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In the article problems connected with possibilities of analyzing human behavior in context of propensities were discussed. Main focus was put on differences in propensities with respect to sex, also in context of E. Fromm’s personality theory. Methodological issues related to propensities were presented. Definition of propensity and methods of measuring propensities were also proposed. In empirical example differences in propensity to smoke cigarettes and propensity to drink alcohol with respect to sex in Polish voivodeships in year 2004 were estimated. Also, econometric models explaining that kind of propensities were introduced.
Is psychoanalysis scientific? Which Oedipus is the >correct< Oedipus? Questions like these have divided psychoanalysis and fueled debates about it since its inception. In this paper, I explore these issues by outlining and adopting an >intertextual< perspective, not to answer such questions but to establish a metatheoretical position that might enable us to step outside of them to consider the broader relationship between theory, myth, literature, and the clinical session. I discuss how concepts such as narcissism and the Oedipal arrangement signify a deeper need for affiliation beyond the content of the myth itself but from within the psychoanalytic field; that they provide a flexible resource but also accrete a historical residue presenting as inertia against a unified psychoanalytic approach. In doing so, the term theory drift is developed to argue that psychoanalytic theory might in part develop through idiosyncratic >etymological< processes that reflect an obligation to retain concepts such as Oedipus and a reluctance to break with existing forms and practices. Finally, I discuss emergence and how it signifies the imponderability of the literary and clinical material with which psychoanalysis works, and look to actor network theory to conceptualize the fluid, intertextual networks within which we exist.
What would Erich Fromm say about North Korea? A preliminary
application of humanist psychoanalysis
(2013)
This paper considers the possibility of applying the sociologically oriented humanist psychoanalysis of Erich Fromm to the evaluation of the political character of the North Korean state and society, with particular attention given to Fromm's concepts of the matricentric complex and patricentric complex, as well as to his analysis of fascism and Stalinism. The author explains that if humanist psychoanalysis is consistently applied, North Korea can be understood as a transitional postcolonial Stalinist state with a patricentric social order that exploits the matricentric complex for mass control.
Rand’s triadic model is particularly germane to understanding Fitzgerald’s Bernice Bobs Her Hair. I will discuss Fitzgerald’s characters, their worlds, and beliefs in terms of the conflicts between the three types of people: >Being,< >Having,< and >Doing.< I will also explain why Fitzgerald presents his characters the way he does and examine how Rand’s theory influences his narrative point of view.
The intention of the author is to further the knowledge on pain, based on a review of the concept of psychic pain as found in Freud, Klein, Bion, and French authors, with the objective of clarifying as far as possible the nature and vicissitudes of pain. After this review, the author describes a case in which she proposes that psychic pain is made up of three essential elements: the first is the overflowing of great quantities that cannot be contained; the second is an intense and immediate defense to protect the psychic apparatus from destruction; and the third is the >return of the foreclosed.< At the end of the paper, the author makes her final, subjective considerations.
This article probes psychoanalytic theory regarding the repercussions of traumatic experiences in memory function. Both memory and trauma are fundamental to psychoanalysis and lead to the psyche's constitution as well as to its limits. The relationship between trauma and memory, based mainly on an aspect beyond the pleasure principle, points toward a function at the limits of the psychic, something between the body and the psyche, between perception and representation – all of which is responsible for psychic differentiation. Trauma has been associated with death drive dynamics and automatic anxiety, which constantly require a prior link to the establishment of the pleasure principle. When there is no possibility of linking and transcribing an event, its effects are negative, that is, it causes narcissistic damage. Ferenczi considers the object's role to be the determinant as far as an event's traumatic fate is concerned. When the object cannot accommodate the subject's needs or assign some meaning to the traumatic experience, introjection and psychic inscription are interrupted. We suggest that the lack of intersubjective recognition occasions the nonrepresentation and the meaninglessness that emerge as corporeal acts during psychoanalytic treatment.
