Review Ahron Friedberg with Sandra Sherman. Psychotherapy and personal change: Two minds in a mirror
(2022)
Charles Thorpe’s >Necroculture< attempts to demonstrate that the variegated experiences of alienation under the technocratic culture of neoliberal capital are experiences tantamount to a culture of death. Thorpe suggests that the root of the necrophilia that denes contemporary capitalist culture is in the valuing of non-living objects over living human beings. In the alienation and replacement of imperfect human labor with automated dead labor and in a highly atomized consumer culture where social participation is mediated by commodity fetishism, the non-living are given priority over the living.
Although the once wildly popular writings of Erich Fromm have fallen into desuetude in the 21st century, Fromm remains a relevant figure for anyone interested in the interpenetrating fields of psychoanalysis, cultural criticism, personal spiritual development and civic engagement in domestic and international affairs. For that reason, his thought is eminently worthy of being revisited. At least that is the claim of Lawrence J. Friedman in his new biography, >The Lives of Erich Fromm: Love’s Prophet<.
A modern demokráciák sem oldották meg az >én< szabadságá nak kérdését, sőt a demokratikus berendezkedésű társadalmakban kialakult a szabadság előli menekülésnek egy teljesen sajátos útja. Fromm meglátása szerint (s ennek érvénye ma még erősebb, mint a könyv megírásakor volt): ahelyett, hogy az egyén megőriz né énje integritását, és spontán módon reagálna környezetére, inkább >megszűnik önmaga len ni, s teljes mértékben a kulturális minták felkínálta személyiségmodellt teszi magáévá.<
Dr. E. Fromm, in a recent report to the Journal of the American Home Economics Association, discussed the two kinds of hatred which he claims exist. One is what he calls the >counterpoint of life<. It is rational hatred, aroused by an attack on life, freedom, country, some person or institution we love. Such hatred is necessary for winning a war against aggression. >People must love what they are defending, in order to hate their attackers effectively.< The other kind of hatred, which he calls >character-conditioned<, was made use of by the Nazis in recruiting their party. The bulk of their recruits came from the lower middle class, who had led a starved and frustrated life socially and economically, particularly since 1918, in Germany. This led to tremendous irrational hatred and destructiveness which could only be expressed in small doses before the Nazi party offered an outlet.
[First page] Critical Theory as a philosophical orientation has provided a radical stimulus to a contemporary generation of thinkers by combining the Hegelian and Marxian dialectical methods with Marx's critique of ideology. This has given rise to a distinctively powerful lens of social analysis for the project of emancipation in the multifarious issues of power struggle, ideology, language, discourse, technology, instrumental reason, aesthetic industry, etc. in social, economic, political, and cultural spheres of contemporary society. The revolutionary insights of Hegel and Marx in Critical Theory however, do not imply a closed system of thought among its practitioners; in fact, at times, it has been discordant, however vibrant. In this collection of correspondence, for instance, Marcuse disagrees with Dunayevskaya on the latter's interpretation and application of Hegel's dialectics and absolute idea/mind, while Fromm accused Marcuse of callousness towards moral qualities in political figures similar to that of Lenin (xviii), and Marcuse likewise attacked Fromm on his Freudian revisionism and liberalism regarding interpretations on Freudian psychoanalysis versus Marxist social analysis.
References to the disagreements between the Frankfurt School's intellectual leaders Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno with Herbert Marcuse (xvii), on the one hand, and with Erich Fromm (xix), on the other hand, were also alluded to. Nonetheless, by and through persistent critical dialogue and exchange-truly a real practice of dialectics-the critical theorists in different perspectives of the Marxist-Humanist, Hegelian-Marxist, and Socialist Humanist standpoints, have preserved and has brought to greater heights. ...