sup-port and pillar of subsistence for urban populations as well as the most poor and disadvan-taged communities. This role played by women is as widespread as undocumented in litera-ture.
Particularly due to technical innovations, we are witnessing an unbounding of reality that increasingly is reflected in an inner striving to get rid of the limitations and boundaries of our own personality by reconstructing it anew. This pursuit of de-limitation, dissolution and blurring of boundaries is seen as a central character trait of the Ego-oriented social character. Such a fabrication of a limitless per-sonality doubtless results in a weakening of such psychic abilities as experiencing one’s self as a consistent and ambiguous entity, being emotionally attached to oneself and to others, feeling one’s own strivings, affects and emotions, and being guided by one’s internalized norms and values. Lastly, the impact of this character formation is discussed in regard to clinical and therapeutic issues.
Erich Fromm was not only one of the founders of IFPS in the 1960s, but also one of the forerunners of the intersubjective tradition in psychoanalysis. Trained at the Berlin Institute, he started in the 1930s, after emigrating to the USA, to reformulate psychoanalytic theory by focusing on man’s need to be related to reality, to others, and to him- or herself. Similarly to Sullivan, Fromm looked at man primarily as a social being. But in contrast to Sullivan, Fromm stressed much more man’s being molded by societal requirements and by an intersubjectivity that is determined by strivings originating in the structure of his social character. Because of Fromm’s ‘‘societal’’ orientation, his approach to psychoanalysis is still of relevance to understanding how the intersubjective and intrapsychic are interwoven in each individual. Beyond that, his approach enables insights into what is going on psychically in society and how these changes can influence the individual’s welfare or suffering.
Igor A. Caruso (1914–1981), one of the founders of the IFPS and the early Vienna Circle of Depth Psychology, began to discuss questions of the interplay between biological, social, and evolutional realities and intrapsychic development in the early 1950s. Caruso understood that Man's specific human ability to transcend his overdetermined biological constitution into a development of conciousness, care, and self-awareness is basic for his need for and lifelong activity related to intersubjective relationships. Sexual and survival drive as a biological basis contain their own transformation as cultural potency within the subject–object relationship. Each act of relationship – to things and living objects – creates a new reality that is a meaningful symbol for both parts of the relationship in their single reality. This new – third – reality gains full effectiveness for both actors as “symbolic realism” and initiates the ongoing development. On this understanding, psychic development is a process of changing interactive creation and effectiveness, following the biological drive dynamic as well as its inherent future transformations by attachment. Symbolisation is therefore the main intrapsychic and intersubjective activity of the development of object- and self-awareness. Caruso emphasises the meaning of symbol and symbolisation as an act of relationship to and within the world, and understood psychoanalytic theories as a changing symbolisation of relationship.
Is psychoanalysis scientific? Which Oedipus is the >correct< Oedipus? Questions like these have divided psychoanalysis and fueled debates about it since its inception. In this paper, I explore these issues by outlining and adopting an >intertextual< perspective, not to answer such questions but to establish a metatheoretical position that might enable us to step outside of them to consider the broader relationship between theory, myth, literature, and the clinical session. I discuss how concepts such as narcissism and the Oedipal arrangement signify a deeper need for affiliation beyond the content of the myth itself but from within the psychoanalytic field; that they provide a flexible resource but also accrete a historical residue presenting as inertia against a unified psychoanalytic approach. In doing so, the term theory drift is developed to argue that psychoanalytic theory might in part develop through idiosyncratic >etymological< processes that reflect an obligation to retain concepts such as Oedipus and a reluctance to break with existing forms and practices. Finally, I discuss emergence and how it signifies the imponderability of the literary and clinical material with which psychoanalysis works, and look to actor network theory to conceptualize the fluid, intertextual networks within which we exist.
On passionate dissent
(2013)
What would Erich Fromm say about North Korea? A preliminary
application of humanist psychoanalysis
(2013)
This paper considers the possibility of applying the sociologically oriented humanist psychoanalysis of Erich Fromm to the evaluation of the political character of the North Korean state and society, with particular attention given to Fromm's concepts of the matricentric complex and patricentric complex, as well as to his analysis of fascism and Stalinism. The author explains that if humanist psychoanalysis is consistently applied, North Korea can be understood as a transitional postcolonial Stalinist state with a patricentric social order that exploits the matricentric complex for mass control.
The author sees H.S. Sullivan's (1892–1949) interpersonal theory as the best theoretical framework for the contemporary intersubjective perspective in psychoanalysis and presents the former in its pluridimensional articulation. After having extended Freud's therapeutic approach to psychotic patients, Sullivan developed both a developmental psychology and a psychoanalytic and psychotherapeutic technique based on the >interpersonal field< as the basic unit of study. To the pluridimensional character of his theory also belongs its application to the cultural and social aspects of our personal identity. Having the contemporary psychoanalytic authors who shaped the intersubjective perspective limited themselves to the clinical dimension, Sullivan's interpersonal theory can still provide the theoretical framework that any psychoanalytic perspective needs.
