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Alan Watts’ seminal text >Psychotherapy East and West<was authored near Humanistic Psychology’s beginnings, also a transformational time for psychotherapy theory and practice. Watts fostered appreciation for Eastern philosophical traditions, particularly in relation to self, identity, and counterculture. In this article, contributions of innovative thinkers cited by Watts, including Gregory Bateson, Erich Fromm, Jay Haley, George Herbert Mead, Rollo May, and Carl Rogers, are highlighted and historically situated toward tracking threads of contemporary influence vis-à-vis social construction, brief therapy, and therapeutic simplicity. The article begins with a brief note on Watts’ countercultural positioning.
This paper contributes to the current debate about decolonisation by rethinking the theoretical base of psychotherapy. It offers, first, a reformulation of the problem of human suffering that draws on the concept of alienation as detailed in the works of Karl Marx, Frantz Fanon, and Erich Fromm. Second, it presents an alternative reading of Wulf Sachs’ psychoanalytic text, Black Hamlet, as viewed through the prism of alienation theory. And third, while affirming the significance of that classic work for psychotherapists today as well as the salience of alienation theory, the paper raises complex questions about the integration of Marxism and psychoanalysis.
I employ the arguments of Erich Fromm and Kurt Wolff to enhance Habermas’s ideas. Erich Fromm’s ideas assert that certain modes of human conduct, such as freedom to be materialistic, distances people from the profundities of being, creating a shallow humanity that becomes fixated with commodities and goods. The chapter highlights an ironic consequence of democratic systems made visible by Fromm: that when there is a surfeit of freedom, people retreat from it because such a freedom also offers an overload of decision-making dynamics. By doing so, they blindly defer to an authoritarian personality or institutions that provide dramatic answers and reassurances that make decisions for them. In this chapter, the trinity of the media, market, and medicine is rendered into such an authority. Yet transcendence from this epiphany, can be found in the ideas of Kurt Wolff, harnessed in the chapter to enhance Habermas’s and Fromm’s ideas. Wolff asserts that the experience of life epiphanies is catalytic in providing a high degree of personal truth for those that experience them. Through his surrender and catch thesis, Wolff argues that exceptionally profound moments in the human condition inspire protagonists to confront the meaning of existence in ways that allow them to self-actualize. The significance and utility of Wolff’s surrender and catch thesis cannot be overemphasized: many Café attendees only found their mettle to live well after exceptionally close encounters with dying, encounters that declutter life so as to unearth the lucidity and courage needed to continue living.
How to conceive and experience one’s self is the linchpin for achieving an efficacious environmental philosophy. Naess was among the first to put the question of self at the center of environmental philosophy and laid cautious claim to >introduce … a concept of ecological self’ for the first time. Naess< >ecological self< is vitiated by at least four flaws: (i) an eclectic and mutually inconsistent set of informative sources (Freud, Fromm, William James; Mohandas Ghandhi and Advaita Vedanta); (ii) a narrow conception of ethics drawn principally from Kant; (iii) inattention to state-of-the-art ecology (the science) as a model for an ecological self; (iv) reinforcing rather than deconstructing the insidious notion of self as substance. A self resonant with ecology would posit the self as a knot, nexus, or node in a skein of social and environmental relationships. Such relationships are internal. The classical antecedent of such an ecological self is not the Hindu Ātman/Brahman – the universal substance in all – as per Naess, but the Buddhist Anātman or Anattā (No-self) / Śūnyatā (Emptiness). In the hybrid philosophical expression of Japanese Buddhism by members of the Kyoto School, the core of the internally related ecological self is the >topos of mu<.
Progressive Psychoanalysis as a Social Justice Movement, Cambridge Scholars Publishing 2017, 217 pp.
