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The fictional protagonist of the Lionel Shriver novel, >We need to talk about Kevin<, massacred nine classmates, his father and his sister with a bow and arrow. He murdered them just before he turned 16, to avoid being prosecuted as an adult. He spared the life of his mother, a kindred spirit, cold, arrogant, who would recognize the depth of his hatred and nihilism. Kevin's maternal grandfather was born in a concentration camp during the Armenian genocide. His mother, Eva, a tough, independent woman, loathed being pregnant and the process of giving birth. Kevin was a demanding baby and then a cruel child. Eva kept telling her husband that she found Kevin's malignity troubling, but he only wanted to see the charming, vulnerable side of the boy. Was Kevin born a sociopath or did he become one due to his experiences in utero and beyond? In this paper, I elucidate how temperamental features, inadequate parenting, transgenerational trauma, and oppressive gender relations created the perfect storm from which Kevin's personality developed. Finally, I will discuss how Eva and Kevin struggled to repair their relationship after the murders, and consider whether forgiveness and reconciliation are even possible after such a heinous act.
Erich Fromm was central to the Frankfurt Institute of Social Research under the direction of Max Horkheimer, but the works of each author, while handling at times similar issues, took different paths. The article’s aim is to analyze how Horkheimer’s anthropology, which would be of importance in Dialectic of Enlightenment, was built as the author embodied in his essays elements of Fromm’s social psychology, albeit overcoming some of its limitations, as well as suggesting new potentials of critique.
The author explores the relationship between Sándor Ferenczi and Sigmund Freud in the light of their correspondence. This allows us to see how Freud was able to offer and create for Ferenczi a >professional and personal home< that enabled the latter to find a much more meaningful and creative contact with himself. According to the author, this experience played an important role in Ferenczi’s later readiness to offer to and create with his patients a similar >psychoanalytic home.< As Freud was not able to share such clinical research work with Ferenczi, a conflict developed between them whose nature has occupied psychoanalysts ever since, and whose seeds can be found in the 1246 letters that they exchanged between January 1908 and May 1933. From this point of view, Ferenczi’s Clinical diary (written in 1932 and published only in 1985) can be seen as the continuation of the dialogue they had entertained for so many years, as well as Ferenczi’s attempt not to give up the “professional and personal home” that they had created together.
The International Federation of Psychoanalytic Societies (IFPS) was established in 1962. The first 20 years of the Federation were a time when psychoanalysis was divided into so-called liberal and orthodox factions. The (then orthodox) International Psychoanalytic Association (IPA) did not admit all psychoanalytic societies, and some societies did not want to join it. In the IFPS, non-IPA-psychoanalysts from Europe, the USA, and South and Middle America came together to discuss their new approaches to psychoanalysis and to find ways to better cope with their patients’ problems. At the beginning an informal organization of autonomous societies, the IFPS persisted for 12 years without a charter. The first three secretary generals came from the German Psychoanalytical Society and greatly influenced the first few years of the IFPS. The IFPS held several international conferences, and new psychoanalytic societies became members. In 1977, after the VIth Forum in Berlin, the IFPS fell into an identity crisis. The conflicts centered on the assumption of responsibility, the authority of the members, and how to understand the aim and sense of the organization. This article deals with the theoretical background of the early IFPS and the development of its self-concept.
The concept of resignation carries widely divergent meanings in the cultural contexts of Western and Eastern experiences. Whereas the Western perspective of resignation implies a negative, impoverished state of self-assertion, the Eastern perspective contains wider and more complex meanings, among which is that resignation is a virtue to be cultivated. Using the writings of the Nobel Prize winner in Literature Yasunari Kawabata, akirame, the Eastern, specifically Japanese, concept of resignation, will be examined for its multilayered psychological and cultural meanings. In addition, from Kawabata’s writing and biographical information, I demonstrate how the Western psychoanalytic concept of Oedipal conflict relates to and manifests in the Eastern psychology of resignation, bridging both Eastern and Western cultures to elucidate underlying, universal human conflicts.
