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With their book Psychoanalytic perspectives on migration and exile (1989), L. Grinberg and R. Grinberg (1984) opened up a new clinical field, which had been neglected for a long time in the psychoanalytic community, although Freud’s multilinguistic competence had greatly contributed to the creation of psychoanalysis. With their book The Babel of the unconscious, Jacqueline Amati Mehler, Simona Argentieri, and Jorge Canestri were able to confirm the hypothesis that it is possible to help multilingual patients to integrate the different aspects of their self which are bound to their mother tongue and to their foreign tongue(s), and thus to allow them to develop a new identity. The author, who has been a psychoanalyst in Munich since 1999, works every day with his Italian patients in this new clinical field, that is in their common mother tongue and at the two levels of their old Italian and their new German identity. Through the detailed presentation of a clinical case, he furthermore shows how, on the one hand, the migration creates a new space in which therapy actually becomes possible, and on the other hand, not only therapy, but also the kind of relationship developed by the patients to their >new country< plays a decisive role in the whole process. Such a frame proved to be particularly good for the emergence, revisitation, and reelaboration of the transgenerational trauma around which the case of Penelope is centered. The author further assumes that the theme of >migration and identity< is becoming more and more important in our globalized world, with clinical consequences whose elaboration requires a specific cultural and technical preparation.
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.
The psychoanalytic movement is experiencing a serious crisis: its scientific consensus, social standing, and impact on practice in mental health have all been steadily declining over the last decades. This unfortunate process has been variously explained in terms of prevailing hedonistic social values, the political influence of drug companies, and cuts in health-related expenditures. Following a suggestion by Garza Guerrero, we rather believe that the sources of the contemporary crisis in psychoanalysis are to be searched for within its own development and current social and cultural life. Specifically, we think psychoanalysis has failed to bring the revolutionary contribution of interpersonal and intersubjective paradigms to its fuller consequences. Here, we review five core dimensions in which such failure is particularly apparent: (1) an unwitting reliance on the medical model of mental illness; (2) an ontological, concrete understanding of unconscious processes; (3) a manifest failure to fully appreciate the role of extratransference relationships in the patient’s life; (4) a naive and idealized view of the psychoanalyst’s person and role; and (5) a marginal awareness of the impact of group-level unconscious phenomena on the social life of psychoanalytic institutions.
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.
In this chapter, we embark upon a historical journey, examining aspects of the lives and work of three individuals who attempted to incorporate the world outside the clinic into their theorizing about psychology and mental health: Frantz Fanon, Karen Horney, and Erich Fromm. These >worlded< clinicians waged important critiques of the psychological theories and practices of their time, particularly along the lines of race, gender, and political economy. We will pay attention to how elements of their own life travels informed their understanding of the importance of context vis-à-vis psychology. We will close with a concrete example of supportive intercultural travel by exploring the cross-cultural engagement of Zen Buddhism and D.T. Suzuki with Horney and Fromm.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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 Art oft Leading. The Significance of Personality and Character in the Choice of Business Leaders
(2018)
The paper attempts to explore the patient–analyst contribution to the analytic process – focusing mainly on the contribution of the analysand – and how their mutual influence might affect the outcome, sometimes beyond the analyst’s capabilities. This is approached through exploration of the co-creation of an intersubjective analytic field by the analytic dyad, in which the analytic phenomena occur, somehow in both participants, but in an asymmetrical way. Their co-creation of the analytic third in this space includes conflictual as well as healthy elements of themselves. The analyst’s professional self and the analysand’s healthy ego parts form an unconscious alliance directed towards a common cause, the progress of analysis, which unavoidably affects both. Clinical material and vignettes from three cases are presented. In these, becomes apparent that the patient can temporarily take over the analytic situation, permitting continuation of the analytic progress. It is argued that, through the above process, a patient can often help and support the analytic process, surpassing the weaknesses and defects that their analyst might have. Influences on patients’ developing mentalization.
Some have attempted to address the popular acceptance of irrational ideas like fascism or capitalism through various combinations of the work of Marx and different forms of psychoanalysis. Some of the better - known attempts in this regard are Erich Fromm’s humanistic psychoanalysis, Wilhelm Reich’s discussion of the role of repressed sexuality as a control mechanism, and today, the philosopher Slavoj Žižek’s explanation via Marx’s theory of commodity fetishism and Lacan’s psychoanalysis.
Here we introduce the dissertation program PSAID (Postgraduate Studies for the Advancement of Individual Dissertations), conducted at the International Psychoanalytic University in Berlin, Germany. We tell stories about our experience: about a wish to sum up in a dissertation after long years of clinical practice what has been learnt in diving deeply into human experience; about the fear of losing one’s identity when something new is to be learned, either planning a research study or conducting an interview that has not clinical but research-driven orientations; about the >biography of theory< – what motivates therapists to make a choice between psychoanalysis or cognitive-behavioral therapy; about how the experience of listening changes when you do not hear a voice but read a transcript and understand how many details allude to a relationship and influence your perception and thinking; about the experience of seeing a voice visualized on an audiogram; about summing up certain characteristics of >situations< in the consulting room. We propose not only to distinguish >online/offline< research, but to include >situationism< as a third concept.
