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Three waves of challenges may be perceived from within psychoanalysis to its reductionist attitude to religion and spirit. These historical challenges from within psychoanalysis are an important context for reading the many papers now being published on spirituality and psychotherapy, and increasingly, spirituality and psychoanalysis. The 1st wave began with some of Freud's contemporaries, among them his friend, the psychoanalyst and pastor Oscar Pfister; the Nobel Laureate Romain Rolland, and the poet T. S. Eliot. Challenges continued after Freud's death: In Britain from psychoanalysts such as Rickman and Guntrip, and in America initially by the European immigrants, Erikson and Fromm. British independent psychoanalysts initiated what may be considered to be the 3rd wave, whose momentum is now swelling to a sea change.
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.
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.
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.
More than fifty years after Erich Fromm’s >The Sane Society< was first published, it remains an important work, surprisingly contemporary in scope, with particular relevance to scholars working in social theory and media studies. Fromm’s primary emphasis is on evaluating the sanity of contemporary western societies, which he suggests often deny its citizens’ basic human needs of productive activity, self-actualisation, freedom, and love. He suggests that the mental health of a society cannot be assessed in an abstract manner but must focus on specific economic, social, and political factors at play in any given society and should consider whether these factors contribute to insanity or are conducive to mental stability. Ultimately >The Sane Society< provides a radical critique of democratic capitalism that goes below surface symptoms to get to the root causes of alienation and to suggest ways to transform contemporary societies to further the productive activities of its citizens. Fromm envisions the refashioning of democratic capitalist societies based on the tenants of communitarian socialism, which stresses the organisation of work and social relations between its citizens rather than on issues of ownership.
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.
Review Louis J. Cozolino: The Neuroscience of Psychotherapy: Building and Rebuilding the Human Brain
(2006)
Review Jurgen Reeder: Hate and Love in Psychoanalytical Institutions: The Dilemma of a Profession
(2006)
Review Herbert J. Schlesinger: The Texture of Treatment: On the Matter of Psychoanalytic Technique
(2006)
On Perseus
(2006)