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This thesis is a critique of romantic love theoretically premised on the analytical psychology of Carl Jung and the humanistic psychoanalysis of Erich Fromm. The aim of this critique is to explore whether there are grounds for postulating a conception of love beyond the current romantic framework. As the critique is primarily concentrated at the depth level, romantic love is examined via the medium of Cinderella folklore, with particular focus on Andy Tennant's 1998 film adaptation of Cinderella, >Ever After<. Based on a Jungian approach to the psyche and psychic products, the methodological framework incorporates the three following tools: The tool of interpretation at the subjective level, in which the characters of the Cinderella fairy tale are read symbolically rather than taken to denote literal fictitious characters; the tool of constructive analysis, in which it is argued that romantic love is more than >nothing but< a boy/girl love story or >nothing but< a myth depicting patriarchal oppression; and the tool of amplification, in which archetypal similarities between the Christian myth and the Cinderella fairy tale are highlighted. The central argument of this critique is that while romantic love does not provide a viable model of relatedness if taken and practiced literally, the romantic myth nonetheless contains within it the basis for a fuller and richer experience of love and relatedness if read subjectively. The rationale for a depth critique of romantic love is based upon the Jungian postulate that phenomena such as dreams and myths issue fundamentally from the unconscious psychic realm, and further upon Jung's recognition of a psychological developmental process he refers to as >individuation< activated by engagement with the products of the unconscious. A symbolic/psychological reading of romantic love brings to light that romantic desire toward another is an outward manifestation of an inner desire for individual realisation, and is expressive of the individual's own capacity for wholeness. The value of a symbolic reading of romantic love is appreciated if it is conceived that it is precisely individual realisation that forms the basis for what is referred to by Erich Fromm as productive or knowledge-based love, argued here to be the ideal and only firm basis for human relatedness generally and intimate relatedness specifically.
Johan Jakob Bachofen (1815-1887) was a Swiss anthropologist and sociologist whose 1861 book, Mother Right: An Investigation of the Religious and Juridical Character of Matriarchy in the Ancient World is best known for his radical claims that matriarchy preceded patriarchy, and that matriarchy is the source of human society, religion, and morality. Scholars have acknowledged Bachofen’s influence on a long list of writers, including but not limited to: Lewis Henry Morgan, Friedrich Nietzsche, Thomas Mann, Friederich Engels, Karl Marx, Erich Fromm, Joseph Campbelll, Emile Durkheim, Carl Gustav Jung, Thorstein Veblen, Ferdinand Tonnies, and Pitirim Sorokin. The focus of my thesis is to bring attention to Bachofen’s influence on the early sociologists (Engels, Durkheim, Tonnies, Sorokin), and more importantly, on the later sociologists and other social scientists whom these early sociologists in turn influenced, including: David Riesman, Talcott Parsons, and Jean Baudrillard.
The study grew out of a desire to examine how it feels to be denied what Hannah Arendt famously referred to as the >right to have rights,< including the right to disobey. More specifically, this study seeks to understand how people living under particular regimes of power – characterised by distinct politics of fear, uncertainty, and silence – feel, define, and express themselves in relation to power, whether in the form of submission or resistance. In other words: How do authoritarian power dynamics affect individuals’ perception of self and how does it play into and shape the everyday life of the individual? At the heart of this inquiry is the notion of the subject, which forms both the conceptual foundation and the central focus of this study.– The study draws primarily on the theoretical contributions of Michel Foucault, Giorgio Agamben, and Hannah Arendt on the interplay of power, resistance, and subjectivity. To frame the discussion, a socio-historical examination of post-independence power practices in Egypt and their impact on the constitution of the political subject is conducted. Research data is generated through an art-inspired qualitative research approach, primarily using Egyptian novels as a source of data to uncover the nuances and interiorities of the process of subject formation. Through a dialogue between Western social theory and Egyptian literature, the study provides an understanding of power practice in Egypt from 1952 to the present, particularly at the level of the inner panorama of the self in society and expands it into a reading of social and political theories on the question of power, subjectivity, resistance, and agency.– The study is divided into six main chapters, including an introduction and a conclusion. Each empirical chapter of this study tells the story of a particular episode in time and is somewhat self-contained, yet all chapters are connected into a large coherent reading of modern Egyptian power practices. Just as the novels examined in this study tell a story with their words, so does my research.– The study concludes that the process of subject formation in Egypt should be understood as an artefact of historical continuity that connects the past to the present, not necessarily in a linear fashion, but in a way that gives it a genealogical context, and as a dynamic process of shifting subject positions. The study further argues for the limitations of the status conception of citizenship as a defining framework for the state – society relationship in the context under study and proposes instead the use of the power – subject framework as a substitute. Last but not least, the study suggests that the connection between theory and method, expressed in the very structure of the research, reveals the epistemic relevance of literature to the conceptual imagination, contributing in a sense, to the discussion of the decolonisation of knowledge production. In some ways, this interdisciplinarity underscores the sheer breadth and hybridity of the concept of subject formation that has become apparent throughout this analysis.
