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Business and economy use advertising to promote their products and to increase their profits. Political parties also try to win votes with the help of commercial propaganda. Every step of the way we are accompanied by advertising, our everyday life and our culture are shaped by it.This article asks how the permanent confrontation with advertising affects the recipients. What consequences does propaganda and manipulation have for people who are exposed to this constant influence? The phenomenon of the Homo oeconomicus is also examined in this context. The Homo economicus is primarily a person who consumes and subconsciously identifies with his or her consumption. He's addicted to consumption. Advertising determines the life of the Homo oeconomicus. The psychologist Erich Fromm already dealt with the phenomenon of exuberant materialism in his book >To have or to be< in the 20th century. This book in particular and his work in general are also presented in this article. Fromm propagated a >rational< consumption that focuses on the real needs of people. A separate chapter is dedicated to Edward Bernays, the nephew of Sigmund Freud, a pioneer of public relations, whose work >Propaganda< – his famous book from 1928, which is still surprisingly current – is presented. Gewista is an Austrian advertising company. This company is in the focus of this article because we can find its out-of-home commercials also in places that were previously free of advertising. That's why the story of Gewista is told and its product range will be presented.Using the example of Gewista there will be asked for the self-image and the foreign attributions of advertising companies. These companies offer a service they describe themselves as a form of communication. Therefore, the article also analyzes whether advertising can really be seen as a topic of communication theories.
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.
Analytic therapy enables patients to relive and repair failures to promote their mentalization by parental figures. However, therapists also fail temporarily to provide the patients with a growth-promoting environment when their patterns of reflexivity on the patients’ experience are undermined. These temporary failures create new opportunities for therapists to access unformulated knowledge about their patients’ experiences and enrich their reflexivity on them, and for the patients to promote their ability to hold themselves in their own minds.
Patients contribute to analytic endeavors through a knowledge of their own unique ways of organizing their experience, of building an intersubjective space with significant others, of the type of life that they consider worth living, and primarily of their specific passions and yearnings. The more that therapists allow the patients’ unique self-knowledge to influence their therapeutic perceptions and decisions, the further they will advance patients’ status as co-experts working together with the therapist to create and formulate new, richer knowledge. In the present article, it is suggested that one of the main reasons why patients’ self-knowledge is excluded from the therapeutic dialogue is that the persuasive power of the therapists’ rich and deep knowledge challenges the patients’ self-authority. Through an illustrative vignette, therapists are recommended to use a metacommunication intervention to restore the balance that has been undermined between the therapist’s authority and the patient’s self-authority.
The 50-minute hour is a feature of psychoanalytic work that is most commonly discussed in the context of case reports. This paper examines it as a concept. The author starts by describing the origin of the 50-minute hour and its development as an element of the psychoanalytic setting or framework. Next, he considers the significance of the clock as a relational factor in the session and reflects on the alienness of the time of day to the unconscious, and the consequences of this alienness. He then uses a clinical example to illustrate the phenomenon of the stretching effect of time in analytic sessions. Finally, the author demonstrates how cleverly the 50-minute hour excises the time needed for unconscious processes from our accelerated present; he shows that it challenges the social convention of time, and has a structuring effect in that it >times< psychic processes.
Schooling, followed by its modernized acclaim in educational standard is distorted with the ideal concept of education. Educational model and custom is kept in form of violence for the sake of achieving so-called disciplined product. It is not only physical but also includes non-physical forces as emotional and psychic are delivered in symbols. It is a part of expectation conflict, as well as internal part of social relation of parents and their children, teachers and their students, even society and children. At the same time, changes in educational ideologies is taking its root in child abuse even more. Education become severely see children as objects, which means reification. This study, using Erich Fromm’s approach, emphasizes in child abuse phenomenon related to Indonesian educational ideologies as a form of modern society's aggression. Timeline of educational ideologies is studied to reveal sources of child abuse within. Critical discourse analysis by Laclau and Mouffe is the method for deconstructing and acting to transformation of internal contradiction between educational ideologies and sources of child abuse. Results of this study show how in each educational ideology tropologically and historiographically implies violence, and that recent educational ideologies is facing crisis to legitimate its irrational authority of social modern society character, which, eventually, sharpen the root to child abuse in educational processes.
