Articles / Artikel
Dreams and transference
(1990)
Outlines perspectives of Freud (e.g., 1900) and of E. FROMM (e.g., 1951) concerning the nature of dreams and their relationship to transference. During psychoanalysis, dreamers must begin to experience the intimate global symbol of their dreams and retain consciousness of what had been unconscious to them. This process must accompany what they communicate in the dyad; otherwise the analytic procedure becomes an intellectual construct and analysands remain aloof from their dreams, the latent content of the dreams, and what they could become aware of in the waking state. Relevant dreams of a 40-yr-old man over 4 yrs of analysis are described.
Träume und Übertragung
(1990)
>Dreams and Transference<: Freud (1915-16, p. 181f.) states: >It is natural that we should lose some of our interest in the manifest dream... In general we must avoid seeking to explain one part of the manifest dream by another. as though the dream had been coherently conceived and was a logically arranged narrative.< For Fromm (1951a, p. 28) man has two poles of experiencing: on the one hand those pertaining to his waking state and his dreams are the other pole; our waking experinece will help us understand the latent, unconscious content of our dreams, and our dreams will help us comprehend the unconscious motivations of our waking lives. For him (cf. 1951a and 1979a), it is true that the ideographs of the manifest dream may often seem absurd, confused, incoherent, but it does lead us to their coherent intrinsic logic. The manifest dream allows us to formulate some tentative affirmations, but above all, it imposes questions whose answers will emerge in our continued dialogue with the dreamer, for he alone has the answer that will allow us to grasp the intimate over-all symbol of his dreams. The totality of the dream must be appraised as a global symbol that represents at the same time an >instantaneous snapshot< of the moment of his being. From a teleological perspective, it is as if the sites presented, the actors and the rest of the cast, other living beings (be they animals, plants, nature) and diverse objects have all been chosen for what they reveal of the dreamer, thus objectifying and demystifying him. Each dream symbol represents a condensation, thus it is a mistake to jump to the conclusion that such a figure is of necessity mother or father or that another is a penis or a vagina; maybe it will all turn out to be so, but we can wait until all is unequivocally clear. As Freud (1900a, p. 608) stated, the understanding of dreams leads us along >the royal road< to what has been unconscious to the dreamer. Only a few dreams fulfill wishes (cf. E. Fromm, 1979a, p. 72 and p. 95f.); the vast majority tend to objectify our present situation and, not too infrequently, they allow us insight into the personality of others. This paper presents some aspects of the humanist psychoanalytic concept of conscious – unconscious and its import for the understanding of transference phenomena and the process of transcending it. Since our dreams clarify our Here and Now it stands to reason that dreams will clearly reveal the state of the >dream-day< transference. By-and-large, the manifest dream reveals the unconscious relationship to significant individuals of the dreamer’s environment, which always includes the therapist whether or not he (she) is present in the dream. Quite often one can see the waking relationship to the analyst and quite another what is evinced in the analysand’s dreams... We must never loose sight of what these latter reveal, for in our dreams we are free and candid. – This paper also presents clinical material.
>Modern Technology and Necrophilia – Remarks on Erich Fromm’s Concept of Necrophilia<: This article focusses mainly on elucidating Fromm’s conception of the link between the main thrust of technological development in modern society, on the one hand, and the formation of a necrophiliac disposition in the contemporary social character structure, on the other. This was a topic Fromm devoted much attention to, particularly in his late research works. The author’s concern is not simply to situate Fromm’s analysis in the wider framework of comtemporary psychoanalytic research work dealing with the same topic; he also takes up the matter of the structural changes occurring in the forms of subconscious and day-to-day awareness that characterize members of modern society. From this perspective, the author shows how the changes in internal psychic dispositions noted by Fromm are intimately bound up with a subtle ongoing trend to increasing instrumentation and fragmentation in day-to-day life. This process becomes concretely graspable in the way the capacity for subjective experience has had walls erected around it and is even actively being destroyed. The consequences of this process are nothing short of alarming, for they point to a ever-present Fascist potential that constantly menaces high-technology society from within.
Welcome Remarks. Opening of the Conference Humanism and Society in Heidelberg, March 1990, 4 p.
(1990)
>The Nature of Man in Erich Fromm’s >Science of Man<<: The polemical question as to whether man is more a questioning being or a being capable of coming up with answers led Fromm to develop his concept of the existential dichotomy of human existence. This dichotomy rests on the contradiction that, for all that man is indisputably a part of nature, his powers of reason and imagination have allowed him to transcend nature. For self-awareness and the awareness of our own deaths have between them destroyed the harmony that once existed between man and nature, between the self and the other. Based on his psychoanalytical experience, Fromm was convinced that without harmony human beings cannot retain their health for long. Thus, the most elemental question of human existence is how to react in the face of this lost unity, in particular how to attain a new unity worthy of our humanity by actualizing our manysided potential. Our existential dichotomy demands a separate response from each and every one of us. To this extent, it constitutes the ever-constant and unchanging wellspring of human nature. The fill of different answers to the selfsame existential question are nothing but manifestations of human nature that vary according to specific historical and individual circumstances in which it is situated. Though it is true that in his early works Fromm did defend the position that human nature is without constant attributes of being, it is also true that he later came to reverse this standpoint, at least in the case of several attributes: >We could say that man is able to love and reason because he is but also, and conversely, that he is, because he is capable reasoning and loving.< (E. Fromm, 1968g, p. 9f.) In his attempts to elucidate human nature Fromm is not solely concerned to lay the theoretical foundations for his >science of man<; he also saw it as being at the heart of his task to establish a general evaluational framework for the social sciences (man as the measure of all things) so that human relationality and social process could be assessed and evaluated.