In search of the Human: The trauma of modernity and the >instrumental reason< of the persecutors
(2019)
This article takes the clinical notion of trauma as a historiographic criterion for understanding modernity and its mythologies. If the rewriting of the term trauma – at the intersection of psychoanalysis and neurobiology, cultural anthropology and philosophy of the mind – is the hallmark of contemporaneity, it is quite acceptable to see the Shoah as a radical historical and epistemological watershed. Never before had such a highly productive bureaucratic-industrial system been designed and implemented for the devastation of the very idea of humanity. Auschwitz was, in the most radical ways, the liminal space between Human and Inhuman. It lay right at the cutting edge of the abyss that the executioner shares with his victim – the annihilation of humanity. This essay crosses a question that has always characterized the social construction of subjectivity: the perimeter of the Human, and the interrelationships between identity, alterity, and recognition.
This paper presents a report on our psychoanalytic investigation of cultural folktales, myths, and fables, in which we study, primarily, the extent to which such narratives lurk behind contemporary representations of men and women. Our aim is to identify the multiple narrative structures that form the core plots and storylines of these tales. Following Roland Barthes’ work on mythologies, we want to decode the tales’ ideological components by deciphering the axiomatic assumptions these tales make about the nature of perceived social reality. This represents an attempt to study a mind that is derived from the text. More specifically, we study narratives whose storylines revolve around the struggle between men and women in order to identify the culture’s core concerns about and preoccupations with the relationship between the sexes. We believe that cultural myths or folktales are a royal road to a nation’s collective conscience, and include gendered patterns of defenses, obsessions, fears, and paranoia.
The author attempts to understand the kamikaze attacks during World War II as a phenomenon that crossed a border into the systemic use of suicide attacks. The author first presents two historical precursors before World War II: the Seinan (Southwest) War in 1877; and an event in 1932 known as the Three Suicide-Bombing Heroes. To examine the process leading to kamikaze, the author offers two examples: a scene in which a suicide attack was proposed to pilots; and a story of a general, Oenishi, who has been identified as a person responsible for the campaign. In the discussion, the author employs psychoanalytic arguments on chosen trauma and apocalyptic order to see kamikaze as sharing a common psychology with other warfare. He then focuses on the previous debate over the normality of suicide attackers and argues for the importance of finding a role for positive value in the psychological processes. He concludes that kamikaze was realized through multiple mechanisms and ended up crossing the border to unconventional attack. He closes the paper by suggesting we should make efforts to keep the positive feedback in response to suicide attacks under a certain threshold in order to avoid reinforcing the spiral.
The present paper is an expansion of the author’s discussion of Harold Blum’s seminal presentation >Hate and its vicissitudes< in Prague in 2017. It aims at an elaboration of various aspects of hate and hatred as a complex dynamic intrapsychic and relational affective-cognitive state, alloyed, in different ways, with aggression and love. In this context, various theoretical perspectives concerning the multifaceted relation between hate, love, and sexuality, and hate and destructive aggression, and transformations between them, including the first study of neurobiological correlates of hate, will be raised and explored. Implication on destruction as well as psychic structuring, adaptation and creativity are also considered. The clinical vignettes illustrates the relevance of multiple theoretical conceptualizations in contemporary psychoanalytic practice.
Part I of this paper discussed various dynamic aspects of hate in the individual developmental and clinical context. Part II, also an expansion of the author’s discussion of Harold Blum’s presentation on >Hate and its vicissitudes< in Prague in 2017, examines the theme of hate as a multidimensional dynamic group phenomenon. The paper uses various theoretical perspectives to focus on group unconscious processes and the group-specific dynamic of regression leading to an activation of primitive ego operations, unleashing destructive aggression as well as creative mobilization. Also considered are the implications in terms of destruction, adaptation, and creativity, in relation to group unconscious dynamic processes and intergenerationally trasmitted trauma and posttraumatic developments.
