Refine
Language
- English (150) (remove)
Document Type
- Articles (127)
- Books (9)
- Collections (5)
- Forewords (4)
- Interviews (2)
- Dissertations (1)
- Journals (1)
- Necrologues (1)
Year of publication
- 2012 (150) (remove)
We are presently at a point of unique circumstantial convergence where recession, an increased emphasis on business ethics, and marketer’s reluctance to accept shifting social agendas have combined to identify the need for a new approach to marketing. Using concepts from the human resources, marketing and psychology literatures, and especially Erich Fromm’s ideas concerning economic character, this paper posits that marketers – as a professional community – are driven to promote consumerist outcomes; victims of an automaton amalgam of calling and character. The analysis suggests the vulnerability of both marketer and consumer are mutually reinforcing and that we need, somehow, to break this damaging cycle of dependence. We know little, however, about how marketers think and feel about their discipline, so this paper also promotes an agenda for marketer behaviour research, as a countervailing balance to a currently disproportionate focus on the consumer.
This paper discusses the notion of mental health from the perspective of the social context in which such a notion has to exist, and has to be fostered or otherwise, by that key social activity in a democracy that is education. In particular, it considers this topic by way of reviewing a thoroughgoing analysis of ‘society and sanity’ presented over a half century ago by Erich Fromm in his >The Sane Society<. The links to and an implications for a PCP understanding of mental health in the light of the ideas of Fromm and some later thinkers are discussed.
Drawing upon the thought of Eric Fromm, this paper argues that efforts to understand and counter behaviour that causes difficulties in education should begin in a critical and reflective engagement with both the conditions of human freedom and the character of educational institutions and society as a whole. Fromm’s critique of dominating ideas about good mental health within capitalistic societies is examined in relation to disablement and attention-deficient hyperactivity disorder. A study of a sixth-form college in the south of England elucidates connections between Fromm’s insights into social psychology and disablement as a process of oppression.
In 1937 Theodor Adorno, in a letter to Erich Fromm, described women as exemplars of commodity fetishism, >agents of the commodity in society<. Adorno wanted Fromm to join him in a study of the invidious psycho-social effects of this phenomenon. Fromm did not respond to this invitation, possibly because his own views on women were diametrically opposed to Adorno’s. To Fromm, women were not agents of capitalist corruption but avatars of altruism, their nurturing qualities providing models for socialist morality. These polarized images of women have their roots in Enlightenment gender theory. This essay outlines the myths of Woman promulgated by Enlightenment intellectuals, in particular the Janus-faced doctrine of ‘female influence’ that dominated eighteenth-century writings on women, which portrayed them simultaneously as acquisitive hedonists and as paragons of self-sacrificial benevolence.
In a 2002 article that appeared in El País, the Spanish writer Javier Cercas allies himself with other scholars who have argued that during the time of its publication he Family of Pascual Duarte (1942) by Camilo José Cela, served as an apologia for Franco’s dictatorship. Following the ideas articulated by Erich Fromm in Escape from Freedom (1941) about fascism as a reaction against the effects of individual isolation in the modern era, I relate Cerca’s political interpretation of the Family of Pascual Duarte with existential and psychological readings of the novel. I argue that the moral decline of Pascual Duarte is the result of his inability to live up to the existential burden of freedom in the seemingly uncaring, anarchical and meaningless universe associated, from the Nationalist perspective, with the political and social programs of the Second Republic. While Pascual tries to elude this responsibility through various mechanisms of escape, primarily through practices of submission and domination, the lack of any legitimate authority to submit to or of any sphere in which he can legitimately assert his own authority, leads Pascual to unwittingly present his meaningless and immoral life as a case for the reassertion of a dictatorial regime.
In his paper, the author considers >the humans’ love of themselves, of their perfection and self-preservation.< He shares Al-Ghazali’s postulate >humans love the eternity of their being< and highlights the presence of this idea in the doctrine of Christianity, in the conceptions of Ludwig Feuerbach (1804–1872) and Erich Fromm (1900–1980).
Beck (1995) has outlined an influential social theory in which the role of modern risks has been highlighted. Modern societies are characterized as qualitatively distinct from premodern societies due to the self-generated new risks of annihilatory potential. Jonas (1979) has proposed an approach highlighting fear as a heuristic guideline for approaching further scientific research and technological development. According to this framework, imagining annihilatory risks inherent in a particular technology and research should make us forego the potential benefits of this technology, as the potential costs are too high. Mittelstraß (1992) argues exactly the opposite and claims that not less but more research and technological progress is necessary in order to enhance the survival chances of the human species. In order to reduce the possibility of deliberate action, which may trigger the annihilation of the human species, however, Mittelstraß (1992) calls for the development of a strong ethos of responsibility. The question, though, remains on what kind of rationale this ethos of individual responsibility may be grounded? It is suggested in this paper that Fromm (1947) provided the answer to the question of how such an ethos may be created and sustained.
Despite readily available facts and figures regarding human-caused natural degradation, a large portion of the public still refuses to believe that the environment is suffering because of our actions. This refusal to believe, paired with a lack of environmental motivation, has become so evident that it recently attracted the attention of scientists and psychologists attempting to account for it from various perspectives. The disbelief in, for instance, climate change, is hard to explain without referring to a mechanism best described as >environmental denial<. Analysis shows that people may be prone to deny anthropogenic environmental damage because their personal identity, as well as the quest for meaning in their lives, depends upon a consumerist modus vivendi. Consciously or unconsciously faced with the dilemma of either accepting that this lifestyle endangers the life of the planet (as well as their and their children’s well-being), and thus accepting its consequences and the responsibility for change, or refusing to believe that the environmental degradation is occurring in the first place, they choose the latter option. This choice is also motivated by the lack of sound alternatives around which new, >greener< identities could be built. Thus any attempt at changing public opinion regarding anthropogenic environmental degradation, as well as any strategy that advocates putting an abrupt end to our environmentally damaging practices, is not likely to be successful if it neglects to provide new footing for identity building.
This thesis is a statement about a series of paintings based on an invented dollhouse object that conveys the artist’s identity and placement in the world. Through this essay, the artist represents the home as a space that fosters the recovery and rebirth of invisible energy, >ki< and examines ideas of transience, interconnection, and rebirth in the mysterious flow of >ki< in the home. Also the artist will explain her own view about being an artist, the methodologies and specific techniques of her paintings, and her artistic direction for the future.
To introduce an archival protocol of a >Debate about methods in the social sciences, especially the conception of social science method represented by the Institute<, held on 17 January 1941 at the Institute of Social Research in New York, the article focuses on certain conflicts in substance and terms of discourse among members of the Institute, with special emphasis on Franz Neumann’s distinctive approaches, notwithstanding his professed loyalty to Max Horkheimer’s theory. These are seen to arise not only from Neumann’s assignment as bargaining agent for the Institute and his distinctive relations with American colleagues, but also from their different orientations to the conflicted legacies of Weimar.