Erich Fromm Online Meetings • Ilene Philipson
Title of the lecture: Encountering the Social Unconscious: The Tragic Case of Masud Khan
Since 2021 the 'Erich Fromm Study Center' in Berlin organizes Erich Fromm Online Meetings to discuss current Fromm research contributions on various topics within an international community of researchers. The meetings themselves are for discussing a contribution that is provided in advance as a video and text. They are made available to those interested in Erich Fromm's thinking in this podcast series.
Dr. Dr. Ilene Philipson, (Oakland, USA) is a training and supervising analyst at the Institute of Contemporary Psychoanalysis in Los Angeles, a faculty member at the San Francisco Center for Psychoanalysis, and a psychotherapist in private practice.
The talk illustrates the significance of Erich Fromm's concept of the “socially conditioned filter” for therapeutic practice using the fate of the psychoanalyst Masud Khan from Pakistan. How important are cultural differences between psychotherapists and patients and what role do different social character orientations play in therapeutic but also in other intercultural relationships?
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Erich Fromm Online Meetings • Joan Braune
Title of the lecture: Leaving Home: Erich Fromm, Katherine Dunham, and Unfolding Humanism
Since 2021 the 'Erich Fromm Study Center' in Berlin organizes Erich Fromm Online Meetings to discuss current Fromm research contributions on various topics within an international community of researchers. The meetings themselves are for discussing a contribution that is provided in advance as a video and text. They are made available to those interested in Erich Fromm's thinking in this podcast series.
Dr. Joan Braune is Lecturer in Philosophy at Gonzaga University in Spokane (USA) and does research in Social and Political Philosophy and the Philosophy of Religion. She has published Erich Fromm’s Revolutionary Hope: Towards a Critical Theory of the Future (Sense Publishers 2014) and co-edited with Kieran Durkin Erich Fromm’s Critical Theory: Hope, Humanism, and the Future (Bloomsbury 2020).
Braune uses the example of Erich Fromm's relationship with the dancer Katharine Dunham to explore the common impulses of humanism. Fromm’s and Dunham’s own lives are a testament to the possibilities that emerge from refusing disciplinary as well as spatial confinement.
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Erich Fromm Online Meetings • Kieran Durkin
Title of the lecture: In Defence of Fromm’s Humanism in the 21st Century
Since 2021 the 'Erich Fromm Study Center' in Berlin organizes Erich Fromm Online Meetings to discuss current Fromm research contributions on various topics within an international community of researchers. The meetings themselves are for discussing a contribution that is provided in advance as a video and text. They are made available to those interested in Erich Fromm's thinking in this podcast series.
Dr. Kieran Durkin (York, United Kingdom) is a sociologist and political scientist and lectures at York University. And he is the author of the book The Radical Humanism of Erich Fromm (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014).
Humanism is under attack today as never before, as seen through the proliferation of many refined varieties of anti, post, and trans-humanism. What, then, can Fromm’s engagement with the humanist thematic contribute to the current debate? The talk considers the various aspects of Fromm’s humanism – radical, normative, interpersonal, etc. – to try to ascertain the outlines of a Frommian response to the crisis of humanism.
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Erich Fromm Online Meetings • Dražen A. Šumiga
Title of the lecture: Erich Fromm and humanistic ethics towards the socially oriented psychotherapeutic praxis
Since 2021 the 'Erich Fromm Study Center' in Berlin organizes Erich Fromm Online Meetings to discuss current Fromm research contributions on various topics within an international community of researchers. The meetings themselves are for discussing a contribution that is provided in advance as a video and text. They are made available to those interested in Erich Fromm's thinking in this podcast series.
Dr. Dražen A. Šumiga (Ljubljana, Slovenia) is a certified Integrative-Relational Psychotherapist and Teaching Analyst (European Association of Integrative Psychotherapy) as well as a lecturer at the Sigmund Freud University in Ljubljana.