The following essay is a modified version of an invited presentation given in Florence, Italy in May 2017. It builds on and extends some of the previous psychoanalytic and multidisciplinary studies of Dante’s >Divine Comedy< as a >psychoanalysis of the Middle Ages< that greatly contributed to the incipient changes of the cultural episteme. The paper will explore and elaborate the continued relevance of Dantian proto-psychoanalytic insight into the complex role of regression, destruction, transgression, and conflict in generating growth, expansion, and creativity, and the ways in which ethics and erotics intertwine in a complex path towards unity, within the context of his multivocal presubjective, intrasubjective, and intersubjective inquiry leading to psychic reorganization. The liminal nature of Dante’s poetry, extending the symbolic and representational range in a way unprecedented in the vernacular literature of his time, vivifying and representing what is traditionally thought of as beyond representation, will also be considered in terms of its relevance to the contemporary psychoanalytic discourse.
Nowadays, violence appears in various forms in Brazil. From an agricultural country, Brazil became rapidly industrialized, which resulted in large rural exodus and explosion of population density in major cities. Brazil faces today a great social and economic disparity, added to endemic corruption of government, nepotism and lack of social planning. The roots of such violence can be found in our archaic heritage that has been forming Brazilian identity since its early days. The interest of former colonizers was to extract wealth, without regarding the establishment of a nation. This exploitation has been always done by force and violence, with the slave labor of native Indians and imported black people. As a state Brazil was exposed to the primal father’s law, and to the absence of a symbolic father, who could have provided his people with a more stable identity, only given by the paternal law. Is it possible to reframe archaic heritage, rebuilding the missing father image without resorting to a false savior of the fatherland? Is it possible to construct a more equitable society that could propitiate true conditions of citizenship in order to make every citizen, to the extent possible, the protagonist of his own history?
Oedipus goes to the opera: Psychoanalytic inquiry in Enescu’s >Œdipe< and Stravinsky’s >Oedipus Rex<
(2019)
Psychoanalytic inquiry into operas based on the life of Oedipus may provide further knowledge on the Oedipus complex. Therefore, we chose to analyze Enescu’s >Œdipe< and Stravinsky’s >Oedipus Rex<. Two distinct methodologies were used in our study. The first explored the concept of free association through musical themes in the operas. The second involved the comparative study of the Oedipus myth in order to provide a deeper understanding of Oedipus’s character. We observed that Oedipus displayed symptoms of his complex through the traits of aggressiveness and arrogance. Moreover, we noticed that Oedipus was compelled by the necessity of finding out who his real parents were and by unconsciously accomplishing the prophecy. Oedipus assumed the responsibility to free the Thebans from plague. Yet, it was too late, for the feared part of the prophecy was already accomplished. He provided a wrong answer to the Sphinx and then received the most severe punishment, one that would have ostracism as its outcome. It was, however, not too late for Oedipus to finally discover who his real parents were. Nevertheless, afraid of losing his place as King of Thebes, he investigated the plague’s causes. This resulted in his aggression as he resisted discovering >where babies come from.<
This chapter employs Caroline Polmear’s contemporary reinterpretation of Michael Balint’s concept of the basic fault as a lens through which to read Othello and Macbeth. In Polmear’s view, borderline pathology arises due to a traumatic rupture in the primal bond between mother and child, and it can take the form of either ocnophilia (clinging to people) or philobatism (clinging to spaces). It is proposed that Othello and Macbeth are representations of these complementary character-types. Othello cannot tolerate any separation from Desdemona, while Macbeth retreats into schizoid isolation. The handkerchief, the loss of which is tantamount to the loss of Desdemona’s love, was received by Othello from his mother at the time of her death, while in Macbeth the rupture of the mother-child bond is figured both in Macduff’s having been >untimely ripped< from his mother’s womb and by Lady Macbeth’s description of killing the baby that was nursing at her breast. Two clinical examples—one of an actual patient, the other of Philip Roth—are offered to illustrate the reciprocal interplay of literature and psychoanalysis. It is argued that the traditional notion of >applied psychoanalysis< should be replaced by what might be called, following Shoshana Felman, >implied psychoanalysis,< or what Fromm has called >literary psychoanalysis.<
This chapter provides a comprehensive overview and rehabilitation of Erich Fromm’s importance as a psychoanalyst. Fromm is lauded for having been an unsurpassed analyst of psychoanalytic politics and the incarnation of what it means to be an independent psychoanalyst, who was unjustly attacked both by orthodox analysts and by his erstwhile colleagues in the Frankfurt School. His 1935 essay, >The Social Determinants of Psychoanalytic Therapy,< in which the influence of Ferenczi and Groddeck is directly acknowledged, and his 1959 book, Sigmund Freud’s Mission, are hailed as summits of his achievement, while The Greatness and Limitations of Freud’s Thought shows him in decline. Three weak points in Fromm’s thought are identified: (1) his tendency to flatten out an individual level of analysis into a purely social level; (2) his penchant for shifting the blame for the problems in psychoanalysis away from Freud onto his followers; and (3) his assumption that motherly love is unconditional. Fromm’s defense of radical humanism is compared with that of Orwell, and it is shown to be grounded not only in philosophy but above all in natural science in The Anatomy of Human Destructiveness.
