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The present study aimed to delineate the psychological structure of materialism and intrinsic and extrinsic value pursuit. Moreover, we compared models based on self-determination theory (SDT), Fromm's marketing character, and Inglehart's theory of social change to account for racial prejudice. In a sample of undergraduate students (n=131) and adults (n=176) it was revealed that the extrinsic value pursuit Financial Success/Materialism could be distinguished from the extrinsic value scales Physical Appeal and Social Recognition, and Community Concern could be distinguished from the intrinsic value pursuit scales Self-acceptance and Affiliation. Moreover, Financial Success/Materialism and Community Concern were consistently and significantly related to prejudice, whereas the other SDT facet scales yielded weaker relationships with prejudice. Structural models based on SDT and Inglehart were not corroborated, but instead the present data supported a mediation model based on Fromm's work in which the effect of Community Concern was mediated by Financial Success/Materialism. Broader implications for SDT are critically assessed.
The author tells the history of his relationship with Malcolm Pines, and uses it in order to describe the latter’s personality and thinking, as well as to trace the influence that he has had on his thinking and practice. The focus of the discussion is on Malcolm’s understanding of the socio-political context of mental processes, including the creation of psychoanalysis by Freud, and the inner politics of psychoanalytical and group-analytical institutions. Malcolm is described as a revolutionary character, in Fromm’s terms. The article is a celebration of Pines’ life and contributions, as he reaches the age of 85.
This paper proposes the use of social psychological and philosophical foundations for designing affective technology that promotes the experience of love. The adopted theoretical basis is the concept of productive love, which is heavily based on Enrich Fromm but also includes theories and scientific findings of numerous psychoanalysts, social psychologists, and philosophers. We conducted a review of the theory about the nature of love and found that social psychological and philosophical approaches differ regarding peoples' understandings. The findings were used to elaborate eight principles of productive love. Based on these principles, we derived criteria for designing affective technology when the objective is to promote productive love. We reviewed the existent studies on affective technologies and implemented the criteria into a system design, the Pictures' Call. A prototype of the system was pretested to illustrate how productive love technology could be based on established criteria.
The idea of sport's character-forming qualities is a globally spread notion, which has begun to be questioned in recent years. In problematizing this notion, the relation of sport to its practitioners has been the primary study. The way the problems reflect the relation of sport to society has been less in focus. This essay sets such a focus with the help of character concepts in social psychology (Riesman, Fromm and Sennett), developing a reconstruction of such concepts of sport in a Swedish context. From being a sphere by the side of society, sport in Sweden from the twentieth century onwards has been increasingly linked in complex ways to the various spheres and actors of society. This understanding of how characters are fostered into and within sport sheds light on the conditions for character formation at different stages of history until the present time. The problems receive further relevance when considering how New Economy culture and its conditions for character formation may affect Swedish sport in the near future.
This article examines the role of comedy and the influence of Kafka in Ana María Shua's comic novel >Soy paciente< (1980). Using Northrop Frye's rubric of comedy as a point of departure, it traces the way in which Shua's text, like Kafka's work, simultaneously inscribes and distorts the traditional utopian themes of comedy: identity acquisition and social resolution. The aim is to relate the distortions to the novel's socio-historical context of El proceso by referring to Erich Fromm's observations on the effect Fascist regimes have on concepts such as social and individual identity. The article also exposes the correlation between Shua's cultural dependency (on Kafkaesque/European creative paradigms) and the novel's oppressive cultural/political context.
This paper explores the way in which Freud's theory of melancholia is being used within sociological theory to explain racial hatred in Britain. The paper critically interrogates the work of Paul Gilroy before engaging with the works of Erich Fromm, Richard Sennett, as well as Freud and Klein's classic psychoanalytic formulations. Using two biographical case studies drawn from original empirical research on racial harassment perpetrators the paper argues that while racial hatred is often melancholic in nature, the losses at the heart of the racist's malaise tend to be only tangentially connected to empire and its crimes. More commonly, the losses that underpin hatred are irreducibly personal and class based, and hence multilayered, losses of love and security, for example, aggravating the pain of losses of respect and community, and vice versa. The paper concludes by drawing attention to the dangerously racialized kinds of imagined community losses of this kind tend to furnish, and the difficulties of providing recognition to those most afflicted by them.