Fromm was one of the psychoanalysts and social scientists who oriented psychoanalytic practice towards the dialogue between the society and the individual subject. Fromm's social and psychoanalytic work and his theoretical focus on human relatedness is crucial for the socially oriented psychotherapy. The notion of the other being as a relational being, which demands acceptance, empathy and authenticity from the psychotherapist, offers much needed humanistic perspective in the postmodern and fragmented society.
Erich Fromm Online Meetings • Rainer Funk
Title of the lecture: The psychodynamics of right-wing populism and right-wing extremism
Since 2021 the 'Erich Fromm Study Center' in Berlin organizes Erich Fromm Online Meetings to discuss current Fromm research contributions on various topics within an international community of researchers. The meetings themselves are for discussing a contribution that is provided in advance as a video and text. They are made available to those interested in Erich Fromm's thinking in this podcast series.
Dr. Rainer Funk is a psychoanalyst, living in Tübingen (Germany). He is Erich Fromm's literary executor and director of the Erich Fromm Institute in Tübingen and co-director of the Erich Fromm Study Center at the International Psychoanalytic University in Berlin. (See here)
By analyzing right-wing populism and right-wing extremism with the help of Fromm's social-characterological insights Funk concludes that many political phenomena can be explained much more plausibly if they are understood as expressions of a reactive narcissistic identity construction rather than as a return of fascism and authoritarianism.
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Erich Fromm Online Meetings • Sandra Buechler
Title of the lecture: The Impact of Erich Fromm’s Writings. On My Psychotherapeutic Practice
Since 2021 the 'Erich Fromm Study Center' in Berlin organizes Erich Fromm Online Meetings to discuss current Fromm research contributions on various topics within an international community of researchers. The meetings themselves are for discussing a contribution that is provided in advance as a video and text. They are made available to those interested in Erich Fromm's thinking in this podcast series.
Dr. Sandra Buechler (New York, USA) is a Training and Supervising Analyst at the William Alanson White Institute in New York.
In her talk Sandra Buechler tries to communicate why Erich Fromm has had such a profound impact on her and on so many others. Fromm's influence on her thinking and clinical work above all is evident in a book entitled Erich Fromm: A Contemporary Introduction (London and New York: Routledge) published in 2024.
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Erich Fromm Online Meetings • Daniel Burston
Title of the lecture: Judaism, Antisemitism and Zionism in Fromm and the Frankfurt School
Since 2021 the 'Erich Fromm Study Center' in Berlin organizes Erich Fromm Online Meetings to discuss current Fromm research contributions on various topics within an international community of researchers. The meetings themselves are for discussing a contribution that is provided in advance as a video and text. They are made available to those interested in Erich Fromm's thinking in this podcast series.
Dr. Daniel Burston (Pittsburgh, USA) is Professor Emeritus of Psychology at Duquesne University, author of the book The Legacy of Erich Fromm (Cambridge (Mass.) and London: Harvard University Press, 1991) and Editor in Chief of Kesher: Journal of the Association of Jewish Psychologists. (See here) - He and his talk is introduced by Prof. Dr. Neil McLaughlin.
Dr. Burston's talk focuses primarily on the first generation of Frankfurt School theorists: Erich Fromm, Max Horkheimer, Theodor Adorno, Herbert Marcuse and Leo Löwenthal. Though Fromm was the only clinician among them, he was instrumental in effecting the kind of Marx-Freud synthesis that inspired the Frankfurt School’s efforts to address the relationship between authoritarianism and antisemitism, and to fashion a methodologically rigorous and sophisticated psychoanalytic social psychology.
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Erich Fromm Online Meetings • Lynn S. Chancer
Title of the lecture: The Contemporary Case of Guaranteed Income: How Fromm’s Ideas Resonate Politically as well as Philosophically
Since 2021 the 'Erich Fromm Study Center' in Berlin organizes Erich Fromm Online Meetings to discuss current Fromm research contributions on various topics within an international community of researchers. The meetings themselves are for discussing a contribution that is provided in advance as a video and text. They are made available to those interested in Erich Fromm's thinking in this podcast series.
