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Examines the relationship between the humanistic psychological ethics of Erich Fromm & his commitment to socialist politics. The concept of >social character<, first formulated in >The Fear of Freedom< (1997, 1941), which provided the analytical framework for much of his subsequent work, is considered. Also discussed is his attempt to formulate a humanistic ethics grounded in a theory of human essence in >Man for Himself< (1997, 1947). Fromm's attempts to develop an ethical socialist politics at three levels – everyday life, democratic institutions, & the emerging >One World< – are introduced. It is argued that Fromm endorses a variety of strategies from old & new social movements that challenge the value structures of modern capitalist society. In conclusion, the claim is pressed that Fromm's social thought, developed on the foundations of his humanistic ethics, constitutes a significant contribution to emancipatory theory. Adapted from the source document.
Shifting Dialogues
(2000)
The article focuses on landscape impressions as a catalyst to start inner progress and creative innovation. The author uses the presumption that a work of art can act as an intermediary and testimony of specific states of mind. Two painters are presented, one contemporary and one from the turn of the last century. The difficulties in describing the origin of a painting and its coming into existence is considered and discussed. The object in view of the article is to point to the practicability of some aspects of psychoanalytical theories in the descriptions of the artistic creative process, of the relation viewer and work of art, of the studio dialogues between artist and viewer in front of the works. Objects relations theory, WR Bion's concepts of reverie, binocular viewing and negative capability, A Ehrenzweig's description of the different stages of the creative process, his positive accentuation of the role of the unconscious, the alternation between dedifferentiation and differentiation and need for the artist to go beyond the known, to be able to loose control of the work and let the painting 'live its life' is central. Art gives its own poetic imprints, not always accessible in words.
Instruments designed to measure Fromm's marketing character (SCOI; Saunders & Munro, 2000) & the vertical & horizontal dimensions of Individualism & Collectivism (Singelis, Triandis, Bhawuk & Gelfand, 1995) were administered to 167 Ss. The hypothesis that scores on the SCOI would be positively correlated with Vertical Individualism was supported. However, there was only partial support for the hypothesis that scores on the SCOI would be positively correlated with Indi-vidualism, as the SCOIscores had the same relationship with collectivism – which was unexpected.
Images-Looking Back
(2000)
This article is written by an art historian, a person whose job it is to analyse and interpret images. In this case however, the article deals with three cases, where the interpreter confronts images with which she identifies in various ways. She conveys the experience of being strongly involved by the images and their represented worlds and also the feeling of experiencing the borderlines between reality, imaginary being and picture medium. The three cases are connected through the theme of >mirroring< and subjectivity.
The Hands of Egon Schiele
(2000)
Through an exploration of Egon Schiele's life and enigmatic ?mannerisms?, which recall those of autistic children and schizophrenic patients, the author explores the impact his outstanding and disturbing paintings can have. The approach is biographical, revealing Schiele the artist as an already gifted though disturbed child. Some material refers to Schiele's way of expressing painful yet creative fantasies, in which different parts of his body (in particular his hands), projected into his paintings, form part of an intimate, creative, disturbed language. From childhood to his early death, Schiele used a coherent figurative language which was both realistic and oneiric; the author develops some ideas on art and psychoanalysis, particularly as to the creative process within a complex and disturbed personality. Working as he did between the psychotic and non-psychotic elements of his personality (Bion), Schiele is an appropriate artist for our time. His drama, his feelings of disintegration and ?dismemberment? are nourished by the creative, sane parts of his personality. The true psychotic artist is not entirely psychotic, for creation requires aesthetic taste and harmony.
Art-A Feasible Illusion
(2000)
Jan Henriksson, Professor of Architecture at the Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm and member of the project-group of the issue >Psychoanalysis Meets Art and Architecture<, elaborates in this interview on different perspectives and ideas about architecture, which for him essentially is a contradictory and open concept with no a priori. Architecture belongs to the field of moral laws or ethics. The instrumental part deals with building and buildings. The working process includes research, penetration and interpretation of which the latter is the most interesting and powerful, not seldom connected with existential questions. The training of the students includes not only the instrumental part but still more important is the training of their critical thinking, to enable them to gain the insight that that which is the truth, looks like the truth no longer is the truth. To be given a lot of freedom during the training helps the students to find an inner compass, an inner bearing which will be decisive in their work. Conflicts are seen as vitalizing and the alternation between order and chaos as fertilizing for creative thinking and acting to take place. The need to express ourselves takes us all somewhere. For Jan Henriksson it is all about processes where different parts interrelate; that is the heart of the matter. The need for architects today to express themselves in words is increasing, to look behind things and to think and reflect about their own work and that of other architects.
