Yearbook / Jahrbuch (1990-1995)
Schriften der Internationalen Erich-Fromm-Gesellschaft e.V.
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w03/1992j
>Humanism in the Life and Work of Erich Fromm. A Laudatio on his 90th Birthday<: Apart from the socio-psychological concern informing Erich Fromm’s whole opus, it is his humanist thought that runs as a leitmotif through his life and work. This essay attempts to indicate the wellsprings of Fromm’s humanist thought and to systematically delineate the essential traits of Fromm’s humanism. The primary early impulse behind Fromm’s humanism was the embodiment of Jewish humanism he encountered in the person of Salman Baruch Rabinkow, the Habad Hassid and Erich Fromm’s Talmudic teacher in Heidelberg between 1919 and 1925. Sigmund Freud’s psychoanalysis with its teaching and guiding precept of opening oneself up to persons in their wholeness was to become the second source of Fromm’s humanism. For all that Fromm stressed his roots in the humanism of the Renaissance and the Enlightenment, there is no doubting the uniqueness and authenticity of his own version, nor that his reading of the essence of humanism transcended these traditional forerunners in essential points. This essay is rounded off by a characterization of the humanist Fromm using only statements quoted from Fromm himself and others on the personality of his teacher Rabinkow.
w06/1995h
>The Significance of Fear in Personality Development<: Fear is a part of life, of the developmental curve followed by human life. When it takes a concrete form, as specific fears, it indicates a threat to human life and launches survival strategies. Rainer Funk shows that without facing down fear there can be no human development. But fear is also a primary feature of psychic ailments. By means of case studies, Hans Hufnagel elucidates the full spectrum of fear-related ailments and goes on to show how pathologies in the capacity for objective relationships by those afflicted are at the root of phobic and fear-rooted neurotic ailments.
w06/1995g
>The Significance of Fear in Personality Development<: Fear is a part of life, of the developmental curve followed by human life. When it takes a concrete form, as specific fears, it indicates a threat to human life and launches survival strategies. Rainer Funk shows that without facing down fear there can be no human development. But fear is also a primary feature of psychic ailments. By means of case studies, Hans Hufnagel elucidates the full spectrum of fear-related ailments and goes on to show how pathologies in the capacity for objective relationships by those afflicted are at the root of phobic and fear-rooted neurotic ailments.
w01/1990e
The present article is an attempt to elucidate the epistemological- ethical significance of the x experience in humanistic psychology and ethics. The aim is to show the epistemological-ethical relevance of the x experience phenomenon for developing a new integral self-understanding of the scientific task as a integral anthropology. The aim is to pick up where Fromm left off in his previously unpublished, cautiously formulated programmatic essay entitled >Institute for the Science of Man.< The article begins with a section looking at Fromm’s conception of >the conscious mind< and >the unconscious<. Particularly stressed here is the radical reform of the Freudian concept of >the unconscious< undertaken by Fromm in his analytical social psychology and humanist psychoanalysis. The second section outlines what the x experience phenomenon is and explains its importance for humanistic psychoanalysis. Fromm’s concept of >derepression< is presented and its important anthropological and epistemological implications discussed. The fact that there had been as good as no scientific study of the logic of the x experience, nor of its epistemological, ethical and anthropological implications, led Fromm to call for what he called an >empirically based psychological anthropology<, which would serve as the basis for all individual disciplines within the human sciences. The third section, given the heading >The Importance of the X- Experience in Humanistic Psychoanalysis for Achieving an Integrally Expanded Self-Understanding in the Sciences and in Mankind,< takes Armin Bader’s epistemological ideal of a integrally expanded self-understanding (the so-called comprehensive method of research) as a key starting point from which a theoretical scientific basis can then be developed for purposes of realizing the Frommian ideal of science as integral anthropology. The article closes by discussing the significance of the x experience for the development of an evolutionary theory of man.
w03/1992c
>The Development of the Mexican Psychoanalytic Society and the Mexican Institute for Psychoanalysis<: In this essay a description is given of the organizational development of the Mexican Psychoanalytic Society, which was heavily influenced by Erich Fromm. After a first stage where a group of psychiatry graduates was trained as psychoanalysts by Fromm at the National Autonomia University of Mexico (the present author was himself among the trainees), the Mexican Psychoanalytic Society was founded in 1956, followed by the Mexican Institute for Psychoanalysis in 1963. An overview is given of the course of studies and methods used at the institute fortraining psychoanalysts; the procedures for screening applicants are also described as well as the various clinical specialties (e.g. focal therapy geared to special groups of clients). The article thus treats the reader to an instructive backward glance at the development of psychoanalysis in Mexico during the 50s and 60s.