The author sees H.S. Sullivan's (1892–1949) interpersonal theory as the best theoretical framework for the contemporary intersubjective perspective in psychoanalysis and presents the former in its pluridimensional articulation. After having extended Freud's therapeutic approach to psychotic patients, Sullivan developed both a developmental psychology and a psychoanalytic and psychotherapeutic technique based on the >interpersonal field< as the basic unit of study. To the pluridimensional character of his theory also belongs its application to the cultural and social aspects of our personal identity. Having the contemporary psychoanalytic authors who shaped the intersubjective perspective limited themselves to the clinical dimension, Sullivan's interpersonal theory can still provide the theoretical framework that any psychoanalytic perspective needs.
Why is it that imprisonment has undergone an explosive growth in the USA and Britain over the last three decades against the background of falling crime rates in both countries? And why has this development met with a significant and escalating degree of support among the public? To the extent that governing elites on either side of the Atlantic have been eliciting public support for their authority by inducing concerns about issues of crime and punishment, what explains the selection of crime as a means to this effect, and in what precise ways do crime and punishment fulfil their hidden political function? Moreover, how do Americans and Britons legitimate their consent to objectively irrational policies and the elites responsible for their formulation? In seeking to advance the study of these questions, the present article rediscovers the method and key findings of Erich Fromm’s ‘materialistic psychoanalysis’, bringing them to bear upon insights produced by political economies of contemporary punishment and related scholarship. Particular attention is paid to the hitherto understudied themes of the political production of middle-class support for punitive penal policies under conditions of neoliberal capitalism, and the crucial role played in this process by the privileged position accorded to violent street crime in the public domain.
Music has the uncanny potential to transport its listeners to normally inaccessible realms of the psyche. Grounded in an object relations perspective informed by the burgeoning neo-monistic philosophical discipline of somaesthetics, it is suggested that the synthesis of conscious (necessarily explicit), unconscious (potentially explicit), and nonconscious (necessarily implicit) elements comprises a more utilitarian concept of the psychic essence of an individual: the >foundational self.< This foundational self, or the >spiritual self,< represents the irreducible and ultimately unformulatable core of human experience that results from the dialectical fusion of true-self object relations with concomitant developmentally primitive psychosomatic self states. It is argued that certain types of so-called >sacred music< – music whose form aligns with implicit affective registries that are filtered through intrapsychic constellations of true self object relations – act as perhaps the most potent catalyst in facilitating experiences of spirituality. The phonological qualities of sacred music share the same spectrum of transitional space in which the foundational self enjoys its fullest expression. Sacred music possesses the ability to dissolve explicit representational boundaries in service of achieving symbolic interpersonal fusion with the foundational self, in so doing facilitating a blissfully ego-boundless sensation of unio mystica.
This paper reveals the basic ideas of Erich Fromm’s analytical social psychology and shows links among work, character and education. Social changes may be better understood in the background of work evolution. Today the concept of waged work has been extended to unpaid activities. At the same time, the working life has been changed from a stable model to a flexible one. The work, its standards and social distribution, are also different now. Erich Fromm’s concept of "social character” clarifies the changes and explains the consequences of the social changes. The relations to work are also different. During these changes – unemployment included – concepts of the unconditional basic income were stud-ied. These concepts explain why it is possible for people without waged work to participate in community life and consumption, without being excluded. The author presents the basic social changes that affected many different subpopulation and age groups.
The history of attitudes toward Freud's adoption of free-associative discourse, as well as toward the significance of the clinical significance of the free-associative method, is critically reviewed. It is argued that, if one takes the re-inviting of repressed contents back into self-consciousness to be the defining process of psychoanalysis as a discipline (distinguishing it even from those psychotherapies that are based on psychoanalytic models of the mind), then free-associating is indeed the sine qua non of the psychoanalysis process. It is further suggested that whereas Freud's notion of libidinality radically subverts Cartesian dualism, our thinking about the significance of free-associative discourse has too frequently lapsed into the mistaken assumption that free-associating should only be about what “comes to mind.” In this context, a way of free-associating with the “bodymind” is described as an addendum to customary psychoanalytic practices. This augmented method remains faithful to Freud's practice of allowing the voice of sensuality to “join the conversation,” at the same time that its clinical implementation incorporates some of the wisdom concerning “breathwork” that comes from the yogic procedures for cultivating awareness.
Ferenczi is regarded as the initiator of the relational model in psychoanalysis. In Britain his influence on Bowlby was largely indirect. In the United States he exercized an explicit influence on the interpersonal school through Clara Thompson. Fromm was already an admirer and supporter of Ferenczi. In comparing Fromm and Bowlby their convergence on the evolutionary paradigm is stressed. These two authors also converge on two important Ferenczian themes: the primary nature of the mother-child relationship and the importance of real-life traumatic events. The quality of attachment may contribute to the social character.
This paper discusses two 19-century French-speaking authors, Pierre Janet and Auguste Forel, who both employed hypnosis and in various ways were influential on psychoanalysis. Marcelle, a long case history by Janet, is presented. Freud’s long review of Forel’s book on hypnotism is then discussed, as well as a short review by Erich Fromm of Forel’s autobiography. A case history by Forel is also presented. The connections between these two authors and modern developments are discussed.
Sullivan Integrated
(2013)