African concepts of beauty and adornments of the body reflect a celebration of life in the face of death. They are derived from ancient times and the sense of man as a biological animal, within the context of life with other beasts. Among these, man is the only one who is born naked without nature's protections and adornment, such as fur, stripes, or feathers. The body is therefore an asset which must be guarded and covered and yet be expressive of strength as well as sexual desire, so as to attract a mate. Beauty, as a source of self-regard in African cultures is also often achieved through empathic identification with animals. Primordial African attitudes to life and death and symbols of beauty apparently influenced Freud's fourth instinct theory conceptions of Eros and Thanatos, as well as Erich Fromm's ideas about life-loving and death-loving societies, as illustrated in selected quotations from their writings.
In this paper, I outline a history of critical marketing studies. The argument put forward that marketing lacks any substantive critical edge is questioned. In surveying our history and finding extensive engagement with a variety of critical perspectives, I connect these with appropriate literature from non-marketing sources to flesh out an account of our critical marketing heritage. I devote considerable attention to the period 1940 to 1990, as this is the historical range of critical marketing literature that most scholars will be unfamiliar with, linking this through citation and discussion to more recently published work. In this way, this paper provides a guide to sources of literature that may have passed marketing scholars by because they violate our disciplinary demands for >recency< (Baker, 2001). As I document, critical marketing studies examines a variety of areas that represent consumer culture theory’s (CCT) >next frontier< if we accept Arnould and Thompson’s (2005) diagnosis. In opposition to Arnould and Thompson’s assertion, CCT’s new frontier, this paper contends, is a frontier that has long been of interest to critical marketing scholars whose work might usefully be re-examined.
Attachment and the driving force of development: A critical discussion of empirical infant research
(2010)
Empirical infant research has led to an enormous expansion of our knowledge of the psychological functions of the infant. From a psychoanalytic perspective, however, it must be questioned whether this research has increased our knowledge of internal psychic life and helped answer the questions of what initiates and drives development. In the first part of this article, we argue that psychoanalysis must necessarily adopt a critical stance towards a scholarly ideal that rests on the positivist empirical tradition. Psychoanalysis has as its object unconscious processes that cannot be directly observed. In the following section, we take as our point of departure the project of attachment theory that Peter Fonagy and his colleagues have developed in an attempt to reconcile psychoanalysis with the empirical and experimental study of small children, and we demonstrate concretely the limitations of such a project vis-à-vis the exploration of the psychic reality of the child. Our line of reasoning continues to demonstrate how drive theory can be shaped so as to contain an object relations theoretical perspective – as has taken place in Jean Laplanche's reinterpretation of the theory of seduction – without abandoning the psychoanalytic theory of the drive and the unconscious.
The author examines different definitions and applications of the terms >psychic energy< and >libido.< With regard to the >psychic energy< terminology, he shows that its application and usage relate in particular to the perspective of Brenner and not to Freud's definition. He argues that Freud uses the term >psychic energy< as a synonym for >libido,< and not >libido< as a synonym for >psychic energy.< It is demonstrated that in Freud's view, up until 1914, >libido< relates to manifestations of bodily sexual tensions, and subsequently this term applies to the manifestations of sexual energy in the psychic field. The author rejects this change in terminology and also challenges Freud's attempt to use dynamic-economic considerations as an explanatory device for epistemological reasons. Freud's concept of energy is inconsistent with the meaning of energy as defined in the physical sciences, and whereas the metapsychological topographical, dynamic, and structural viewpoints have a solid foundation in the representational world to which the psychoanalytic process affords unique access, this is not true of the economic viewpoint. It is claimed that bodily tensions only exist in the representational world in the form of affects, so that, in the author's opinion, the economic viewpoint should be abandoned in favour of an affective one. In the context of the endeavour to obtain pleasure and avoid unpleasure adduced by Freud, this viewpoint focuses on the relationships between affects and the different elements of the representational world, thereby serving as the subject of metapsychological investigation.