Groddeck’s Lessons
(2019)
This chapter examines both >Groddeck’s teaching,< in the sense of the enduing value of his contributions to psychoanalysis, as well as >Groddeck’s lessons,< that is, what we can learn from his blind spots. The question of who is a psychoanalyst stands at the center of Groddeck’s relationship to Freud, and in accepting Groddeck’s assertion that transference and resistance are the >hubs of treatment,< Freud offers his most expansive definition of a psychoanalyst. Groddeck’s genius is most fully displayed in The Book of the It, the epistolary form of which casts him at once in the roles of analyst and patient. From Groddeck’s biography, it is clear that he was an extremely traumatized individual, as is further attested by his analysis in Letter 25 of his penchant for the number 26,783. But Groddeck does not recognize that he has been traumatized, and his one-sided theory that the It is >responsible for everything< reflects his inability to give due weight to environmental factors. Despite his astonishing candor, Groddeck never discusses his divorce from his first wife or the tragic story of his daughter Barbara, wounds that must have too painful for him to expose to the gaze of the reading public.
This chapter employs Fromm’s concept of the >magic helper< to analyze the symbiotic nature of the Freud-Ferenczi relationship. Because both sadists and masochists, according to Fromm, are unable to tolerate genuine freedom, the sadist is dependent on the masochist, no less than the masochist is dependent on the sadist. As Clara Thompson, who was in analysis with both Ferenczi and Fromm, recognized, Ferenczi suffered from his need to be loved and accepted by Freud, and unconsciously resented him for that reason. Fromm’s contrast between the >original self< and the >pseudo self< parallels Winnicott’s antithesis between the True Self and the False Self, as well as Horney’s antinomy between the >real self< and >phony self.< Marcuse’s critique of Fromm is based on an adherence to Freud’s outmoded drive theory. Whereas Freud plays the role of what Daniel Shaw calls the >traumatizing narcissist< in his relationship with Ferenczi, Ferenczi, until his emancipation in his final years, exhibits the deformations resulting from what Bernard Brandchaft calls >pathological accommodation.<
This chapter offers a proto-Frommian reading of Paradise Lost. The opening section reviews the debate between >theological< and >Romantic< critics of Milton’s poem—C. S. Lewis and Stanley Fish, on the one hand, and A. J. A. Waldock and William Empson, on the other. Although Waldock pointed to the structural contradictions in the epic, and Empson argued that God was >put on trial< in the narrative, the neo-Christians have gotten the upper hand because the neo-Romantics have been unable to provide an overarching framework to account for their observations. The middle section furnishes such a framework by synthesizing Kenneth Burke’s >logological< analysis of the Fall as inevitable from a narrative perspective with Bernard Paris’s insight that God is the supreme narcissist in the poem. The final section compares Milton’s God and Freud as patriarchs who impose a double bind on their followers and are motivated by a compulsive need for fame.
The conflict between Freud and Ferenczi during Ferenczi’s final period centers as much on their differences in technique as on Ferenczi’s revival of Freud’s pre-1897 trauma theory. Severn is the first patient since the 1890s whose childhood sexual trauma was the focus of her analysis, just as she was the first since Anna O. whose trauma-based dissociation was integral to her treatment. The corollary of the revival of trauma theory is a model of the mind based not on repression but dissociation. Ferenczi belongs to a tradition of analysts including Breuer, Fairbairn, and Sullivan who worked with a dissociation model. The fountainhead of this tradition is Janet, but though Ferenczi read and quoted from Janet, no references to Janet are found in Ferenczi’s work after 1924, when he began to move away from Freud. It is necessary to integrate scholarship on Ferenczi with the vast body of work on dissociation. Ferenczi is situated between Freud and Severn. Reversing the traditional verdicts, Ferenczi’s relationship to Freud is viewed as an enactment, whereas his relationship with Severn constitutes an authentic dialogue.