(2017)
Psychoanalytic sociology and the traumas of history: Alexander Mitscherlich between the disciplines
(2017)
This article examines the way aspects of recent history were excluded in key studies emerging from psychoanalytic social psychology of the mid-20th century. It draws on work by Erikson, Marcuse and Fromm, but focuses in particular on Alexander Mitscherlich. Mitscherlich, a social psychologist associated with the later Frankfurt School, was also the most important psychoanalytic figure in postwar Germany. This makes his work significant for tracing ways in which historical experience of the war and Nazism was filtered out of psychosocial narratives in this period, in favour of more structural analyses of the dynamics of social authority. Mitscherlich’s 1967 work >The Inability to Mourn<, co-authored with Margarete Mitscherlich, is often cited as the point at which the ‘missing’ historical experience flooded back into psychoanalytic accounts of society. I argue that this landmark publication does not hail the shift towards the psychoanalysis of historical experience with which it is often associated. These more sociological writers of the mid-century were writing before the impact of several trends occurring in the 1980s–90s which decisively shifted psychoanalytic attention away from the investigation of social authority and towards a focus on historical trauma. Ultimately this is also a narrative about the transformations which occur when psychoanalysis moves across disciplines.
Social Character (Fromm)
(2017)
My article provides a systematic interpretation of the transformation of capitalist society in the neo-liberal era as a form of what Karl Polanyi called ‘cultural catastrophe’. I substantiate this claim by drawing upon Erich Fromm’s theory of social character. Fromm’s notion of social character, I argue, offers a plausible, psychodynamic explanation of the processes of social change and the eventual class composition of neo-liberal society. I argue, further, that Fromm allows us to understand the psychosocial basis of the process that Polanyi calls cultural catastrophe. This requires an elucidation of the major social forces of financialization and emancipation which, I argue, proved to be important formative factors in the emergence of neo-liberal society. The cultural catastrophe of neo-liberalism concerns the working class, whose prevailing social character has become misaligned with the new expectations and requirements of neo-liberal society.
This article seeks to problematize the issue of pathology and to render it intelligible. I elucidate a cultural-political model of a) why pathology is prevalent in numerous forms and social domains, and b) interventions for ameliorating widespread pathology, and ultimately eradicating it. This model draws on the work of Erich Fromm that articulates how pathology is characteristic of normal social, psychological activity in many or most societies. This article also discusses two ways in which prevalent pathology is misunderstood, and not corrected, eradicated, or prevented. One misinterpretation is the standard biomedical model of pathology. A second misinterpretation is a liberal, humanistic, postmodern position that denies all pathology and insists that behavior is a positive expression of choice and agency, which must be validated and accepted rather than corrected.
In this paper, I compare two theories of ideal love, the Platonic and Frommian, and argue that they give opposite advices to lovers in practice. While Plato emphasizes >whom to love< and urges one to continuously look for a better beloved, Erich Fromm emphasizes >how to love< and urges one to grow and change with one’s imperfect lover. Using the movie >Her< as an example, I explain why an ideal love is extremely difficult to attain under the guidance of the Platonic and Frommian ideals. In an imperfect love, to leave or to stay seems to be a question with no simple answer.
This chapter explores a fundamental alternative philosophy of the subject. Drawing inspiration from Adorno’s critical theory and from Fromm’s social psychology, Smith offers a contemporary, cross-disciplinary study of the subject, including the individual’s relation with society and social development. What emerges is a deeply insightful approach to understanding social interaction, developmental psychology and the problem of ego colonization. Enriching arguments laid out in early chapters, Smith employs a methodologically innovative conception of the development of the subject: from its (de)formation and early childhood development to more practical issues such as compassion fatigue, deficits of reason and empathy. Smith shows how negative social conditions foster emotionally overwhelmed individuals – a deeply repressed, closed, traumatized subject. This chapter also covers other important practical issues, such as the problem of economic coercion, pathological reproduction, cycles of domination and violence, and the everyday effects of >needless suffering< on the psyche.
The article discusses the contributions of the Frankfurt School (Max Horkheimer, Theodor W. Adorno, Herbert Marcuse, and Erich Fromm) to a theory of fascism in the 1930s and 1940s, after the Institute for Social Research had moved to the United States. The discussion concentrates on the economic and psychoanalytic aspects and concludes that Critical Theory remained too close to traditional Marxism to generate more profound insights into the nature of fascism, especially with regard to its political features.