Particularly due to technical innovations, we are witnessing an unbounding of reality that increasingly is reflected in an inner striving to get rid of the limitations and boundaries of our own personality by reconstructing it anew. This pursuit of de-limitation, dissolution and blurring of boundaries is seen as a central character trait of the Ego-oriented social character. Such a fabrication of a limitless per-sonality doubtless results in a weakening of such psychic abilities as experiencing one’s self as a consistent and ambiguous entity, being emotionally attached to oneself and to others, feeling one’s own strivings, affects and emotions, and being guided by one’s internalized norms and values. Lastly, the impact of this character formation is discussed in regard to clinical and therapeutic issues.
This thesis attempts to advance the underappreciated thought of Erich Fromm as both a crucial contribution to twentieth century intellectual history and a potentially pivotal point from which to transcend current theoretical impasses. In particular, I argue that Fromm's radical humanism can participate in the rejuvenation of contemporary social theory, which is still largely constrained by the dual reductionism of positivism and poststructuralism, and that a return to it will encourage renewed theorising of, and empirical engagement with, the connections that obtain between the >psychological< and the >social<, the >essential< and the >constructed<, and the >is< and the >ought<. I try to show that Fromm's qualified essentialism and ethical normativism are sensible, viable, and desirable, and that they, coupled with his analytic social psychology, which is based on his underlying humanism and elaborated through a unique fusion of Marx and Freud, provide the basis for the development of practical strategies to realise humanism in the world. Perhaps above all, I try to show that there is a deceptive complexity and sophistication to Fromm's ideas, which are all too often taken as simple and naive.
In 1950, Elihu Katz submitted his MA thesis called >The Happiness Game – A Content Analysis of Radio Fan Mail< at Columbia University. It was supervised by Leo Löwenthal, and drew on recently published work by Paul Lazarsfeld, Robert Merton, and Erich Fromm. The topic for the thesis came from Löwenthal, who, as Katz now recalls, was then preparing to become Director of Research for Voice of America. Somehow, he obtained from CBS, perhaps through Lazarsfeld, several thousand letters sent in to the network during the early months of 1948. He was interested in letters sent by listeners in anticipation of such mail landing on his desk in his new position. The letters were sorted into different bundles and assigned to various graduate students for analysis. It was a happy chance that the bundle assigned to Katz were letters sent in by listeners (overwhelmingly female) in response to a request from a popular radio broadcaster of the day, Ted Malone. Malone asked regular listeners to his daytime show to note whenever they felt happy across the whole of February 1948 (a leap-year) and, at the end of the month, to send him a letter telling of their happiest day. Over two thousand letters were received, and from this, a sample of 236 letters was selected and submitted to a careful content analysis which formed the substance of the thesis. Immediately following this, Katz entered the doctoral program in the Department of Sociology and began to work with Lazarsfeld, a collaboration which culminated in Katz’s work on the Decatur survey material that Lazarsfeld had commissioned in 1943. It became his doctoral thesis and was published as >Personal Influence< (1955), co-authored by Katz and Lazarsfeld – a landmark in American sociological literature.
Erich Fromm analyzed how man is divided in his sense of true self. This division within forces him to cling to abstract and concrete entities outside of himself and Fromm calls this >transference< which he, after all, borrowed from Freud. This transferring of man’s individuality to outside forces brings temporary relief to his experience of powerlessness and loneliness. The transference makes man acquire a masochistic character wherein he submits himself to outside irrational forces that perpetually dehumanize him. This is the reason why his ethics is a struggle to bring back the power of man within, nursing his potentialities to change himself and transform his world. Ethics, for Fromm, is a form of normativity which leads man into freedom to fully actualize his own sense of self.
The long term perspective
(2013)
The journal >Psyche – Zeitschrift für Psychoanalyse und ihre Anwedungen<: A historical overview
(2013)
The author presents a historical overview of the evolution of the German journal Psyche, starting from its foundation by Alexander Mitscherlich, Felix Schottlaender, and Hans Kunz in 1946. After the gradual reorientation of Psyche in the direction of being a purely psychoanalytic journal, Mitscherlich became its sole editor in 1969. In the 1980s, Psyche played a central role in the discussion and working-through of the German analysts' involvement in the National Socialist Regime. In 1997, Werner Bohleber followed Margarete Mitscherlich as editor-in-chief. Psyche, the only monthly psychoanalytic journal in the world, keeps not only documenting, but also shaping the main developments taking place in our field, on both a national and an international level. As far as the last 20 years are concerned, the journal has also played a central role in the debate conducted in and outside Germany in terms of empirical research in psychoanalysis and the dialogue with the neurosciences.
