>Solidarity< conjures up positive images of the strength of togetherness and community, but in practice it is experienced by groups when confronted by a real or perceived threat from other groups. The ideal of a universal human solidarity appears tenuous and flimsy. However, Richard Rorty and Axel Honneth have attempted, in different ways, to bring this ideal under philosophical consideration. Their treatment of human solidarity is flawed by their a priori rejection of the normative idea of a common human nature. Such an idea, termed ‘radical humanism’, is reconstructed from the work of Erich Fromm, and one of its chief implications – the rejection of liberal nationalism – is proposed as part of a radical challenge to contemporary social and political theory.
During his years as a member of the Frankfurt School, Erich Fromm developed a strong interest in the idea that there were distinctive male and female character orientations. Drawing on the positive evaluation of matriarchy made in the nineteenth century by the Swiss anthropologist J. J. Bachofen, Fromm argued that a >matricentric< psychic structure was more conducive to socialism than the patricentric structure which had predominated in capitalism. His interest in maternalism and his opposition to patriarchy played an important part in his rejection of Freud's theory of drives and in the development of a humanistic ethics in which love plays a central part. The idea of a gendered humanism is central to Fromm's social thought, although there is a danger that the over‐emphasis of sex‐based character differences unintentionally re‐opens the danger of the kind of sexual stereotyping which he resolutely opposed.
The undeniable realities of globalization at the dawn of the 21st century have brought the United States and its citizens to the startling realization that we must grapple politically, economically, and culturally with the wide range of diversity existing within and without our borders. As greater numbers of culturally diverse persons are now represented in their caseloads, psychoanalysts are also forced to examine the relevance of psychoanalytic theories and practice in meeting their needs. The author discusses three papers that propose overlapping and differing opinions as to the function of psychoanalysis in the lives of culturally diverse patients, and its capacity to influence more public, social and political change. This paper questions the meaning of the term >culture.< It attempts to tease apart the nature of memory and dissociation among those who suffer intergenerational trauma because of their membership in particular cultural or ethnic groups. Also addressed is the extent to which, as described by social constructivist theory, self is entirely a socially constructed phenomenon. The author questions the extent to which, alternatively, >self,< possessed of will, agency and authority, exists in a mutually influencing relationship with the social world.
Martin Buber und Erich Fromm
(2004)
历史发展到今天,现代化给人类带来了前所未有的社会生产力,极其丰富的物质享受和丰富多彩的人类文化,但同时也带来了无所适从的紧张情绪、迷失感和危机。人类的精神健康成了一个十分尖锐的问题,寻求健康的人格成为人们的共同愿望。埃里希•弗洛姆(1侧X〕一1980),美国著名心理学家、社会哲学家,法兰克福学派的重要代表人物。他生活于动荡不安,灾难迭起的20世纪,残酷的社会现实使其从少年时代就开始思考与战争有关的心理学问题,思索人与社会的关系。1941年,弗洛姆出版了其关于研究纳粹主义心理学问题的著作《逃避自由》,他在书中剖析了法西斯主义崛起的心理根源,阐述了自己对人性的思考,提出了独具特色的健康人格观。弗洛姆认为病态的社会造成病态的人格。他指出资本主义社会的自由是现代人的困境的根源。一方面,社会生产力的发展解除了传统社会对个人的种种束缚,个人获得了独立和自由;另一方面,社会生产力的发展也瓦解了稳定的社会结构,人们在获得>自由<的同时却发现生活中充斥着无数的不确定性—人失去了安全感和归属感。随着工业和技术的发展,人类生活的每一个角落都打上了人的印记,人类因与自然的血缘联系被 ...
In light of the contemporary shift away from the universalizing of the Eurocentric perspective, brought into focus with the advent of globalization, it may be useful to consider reorienting traditional psychoanalytic assumptions about human nature to those that are more appropriate to the recognition of a culturally pluralistic world. The author argues that ego psychology originated in the Western Enlightenment's emphasis on liberal individualism, which has limited its applicability across races, classes, and cultures. Relational theories, in their capacity to include the examination of the socially constructed dimensions of the analytic dyad (including race, class, gender, ethnicity, and sexual orientation), offer crucial theoretical and clinical possibilities, lacking in traditional psychoanalysis, that may help analysts to address some of the important cultural sources of psychological suffering. In the relational view expressed here, the unconscious – as made manifest in everyday life and in the transference and countertransference of the analytic situation – is reformulated to include social and cultural influences.