This thesis is an intellectual history of dialecticism and its use in the works of the Frankfurt School members, Erich Fromm and Herbert Marcuse. Famously, these two men had a ferocious and polemical debate in the pages of Dissent Magazine in 1955-56. The Fromm-Marcuse Debate has since become almost the sole lens in which the intellectual differences and similarities between these men are analyzed. Through a comparative and historical analysis of their individual work, largely removed from the Dissent Debate, I offer a new interpretation of their conflict, their personal relationship, and a new perspective on critical theory and its relationship to political action. I argue that Erich Fromm and Herbert Marcuse's intellectual ideas are better juxtaposed through their interpretation of dialectics, rather than psychoanalysis, and that through this, they present us with starkly different prescriptions for individual and collective political engagement. Thus, both Fromm and Marcuse are outliers within the field of critical theory, and certainly within the Frankfurt School, even as their ideas remain in firm conflict with one another.
The main purpose of this thesis is to explore the influence of the social unconscious on human beings in a future context. In psychoanalyst Erich Fromm's view, the social unconscious refers to Individuals who are afraid of being separated from the society they live in, they often adapt and distort their human needs to meet the requirements of our social system. However, with the strengthening of personality and self-awareness in our present society, how will the relationship between the social subconscious and people's self-awareness change in the future? This is the key issue of this thesis. In the first part, by studying the definition of the social unconscious and related works, this thesis tries to understand the root cause of the influence of the social unconscious and how it affects people's behavior and decision-making. In the second part, this thesis makes an in-depth study of Cyberpunk and objective imagery in related works, revealing that Cyberpunk is a projection of the real world, and clues for many problems in the real world can be found in the Cyberpunk world. In the third part, this thesis explores the changes in people's consciousness in the Cyberpunk world. Finally, this thesis concludes people will not be rid of the influence of the social unconscious whether in the real world or the future world. Even as people's self-awareness is constantly enhanced, self-awareness and social unconscious will always exist as contradictory to one another.
Given the current juncture in history, humanity is faced with the herculean task of adapting to a tumultuous present and a glimmer future. Should climate projections be accurate, there is little time to waste. This work makes the claim that we are not only in a political gridlock but also in an academic one. Researching climate philosophy from its inception, the concluding view is that no major progress, outside of a standardized descriptive analysis, has been achieved. Thus, the work evaluates an array of climate philosophers e.g. Stephen Gardiner, James Garvey, Peter Singer, Walter Sinnott-Armstrong, etc., with specific emphasis on the economic philosopher John Broome, suggesting that their recommendations and assessments fall short of being totalizing in scope and therefore of producing viable theories that, if practically sought after, can achieve social sustainability. To fix the problem of a lack of social and strategic trajectory, I offer up Erich Fromm's humanistic philosophy as a suggestive model. In doing so, the argument is made that this can aid in reorienting our external/empirical obsession by shifting our focus toward our ‘interiority – our internal worlds and psyches –, since a necessary condition in achieving sustainability is changing our mindset. By focusing on the human psyche, its structure and needs, can our behavior finally shift in a way that compliments scientific recommendations and ecological demands. Hence, Fromm lends the climate philosophy discussion an ontological framework from which to better direct and more readily navigate toward less socially precarious and more ethical inclined waters.