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 we will explore the postmodern conception of the >death< of the subject and the fol-lowing postmodern philosophical premises: the critique of the master narratives, the critique of metaphysics, the deconstruction of foundationalism, and the critique of the Enlightenment notion of the autonomous and free subject. In the central part of the article we will explore the limitations of the postmodern philosophy and introduce Fromm’s notion of the birth of the self in the time-history continuum. Contrary to the postmodern philosophy, we will insist on Fromm’s non-essentialist notion of being as a paradox and on the notion of the human agency which is crucial for the psychoanalytic (therapeutic) work and a personal transformation.
Posing the question of the possibility of transference at the moment of a decompensation, the author proposes rethinking the psychiatric concept of >unmotivated laughter< in light of psychoanalytic experience, taking a case study as a point of departure. In the present research, the intention is to understand the rule of laughter outside the conception of the joke (Witz), by tracing the trajectory of the conceptualization of laughter from Freudian to Lacanian psychoanalysis. This review is needed in order to understand an experience of interpretation of laughter at the time of a decompensation in the schizophrenia of an adolescent, in which (un)motivated laughter formed a symptom. >Jouissance-laughter< necessitates changing the psychiatric understanding of laughter in schizophrenia, where its motivation is not what is comical in the here-and-now. In this laughter, the humorous or comic response of the clinician becomes an interpretation. Published online: 18 Apr 2018.
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 examines how clinicians can arrive at effective therapeutic action by means other than spoken language. The paper presents a view that resonating affective states promote intimacy in the therapeutic encounter and is in fact a vital part of the curative process of psychotherapy. This emotional interchange supplements traditional notions of insight by adding an aspect of an >embodied self< who knows. A clinical case that demonstrates this view is presented and discussed.
The article examines features of stability and transformation of the personality type emerging as a normative and value image of the modern Russian society. Based on approaches of Erich Fromm, David Riesman, Yuri Levada, two trends can be revealed: one of them aims to preserve those archetypal characteristics so typical of >Soviet human<, another one deals with formation of new properties that would meet goals of market oriented society and define features of individual success. Russian society is characteristic of global processes of values modernization, reasoned by R. Inglehart and C. Welzel, and reflecting individual’s pursuance of greater personal freedom and self-expression. The new value system of the Russians is still nascent; giving up on old social and cultural reality is of phantom nature. Previous research analysis allows concluding that the personality type is balancing between two poles, caused by socio-economic conditions fluctuation, poor establishment of institutional factors for system implementation of the new model, missing of a clear vision of the future, which could serve as a reference. Russian society appears to be split according to the typological dominance factor into two groups – active and passive. The problem arises on how lack of uniform symbolic and semantic field effects the modern personality type formation as it leads to social relations mobility, ongoing risk and complex processes in semio-phychological space. However, the personality type instability may be also caused by socio-cultural specifics, traditions, lack of public communication space development, preservation of former institutional structures and a particular lifestyle.
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.
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.