The author notes that, overall, he and White seem to agree on many important issues that she writes about in her commentary, such as the necessity of recognizing both our shared humanity and the agency of separate, subjective selves. He argues, however, that White mischaracterizes what it means to think of the self as socially constructed, and he clarifies his views of how the concept of a socially constructed self may be related to individual differences in the same culture, and to personal agency. He responds to White's imputation that his paper implicitly prescribes a type of intervention or mandates some particular view of the Truth as a new theology, substituting a concrete environmental or social determinism for the abstract (intrapsychic) determinism that he criticizes. Finally, he responds to some interesting and insightful questions White raises about the case vignette of Mr. J that was presented in his essay.
This paper is a continuation of the author's thoughts on Ferenczi as >the mother< and his capacity to identify with women, as expressed in previous work from 1989, 1991, and 1997, and it revisits Hoffer's now widely quoted sobriquet for Ferenczi as >the mother of psychoanalysis<. That phrase makes assumptions about the Freud- Ferenczi relationship which contradict the still widespread view of Ferenczi as someone whose bizarre, acting-out exploitations of patients are best used as a cautionary tale, while his gargantuan creativity goes unrecognized. Freud's defensive ambivalence about Ferenczi created a legacy of mistrust that results in Ferenczi's still being misquoted in the manner deplored by Balint in 1948. This paper takes up some of these issues in the context of examining Ferenczi's unconventionality, particularly with respect to the fluidity of his masculine and feminine identifications. This was not only unusual for the time, but was so different from most of his psychoanalytic colleagues that these differences were viewed as pathology rather than as manifestations of a distinct originality. Contemporary ideas about androgyny are cited as a better descriptive fit of Ferenczi's attributes, and support for such an interpretation is marshalled, even as it is acknowledged that Ferenczi continues to elude categorizing, even on today's terms.
The subject matter of identity belongs to the orthodox psychoanalytic movement. For about the last 15 years, the International Psychoanalytic Association (IPA) has successfully tried to facilitate research and to promote projects. If the resistance of influential analysts against empirical investigation decreases further, >psychoanalytic movement< and its unfavourable concomitants will be a thing of the past. The development to a scientific community will no longer be hampered by controversies over professional identity. – The psychosocial dimension and its normative implications put the concept of identity into question. Instead the author suggests that we speak of a psychoanalytic attitude. This professional self is closely connected to the personal self. It is however, necessary to separate the method from the person. For a long time the genealogy of the training analyst determined the membership in the ever-growing family of psychoanalysts. There have been black sheep right from the beginning. Dissidents, therefore, belong to the history of Psychoanalysis. The official acceptance of pluralism within the IPA invites comparisons between the various schools according to scientific criteria. The methodology of modern psychoanalytic process and outcome research provides principles for writing treatment reports. Group identities in their dogmatic aspects are detrimental for the future of psychoanalysis. The message of the paper is to express the hope that a critical eclecticism might replace psychoanalytic schools.
Following Ferenczi's tradition of examining the dynamics between analyst and analysand, I will explore aspects of this relationship particularly around issues of mutuality versus inequality, all occurring without the conscious involvement of either participant. I propose that these issues of attachment can be further illuminated by examining the underlying neuropsychobiological processes. Case examples will be offered to illustrate these points.
Die Kunst des Liebens: Körpererfahrung und Tanz als Zugangswege zur schöpferischen Eigenkraft
(2004)
The Role of Enactments
(2004)
Race remains one of the most highly charged subjects of discourse in our society. At a cultural level, white racial identity has become dissociatively split off from the rest of identity formation. A racialized subjectivity is usually carried by those with darker skin colors, whereas whiteness is experienced as an unmarked and invisible state. The author argues that whites have dissociated the historical position of the oppressor from collective consciousness, due to our inability to tolerate an identification with the aggressor. Our disavowal of race as constitutive of subjectivity ensures that race becomes a site for enactments. This paper follows the transference-countertransference dynamics between an African American patient mandated to treatment and the author, a white analyst born in South Africa. The haunting presence of racial trauma infused the analysis. Focus is placed on the rich, often unmetabolizable experiences of race, including the ways in which the structure of the treatment recreated the racial dynamics of slavery.