This chapter presents the discovery that Elizabeth Severn’s 1933 book, The Discovery of the Self, contains disguised case histories of both herself and Ferenczi, and thereby constitutes a companion volume to Ferenczi’s Clinical Diary. From having been known primarily as >R.N.,< the most important patient in the Diary, Severn emerges as a subject and original contributor to psychoanalysis in her own right. Severn’s reception of Ferenczi’s legacy is compared to that of two of his other American patients, Izette de Forest and Clara Thompson, the latter of whom envied Severn for her closeness to Ferenczi. Multiple correspondences between the accounts of Ferenczi and Severn of their mutual analysis, as well as of their histories, are set forth. The significance of Strindberg’s play, The Father, for Ferenczi’s transference to Severn is examined. Ferenczi and Severn are shown to have been two deeply traumatized individuals who healed themselves by finding their spiritual counterparts in each other.
Introduction >One Man Cannot Be the Same as Many<: Glimpsing New Paradigms through Old Keyholes
(2019)
The introduction sets the stage for the ensuing chapters by meditating on the key phrases in the title, which are indebted to and inspired by the work of Donnel Stern as well as Philip Bromberg. Fromm is praised for his espousal of a humanistic psychoanalysis as well as his critique of authoritarianism, and his concept of >literary psychoanalysis< is introduced. Freud’s interpretation of Oedipus Rex is shown to be important as much for its >unformulated< assumption of a >hidden reality< theory of the mind as for his extrapolation of the idea of the Oedipus complex. The humanism of Fromm is contrasted with Sullivan’s claim that personal individuality is an >illusion<; Stern and Bromberg are critiqued for decoupling trauma from dissociation and for positing that these are normal conditions of the mind. It is argued that a forensic stance is warranted in hermeneutic endeavors and that it is possible to reconcile objectivist and constructivist epistemologies.
This chapter tackles the perennial critical conundrum of Iago’s motivation. Agreeing with Coleridge’s assessment of his >motiveless malignity,< it argues that all attempts to explain Iago’s character in terms of individual psychology prove inadequate and that he can be more satisfactorily understood by employing Fromm’s concept of >social character.< Iago is the prototype of early modern capitalist man who exhibits the >pathology of normalcy< and exemplifies three of Fromm’s four >unproductive orientations<—exploitative, hoarding, and marketing. Iago’s lack of a sense of self leads him to destroy rather than to create, and thus manifests the impulse for negative transcendence, or what Fromm terms necrophilia. As necrophilia is the most malignant form of the anal character, this analysis accounts for the pervasiveness of anal imagery in Othello, including in the speeches of the otherwise feeble Clown. Iago, neither devil nor human, is at once a product of his age and the quintessence of all those, from Caligula to Hitler, for whom madness is a way of life because they seek to transcend through destruction the limits of human existence.
This chapter takes to task Elisabeth Roudinesco’s biography, Freud in His Time and Others, for innumerable factual errors and, even worse, for the assumption that she is presenting the objective truth about Freud. Three traditions of Freud biography are delineated: the hagiographic, of which Roudinesco’s is the latest example, the Freud-bashing, and the revisionist, which sees Freud as having created something incontestably great but also as having been tragically flawed as a human being. Roudinesco’s errors range from the trivial, to the mildly compromising, to the inexcusable and disqualifying. With respect to Jung, Roudinesco is shown to rely on Deirdre Bair’s biography, which is itself unreliable, instead of on her own reading of the primary sources. Roudinesco’s true colors are displayed above all in her treatment of Freud’s sexuality, as when she asserts that he has been >accused< of masturbation, claims that an affair with his sister-in-law >doubtless never happened,< and alleges that Freud had a >horror of adultery.< The all-too-human Freud was very different from the lifeless icon worshiped by Roudinesco.