Modern society is marked with utmost ambivalence. There is the utmost desire to be free, creative, and productive. Yet, our creative and productive desires trap us and now control our own freedom to become. Couple this inconsistency with the rapid sociostructural changes, fragmentation of traditions, and dissolution of communal well-being, what we have is a life of uncertainty. It is a life debased from its very ontological foundation with the transmission of technorationalities of the capitalist industry. In modernity, we could no longer speak of individuality and subjectivity since the very historical thread that serve as its foundation is now wavered towards accumulation and possession of the capital. Moreover, this overleaning towards the capital deadens us unconsciously that we mistake this for reality. The market ideology with all its rationalizations reifies human consciousness to the extent that we consider the technorationalities as the ontological normative structure. As a result, there is a growing dislocation of subjectivity which leads to neurotic social behaviors and inner social contradictions. As a result, we have our own social discontents. It is then the aim of this paper to ponder on the psychosocial effects of the market economy. I argue that there is a need to look at the effects of this economic system that perpetually delineate subjective experiences and plunge humanity into incontrovertible pseudo images. It is at this point that Fromm’s radical psychosocial interpretation of society becomes binding. I argue with Fromm that our social libidinal drives or what he termed as social characterology, which we are all unconscious of, must be thoroughly brought to fore. I claim that this particular characterology result to the obstructions of a normal and healthy society.
In proposing a refounding of psychoanalysis within a humanist perspective, the author suggests a comparison between Elie Wiesel’s discussion of concepts such as witnessing, testimony, and memory as redemption, and Sandor Ferenczi’s idea of the therapist as >benevolent and useful witness,< who, thanks to his/her true empathic and committed participation, in contrast to Freud’s neutrality, enables the patient to achieve real awareness of the split parts within him- or herself, as well as an integration of the fragmentation due to trauma. Against >indifference,< the practice of connectedness, responsibility, memory, love, and forgiveness as true elaboration of trauma and >going beyond< are proposed as tools towards a >persistence of the human< in a world of increasing dehumanization.
I examined a better therapeutic approach for addressing the heart-rending emotional state of a client exposed to serious traumatic experiences during early childhood without experiencing affect attunement from surrounding adults. The clinical case describes a woman in her early 20s who had lost her memory of past sexual abuse by her father. She visited an on-campus student counseling room complaining of feeling she was >not herself.< This paper focuses on intersubjective exchanges involving moments when her traumatic experiences were about to be revived during weekly face-to-face psychoanalytic psychotherapy. I took note of the joint attention that developed between us concerning my attunement with her painful emotional experiences. We eventually shared subjective affective states fostered within a safe mental space. Using this as a starting point, we traced the process by which she came to accept the painful memories and associated experiences surrounding the heart-wrenching affect that she had had no choice but to >shroud in darkness,< as well as accepting her feelings of reality. I made use of knowledge from infant research shedding light on how two people can instantly mutually influence their actions and behaviors, and explored, in great detail, what sort of implicit relatedness had developed between us.
Love as an Active Choice
(2018)
Thanks to Nestor Haddaway, one cannot simply ask, >What is love?< without instinctually following it with the lyrics >Baby don’t hurt me, don’t hurt me, no more<, and I couldn’t bring myself to do it in this essay. However, now that I have posed the question – and gotten that song stuck in my head I’d like to ask the question in a better way: How does one love? The root of society’s widespread confusion on love is that it is not asking the right question. By asking how to love, one can then move on to ask more specific questions, particularly, how to maintain one’s individuality in love. I argue, with the help of Erich Fromm’s book >The Art of Loving< and Bell Hooks’ book >All About Love< that this image of a moving statue, >Man and Woman<, by Tamara Kvesitadze (Fig. 1) represents the answer to this question with its oscillation between the individuality and the connectedness needed for mature love. Contrary to the common conceptions that love is simple and out of one’s control, love is an active balance – a constant motion – between being together and yet separate.
Donald Trump and his followers who never waiver stand at 41.5% of the US population (Fivethirtyeight.com), the embodiment of a lust for power and fame and the minions who crave fulfillment through his arrogant and belligerent antics. Speaking from the mid-Twentieth century, Fromm offers a starting point for our discussion of the present day, centered on the social-psychological intersection where everyday people recreate the systems upon which they both depend, and which may very well destroy them.