In. Reply to Altman's discussion, the author explores in more depth the topic of whiteness, both her South African and American whiteness. She situates American whiteness in the history of slavery, Jim Crow, and the ongoing racial discrimination of the present. When Altman points to the author's unconscious submission to the regulatory power of the larger society, she postulates that her submission is to American whiteness. She notes that, in finding a new home, that which she wished to discard – a white racist identity synonymous with the oppressor – has reappeared, to be confronted once again.
What happens when governments, institutions, or associations betray our most cherished values and ideals? Through the tropes of melancholia, perversion, and the fetish, this paper examines the complex reactions that such a betrayal may elicit. The author argues that betrayal evokes shame and guilt by association, and that it also engenders the complicated form of mourning implicated in melancholia. A person may disavow the betrayal itself in order to deal with these painful reactions. This disavowal may then become stabilized via the use of the fetish in its various forms (e.g., the commodity fetish, the body fetish, and the fantasy fetish). This has perverse consequences, including subtle enactments of racism and other forms of marginalization and exclusion of Otherness.
Altman's commentary challenged this author on both a personal and a theoretical level. On a personal level, she was encouraged to explore her knowing at one moment but not knowing at another, her own self-interest in the position of beneficiary. Thus, the mechanism of disavowal that underpins liberal racism was revisited in a more clinically oriented manner. On a theoretical level, Altman's response invited a more refined exploration of liberal racism as it differs from blatant racism. It also facilitated a more nuanced application of Lacanian and Kleinian theory to this matter.
Right now, North American psychoanalysis, taken as a whole, seems rough-edged compared with its European counterparts. It puts more emphasis on the reality of other minds that inevitably influence and limit the ways in which the patient's unconscious psychology does and does not become available for analytic scrutiny and change. It is more in the United States, than elsewhere, that a new literature on sexuality (as a key source of fantasy, transference, countertransference, anxiety, etc.) is vital. We are more eager to incorporate ideas from France and Britain than French and British psychoanalysts are to adopt ours. Affect has assumed a more direct and explicit role in American literature than in British or French literature. Finally, the expectation is more urgent here that psychoanalytic treatment will work, that the quality of patients' subjective and relational lives and the quality of their loving and working will be better after analysis.
This article invites Primo Levi, the internationally esteemed citizen of Turin, Italy and survivor of the Auschwitz to instruct post 9/11 psychoanalysis in five lessons on living and dying in the aftermath of severe trauma. Relying on excerpts from Levi's writings, the author invites Levi to speak to the reader words of warning concerning contemporary psychoanalysis' benign omnipotence in embracing overly simplistic theories of cure, resiliency and psychic repatriation of the human spirit in the aftermath of severe trauma.
Starting with Castel's description of the network society the author examines the disintegration of the patriarchal family. A process that is dependent on the diversification of family types, the increasing amount of women in working life and the feminist movement. The changes in ideology and in the means of production influence the development of individuals. This is discussed with respect to Erikson's epigenetic diagram and Fromm's theory of a social character. These social processes also effect psychoanalytical theory especially how we understand female sexuality and perversions or neoesexuality.
Para Fromm, o dilema básico humano referia-se ao fato de que ao longo dos anos quanto mais às pessoas ganham liberdade mais elas se sentem solitárias, inseguras e separadas da natureza. Fromm sugeriu que as pessoas identificavam-se com as religiões e com as pátrias, na tentativa de lidar com a sensação de perda de vínculo com a natureza. A idade média teria sido, para ele, a última era de estabilidade na qual o individuo possuiu realmente sentimento de pertencer a uma classe. Três mecanismos de fuga aos aspectos da liberdade foram propostos por Fromm, porem na tentativa de recuperar a segurança perdida: O Autoritarismo, a Destrutividade e a Conformidade Autômata.