Since the concept of imaginative elaboration of body functioning, which is essential to Winnicott's idea of psyche-soma, has rarely been investigated up to now, this article sets out to do this and tries to pursue the meaning and articulation of that concept in the corpus of Winnicott's theory. In this way, it contributes to bringing the body to the core of psychoanalytical theory.
This article deals with the six German-Jewish psychoanalysts who fled from Nazi Germany to the Netherlands in the 1930s. Watermann and Landauer perished in the German concentration camps. Levy-Suhl survived the German occupation of the Netherlands but died soon after. Reik went on to the USA before World War II. Lampl and Keilson lived and worked in the Netherlands for the rest of their lives.
Sullivan Integrated
(2013)
The author sees H.S. Sullivan's (1892–1949) interpersonal theory as the best theoretical framework for the contemporary intersubjective perspective in psychoanalysis and presents the former in its pluridimensional articulation. After having extended Freud's therapeutic approach to psychotic patients, Sullivan developed both a developmental psychology and a psychoanalytic and psychotherapeutic technique based on the >interpersonal field< as the basic unit of study. To the pluridimensional character of his theory also belongs its application to the cultural and social aspects of our personal identity. Having the contemporary psychoanalytic authors who shaped the intersubjective perspective limited themselves to the clinical dimension, Sullivan's interpersonal theory can still provide the theoretical framework that any psychoanalytic perspective needs.
The author sees H.S. Sullivan's (1892–1949) interpersonal theory as the best theoretical framework for the contemporary intersubjective perspective in psychoanalysis and presents the former in its pluridimensional articulation. After having extended Freud's therapeutic approach to psychotic patients, Sullivan developed both a developmental psychology and a psychoanalytic and psychotherapeutic technique based on the >interpersonal field< as the basic unit of study. To the pluridimensional character of his theory also belongs its application to the cultural and social aspects of our personal identity. Having the contemporary psychoanalytic authors who shaped the intersubjective perspective limited themselves to the clinical dimension, Sullivan's interpersonal theory can still provide the theoretical framework that any psychoanalytic perspective needs.
This paper explores psychosocially young unemployed men’s resistance to work they describe as ‘embarrassing’ and ‘feminine’. The context is the closure of a steelworks in a town in the South Wales valleys, in which their resistance is mediated by father–son relationships that dictate what counts as proper manly work. In this study, young men, as well as their mothers and (where possible) their fathers, were interviewed. The interviews reveal a community suffering the effects of intergenerational trauma and riven with complex feelings about masculinity and femininity. These feelings are projected onto the young men, who feel bullied and shamed by their families, peers and others in the community because they are unable to find gender-appropriate work. The implications of these findings for un-derstanding youth male unemployment are considered.
Review Kakar, S.: >Kultur und Psyche. Psychoanalyse im Dialog mit nicht-westlichen Gesellschaften<
(2013)
Review Friedman, L. J.: The Lives of Erich Fromm: Love's Prophet: The Art of Being Erich Fromm
(2013)
Although the once wildly popular writings of Erich Fromm have fallen into desuetude in the 21st century, Fromm remains a relevant figure for anyone interested in the interpenetrating fields of psychoanalysis, cultural criticism, personal spiritual development and civic engagement in domestic and international affairs. For that reason, his thought is eminently worthy of being revisited. At least that is the claim of Lawrence J. Friedman in his new biography, >The Lives of Erich Fromm: Love’s Prophet<.