With growing inequality, the American dream is becoming less effective as a collective myth. With its focus on material success, competition and self-reliance, the intensified diffusion of neoliberal scripts of the self is leading the uppermiddle class toward a mental health crisis while the working class and lowincome groups do not have the resources needed to live the dream. African Americans, Latinos and undocumented immigrants, who are presumed to lack self-reliance, face more rigid boundaries. One possible way forward is broadening cultural membership by promoting new narratives of hope centered on a plurality of criteria of worth, ‘ordinary universalism’ and destigmatizing stigmatized groups.
This article intends to propose a basis for a reflection on how separation mechanisms, both intrapsychic and social, may, by a normal identification process, be comparable in traumatic situations to true forms of violence. According to the theories of Benedetti and Peciccia (1996), a symbiotic Self and a separate Self are continuously present, integrated development lines of the Self, even though they are never fully conscious. Conversely, in the structure of the psychotic Self, a deintegration is inferred between the symbiotic and the separate states of the Self, of which the patient is painstakingly conscious. In light of significant psychoanalytic theories relating to the anxiety of separation, we aim to interpret this symbiosis and separation through the history of Michele, a psychotic young man from a Camorrist family, who was currently hospitalized in a psychiatric facility. The article intends to investigate the separation imposed by the clan, and the even deeper one, inferred from the significant separations experienced within the family circle. Furthermore, we will also outline our therapeutic method and the use of progressive mirror drawing, a psychotherapeutic technique which can be used with patients suffering from different pathologies that compromise verbalization, such as psychosis.
This paper presents a case of >trauma by omission< as a product of the attachment process. The absence of intimate and specific recognition and response by the caretaker of a child can create, by their omission, a >freeze< version of the fight/flight/freeze trauma response. The frozen moments, then dissociated, can become confusion and paralysis at the cusp of adulthood. This state is illustrated in the case below of a 23-year-old Chinese woman being treated by a 29-year-old Chinese male psychoanalytic fellow. The role of cultural context in >omission< is highlighted regarding development and treatment, which is taking place in a Communist society with a recent violent history of extinguishing individuality, modifying how attachment and individuation are expressed. A relational/interpersonal treatment orientation is applied and advocated at this intersection of individual and social realities. This paper contributes to attachment theory by raising awareness of how its many forms and outcomes may or may not be deemed healthy and functional.
In Formulated Experiences, Peter L. Rudnytsky continues his quest for a >re-vision< of psychoanalysis by coupling his revival of the unjustly neglected figure of Erich Fromm with his latest groundbreaking research on Ferenczi and Groddeck. Committed at once to a humanistic and to a literary psychoanalysis, Rudnytsky explores the subjective roots of creativity and critiques the authoritarianism that has been a tragic aspect of Freud’s legacy.Through his clinically informed interpretations he brings out both >hidden realities< and >emergent meanings< of the texts and authors he examines, including Shakespeare’s Othello and Macbeth, as well as Milton’s Paradise Lost. A preeminent scholar of the history and theory of psychoanalysis, Rudnytsky displays an interdisciplinary expertise that makes Formulated Experiences truly sui generis and unlike any existing book. Bridging the artificial divide between the academic and clinical worlds, his eloquent championing of the interpersonal and relational traditions will captivate contemporary psychoanalysts and psychotherapists, while his insightful close readings provide a model for psychoanalytic literary critics.
The authors note a contradiction between empirical findings and the dismissive conclusion of the German Federal Ministry for Family Affairs, Senior Citizens, Women and Youth (FMFASWY) that the treatment of children in early day care will not affect their relationship to their mother or entail any serious damage for their future. They use this contradiction as an opportunity to discuss the social function of early childhood socialization in day care. They come to the impression that the FMFASWY, in its assessment of research on day-care centers, was also intuitively guided by sociopolitical interests insofar as the emergence of a social character satisfying current social requirements is favored more by primary socialization in day care than in families.
