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One of the perennial questions in Shakespeare studies concerns what Coleridge called the >motiveless malignity< of Iago. Instead of looking at Iago as an individual, however, I will argue that he is best understood as a representation of the >social character< of early modern bourgeois man. Iago’s denial of spiritual values and his mercenary nature can be understood in this light. Fromm’s theses concerning the interconnections among anal libido, the death instinct, malignant aggression, and necrophilia all find support in Shake-speare’s supreme villain.
This paper presents the text of an imagined oration from a senior faculty member to a newly hired faculty member on the topic of how to stay sane in the academy. It begins by characterizing the basic problem at the heart of the university: students are not learning as much as they should and professors are not teaching them in a way that ensures they do. The problem is one of dysfunction and denial. The university is not able to effectively perform its main function and the involved stakeholders pretend everything is fine. Seen in the light of Fromm’s (1955) criteria of mental health, many aspects of modern university life are quite >insane<. I discuss three specific things to avoid that will protect the faculty member’s sanity: avoid the >unstated compact< between faculty and students, avoid the prospect of a promotion to the administration, and avoid the lure of popularity and politics. I then discuss three affirmative steps to enhance faculty mental health: consider first things, honor the call of truth in the world and your discipline, and regularly recall the deeper purpose of the university. The paper concludes with a candid analysis of why the professoriate’s public prestige has precipitously fallen over the past 40 years. (APA PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2018 APA, all rights reserved)
If psychoanalysis is to avoid total marginalization, something has to be changed in the way future generations are prepared for working with patients and doing research. Reformation of psychoanalytic education may easily be the crucial issue when it comes to the survival of psychoanalysis. Its current organizational scheme has been criticized for various reasons, and various models of its structure have been proposed. I advocate a model that would combine the best features of the university education (training in clinical skills together with philosophy of science and research methodology) with personal analysis as part of psychoanalytic institutes. Although universities can remedy some of the problems of psychoanalytic institutions, they cannot contain the subjective experience of being analyzed.
Erich Fromm’s >Escape from Freedom< (1941) charts the growth and decline of freedom and selfawareness in the West from the Middle Ages to modern times, when people sought refuge from insecurity and responsibility in totalitarian movements, such as Nazism and Fascism. In contrast to the thesis that >Escape from Freedom< is evidence of >The Americanization of a European Intellectual,< Fromm wrote it because freedom, or the lack of it, was an acute problem in Nazi Germany, not America. His language and concepts were formed and fused during the crucial ideological and intellectual struggles of a specific, wretched moment in German history, the rise and triumph of Nazism; hence, he waged a Kulturkampf against Nazi barbarism to save Western humanist civilization.
I describe my collaboration with Giovanni over the span of almost 15 years during which time we developed a multimotivational model that built on attachment theory and explored some of its clinical implications. I mention the many ways Giovanni influenced my thinking, and provide a few personal stories about Giovanni that give a sense of his generous, warm and creative nature. Throughout the article I describe how I developed some of the ideas we worked on together to provide a broad evolutionary and developmental outlook on human nature. We had planned to write a book together on this ambitious project, but personal circumstances got in the way.
This article describes a psychoanalyst's personal experience in an international and interdisciplinary social trauma research network. Crises and conflicts are understood as an integral feature of such a collaboration. Using the self-reflective capacity of the psychoanalyst may help to turn them into a new perspective. Crossing disciplinary borders, reconnecting to the field of academic research, might prove to be a rather rewarding step.
This text is intended as a contribution to the study of the profound mutual relations between architecture and psychoanalysis. Architecture creates representations that conceal unconscious forms of thought; psychoanalysis helps to explain the meanings of these representations – forms of construction and forms of the psyche. The multifaceted work of psychoanalyst Christopher Bollas – his thoughts on the relationships between psychoanalysis and architecture, on the vitality of objects, on the creative implications of the Oedipal relationship – serves as a critical and decisive instrument for the authors’ inquiry. The issue of the >vitality of objects< as described by Bollas also concerns – but only in part – the architectural >object.< One modern form of architecture with an inordinate capacity empathy has to be Louis Kahn’s. Kahn’s youngest son , Nathaniel, lost his father when he was still a child and hardly had a chance to get to know him. After becoming an adult and an established film-maker, he managed to recover his father in two ways: by discovering him in his works, with their powerful affective impact; and by drawing from those very works of his father to enhance his own creative process in his filmic art. As it turns out, it is this very process that has allowed for an emblematically positive resolution of the Oedipal relationship.
Paolo Gerbaudo’s book >The Mask and the Flag: Populism, Citizenism and Global Protest<, whose approach is reflected in his Crosscurrents piece in the issue of >Media, Culture & Society< at hand, is a response to these societal, political and academic challenges. This Cross Currents comment asks, I ask, the following: Why is it that right-wing authoritarian populism in recent times has become much more popular than left-wing movements? How do right-wing authoritarian movements communicate? Why is it that right-wing political communication strategies seem to garner and result in mass support? The critical theory of authoritarianism advanced by the Frankfurt School and related authors on fascism, Nazism, and the authoritarian personality help us to critically analyse the communication of authoritarianism. In this context, particularly the works by Franz Leopold Neumann, Erich Fromm, Theodor W. Adorno, Herbert Marcuse, Leo Löwenthal, and Willhelm Reich are relevant.
