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- 2019 (299) (remove)
Making films can be a lifeline, an aid to going on living when (we feel) the world around us has disappeared. Looking, showing that there’s a >there there,< recording the present moment and thereby preserving it, can, for a time, make us not feel the nothingness within us. But the rescue that comes from making a film is always provisional. Why? Because every film has an end. Because if there are no more films to make, if there is nothing that deserves to be looked at (the worst case scenario), going on living will have exhausted itself, and taking one’s own life (if indeed there was a life to take) may seem the only option. Chantal Akerman’s >No Home Movie< – a film recording the slow death of her mother in her Brussels apartment – is this worst case scenario. A moving record of the psychic devastation that comes about when we, slowly but surely, lose the one object worth looking at. Panic, depression, hopelessness, and a fierce determination to go where the disappeared object went. To this last home where nothing no longer moves.
Fromm was one of the first psychoanalysts to deal with the crisis of civilization. His ideas about human nature, the social character and the social unconscious, the pathology of normalcy and the ideal of productivity are important. Fromm criticizes industrialism for its unrealizable promises of freedom and happiness, which correspond to an ideology of growth and progress. The satisfaction of >false< needs and desires does not lead to human well-being.
Fromm's Contribution to the Analysis and Critique of the Ongoing Rise of Right-Wing Movements
(2019)
One of the most important political changes in Europe, the USA and beyond is the growth of nationalistic parties and authoritarian structures within states. This contribution aims to demonstrate how a Frommian perspective on basic psychological needs, asynchronicity and alienation could contribute to a social-psychological understanding of nationalistic trends. At the end of the paper, we present some conclusions drawn from this social-psychological point of view concerning the development of a sane society.
The work of Erich Fromm is often overlooked in contemporary feminist thought. Yet important areas of relevance—his critiques of symbiotic love and sadomasochism, advocacy of mutual recognition, and objections to patriarchal presumptions in Freud’s work—render Fromm’s thought useful for feminists. Disadvantages adhere in Fromm’s ideas too, including sexist language and biologically-tinged maternalism. However, this paper reinterprets these problems to advocate for rediscovering both Fromm’s feminist and humanist aspirations.
Fromm’s necrophilous character is evident in state and governmentally run psychiatric hospitals in the United States. Rigid over-reliance on behavioral interventions can be seen as defensive posturing against the terror of uncertainty when confronted with psychosis. Clinical vignettes with institutionalized schizophrenic adults are presented. A plea is made for clinicians to work from a position of respect and love to fight the dehumanization that can result when a psychoanalytic mindset is abandoned.
The Many Prisons of Women Predestined to Commit a Crime. Sadomasochism as a Female Survival Strategy
(2019)
This is an approach to Mexican female delinquency from a Frommian sadomasochism and a non-punitive criminal justice perspective, based on autobiographical life stories written by women confined in Mexican prisons. Those women have always lived in a society which assaults them in a thousand ways and treats them with inequity; whatever their crime, they are not judged with a gender perspective. Almost all are poor, many of them are mothers forced to abandon their children to serve their sentence behind bars in despicable conditions, accused of crimes that many times they commit induced by their partners' behavior against them.
Erich Fromm’s life during the 1930s, his confrontation with Nazism and his family’s experience of the Holocaust is explored. The impact of this period on his writing, especially Escape from Freedom is considered. The current political situation, in which anti-Semitism has increased and minorities are persecuted makes the examination of Fromm’s experience of persecution and exile especially relevant. The author uses his own German family history and his discovery of his grandfather’s Nazi past to examine the importance of Fromm’s analysis of authoritarian tendencies in Germany in the early 1930s.
In this paper I compare Fromm’s account of social transformation with that of Alain Touraine. I argue that although there are many points of connection between Fromm’s account of >the art of living< and Alain Touraine’s account of the >Politics of the Subject,< Fromm ultimately goes beyond Touraine at many points, offering a more detailed explanatory account of how individual transformation is related to the larger, but related, goal of social transformation. I conclude that Fromm’s often overlooked account of the mechanics of individual change ought to be returned to in the process of reinvigorating social theory and practice.
The aim of this paper is to examine post-truth politics using Erich Fromm’s theory of narcissism and showing a route towards a sane society in Fromm’s sense. Post-truth situations are generated by negative synergistic effects between narcissistic psychological tendencies and social media. Both of them have so-called filter bubble effects which segregate people from inner and outer reality. The process of integrating an unknown experience or reality into the self produces a new experience. That is a definition of Fromm’s love and the way to overcome narcissism.
In my overview of the development of Fromm's theories, I show, first of all, how Fromm and his theory of relatedness and social character aimed to understand the individual and society in a different way from what was usual at that time. Secondly, I expound how relevant the often ignored social psychoanalytical approach is for current thinking in terms of relatedness, and how open his approach is to insights stemming from human biology.
This paper highlights the relevance of Erich Fromm’s concepts of social character and social change to offer a more nuanced understanding of the neo-liberal inter-generational traumatic legacy of loss of stable work, changing worker gendered identity, disrupted affect, community engagement and historical memory within a global context of insecure labour and emerging neoliberal forms of social character in the aftermath of massive redundancies and unemployment experienced recently in some post-industrial working class communities in the UK.
In the social sciences, there are different point of views on how social change has an impact on good leadership in contemporary societies. As a contribution to this debate, this article builds on basic ideas of the humanistic approach of Erich Fromm and highlights the associated possibilities for an adequate understanding of contemporary leadership demands. Key narratives and open questions related to challenges for leadership in contemporary societies facing digital transformation are evaluated from a Frommian perspective.
A longitudinal study of early attachment and social character development of 14 Nahuat mother-infant dyads -since the infants were 11 months, having assessed them at 9 years of age and again in their late adolescence- show a significant improvement on the youngsters’ emotional development. The study conducted by the Seminario de Sociopsicoanálisis within a 40-year-long humanizing project in the village, called >Intercultural Participation Project,< suggests the benefit of promoting the rescue of their indigenous Nahuat culture and tradition.
Introduction
(2019)
Mainstream social science has been blindsided by the rise of Trumpism and broader growth of authoritarian populism. We make the case that Frommian work is desperately needed inside the core of contemporary social science theorizing by examining social character theory up against and alongside the concept of habitus developed by French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu. Both Fromm and Bourdieu were concerned with the human costs of social change and economic development, Fromm with his writings on advanced capitalism in The Sane Society (1955a) and on Mexican village life in Social Character in a Mexican Village (with Michael Maccoby, 1970b), and Bourdieu with his extended studies of peasants in Algeria during the French colonial war of the 1950s and early 1960s. We will compare and contrast the theory of social character developed in the Mexican study with Bourdieu's concept of habitus, and discuss what Fromm's ideas can add to Bourdieu-influenced critical social science.
In the first part, the article reconstructs, through the idea of >pathology of normalcy,< Fromm's critique of the cultural foundations of contemporary capitalism. In the second part, it is carried forward through the concepts of >social character< and <alienation,< in order to understand how the late twentieth-century capitalism deepens an anti-humanist culture as never before. Finally, in the conclusion, it seeks to demonstrate how Fromm anticipates some essential features of the critique of capitalist culture, later analyzed by critics of the >new< capitalism, such as Axel Honneth, Richard Sennett and Boltanski & Chiapello.
Erich Fromm had developed a dialectical approach on alienation phenomena in work. On the one side he criticizes today’s poor working conditions and on the other side he shows productive orientation in work. In my essay I will discuss empirical and theoretical contributions of social-psychological research in this Frommian perspective.