Our meta-analytic review investigates how employee participation in democratic enterprises is related to psychological outcomes. We gathered 60 studies through a systematic literature search of quantitative field studies (published between January 1970 and May 2017) and extracted 138 effect sizes related to three indicators of organisational democracy (OD) and 15 psychological outcomes. The overall findings suggest that employees’ individually perceived participation in organisational decision making (IPD) had a stronger relation to job satisfaction (ρ = .25), job involvement/work motivation (ρ = .36), prosocial work behaviours (ρ = .24), civic and democratic behaviours (ρ = .21) and perceived supportive climate (ρ = .44) than the other two OD indicators: structurally anchored employee participation (SAEP) and employee participation in collective ownership (EO). This was not the case for valuebased commitment: the relations of SAEP (ρ = .40), EO (ρ = .34), and IPD (ρ = .46) with commitment were nearly equal. Mediation analyses indicated that IPD partially mediated most of the effects of SAEP and EO on the outcomes mentioned. The cross-sectional database and a small number of studies for some of the outcomes are the main limitations of this study.
Terrorism is a worldwide phenomenon, as the >Global terrorism index< reveals. The aim of terrorism is to take command over our feelings and our imagination to compel us to change our ways of life and release a clash between civilizations. In my discussion, I will concentrate on identity, an individual’s feeling of being unique, having a coherent self while at the same time being part of a large group. My intention is to link the concept of identity to affects and thinking and the loss of reality-testing when the group is dominated by schizo-paranoid anxiety. Two lines of thought stand out in my discussion of terrorism – the power of identity and the search for meaning – both of which are affected by globalization, the rise of a network society, and disenchantment with the world.
Erich Fromm was one of the first psychoanalytic thinkers who was genuinely interested in Asian philosophies. In the first part of this article, I will show Fromm’s imago of Buddhism as a radical, nontheistic, and ethical philosophy >without God.< I will argue that Fromm made an important difference between the phenomenal ego and being that proves crucial for his understanding of psychoanalysis and his critique of modern society. I will also explore Fromm’s synthesis of Buddhist philosophy and psychoanalysis, and show the similarities and differences between them.
In >Sleeping memories< (2017), French writer Patrick Modiano confronts the past and his memories in a different way compared with his previous novels, as he keeps trying to revisit and reprocess them. In this book he adds a new method, the dreaming revision of memories, especially traumatic ones, turning to the work of Marquis d’Hervey de Saint-Denys, >Les rêves et les moyens de les diriger: Observations pratiques.< I would suggest that in this way he dreams undreamt traumas, thereby transforming them. In doing so, Modiano meets Thomas Ogden’s art of psychoanalysis.
In this article we will explore three important themes: (1) Fromm's anti-objectivistic perspective which stands for the idea that the other Being should not become an object in analysis; (2) the central idea of the relatedness and the relational dimension in the psychotherapeutic practice; (3) in the last part we will analyze the existential-ontological level which is manifested in analysis. We will focus our attention on the different ways in which Fromm as a psychoanalytic thinker, social critic and humanist can help the therapists to include the existential and social dimension in the psychotherapeutic work.
Erich Fromm’s analysis of >pathological normalcy< offers promising social-theoretical resources to help transcend the contemporary, >domesticated<, diagnosis of social pathologies. This article commences by briefly tracing the numerous limitations of the current orthodoxy, epitomised by the recognition-cognitive >pathologies of recognition< approach. A sympathetic reconstruction of Erich Fromm’s diagnosis of pathological normalcy is then presented as a promising palliative. The strengths of Fromm’s social-theoretical framework are then outlined: Fromm’s scholarship presents a structure through which objectively inadequate and contradictory social conditions can be diagnosed, while emphasizing their important connections to the social-psychological pathologies which sustain them. The efficacy of Fromm’s approach is then defended against post-modern and social-constructivist critiques. This article thus supports the rehabilitation of Fromm’s work within the sociological mainstream as an important antidote to the ‘domesticated’ framing of social pathology which continues to dominate contemporary scholarship.