Dr. Lynn S. Chancer (New York, USA) is a professor of sociology at Hunter College and executive officer of the PhD Program in Sociology at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. She teaches courses on sociological and feminist theory, criminology and law, and psychosocial and feminist studies. (See here)
Lynn Chancer suggests, returning to Fromm’s clear articulation of the benefits of guaranteed income while tapping his ideas to respond objections, Fromm’s work is well worth recalling in both philosophical and political contexts. It allows for nuanced ‘both/and’ rather than ‘either/or’ orientations such that, as in this case, advocating guaranteed income and job creation can both be supported while rechanneling energies away from stigmatizing and over simplistic social reactions.
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Erich Fromm Online Meetings • Jonathan Keir
Title of the lecture: A Frommian Dialogue with the Pluriverse: The Centenary of Fromm's Dissertation and the Potentials of a Worldwide Fromm Reception
Since 2021 the 'Erich Fromm Study Center' in Berlin organizes Erich Fromm Online Meetings to discuss current Fromm research contributions on various topics within an international community of researchers. The meetings themselves are for discussing a contribution that is provided in advance as a video and text. They are made available to those interested in Erich Fromm's thinking in this podcast series.
Dr. Jonathan Keir (Tübingen, Germany) is a foundation officer of the Karl Schlecht Foundation and lecturer at the Weltethos Institute Tübingen.
In 2022 Keir published the book The House That Fromm Built (Karl Schlecht Foundation) in which he goes right back to the beginning of Fromm’s intellectual journey and walks through his doctoral thesis, which happens to be celebrating its centenary in 2022, the year it was for the first time published in an English translation. Keir takes Fromm's dissertation as the starting point for a dialogical way of thinking that is highly relevant in a globalized world.
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Erich Fromm Online Meetings • Rainer Funk
Title of the lecture: Zur Psychodynamik von Rechtspopulismus und Rechtsextremismus
Since 2021 the 'Erich Fromm Study Center' in Berlin organizes Erich Fromm Online Meetings to discuss current Fromm research contributions on various topics within an international community of researchers. The meetings themselves are for discussing a contribution that is provided in advance as a video and text. They are made available to those interested in Erich Fromm's thinking in this podcast series.
Dr. Rainer Funk ist ein in Tübingen lebender Psychoanalytiker, der den Nachlass und die Rechte von Erich Fromm verwaltet. Er leitet das Erich Fromm Institut in Tübingen und ist Ko-Leiter des Erich Fromm Study Centers an der Internationalen Psychoanalytischen Universität in Berlin. (Siehe hier)
Analysiert man den Rechtspopulismus und den Rechtsextremismus mit Hilfe von Fromms sozialcharakterologischen Erkenntnissen, lassen sich viele politischen Phänomene sehr viel plausibler als Ausdruck einer reaktiven narzisstischen Identitätskonstruktion begreifen, und nicht als eine Wiederkehr von Faschismus und Autoritarismus.
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Erich Fromm Online Meetings • Luis Jimenez
Title of the lecture: Reflections on Fromm’s notions of alienation and destructivity in the context of intergenerational transmission of trauma in late modernity
Since 2021 the 'Erich Fromm Study Center' in Berlin organizes Erich Fromm Online Meetings to discuss current Fromm research contributions on various topics within an international community of researchers. The meetings themselves are for discussing a contribution that is provided in advance as a video and text. They are made available to those interested in Erich Fromm's thinking in this podcast series.
Dr. Luis Jimenez is a Frommian psychoanalyst, as well as senior lecturer and Director of Research at the School of Applied Health & Communities / Counselling Program, University of East London. (See here)
While Fromm didn't explicitly address the concept of intergenerational trauma transmission, his theories of alienation and destructiveness offer profound insights into the psychosocial dynamics and political mechanisms that can perpetuate trauma across generations. In this talk, some aspects of Fromm’s own work are discussed which have resonated with studies on how? global economy changed worker identity in a post-industrial context.
