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The author tells the history of his relationship with Malcolm Pines, and uses it in order to describe the latter’s personality and thinking, as well as to trace the influence that he has had on his thinking and practice. The focus of the discussion is on Malcolm’s understanding of the socio-political context of mental processes, including the creation of psychoanalysis by Freud, and the inner politics of psychoanalytical and group-analytical institutions. Malcolm is described as a revolutionary character, in Fromm’s terms. The article is a celebration of Pines’ life and contributions, as he reaches the age of 85.
African concepts of beauty and adornments of the body reflect a celebration of life in the face of death. They are derived from ancient times and the sense of man as a biological animal, within the context of life with other beasts. Among these, man is the only one who is born naked without nature's protections and adornment, such as fur, stripes, or feathers. The body is therefore an asset which must be guarded and covered and yet be expressive of strength as well as sexual desire, so as to attract a mate. Beauty, as a source of self-regard in African cultures is also often achieved through empathic identification with animals. Primordial African attitudes to life and death and symbols of beauty apparently influenced Freud's fourth instinct theory conceptions of Eros and Thanatos, as well as Erich Fromm's ideas about life-loving and death-loving societies, as illustrated in selected quotations from their writings.
Aspects of Psychodynamic Neuropsychiatry I: Episodic Memory, Transference, and the Oddball Paradigm
(2010)
This article examines the role of comedy and the influence of Kafka in Ana María Shua's comic novel >Soy paciente< (1980). Using Northrop Frye's rubric of comedy as a point of departure, it traces the way in which Shua's text, like Kafka's work, simultaneously inscribes and distorts the traditional utopian themes of comedy: identity acquisition and social resolution. The aim is to relate the distortions to the novel's socio-historical context of El proceso by referring to Erich Fromm's observations on the effect Fascist regimes have on concepts such as social and individual identity. The article also exposes the correlation between Shua's cultural dependency (on Kafkaesque/European creative paradigms) and the novel's oppressive cultural/political context.
Is Love Curative?
(2010)
This paper explores the way in which Freud's theory of melancholia is being used within sociological theory to explain racial hatred in Britain. The paper critically interrogates the work of Paul Gilroy before engaging with the works of Erich Fromm, Richard Sennett, as well as Freud and Klein's classic psychoanalytic formulations. Using two biographical case studies drawn from original empirical research on racial harassment perpetrators the paper argues that while racial hatred is often melancholic in nature, the losses at the heart of the racist's malaise tend to be only tangentially connected to empire and its crimes. More commonly, the losses that underpin hatred are irreducibly personal and class based, and hence multilayered, losses of love and security, for example, aggravating the pain of losses of respect and community, and vice versa. The paper concludes by drawing attention to the dangerously racialized kinds of imagined community losses of this kind tend to furnish, and the difficulties of providing recognition to those most afflicted by them.
Response to Commentary
(2010)
Returning to Freud
(2010)
For most readers Erich Fromm does not require an introduction. His writings have been translated into several languages, and his thoughts have been popularized in various types of media. This review provides a brief biographical notation for those readers not thoroughly familiar with him. This book is edited by Rainer Funk, a psychoanalyst in private practice in the city of Tübingen, Germany. He is Fromm’s sole literary executor and owner of his library, has edited posthumously several books based on Fromm’s writings, and has written and edited books about Fromm’s life and work. The present volume includes two previously unpublished articles by Fromm on therapeutic practice, and the rest is a collection of writings solicited from Fromm’s former students, supervisees, colleagues, and friends, who provide anecdotal and personal information as well as comments on Frommian therapeutic style and technique. Although Funk’s book provides only glimpses of Fromm’s main criticisms of classical psychoanalysis and his social ideas, it will be of interest to clinicians and laypeople alike who are willing to become acquainted with one of the most important thinkers of the second half of the 20th century.