w02/1991e
>The Fromm-Marcuse Debate Revisited<: After his polemic with Herbert Marcuse in the fifties, Erich Fromm came to be regarded by the intellectuals of the >New Left< as an essentially conformist thinker, although it was indeed Fromm who was initially responsible for drawing attention in the US to the early writings of Marx and who, together with C.W. Mills, was long the best known critic of capitalist society in that country. The fact that Fromm’s work was falsely assessed for a long time was in no small sense due to the massive attacks Marcuse launched against his former colleague from the Institut für Sozialforschung, whom he charged with undermining the critical potential of psychoanalysis in favor of an ideologically glossed over menschenbild in the service of conformist values. Marcuse’s critique, however, is untenable since he wildly overestimates the importance of the libido theory; moreover, Marcuse fails to see that Fromm’s social psychology consistently (i.e. even after his turning away from orthodox psychoanalysis) aims at a critique of the prevailing social character and that his ethical commitment to a >productive< life is no easy bedfellow of capitalist productivity increases. In no less measure, the charge of >sociologism< leveled by Adorno and R. Jacoby – by which is meant a harmonization between personality structure and society – is far wide of the mark, since it overlooks Fromm’s postulate of the need for disobedience and creative non-adaptedness in the face of the omnivorous tendencies of society. From today’s critical perspective on the debate waged at that time, it clearly emerges that Erich Fromm has been unjustly consigned to oblivion as protagonist of the >left<.
w02/1991f
>The Social Relevance of the Fromm-Marcuse Conflict<: At the heart of this study are the two authors’ divergent approaches to human nature and to the individual/society interface that their different theories were woven from. Both, as it happens, operate with diametrically opposed preconceptions. For Fromm man is a social being; for Marcuse, however, man is non-social by nature – i.e. that man looks on his fellow man agonistically is a fact anchored in his very biology. Fromm, for his part, is aware of the consequences of his underlying menschenbild, and elsewhere he assesses its implications for the theories he tries to develop on its basis. Other differences crop up in the respective conceptions of the relation between >theory and practice<, as well as in the account given of >individual< and >society<. Fromm places at the heart of his concern the concrete individual and the concrete social situation in the here-and-now; while Marcuse is content to deal with an idealistic abstraction of such. Theory is a closed book for the Frankfurt School in the sense that social practice can no longer have any effect on theory – only with the advent of a nonagonistic society would the book be reopened. Here Fromm clearly has the more open conception of the essence of the social scientific task. He sees theory and practice as constantly enriching each other, and so contributing to ever more exact insights into man and his place in the world. The disparate nature of the two approaches is nowhere more fraught with consequences than in the opposing conceptions of therapy and of psychic health. Here we find Adorno and Marcuse adopting an anti-Enlightenment stance: man must achieve an even greater consciousness of his impoverishment. Fromm, on the other hand, is concerned with the optimal unfolding of the manifold possibilities found within each individual – i.e. in concrete individuals living here and now, and not in their abstracted and idealized form. This study praises Fromm for recognizing that the conflict between him and Marcuse was more than just a personal one. Numerous passages are cited where he makes the point that Marcuse has delivered just the ideology sought by a disorientated, spoilt, narcissistic youth to justify its sense of malaise. Fromm, on the other hand, is commended for the way in which he repeatedly highlights the implications and consequences of an untenable menschenbild.
w04/1993g
>The Social Roots of Modern Science<: This discussion is predicated on the following theses: - Modern science, and especially physics as it has developed since Galileo and Newton, is not value-neutral. It is therefore not merely science’s practical outlets and technological spinoffs that embody the interests, values and weltanschauung of its practitioners. Rather its specific mode of grappling with nature is, both in its methodology and basic concepts, interest- and value-laden from the outset; moreover, science is rooted in a particular view of the world. The view of the world in which science is grounded, and hence also its fundamental concepts, are socially mediated historical developments. It is from basic social structures, especially those in the socio-economic sphere, that such scientific concepts as space and time, the knowing subject, and objectivized nature, have been won, i.e. they have derived from them central aspects and structural features of their interpretive edifice. The present attempt at a materialistic explanation of modern science seeks to answer the question of how scientific theory formation and experimentation,science’s characteristic mode of grappling with nature, can be construed as an historically conditioned way of conceiving nature. Here Alfred Sohn-Rethals’ theory, according to which economic modalities are >reflected< in human consciousness, proves too narrow an answer. This article mainly draws on Fromm’s pivotal concept of >social character<. Applying the latter to the problem of deriving the basic concepts of natural science, the author offers the following answer: To each specific historically conditioned mode of production there pertains a specific social character – the ego must accept what is incumbent on it, as a social actor, to secure the preservation of society. It is in need of an orientational framework, an object of reverence, an appropriate identity. As far as the ego’s relation to nature within a given production modality is concerned, the image of nature and the basic concepts of natural science communicate an orientational framework to the ego, together with the necessary means, to stabilize the identity required by the production modality.
w03/1992d
>Methods of Social Character Research in Erich Fromm<: In the 60s team of cultural anthropologists from Mexico and the United States headed by Erich Fromm conducted a socio-psychological survey, the findings of which were published in 1970 under the title >Social Character in a Mexican Village. A Sociopsychoanalytic Study<. The author of the present essay, who closely collaborated with Fromm on this field project, reports both on the data collection methods and evaluational practices used and on the findings reached by the survey. This co-production with Fromm can certainly lay claim to exemplary status for a large part of the Mexican rural population, pointing to a narrow link between the various manifestations of the social character of the villagers, the role of tradition in the culture and family respectively, and the nexus of economic relationships. This research project resulted in the practical conclusion that the situational realities of the most strongly disadvantaged group in the rural population – young people – needed to be improved by educational programs and agricultural projects, so as to stem the growing polarization between rich and poor among the villagers.