This discussion explores and compares the explicit interpersonal method of psychoanalysis of Harry Stack Sullivan and the implicit and until now insufficiently recognized interpersonal method of Sigmund Freud. Interpersonal means interaction via expression of feelings, emotions, and actions, gestures of body and face, and words. The centrality of emotions as motives and movers or action suggests redefining psychic reality as emotional reality. While Freud did not have the word >interpersonal,< invented by Sullivan, he nevertheless acted as an interpersonal psychotherapist both in his prepsychoanalytic period and, thereafter, from his beginnings as a psychoanalyst in 1893. The other purpose of this paper is to promote a new era of collaboration and cross-fertilization between the IPA and other psychoanalytic authors and organizations.
This article takes the position that our contemporary overheated media environment lends itself to comfortable passivity, resulting in mental breakdown in the guise of the dark emotions: anxiety, melancholia and boredom. This is especially the case with the inevitable synergy of the upcoming technological transformations from genetic modification, virtual reality simulacra and artificial intelligence/robotics. After discussing the data from the World Health Organization regarding the stark increase of people across the globe suffering from depression and anxiety, this article weds the concepts of McLuhan’s hot-cool distinction with Fromm’s delineation of the productive character orientation. Following Fromm, this article argues that joy ensues from reason, productive labour and love–sorrow from ignorance, alienated work and indifference. When we willfully abrogate our responsibilities to self and other via non-participational mediated forms, we cede away our potential for growth and development. This leads to the emotional breakdowns of guilt, boredom, anxiety and melancholia. Viktor Frankl’s logo-therapeutic perspective is discussed as a counterbalance to the social effects wrought by our overheated technological environment. Frankl’s stress on phenomenological meaning as the cornerstone of existence provides a lens to understanding the affects of an over-reliance on technological gadgetry.
The Art oft Leading. The Significance of Personality and Character in the Choice of Business Leaders
(2018)
Here, I attempt to formulate some thoughts about the past, present, and future of psychoanalysis and its institutions in Germany. To do this, I have employed my varied experience as a supervisor and consultant to many such psychoanalytic institutes over the past several years. Themes discussed include the history of psychoanalysis in postwar Germany, the organizational structure of German psychoanalytic institutes, and their cultures in regard to group and organizational dynamics, and political and economic aspects. Finally, I add brief thoughts about the future, taking into account recent developments relating to planned changes in laws governing psychotherapy in Germany. Further, I attempt to analyze and comment on: coming to terms with the past; how to begin after the >Zero Hour<; the form of organization of psychoanalytic institutes in Germany; missing patients and missing candidates; constructive debate and hurting people’s feelings; the lack of >detoxification< and >recycling< of the poisonous remains of psychoanalytic processes; and the future of psychoanalytic institutions in Germany. I end with an example of a typical primary task used in conducting large groups in the institutes in which I worked, and include an anonymized table listing individual interventions, their duration, and frequency. These should provide an idea of my way of working, and an overview of the dimensions of the task.
Criminology (as the scientific study of criminal behaviour on the individual and social level) and psychology (as the science, which seeks to understand individuals and groups) pay special attention to motivation – a theoretical construction, used to explain behaviour. In this article the motivation of recipients of bribery is widely investigated. In addition to such well-established motives as greediness, selfishness, prevalence of personal interest, the author analyzes also other criminal behaviour determinants. The works, which are used in this research are of the following authors: John Broadus Watson, Edward Lee Thorndike (Behavioural); Sigmund Freud, Erich Fromm (Psychoanalysis); Carl Rogers, Abraham Maslow (Existential-humanistic theories); William Isaac Thomas (Thomas theorem); Florian Witold Znaniecki (sociological theory); Erik Homburger Erikson (theory on psychosocial development of human beings); Jean William Fritz Piaget (theory of cognitive development); Herbert Lefcourt, Ronald Smith (>Locus of Control<) etc. As the result of this research the author has concluded that bribe-takers’ behaviour is determined by such psychological constructs as the desire for power, fear, envy, mental deflections, mania, feeling of exclusion, the need for extreme, oppressed creativity.