Stairways of the Mind
(2000)
Instruments designed to measure Fromm's marketing character (SCOI; Saunders & Munro, 2000) & the vertical & horizontal dimensions of Individualism & Collectivism (Singelis, Triandis, Bhawuk & Gelfand, 1995) were administered to 167 Ss. The hypothesis that scores on the SCOI would be positively correlated with Vertical Individualism was supported. However, there was only partial support for the hypothesis that scores on the SCOI would be positively correlated with Indi-vidualism, as the SCOIscores had the same relationship with collectivism – which was unexpected.
Erich Fromms Einstellung gegenüber den abstrakten Wissenschaften wie der Ma-thematik erscheint uneinheitlich: einerseits hat er bekannt, abstraktes Denken falle ihm schwer, andererseits hat er Vertretern abstrakter naturwissenschaftlicher Theo-rien wie Einstein und Heisenberg eine revolutionäre Haltung attestiert. Tatsächlich lässt sich Fromms Kreativitätsbegriff auch für die Mathematik fruchtbar machen. Fromm fordert auf, die Dinge in ihrem >So-Sein< wahrzunehmen und darauf kritisch zu >antworten<, ein Verhalten, das die Bereitschaft zur Abstraktion mit einschließt. Der didaktisch bedeutsame >Siehe-Beweis< in der Mathematik ist damit ein Muster-fall dieses Frommschen Ansatzes. Zu Fromms ganzheitlichem Anspruch gehört seine von ihm auch gelebte Forderung an den Menschen, sich Konflikten zu stellen und so seinen Charakter zu entwickeln. Dies verweist auf einen speziellen Grund-zug mathematischen Denkens, nämlich das Bestreben in der Mathematik, sich über Normen hinwegzusetzen, wie es die Entdeckung der nichteuklidischen Geometrien im 19. Jahrhundert zeigt. Dieser prometheische Geist der Mathematik, der von Pädagogen oft übersehen wird, steht damit dem Frommschen Kreativitätsbegriff sehr nahe.
Instead of using a psychological grid when reading literature, Freud recommended that we let the actual writer instruct us. The same applies to artists. Here I will be asking two questions: can one make a formal comparison between the painter's visual approach, and the analyst's psychic approach which leads him to form a particular interpretation? Can one compare the spectator's feelings when a painting imposes itself on him, with the analyst's feelings when confronted with the silence of the analysand? Out of these two questions another, more general one arises: what can the psychoanalytical approach to artistic representation bring to the understanding of the analytical process?
Fromm's important contributions to the modern development of psychoanalytic thought are often ignored and frequently misunderstood. An early proponent of revisions of psychoanalytic theory and therapy similar to recent trends in object relations, self-psychology and interpersonal psychoanalysis, Fromm was a vi-sionary for a Freudian theory built upon orthodoxies of the past but going beyond them. It is argued here that Fromm's unique role in helping create a new version of psychoanalysis for the 21st century was as sociological as it was intellectual. Fromm's contributions were intimately linked to his institutional positioning close to the center but on the relative margins of the discipline. This paper will outline how sociological dynamics shaped Fromm's revision of psychoanalysis. We will con-clude by discussing how Fromm was able to have a more dramatic influence than other Freudian revisionists who were less favourably positioned.
Spacing Unpredictability
(2000)
The paper deals with notions of complexity in art and architecture. On the basis of a recent sculptural work by Richard Serra, Torqued Ellipses (1997), the notion of complexity is investigated in terms of how it situates the viewer, and affects our sense of space and time. Serra's work is analyzed in terms of the artist's working method, the production of the work, and finally the >external relations< which connect it to the viewer and the context. In each of these steps, the notions of complexity and unpredictability are shown to have a formative role. This gives his work a relevance for several fields using working processes as methods. The relations between space and time, object and context, are redefined in Serra's work, which also gives it a more specific importance for architectural theory and practice.
