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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.
埃里希•弗洛姆是人本主义的马克思主义的重要理论家,一生著作颇丰。他的主要代表作有《逃避自由》、《自我的追寻》、《健全的社会》、《马克思论人》、《弗洛伊德思想的贡献与局限》等。弗洛伊德的精神分析学说和马克思主义学说是其思想的主要来源。作为一个精神分析治疗师,弗洛姆创造性地发挥了弗洛伊德的无意识理论,提出了自己的社会无意识理论,这也成为他的社会理论的基础。在研究人的心理状态时,他不仅考虑到了人的生理本能因素,更多地看到了社会历史文化因素对人的心理状态的影响。只有深入研究这些因素对人的性格结构的影响,才能理解现代人为什么要逃避自由,也才能看清现代资本主义社会的病态本质,从而寻求一种健全的人道主义社会。本文试图理清弗洛姆社会理论的逻辑进路,研究他的理论的核心基础和基本内容,发现从人性层面到社会层面的弊病以及解决之道。最后从总体上对弗洛姆的社会理论进行批判性的评价。第一章是阐述弗洛姆社会理论的生成背景和思想渊源,使我们对弗洛姆其人有一个整体上的认识和把握。第二章首先指出了弗洛姆社会理论的基础—无意识理论,其次探讨了社会理论的基本内容及其丰富内涵。其中,弗洛姆分析了现代人逃避自由的心理机制,并探讨了社会性格的两种类型。弗洛姆认为我们应当与世界建立起自发创造性的联系,用爱与理性的力量创造性地生活。在这里他重点强调了社会无意识和社会性格在联结经济基础和意识形态之间的中介作用。最后阐述了弗洛姆对病态社会的剖析及他对健全的人道主义社会的构想。第三章从马克思主义的视角对其理论进行了批判性的评价,分析了它的理论价值和局限性。
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?
自由问题既是一个重要的现实生活问题,又是一个重要的哲学问题。自人类拥有意识的那一刻起,对于自由的追求就从没有间断过。经过不断的努力,近代西方国家通过资产阶级革命推翻了封建统治纷纷建立起了资本主义民主制度,人们获得了空前的自由。但是,对于这来之不易的自由,人们并没有很好的享受反而走向的自由的反面。一些人如饥似渴的贡献出自己所拥有自由,加入法西斯、希特勒等极权组织,引发了一系列的战争和社会危机。对于这种逃避自由的现象,西方马克思主义的主要代表之一弗洛姆对其进行了深刻的研究和分析,总结出消极自由并不能够带给人们完整的自由,只有积极自由才是人们真正的自由。弗洛姆的积极自由思想主要继承了马克思的历史唯物主义思想和弗洛伊德的精神分析思学说,他吸收了弗洛伊德的无意识理论、性格学说和自由观以及马克思的异化和自由思想,同时他的也深受犹太教的救世情怀和弥赛亚思想的影响。但是弗洛姆更倾向于马克思的思想,他认为马克思的历史唯物主义揭示了资本主义社会中的种种矛盾,并对其进行了深刻的分析与批判,而弗洛伊德仅仅把人的本质需要说成的性欲的需要,他的思想深度和广度都不及马克思,带有着无法克服的局限性。虽然弗洛姆的积极自由思想很大程度上继承了马克思的思想,但他与马克思的自由思想有着很大的差异,无论是对人的本质的认识,还是关于人的异化思想,或是他们对所追求的积极自由的看法以及实现路径都有着很大的不同。他的积极自由与思想在一定程度上弥补了马克思自由观的不足,具有重要的研究价值。弗洛姆的自由思想不仅具有着无法取代的理论意义,对于解决处于转型时期的中国所遇到的问题也具有着重要的借鉴意义。当前,科技的快速发展给我们的生活带来了极大的变化,高水平的生活质量、便捷的生活方式、舒适的生活环境,但是,人们的精神状况却并没有我们所预想的那样良好,人们的精神空虚,迷茫,幸福感下降,人与人之间冷漠、疏离。因此研究弗洛姆的积极自由思想对于分析并解决我国当前的自由困境具有重要的意义。本文由四大部分组成。第一部分主要是介绍弗洛姆的个人经历,从弗洛姆思想形成的社会历史背景和主要理论来源出发,来分析弗洛姆所处的社会时代背景和个人生活经历对他的思想形成的影响;第二部分是弗洛姆积极自由思想的基本内容。通过对近代积极自由思想内涵的确立以及弗洛姆对近代自由思想的批判来引出弗洛姆的积极自由思想以及积极自由的实现。第三部分是将弗洛姆与马克思的积极自由思想进行比较。通过马克思与弗洛姆关于人的看法,关于异化的理解,关于积极自由的认识的不同分析出弗洛姆积极自由思想的可取之处与局限性。第四部分是弗洛姆积极自由思想的当代价值。弗洛姆的积极自由思想具有重要的理论价值与实践价值,对于我国社会主义现代化建设、对于解决当代中国人与社会发展存在的问题具有着十分重要的借鉴意义。但是弗洛姆的自由思想也存在着一些不足之处,需要引以为戒。
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.<
Vorwort
(2019)
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.