One of major challenges facing contemporary psychiatry is the insufficient grasp of relationship between individual and collective mental pathologies. A long tradition of diagnosing >mental illness< of society – exemplified by Erich Fromm – stands apart from approach of contemporary social psychiatry and is not perceived as relevant for psychiatric discourse. In this Perspective article, I argue that it is possible to uphold the idea of a supra-individual dimension to mental health, while avoiding the obvious pitfalls involved in categorical diagnosing of society as suffering from mental illness. I argue for an extended notion of public mental ill-health, which goes beyond the quantitative understanding of mental health as an aggregate of individual diseased minds captured in statistics, and which can be conceived as a dynamic, emergent property resulting from interactions of individual brains/minds in social space. Such a notion, in turn, presents a challenge of how to account for the interfacing between individual minds/brains and the collective mental phenomena. A suitable theoretical framework is provided by the notion of epidemiology of representations, originally formulated by cognitive anthropologist Dan Sperber. Within this framework, it is possible to highlight the role of public (material) representations in inter-individual transfer of mental representations and mental states. It is a suitable conceptual platform to explain how the troubling experiences with causal or mediating role on mental health, to a significant degree arise through a person’s direct interaction with material representations and participation in collective mental states, again generated by material representations.
Coetzee’s novel >Disgrace< addresses the question of dysfunctional inter-human relationships and explores the themes of domination, subjection, and character distortion in the context of the post-apartheid South Africa. In fact, this paper holds, >Disgrace< fictionalizes Coetzee’s concerns about the social deformation that springs from distorted relationality. According to Erich Fromm’s social thought, the apartheid regime represented an insane society based on sadistic domination and masochistic submission. It systematized sadomasochistic patterns of interpersonal relatedness and excluded horizontal relationships based on love and mutual care. Disgrace shows that how the same dynamics of intersubjective relationships still feature in the >new< South Africa. A parallel is, therefore, drawn between Coetzean ideas about deformed relationality and social deformation and Frommian symbiotic relatedness and sociocultural insanity. The apartheid’s spirit of insanity lingers in the post-apartheid period since its modes of human interactions persist. The transition from the earlier racist system to a genuine democracy, the novel suggests, sounds impossible unless love replaces sadomasochistic relationality.
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.
This paper studies the interaction of the clinical theories of two major British theorists, Melanie Klein and Donald Winnicott. Through three clinical examples, we see how the >Klein-Winnicott dialectic< operates in a significantly developmental fashion to advance and fulfill clinical work. Winnicott’s >object survival< is looked at in developmental conjunction with Klein’s >mourning< as a primary clinical and developmental process. This interaction also captures the essence of working with the aggression of a self that has been traumatically disrupted within its early development. This paper demonstrates how such work leads to the assimilation and grieving of primal object loss, evolving into a >developmental mourning process.< This developmental mourning includes the working-through of an >abandonment depression< in the character-disordered patient. A clinical example in a 1989 essay on >psychic pain< by Betty Joseph is used to set up the clinical challenge of going beyond the symptomatic clinging behavior of developmental arrest, into full psychic birth as a separate other, an Other who can relate to an Other. Conclusively, the subjective visceral affect noted and monitored in its clinical dimensions here is that of human >heartache,< which can also include regret.
The story of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden is a seminal text within the Christian tradition and is considered to hold innermost truths about human nature. From a psychological perspective, Osman argues that since the narrative of Adam and Eve is the first telling of human experience within the Bible and since similar myths exist in other cultures, this story is likely to point to >significant truths about psychic functioning.< Ellens suggests that whether we take this story at a literal, symbolic, mythical, or metaphorical level, it provides us with a framework for thinking about the human condition. Inherent in this story is a series of themes that are central to psychological theories of development such as loss, separation, dependency, intersubjectivity, vulnerability, shame, and desire. This article focuses on two competing theological interpretations of the Garden of Eden emanating from the work of the church fathers Augustine and Irenaeus and explores how the work of psychoanalysts Erich Fromm and Melanie Klein maps onto these two traditions. The author argues that the work of Klein and Fromm can serve to illuminate these different theological traditions, assist us to reflect upon questions of psychological maturity and moral development, and provide a basis for dialogue between theology and psychology in which both the full goodness and the inherent destructiveness of humanity is fully recognised.