Treatment for drug-induced depression usually consists of cessation or reduction of the causative agent and psychopharmacologic management. In addition, psychotherapy can be useful as an adjunctive treatment. The author presents case material related to a young woman with an inborn physical illness, who became depressed during the course of interferon treatment for a medical complication, hepatitis virus infection. In addition to the cessation of interferon and pharmacologic management, supportive psychotherapy of a psychodynamic orientation was started in order to address the patient’s low self-esteem and anxiety about her future. During the course of psychotherapy, it was understood that the premature cessation of interferon was, to her, a narcissistic injury. It was also important to explore the meanings of her inborn illness and her guilty feelings. After reviewing various formulations of depression, the author discusses the case material from an integrative perspective, which describes vicious cycles of depression.
This paper explores how Sullivan's interpersonal theory can be applied clinically and illustrates this with a clinical case. It considers the emotional impact, on the clinician, of a Sullivanian point of view. Each theoretical orientation equips the analyst differently. Sullivanian technique impacts the analyst's focus, feelings of competence, and hopefulness. Although each theory emphasizes different aspects of the clinical material, this paper suggests that there is a set of clinical values that inspire the work of all analysts, regardless of orientation.
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.
This paper posits that an infusion of psychoanalytic concepts into the teaching of sociology in undergraduate liberal arts curricula offers a route to expanding students’ understanding of how self and society are entwined in a condition of mutual crisis in contemporary society. We argue that the liberatory project at the core of the liberal arts is served well by linking the critical perspectives found in these two disciplines. We provide as specific examples from our own teaching: (1) a demonstration of how Freud’s concept of neurosis has an affinity with Marx’s concept of alienation; and (2) a discussion of how the torture sequence in Orwell’s 1984 presents an inversion of a psychoanalytic treatment through which the power of propaganda is illuminated. We conclude that teaching the two disciplines in tandem helps students grasp how the self is a socially constructed entity and how the orthodoxies of neurosis and social control are available for critique and change.
This paper follows up Bion’s development, focusing its attention on Cogitations in particular and suggesting that it can be read as a sort of new >Clinical Diary< à la Ferenczi. The authors, showing us both the link between the writings of the London Bion and those of the American one, stress the dramatic change that took place in his theoretical and technical position around about 1967, when he crossed the Atlantic for working and teaching in North and Latin America, and gradually arrived to formulate a kind of listening more authentically centered on his own thoughts and emotions and those of the patient during the analytic encounter.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
Psychoanalysis and academia: Psychoanalysis at the crossroads between exact and human sciences
(2018)
It is proposed that the mental health crisis in >developed< societies is largely due to the fact that psychology is heavily based upon an exact science model academically, and upon a medical model clinically. Indeed, these models favor an apperception of mental pathologies as essential entities with a biological etiology, and this reification facilitates a process of nonimplication of the sufferer as concerns his condition. The progress in brain sciences holds the promise of acknowledging psychology as an autonomous discipline, properly describing mental logics, which are constrained, but not determined, by brain characteristics; moreover, mental logical operations mandatorily need content from the contingent history of the subject's life to become instantiated. Psychology, then, is at the interface between an exact science and a human science epistemology. Consequently, we need psychologists and clinicians in the field of mental health who can apply a particularized approach to mental distress, who can deal with the personal feeling of nonmastery, who can base their clinical thinking on the patient's story, and who thereby systematically stay away from any essentializing temptation, while simultaneously being aware that the theoretical framework they operate from is embedded in a continuous scientific dialogue. Psychoanalysis is at that crossroads.
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.
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.
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.
This paper applies the theoretical framework of Fromm’s humanistic psychology to examine the reported content of North Korean defectors’ dreams during sleep and considers what the psychological data suggests about the defectors’ past social experience in authoritarian North Korea and their present social situation as adults learning to adjust to a new life in neo-liberal South Korea.
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.
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.
Building on bell hooks’ conceptualization of love as a mode of political resistance, this article explores how prisoners’ radio employs love to combat injustice. Through an examination of two prisoners’ radio projects – The Prison Show in Texas and Restorative Radio in Kentucky – I argue that incarcerated people and their loved ones appropriate the radio to perform public and revolutionary acts of love, countering the oppressive forces of mass incarceration in the United States. By unapologetically positioning their love for prisoners front and center, ordinary Americans subvert systems of oppression which mark incarcerated folks as incapable and unworthy of love. Love is an intrinsic marker of humanity, so prisoners’ radio allows the incarcerated and their advocates on the outside to actively challenge the dehumanization that people face behind bars.
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.