The author examines the role that the buying of commodities plays in the identity formation of the individual. He concludes that it is nowadays no longer the instrumental utility value but a psychical utility value that influences the decision to buy a commodity and that the psychical utility value can have different functions for consumers. In neurotically structured individuals, normal consuming can end in an identity extension where the individual identifies transitively unconscious scenes with those in advertisements, thus making these unconscious scenes conscious in their guise. When individuals are mainly narcissistically structured, an >identity of commodities< can be found, that is, a non-personal identity formation mediated by commodities in which the individuals identify reflexively with the scenic figures from Internet games, movies, television programs, and commercials.
Global warming – reality or fantasy? Certainly, global warming is a dystopia linked to other catastrophes in human history, such as the Flood and Noah's Ark. Noah's belief in God saved his life and the life of his family. In our time, we need to sustain our belief in the human capacity to cooperate and survive. This is a necessary background when thinking of the future and analysing the border between fantasy and reality, between fear and paranoia, and in the process in which a new worldview takes form.
The process of a de-territorialized or multilocal world productive system, which is more informational than industrial and more speculative than productive, has led to a crisis in social structures and the breakdown of identity referents that formerly had provided a sense of meaning to individual and social life. We are facing both a breakdown and a disarticulation of institutional and symbolic mediations from the past, and also a process of reorganization of differences and inequalities that are having a strong impact on identities. The individual and collective construction of subjectivity is acquiring multiple forms, some of them unexpected, others unprecedented. In what way does reality question psychoanalysis?
Psychoanalysis is in a somewhat better position in French universities than elsewhere in Europe. Although the situation can at times be difficult, psychoanalysis remains the major reference for students in clinical psychology, both in the adult sector and in that of children and adolescents. This is to some extent related to the setting up of a European interuniversity study group on teaching and research in psychoanalysis and psychopathology (SIUEERPP), which brings together psychoanalyst lecturers (belonging to various schools of thought) in order to defend the ongoing presence of psychoanalysis in training clinical psychologists. Conditions are not quite as good as regards the training of psychiatrists, where it is much more difficult for teaching based on psychoanalysis to survive, even in the few >strongholds< that it still manages to occupy. Things are slightly better in child psychiatry, where the illusion that medication alone is sufficient for treatment is somewhat weaker.
This article presents the evolution of a face-to-face analysis of a severely disturbed 16-year-old girl. In the first part of the analysis, communication was mainly at a nonverbal level, via gestures, body movements, gaze, long silences and the coded language of dreams without associations. The importance of listening is stressed, including a >hearing with eyes,< in order to attune to presymbolic levels of the patient's psychic organization and to gather preverbal elements of her subjective expression. The analytic device is considered as a transformation system through which unconscious somatopsychic processes – sensorial, emotional and protomental states – acquire the quality of representability. In the final phase of the analysis, thanks to her acquired capacity to narrate, relive and work through what had been enacted in the relationship and what had been discarded, repeated and transformed in dreams, the patient succeeded in revealing and signifying her internal experience in the context of the transference. The author is confident that the introjection of the analytic experience and the elaboration of the separation from the analyst will further modify, in the post-analysis, the traumatic memory of the death of the patient's mother, which is repeated in the transference at the end of the analysis.
While exploring the transgenerational transmission of intrapsychic contents and processes, Faimberg coined the term alienating identification to convey the impact of the parents' intrusion into the child's psyche, and of the expulsion into it of rejected parts of themselves. In addition, Torok and Abraham use the term phantom to describe aspects of the presence of a split-off, traumatized part of the self of a person, usually related with unresolved mourning, in another person's mind. The existence of such processes constitutes a major problem for the subject's narcissism, that is, the way he invests himself, and for his relation to experience and reality. It also may be used as an omnipotent means of avoiding psychic pain, by identifying with his object's omnipotent way of rejecting painful reality. This paper will explore, with the use of clinical material, the defensive use of such phenomena on the part of the subject, as well as their impact on the analyst's mind, that is, on his countertransference, when he is working with carriers of alienating identifications and phantoms. Stress is put on the importance for the analyst of containing the uncanny experiences of being cut off from the patient's mind and of being controlled by something he ignores.