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Erich Fromm Online Meetings • Neil McLaughlin
Title of the lecture: Erich Fromm’s global public sociology
Since 2021 the 'Erich Fromm Study Center' in Berlin organizes Erich Fromm Online Meetings to discuss current Fromm research contributions on various topics within an international community of researchers. The meetings themselves are for discussing a contribution that is provided in advance as a video and text. They are made available to those interested in Erich Fromm's thinking in this podcast series.
Dr. Neil McLaughlin is professor of sociology at McMaster University and at the Institute for the History and Philosophy of Science and Technology at University of Toronto. (See here)
The presentation refers to the introduction and the conclusion chapter of McLaughlin's book on “Erich Fromm and Global Public Sociology” (Bristol University Press, 2023). For McLaughlin Fromm’s commitment to hope, humanism and political engagement, along with the powerful theoretical ideas and the research tradition he created, provides an invaluable set of intellectual resources for a global public sociology for the twenty-first century.
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Erich Fromm Online Meetings • Matheus Romanetto
Title of the lecture: What lies beyond psychoanalysis? Fromm and Marcuse after the Dissent debate
Since 2021 the 'Erich Fromm Study Center' in Berlin organizes Erich Fromm Online Meetings to discuss current Fromm research contributions on various topics within an international community of researchers. The meetings themselves are for discussing a contribution that is provided in advance as a video and text. They are made available to those interested in Erich Fromm's thinking in this podcast series.
Matheus Romanetto, MA, is a graduate teaching assistant at the Sociology Department of the University of Kansas (USA). His current dissertation project is an investigation of political conflict within kinship networks in contemporary Brazil, where Romanetto grew up and studied sociology.
During his time as a scholarship holder at the Erich Fromm Foundation in Tübingen, he researched, among other things, the dispute between Erich Fromm and Herbert Marcuse, as reflected in the debate in the journal Dissent. The article examines the two scholars' understanding of psychoanalysis and their reception of Freud.
A revised textform of his presentation is available as chapter II-B in M. Romanetto: Critique and Affirmation in Erich Fromm. Humanistic Politics and the Psychoanalytic Clinic, London (Routledge), 2024.
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Erich Fromm Online Meetings • Rainer Funk
Title of the lecture: Was bringt Menschen dazu, politisch rechts zu wählen? Erkenntnisse aus dem Spätwerk Erich Fromms
Since 2021 the 'Erich Fromm Study Center' in Berlin organizes Erich Fromm Online Meetings to discuss current Fromm research contributions on various topics within an international community of researchers. The meetings themselves are for discussing a contribution that is provided in advance as a video and text. They are made available to those interested in Erich Fromm's thinking in this podcast series.
Dr. Rainer Funk ist ein in Tübingen lebender Psychoanalytiker, der den Nachlass und die Rechte von Erich Fromm verwaltet. Er leitet das Erich Fromm Institut in Tübingen und ist Ko-Leiter des Erich Fromm Study Centers an der Internationalen Psychoanalytischen Universität in Berlin. (Siehe hier)
Die politische Entwicklung unter der Regierung von Donald Trump, aber auch die Erfolge nationalistischer Parteien in Westeuropa lassen verstärkt fragen, warum immer mehr Menschen rechtsgerichtete politische Parteien wählen. Rainer Funk sensibilisiert mit seinem psychologischen Beitrag für das destruktive und gewalttätige Potenzial bei einer Dominanz des narzisstischen Sozialcharakters (statt die Entwicklungen als Rückkehr des Autoritarismus zu begreifen). Genau dies hat Fromm selbst in seinem Spätwerk getan.
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Erich Fromm Online Meetings • Catherine B. Silver
Title of the lecture: Re-thinking the Self Through Negativity: Clinical Vignettes Based on Fromm's Insights about Attachment, Destructiveness, and Pleasure
Since 2021 the 'Erich Fromm Study Center' in Berlin organizes Erich Fromm Online Meetings to discuss current Fromm research contributions on various topics within an international community of researchers. The meetings themselves are for discussing a contribution that is provided in advance as a video and text. They are made available to those interested in Erich Fromm's thinking in this podcast series.