In 1929, Wilhelm Reich lectured on >Psychoanalysis as a natural science< before the Communist Academy in Moscow; he was the only Freudian-trained Central European psychoanalyst to do so. That same year, his article >Dialectical materialism and psychoanalysis< was published in the Academy's journal, Under the Banner of Marxism, in both Moscow and Berlin. By this time, Reich's involvement with political activism aligned with the Austrian Communist Party was increasing, while simultaneously psychoanalysis in the Soviet Union was in decline. Our paper places these events in their proper historical context and includes a discussion of the various attempts to determine the compatibility of psychoanalysis and Marxism. We offer analyses of both the article, >Dialectical materialism and psychoanalysis,< and the lecture, >Psychoanalysis as a natural science,< and the reactions to both by Reich's Russian critics. We show the ways in which responses to his lecture foreshadow what becomes the standard Soviet assessment of psychoanalysis. As an appendix to this paper, we provide the first English translation of the Russian account of his lecture, as published in the Herald of the Communist Academy.
In this article, I claim that humor can be a form of social pathology. In opposition to the general humor-affirmative atmosphere, I develop the critical tradition of humor research, and suggest that there is a darker side to fun and laughter. Using insights from Henri Bergson’s theory about laughter and Erich Fromm’s critical social thinking, I formulate a novel theoretical combination which opens up fruitful perspectives on contemporary humor and its social nature. This empirically motivated conceptual position helps us to understand the role and function of humor and laughter. My conclusion is that parts of the contemporary humor catalogue reflect collective destructive and even death-orientated tendencies. The main argument is that if humor is not in line with humanistic values and is not based on a life-orientated worldview, it is in danger of becoming pathological.
This paper tries to outline two different ways of thinking about the concept of negative liberty. On the one hand, one can think of negative liberty in the external view that is entitled the external negative liberty in this paper. Here, human being is free if no one stops him/her from doing whatever s/he may want to do. On the other hand, one can think of negative liberty in the internal sense that is entitled the internal negative freedom by the researcher. In this view, human being realizes him/ herself as a person who exists separately from others but s/he does not have his or her own identity. For this purpose, after analyzing of two approaches through a two prominent thinkers’ standpoints including Isaiah Berlin and Erich Fromm, this question is going to be answered; what negative liberty is based on the two new perspectives, the external and internal perspectives.
This article addresses both the rewards and the daunting complexities of teaching psychoanalysis to undergraduates in the USA, where the idea of a university as a site for the cultivation of the life of the mind is under siege. The essay recommends a close critical reading of key Freudian texts, the establishment of a classroom atmosphere of trust, genuine respect for expectable student skepticism, and the capacity to wait as dystonic ideas gradually take hold and reveal their worth. Speed, a ubiquitous feature and a questionable desideratum of twenty-first century US culture, as well as facile cleverness, a desideratum within academia, tell against the psychoanalytic process, which is long, slow, halting, laborious, and painful, but a process that can, at best, open what has heretofore been sealed.
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.
Realist scholars are increasingly turning their attention to Pierre Bourdieu's concept of habitus or dispositions as a way of theorizing thought and behaviour. In this article, the author offers a contribution, based on Erich Fromm's social psychology, to the realist theory of habitus. The author argues that while Bourdieu and Fromm both see the quest for meaning as the source of subjectivity in social life, Fromm goes further than Bourdieu in analysing the psychodynamic consequences of the acquisition of habitus. Fromm provides additional tools to understand the properties of habitus that emerge from its interaction with primary psychological needs. Principally, Fromm's work reveals an undertheorized set of emergent properties of habitus.