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This paper explores the unconscious communication of primary-process material in clinical work with a Latin American male that occurred while I was nursing my first child. Mutually dissociated aspects of self-experience became part of the relationship soon after an unexpected instance of >let-down<. The concept of Eros, the collection of life-preserving instincts that preserve and protect the body and mind – borrowed by Marcuse and other thinkers of the Frankfurt School to understand specifically the generative potential of consciousness – emerged as a helpful construct for understanding the transference and countertransference. Bowlby's notion of attachment, Fromm's social reconceptualization of drive, and Mitchell's integration of the biological and the social dimensions of drive all can be conceived as attesting to the powerful impetus to seek in others connections that create and enable a life structure. Eros in the therapeutic relationship can help recover dissociated elements of the individual, cultural, and political psyche.
In distinguishing between negative and positive freedom, Isaiah Berlin expressed a preference for negative freedom. Given the track record of those who in the past have advocated positive freedom, this is not surprising. But advocates of positive freedom do not accept that tyranny necessarily results from embracing their conception of freedom, and they are convinced that a commitment to negative freedom is never enough to defend “freedom” against tyrants. They do, however, share one thing in common with those who favor negative freedom: both equate their conception of freedom with >true freedom,< and treat the other as either false or incomplete. This might suggest that Berlin's distinction is more a partisan's tool than a tool of analysis. I disagree. But rather than reducing it to a distinction between >freedom from< and >freedom to,< we need to expand it. Not only will this enable us to move beyond an important criticism of Berlin's conception of freedom, it will also provide a better explanation for why negative freedom is as likely as positive freedom to diminish “true freedom” and why positive freedom is as likely as negative freedom to increase it.
Celebrating the 50th Anniversary of the American Academy of Psychoanalysis and Dynamic Psychiatry
(2006)
The author discusses Dr. Fiscalini's idea of coparticipant psychoanalysis by placing it in historical context. The ideas of the personal self and the interpersonal self emerge from two divergent lines of interpersonal thought, one being Sullivan and the other Fromm. The author poses several questions for consideration.
Erich Fromm
(2006)
Erich Fromm (1900–80)
(2006)
Erich Fromm and Sociology
(2006)
The idea of social character has a long and important history within sociological thought. The concept addresses the fundamental question of the relationship between society and the individual, structure and agency. Tracing the development of the idea of social character from the classical sociology of Marx and Weber to more contemporary writings within American sociology by figures such as Fromm, Riesman, and Mills reveals ideas and perspectives central to the development of social theory. Although many argue that the idea of social character is no longer important in sociology, it has in fact resurfaced in Pierre Bourdieu's notion of habitus. Habitus specifies the original idea of social character without the biological or essentialist traits found in most of the earlier work. Habitus marks a substantial advance beyond earlier ideas of social character, providing a more purely sociological answer to the structure/agency (society/individual) problematic.
Introduction
(2006)
On Perseus
(2006)
Psychodynamic Diagnostic Manual. Silver Spring, MD (Alliance of Psychoanalytic Organizations) 2006.
(2006)
Erich FROMM's work in psychology and social theory includes an analysis of the contradiction in Sigmund Freud's thought between bourgeois patriarchal morality and radical demystification; however, FROMM's work contains its own contradiction between generative theory of social character and an idealistic concept of the >productive< individual. FROMM introduced the concept of >social character<, basing it on existential necessities imposed by the socioeconomic system, and interpreted Freud's theories as revealing some of the motivational basis for the individual's pursuit of this imposed behavior, while rejecting Freud's pessimistic concept of human nature. However, FROMM's concept of the productive person is an ideal type without clinical or historical grounding. It does not offer an adequate basis for resolving the problems of neurotics, but in fact is likely to encourage submission to them, blocking the attainment of positive relationships to social institutions and situations.