The postmodern university is experiencing a legitimation crisis because of a deepening and corrosive mistrust of all forms of authority; even those that are intended to benefit students by enabling them to >think critically<, or to deepen and improve their knowledge and skills. Some of the problem is rooted in prevailing cultural and economic trends, but others inhere in the nature of postmodernism itself; especially the postmodern claim that truth itself is non-existent or simply unattainable or unavailable, even at the best of times. Unlike earlier generations of critical theorists, who believed that >the truth shall make you free<, postmodern theorists, following Nietzsche, claim that the very idea of truth is moot, if not entirely obsolete. But absent a commitment to a search for truth, the entire structure of the university itself begins to crumble.
This paper combines historical and biographical work on the Frankfurt School of critical theorists with a sociological approach to intellectual creativity outlined in Michael Farrell’s provocative book Collaborative Circles: Friendship Dynamics and Creative Work. Revisiting earlier research on the often unheralded role the psychoanalyst Erich Fromm played in the early years of the critical theory tradition, the paper reviews the theory of collaborative circles outlined by Farrell, applies this social science explanation of conflict and creativity to the Frankfurt School network of Horkheimer, Fromm, Adorno, Marcuse, Lowenthal etc. and suggests a new way of thinking about the history of this innovative and controversial group of social theorists and researchers. The paper concludes by suggesting revisions to the Farrell model of collaborative circles and compares and contrasts the strengths of the theory to the “scientific intellectual movements” approach outlined by Frickel and Gross.
Contemplating spiritual experience: Winnicott's potential space, Tibetan bardo, and liminality
(2018)
In this paper, ways of contemplating and accommodating the unfamiliar, especially the >other< of spiritual experience, are considered. Some concepts from psychoanalysis, such as Winnicott's >potential space< and his notion of >holding,< are helpful in comprehending spiritual experiences that can easily be misunderstood, or >flattened out< to use Bion's phrase. Interesting and rather remarkable confluences in these concepts from psychoanalysis and from Tibetan Buddhism (bardo) and cultural anthropology (liminality) are considered in their functions of both enabling and comprehending these extraordinary and often life-enhancing experiences.
This paper presents Fromm’s (1900–1980) ap-proach to religion and religiosity, in light of Hermann Cohen (1842–1918) thought. Despite differences in their thought, Cohen and Fromm share some things in common. Their critique of culture is based on a unique definition of das Individuum, the human condition. They demon-strate a cautious approach to modernity and progress.
We implemented research of >surveillance study for independence and Improvement in ADL of the fracture of the femur patient by a welfare device >by the Association for Technical Aids in 2000< and >Research investigation about the upper-limbs training combined with lift device development for Motivative exercise, Small and Medium Enterprise Corporation, 2001<. Through those study by the national grants, the 21st Century Rehabilitation Research Society was born again as the Biophilia Rehabilitation Academy (hereafter BRA). We explore the mechanism, spread the new rehabilitation method, and enable them to do by anyone who learned it. The purpose of the BRA is, i) to study a new rehabilitation method in order to live for the disabled elderly independently and the physical ability improved by overcoming impairment, ii) to explore the mechanism, to spread the new rehabilitation method, and to enable them to do by anyone who learned it, and iii) to study the influence on the social economy by independence acquirement for them. The source of biophilia which we used is preface of the Revolution of Hope which U.S. philosopher Erich Fromm wrote. The preface of a source is shown below: Appealing to the love for life (biophilia) that still exists in many of us. Only through full awareness of the danger to life can this potential be mobilized for action capable of bringing about drastic changes in our way of organizing society. Not that the author optimistic about the chances of success; but he believes that one cannot think in terms of percentages or probabilities as long as there is a real possibility even a slight one that life will prevail. The predecessor of BRA, the 21st Century Rehabilitation Research Society studied to confirm the fact as a medical fact that the 30% of bedridden elderly became a walk possible, as a result of performing Takizawa Method rehabilitation. Japanese have been promoted and allowed to live on the others' care and to be admitted to a hospital if one needed care due to a cerebrovascular disorder, fracture and/or else by their kindness. The Japanese pension system of the current disbursement approach seems to be a pyramid investment organization. If the newer members increase in number, the earlier members gain more money. The Baby boomers increased in the population of workers’ number and was a kind of the newer members for paying. If the public pension maintains the present system, it would be bankrupted by increasing old baby boomers who receive money in number and descendants as newer members decrease in number by the lower birthrate. The increase in care related people and in the medical expenses by aging (social security expenditure 2025 prediction 207 trillion yen/216 trillion-yen gross pay in whole Japan) would hit baby boomers directly, and it becomes impossible and to live peacefully in Japanese tenderness like the former lifestyle. Therefore, we consider that >the heart and will which he continues hope to live as human just when it becomes a disabled person< are important. The author titled our study group >biophilia< which represented it and got all the members’ approval. We introduced the studies of the Biophilia Rehabilitation Academy, which was evolved from this way in 2002.
In this article, I discuss in detail how Erich Fromm’s categories can help de-scribe Trump’s character, or >temperament,< a word used to characterize a major flaw in Trump in the 2016 U.S. presidential campaign and his rule as President by the end of the first year. In >The Anatomy of Human Destructiveness< (1973), Fromm engages in a detailed analysis of the authoritarian character as sadistic, excessively narcissistic, malignantly aggressive, vengeably destructive, and necrophiliac, personality traits arguably applicable to Trump. In the following analysis, I will systematically deploy key Frommian socio-psychoanalytic categories to Trump and his followers to show how they can illuminate Trump and authoritarian populism.