Review Borgogno, F.: >The girl who committed hara-kiri and other clinical and historical essays<
(2013)
Review Borgogno, F.: >The girl who committed hara-kiri and other clinical and historical essays<
(2013)
Different theoretical perspectives have been developed within the psychology framework for the analysis of the authoritarian phenomenon. They constituted some of the background lines of what would afterwards be considered as the field of Political psychology. The first approach takes place in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century’s, along with group psychology, where authoritarianism is studied as an emergent behavior of crowds. Subsequently, developments in authoritarian personality suggest a change in the analysis axes by studying the phenomenon in an intra-individual way. A third perspective arises with the cognitive approach, represented by the concept of dogmatism, which emphasized the study of beliefs and the way in which individuals defend them. Parallel to this approach, advances in the field of Experimental Psychology on obedience, account for the situation in the authoritarian phenomenon. Later on, the study of authoritarian personality is taken up once more with the concept of right-wing authoritarianism, which is defined as the individual differences in the covariation of three attitudinal clusters (authoritarian submission, authoritarian aggression and conventionalism). Finally, the most recent perspective for the study of the phenomenon suggests rethinking rightwing authoritarianism as an intergroup phenomenon, since its three attitudinal clusters account for a group phenomenon, plus a personality trait. The main objective of this paper is to critically review each of the six perspectives which have approached the study of authoritarianism as psycho-political phenomena, showing its peculiarities as well as its differences so as to finally consider which of those are still acceptable alternatives for the interpretation of this phenomenon.
Neurosciences have experienced tremendous development in the last decades. Research on genetics, structural and functional neuroimaging advance at a frantic pace. At the same time, psychoanalysis as a whole has been in decline, reflected in a reduced influence on culture, academia and mental health. However, there are some optimistic signals pointing to a slow but steady recovery. Three factors among others have contributed to this changing situation: interest in personality disorders, attachment theory and links to neuroscience. The approach to neuroscience has been especially contested among us, and some colleagues distrust these advances and take refuge in more familiar approaches to clinical work and research. There are also colleagues who maintain a naive view of neuroscience, expecting confirmations it can never provide. Some interesting ideas in psychoanalysis today come from projects involving neuroscience – or at least taking advantage of a research methodology more usually applied to natural sciences, and overcoming the methodological problems often found in traditional psychoanalytical papers. This rediscovery of nature and science in psychoanalysis should be considered not as a deviation from our core field, but rather as a return to the attitude of discovery and risk-taking our discipline once showed, and lost.
This paper aims to present the body as a possible psychic retreat in the face of annihilation anxiety. The sensations produced on the body seem to be a preferable place of psychic retreat in the patient's efforts to assuage her tormented intrapsychic reality. In such cases, unconscious phantasies are experienced mostly on the bodily level because of their intensity and primitive nature. Accordingly, self- and object representations tend to reside in the body and are accessible via the body. In this regard, bodily sensations offer a sense of continuity and cohesion, and allow for the further psychic elaboration of the unconscious conflicts.
I present and analyse here the phenomenon of a specific language that was spoken within the walls of a maximum security prison in the south-east of England between 2006 and 2007. In doing so, I look at the adolescent who becomes an offender, and how his language is thereby altered, here exploring language in groups and drawing on Freud and Bion, as well as the sociological contributions of Emery, Goffman and Messerschmidt, and the linguistic contribution of Teresa Labov. Examining the social structures that the language enforced, I examine my own role within and outside the prisoners' language, and explore what the prisoners learned from me and my language, and vice versa. I explore the nature of learning a language inside a prison, and examine the need for a homogeneity of language and the social adhesive in the language used. I look at my experience of one-to-one teaching versus group teaching: specifically, the differences in language used by the prisoners in these different scenarios, and try to determine to what extent language comes from outside influences and what to extent it forms and permutates inside. Using actual examples, I argue that despite the exuberance and inventiveness of the language, its usage follows Freud's >“Beyond the pleasure principle,< in that there is an attempt to reduce excitation. Finally, I regard prison language as a psychic retreat, drawing on the work of Steiner, Meltzer, Emanuel, and Leader (among others); and I ask questions not only about the prisoners, but also about the function of learning inside a prison itself, while regarding the language used as a depressive defence. No identifying reference to any single prisoner, or any specific crime, has been included in these pages. The people and the place that are alluded to throughout have been rendered anonymous.
