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For most readers Erich Fromm does not require an introduction. His writings have been translated into several languages, and his thoughts have been popularized in various types of media. This review provides a brief biographical notation for those readers not thoroughly familiar with him. This book is edited by Rainer Funk, a psychoanalyst in private practice in the city of Tübingen, Germany. He is Fromm’s sole literary executor and owner of his library, has edited posthumously several books based on Fromm’s writings, and has written and edited books about Fromm’s life and work. The present volume includes two previously unpublished articles by Fromm on therapeutic practice, and the rest is a collection of writings solicited from Fromm’s former students, supervisees, colleagues, and friends, who provide anecdotal and personal information as well as comments on Frommian therapeutic style and technique. Although Funk’s book provides only glimpses of Fromm’s main criticisms of classical psychoanalysis and his social ideas, it will be of interest to clinicians and laypeople alike who are willing to become acquainted with one of the most important thinkers of the second half of the 20th century.
Since 1999, the author has been working as a psychoanalyst in Munich, Germany, in the context of the German National Health Service, which covers psychoanalytic psychotherapy of up to 300 sessions with a frequency of up to three times a week. He has mostly been working with Italian patients in their common mother language. In other words, globalisation has made it possible to help patients heal the wounds of their old Italian self, develop a new German self, integrate them with each other, and thus allow foreign patients to become >citizens of the world.< After presenting the context of his clinical work, including the German Kassensystem and the characteristics of the Italian patients he works with, the author provides the reader with a review of the literature on migration and identity from a psychoanalytic point of view. Sociology and literature also offer an important key to the understanding of his patients. At this point in the paper, the author presents three patients, their history, the background of their migration to Germany, and the work he did with them. This allows him to come to the conclusion that psychoanalysis can help patients actualise the potentialities intrinsic in globalisation, in order to move towards a richer and more sophisticated identity.
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.
It is widely known that Freud gives Oedipus a central place in both his psychoanalytic theory and praxis. Freud introduces the Oedipus myth as the crucial key for understanding the tragedy of human life. One of the most problematic issues innate to the human condition is aggression. This paper argues: (1) that Freud's insights into human aggression can at the very least be viewed as one-sided and problematic; and (2) that the heuristic potential of the Oedipus myth is, correspondingly, limited. It considers how the Hungarian psychiatrist and analyst, Lipót Szondi, tries to bridge this gap using the myth of Cain and Abel. The aim of this paper is to explore how Szondi's interpretation of this myth offers a much more subtle approach to human aggression. Szondi's alternative and distinctive look at aggressive phenomena offers an exciting and fruitful addition to Freud's interpretation as exclusively referring to sadism and/or the death instinct. This contribution wants to highlight Szondi's amendment to Freud's Oedipus and aims to show that psychoanalysis can benefit from taking into account the mythical figures of Cain and Abel.
In 1995 a seminal paper by Howard Shevrin classified four conceptions of psychoanalysis: first as a human enterprise such as governing and teaching second as a science sui generis that does not require any additional empirical research third as a clinical science that focuses on psychotherapy research and fourth as a science tout court that is of course expected to validate its basic assumptions on the mind. Fifteen years later, Shevrin's classification has remained illuminating. All kinds of research are welcomed in psychoanalysis, but it is also true that, in the current debate on research in psychoanalysis, the interest in testing its assumptions on the mind is no longer a topic. But it is precisely this which is crucial in a time when the sciences of the cognitive field, such as neurobiology and the cognitive sciences, seem to be tentatively cooperating with psychoanalysis in a few studies, but overwhelmingly absorbing many psychoanalytic assumptions without mentioning psychoanalysis. In order to exist and survive as a science in the long run within universities, academies of sciences, and other scientific research institutions, the psychoanalytic community has to face the challenge and prepare itself not only for prospective dialogue, but also for confrontation.
Laudation for Noam Chomsky
(2010)