Erich Fromm hat sich Zeit seines Lebens mit der Geschlechterfrage befasst. Sein wohl bekanntestes Buch Die Kunst des Liebens (1956) handelt jedoch nicht nur von der Beziehung zwischen Mann und Frau, sondern auch von der Nächsten- und Selbstliebe, von der Liebe zwischen Eltern und Kindern und von der Liebe zu Gott. Fromm sucht gemeinsame Grundzüge der verschiedenen Formen von Liebe her-auszuarbeiten. Liebe ist nach ihm ein aktives, produktives Tun, kein bloßes Gefühl, und ohne Fürsorge, Verantwortungsgefühl, Achtung vor dem andern und tiefrei-chendes Erkennen sollte man nicht von Liebe reden. Fromm grenzt sich damit von Auffassungen ab, die die Liebe auf ein erotisches Gefühl reduzieren oder mit Se-xualität gleichsetzen. Im vorliegenden Beitrag wird zunächst Fromms Liebesbegriff expliziert. Helmut Johach hebt als Verdienst Fromms hervor, dass er sich dieses so wichtigen, von der Wissenschaft – auch von der Psychoanalyse, von der Fromm herkommt – vernachlässigten Themas angenommen hat. Andererseits weist er auf die Schwierigkeit hin, so verschiedene Aspekte wie Mutterliebe, Erotik und Nächs-tenliebe auf einen gemeinsamen Nenner zu bringen. Im weiteren Fortgang geht Johach genauer auf die Mann-Frau-Beziehung ein, wobei er neben der Kunst des Liebens auch einige Aufsätze Fromms heranzieht, in denen – Stichwort: Patriarchat – der >Kampf zwischen den Geschlechtern< thematisiert wird. Fromm ist zwar ein Befürworter der Emanzipation der Frau, die Forderung nach Gleichberechtigung darf nach ihm jedoch nicht so verstanden werden, dass sich die Frauen in allem den Männern angleichen sollten. Die Spannung zwischen den Geschlechtern müs-se vielmehr als >Polarität< erhalten bleiben. Vor allem in der Sexualität zeigt sich nach Fromm, dass neben erotischer Anziehung häufig auch Macht, Aggression und spezifische Ängste auf seiten der Frau und des Mannes eine Rolle spielen. Johach geht diesen Fragen nicht nur anhand von Texten Fromms nach. Er setzt Fromms Aussagen auch zu den konkreten Erfahrungen mit den Eltern und den Frauen in Fromms Leben in Beziehung. Dabei zeigt sich, dass Fromm nicht nur lebte, was er schrieb, sondern dass das, was scheinbar leichtfüßig in der Kunst des Liebens als >Theorie der Liebe< daherkommt, das Ergebnis eines langjährigen Entwicklungs-prozesses ist, zu dem auch schmerzhafte Konflikte und Trennungen gehörten.
Someplace in Mind
(2000)
This paper is aimed at placing the importance of Ferenczi's thinking in the wide field of psychiatry where Ferenczi has not been given any niche whatsoever. The author is in a position to approach topics that are fundamental for the work of both psychiatry and psychoanalysis. The Multifamily Psychoanalysis (MP), created by the author, not only allows professionals to counteract a current psychiatric trend aimed at eliminating the importance of subjectivity but MP also contributes to rescuing the thinking of Ferenczi, and to a better understanding of the Freud-Ferenczi controversy. It is the author's contention that Ferenczi embodies the very spirit of pioneers: no difficulties, however insurmountable, could ever stop him. He paved the way for further psychiatric research work, and his clinical contribution extended the realm of metapsychology.
Participation in writing and creative process offers a unique window to view the evolution of the mourning process. This study traces how a painter's work as shown to such a group reveals and interacts with her developmental progress as she goes through the mourning process in individual therapy with the author, who is also the leader of the writing and creative process group to which the artist belongs. Through these mutually beneficial exchanges, the patient is able to relinquish her constructed false self-identity for an authentic female identity, as seen in the evolution of her painting over her two-year participation in the writing and creative process group.
This paper was one in a series of lectures called >Space and identity< that were given to a public audience during the spring of 1998. >Space and identity< was part of the program for Stockholm as the cultural capital of Europe in 1998 and was arranged by the Museum of Architecture and the two psychoanalytical societies in Stockholm. Building on the theories of especially Winnicott and Bion and with references to literature the paper gives a picture of the development of inner space and of potential space as the place for creativity and creative living.
Interacting with the work of art entails a spatial situation, which is double. On a mental plane it is encapsulated reverie, on a physical plane it is production and consumption. These two are woven together as an orthogonal text or texture. The space of the work of art thus contains both the process of its making and its viewing. Seen as a dimensional space it is non linear. It is characterized by oscillations, discepancies, misalignements, multiplicity and recurrence. There is a correspondance between the studio and the exhibition area, as well as a dialogue between privileged and unprivileged spaces. The situation has something in common with oneiric space, where weightlessness and gravity oscillate.
In Appreciation: Erich Fromm Lecture given at the April general meeting of Humanists in Utah,
(2000)
Review Fromm, E.: The Art of Lovong (1956a, English): Dr. Love. Erich Fromm’s >Art of Loving<
(2000)
Erich Fromm’s Life and Work
(2000)