Dr. Catherine B. Silver is a professor emerita of sociology at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York and a Senior Training Psychoanalyst of The National Psychological Association for Psychoanalysis.
In her presentation she illustrate how she uses Fromm's socio-psychoanalytic approach in her clinical work. The linkage between individual and collective responses to negativity occurs through the internalization and sharing of a social unconscious embodied in social character structure. Hence the question for this presentation is: How can positive and negative emotional power, experienced through the linkages of attachment, destructiveness, and pleasure, bring about personal and social transformations within a technologically advanced, information age society?
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Erich Fromm Online Meetings • Michael J. Thompson
Title of the lecture: The Ontological Structure of Erich Fromm’s Critical Humanism
Since 2021 the 'Erich Fromm Study Center' in Berlin organizes Erich Fromm Online Meetings to discuss current Fromm research contributions on various topics within an international community of researchers. The meetings themselves are for discussing a contribution that is provided in advance as a video and text. They are made available to those interested in Erich Fromm's thinking in this podcast series.
Dr. Michael J. Thompson (New York, USA) is a professor of Political Theory at William Paterson University (USA) and a Licensed Psychoanalyst and Faculty member at the William Alanson White Institute in New York.
The talk explores Erich Fromm’s concept of humanism arguing that it pro-vides us with a unified theory for both clinical work as well as social criticism. Fromm's humanistic ideas are rooted in a structure of thought that sees our existence, our ontology as human beings as constituted by our inherent capacities for both relatedness as well as positing ends and purposes in the world. Fromm’s ideas constitute a critical humanism that can be realized in the world via self- and social transformation and not merely an abstract set of principles or concepts.
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Erich Fromm Online Meetings • Sonia Gojman de Millán
Title of the lecture: Erich Fromm’s Social Character and John Bowlby’s Attachment Theories. An Integrative Approach for Research
Since 2021 the 'Erich Fromm Study Center' in Berlin organizes Erich Fromm Online Meetings to discuss current Fromm research contributions on various topics within an international community of researchers. The meetings themselves are for discussing a contribution that is provided in advance as a video and text. They are made available to those interested in Erich Fromm's thinking in this podcast series.
Dr. Sonia Gojman de Millán is a training und supervising psychoanalyst at the Seminario de Sociopsicoanálisis A.C. in Mexico and conducted together with her husband Salvador Millán for decades the Seminario Sociopsicoanalítico. She was former Secretary General of the International Federation of Psychoanalytic Societies and is a certified coder of the Ainsworth Infant Strange Situation Procedure.
The presentation introduces to Fromm's social character theory and its theoretical origins, then focusing the reproductive function of women because it has such a transcendent importance to the development and emotional health of children. Mother’s role was highlighted by Fromm as primary to the infant in comparison to the later one of father, and has amply been proven by John Bowlby’s Attachment Theory as transcendent in her role of primary caregiver; this has been confirmed through a vast number of longitudinal research projects.
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Erich Fromm Online Meetings • Rainer Funk
Title of the lecture: What makes people vote for the political right? Insights from Erich Fromm's late work
Since 2021 the 'Erich Fromm Study Center' in Berlin organizes Erich Fromm Online Meetings to discuss current Fromm research contributions on various topics within an international community of researchers. The meetings themselves are for discussing a contribution that is provided in advance as a video and text. They are made available to those interested in Erich Fromm's thinking in this podcast series.
Dr. Rainer Funk is a psychoanalyst, living in Tübingen (Germany). He is Erich Fromm's literary executor and director of the Erich Fromm Institute in Tübingen and co-director of the Erich Fromm Study Center at the Interenational Psychoanalytic University in Berlin. (See here)
This contribution discusses the question of how the current political development, in which more and more people are voting for right-wing parties, can be understood psychodynamically using Fromm's theories. Rainer Funk sensitizes to the destructive and violent potential of a dominant narcissistic (rather than authoritarian) social character. This is what Erich Fromm's late work stands for.
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