This paper discusses two 19-century French-speaking authors, Pierre Janet and Auguste Forel, who both employed hypnosis and in various ways were influential on psychoanalysis. Marcelle, a long case history by Janet, is presented. Freud’s long review of Forel’s book on hypnotism is then discussed, as well as a short review by Erich Fromm of Forel’s autobiography. A case history by Forel is also presented. The connections between these two authors and modern developments are discussed.
On psychic reality and neutrality: Empathy and the work of construction in countertransference
(2013)
The clinical challenges faced in encountering patients who do not fit the standard treatment of Oedipus conflicts clearly show the limitations of the interpretative method, thus making indispensable the study of clinical concepts and techniques as a way to broaden the psychoanalytic horizons. In order to analyse the different psychopathological problems resistant to traditional clinical approaches, it is necessary to reorganise the technique on the basis of a better understanding of the ways in which subjectivity is rooted in early psychic constitution. In this way, empathy becomes important as a clinical tool. The use of empathy must be understood as a decisive factor in handling clinical cases and situations in which the treatment encounters obstacles that restrict the power of the analyst's verbal interventions.In this case, can we say that the use of empathy interferes directly with and changes the position of the concept of psychic reality? Moreover, as we use empathy, can we also say that the concept of neutrality is transformed, without being abandoned? The intention of this paper is to discuss these questions using clinical material taken from the analysis of borderline clinical cases and situations.
Why is it that imprisonment has undergone an explosive growth in the USA and Britain over the last three decades against the background of falling crime rates in both countries? And why has this development met with a significant and escalating degree of support among the public? To the extent that governing elites on either side of the Atlantic have been eliciting public support for their authority by inducing concerns about issues of crime and punishment, what explains the selection of crime as a means to this effect, and in what precise ways do crime and punishment fulfil their hidden political function? Moreover, how do Americans and Britons legitimate their consent to objectively irrational policies and the elites responsible for their formulation? In seeking to advance the study of these questions, the present article rediscovers the method and key findings of Erich Fromm’s ‘materialistic psychoanalysis’, bringing them to bear upon insights produced by political economies of contemporary punishment and related scholarship. Particular attention is paid to the hitherto understudied themes of the political production of middle-class support for punitive penal policies under conditions of neoliberal capitalism, and the crucial role played in this process by the privileged position accorded to violent street crime in the public domain.
This paper addresses the notion of irrationality and madness, as they are understood within the psychoanalytic framework. By highlighting their similarities and differences, as well as by emphasizing the crucial defensive position that manifest psychosis holds in the midst of all this, an attempt is being made to delineate the links between the conjectured earliest interaction that the infant has with its environment and the burgeoning conscious rational mind. Winnicott's conceptualizations around fear of breakdown, disintegration, the environment-mother, and therapeutic regression are utilized to form a bridge between the theoretical understanding of madness and the clinical applications of this understanding, as illustrated by a clinical vignette.
Ferenczi is regarded as the initiator of the relational model in psychoanalysis. In Britain his influence on Bowlby was largely indirect. In the United States he exercized an explicit influence on the interpersonal school through Clara Thompson. Fromm was already an admirer and supporter of Ferenczi. In comparing Fromm and Bowlby their convergence on the evolutionary paradigm is stressed. These two authors also converge on two important Ferenczian themes: the primary nature of the mother-child relationship and the importance of real-life traumatic events. The quality of attachment may contribute to the social character.
This paper reveals the basic ideas of Erich Fromm’s analytical social psychology and shows links among work, character and education. Social changes may be better understood in the background of work evolution. Today the concept of waged work has been extended to unpaid activities. At the same time, the working life has been changed from a stable model to a flexible one. The work, its standards and social distribution, are also different now. Erich Fromm’s concept of "social character” clarifies the changes and explains the consequences of the social changes. The relations to work are also different. During these changes – unemployment included – concepts of the unconditional basic income were stud-ied. These concepts explain why it is possible for people without waged work to participate in community life and consumption, without being excluded. The author presents the basic social changes that affected many different subpopulation and age groups.