Ein selbstbestimmtes Leben zu führen, das sich von keinen äußeren und inneren Vorgaben einschränken lässt, gleichzeitig aber hohe Ansprüche an Selbstoptimierung und Selbstverwirklichung zu realisieren versucht, zeichnet vermehrt das Leben von vor allem jungen Menschen aus, die therapeutische Hilfe suchen. Was bringt sie dazu, ihr Leben so einzurichten, dass sie sich mit Grenzen und Selbstbegrenzungen so schwer tun und sich nicht mit weniger begnügen können? Der folgende Beitrag fragt anhand der Psychoanalytischen Sozialpsychologie Erich Fromms nach den Ursachen für die Entwicklung eines neuen Sozialcharakters, der sich die digitale Technik und die elektronischen Medien zunutze macht, um selbstbestimmt, ungebunden und ohne Rücksicht auf Vorgaben und Maßgaben Wirklichkeit neu, anders und besser zu ‘schaffen und dabei vor der eigenen Persönlichkeit nicht Halt macht. Der Fokus der Ausführungen liegt dabei nicht auf den sich daraus ergebenden klinischen Fragen, sondern auf den pathogenen Auswirkungen dieser Sozialcharakterbildung in den Psychen der Vielen. Die Frage der Unersättlichkeit - des Nicht- genug-bekommen-Könnens — ist so alt wie die Menschheit. Sie wurde traditionell vor allem unter dem Begriff der Gier erörtert, und zwar einer Gier, bei der man trotz Befriedigung nicht satt wird. Dass man Hunger hat und deshalb eine Gier spürt, ist etwas sehr Natürliches; dass man die Gier befriedigt und sich dennoch unersättlich erlebt, verweist auf eine charakterologische Gier und bedarf einer psychologischen Erklärung.
Anknüpfend an das Tagungsthema >Lust auf Zukunft trotz Sorge und Zweifel< wird versucht, von der Sozial-Psychoanalyse Erich Fromms her die Lust auf Zukunft mit Fromms Konzept der Biophilie zu begründen. Dabei wird die Lust auf Zukunft psychologisch als die dem menschlichen Leben inhärente primäre Tendenz begriffen, die konstruktiven Lebensmöglichkeiten zur Entfaltung zu bringen. Diese primäre Tendenz kann aber durch psychische Anpassungsleistungen an bestimmte wirtschaftliche und gesellschaftliche Erfordernisse geschwächt werden. Dies wird an den von Fromm analysierten Sozial-Charakterorientierungen sowie an dem vom Autor beschriebenen ich-orientierten Charakter verdeutlicht.