This essay explores the psychoanalytic sanitarium (Therapeutikum) directed by Frieda Fromm-Reichmann and Erich Fromm in Heidelberg from 1924 to 1928. The Therapeutikum aimed to combine adherence to Jewish ritual with psychoanalytic practice and radical politics for a group of GermanJews who were rethinking their Orthodox backgrounds in light of new intellectual and political currents and modern sensibilities. Visitors to the sanitarium included many leading German-Jewish thinkers, and Heidelberg’s proximity to Frankfurt placed the Therapeutikum in the orbit of the Institute for Social Research and near a major hub in the renaissance of Jewish learning then occurring. At the centre of the article is a discussion of essays by Fromm-Reichmann and Fromm that subjected Jewish ritual (kashrut and shabbat) to psychoanalytic investigation. Appearing in Imago in 1927, the articles marked the two writers’ public break with Orthodox Judaism. This essay argues that the Imago articles marked a crucial moment in the political, intellectual, and religious history of German Jewry. Even if the Fromms’ synthesis of Freudianism, radical politics, andJudaism was conceptually shaky, their sanitarium illustrates the centrality of psychoanalysisças a sensibility, a hermeneutic and above all away of creating social and communal bondsçto a generation of GermanJews navigating the challenges of German and Jewish modernity.
Trauma is the subject of increasing attention in contemporary psychoanalysis. Its complexities will be explored in a clinical case, emphasizing traumatic experience and unconscious conflict across developmental phases. The patient, a young adult white man began analysis complaining of anxiety and depression. Born to adolescent parents, he had experienced infantile stress and childhood traumatic illness. Needy, greedy, and dependent, he was gratified by the frequency and intimacy of psychoanalysis. Genetic interpretation and reconstruction were particularly important in the analytic process. Analytic progress with attenuation of unconscious conflict and developmental transformation proved enduring after termination.
Review Jonathan Sklar: Dark times. Psychoanalytic perspectives on politics, history and mourning
(2019)
The vacuum of kidnapping
(2019)
All forms of kidnapping are presented in this paper, as is their psychodynamic underpinning affecting human behavior: abduction with or without ransom, political kidnapping, kidnapping by well-organized criminal groups, human trafficking and governmental kidnapping, which all highlight the important crises in the major decline in ethics and values. Apathy, fear, and insecurity lead to an increase in dependencies on substances, psychosomatic problems, and depression, which result from the suffering of this >vacuum of kidnapping.< The author wonders, >Has right to live in peace been kidnapped?<
A client who wants his story to be made into a case history presents for psychoanalysis. An artist all his adult life, he expresses his sexual trauma through his art. His more recent artistic output is in the form of avant-garde video montages. The analysis stalls, becalmed by a failure to understand a circumcision event, a punishment for sexual expression. If Ferenczi and the Budapest school model learning from therapeutic errors, freedom of thought, sincerity, and experimentation, then this case history illustrates those. Real sexual trauma and a real circumcision event are entangled with fantasy and art in attempts to come to terms with them. The circumcision event was better understood with multiple readings of Carlo Bonomi’s work, which became part of the analysis. The wider Ferenczi community also became part of the story of the analysis, and in a kind of mutuality the analysis wants to make a contribution to that body of knowledge.
Relational and field theories have much in common, despite divergent foundations. In this paper, several areas of divergence are selected, including the structure of the field as a relational matrix or as an unconscious joint fantasy of the couple; the fate and form of insight; and the nature of the unconscious as relational or ubiquitous. Differences in cognitive and attentional sets are identified and linked to different modes of insight. Using a clinical vignette, these divergences will be illustrated with an attempt to compare and contrast the two approaches through a discussion of how each lens highlights, expands, or forecloses different features of the analytic process. A mode of conceiving the unconscious as unstructured and multiple in potential is offered to reconcile divergent assumptions in therapeutic action. A consideration of Sandor Ferenczi’s clinical emphasis on relaxed technique, elasticity, and especially mutuality suggests that he would have been a field theorist were he among us today.
The infant observation presented in this paper was conducted weekly for two years. Through an extensive use of clinical vignettes and personal and theoretical considerations, this article aims to highlight that both harmonies and pauses, as well as interruptions and dissonances, can be present in early interactive exchanges, forming the fabric of a relational piece of music that is not always as harmonious as might be desirable. The role of the father in moderating problematic interactions between the mother and her child is also examined.