The Contribution of Enrique Pichon-Rivière: Comparisons with His European Contemporaries and with Modern Theory

2016 ◽  
Vol 6 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
David E. Scharff
Keyword(s):  
Social World ◽  
Modern Theory ◽  
George Herbert ◽  
George Herbert Mead ◽  
Analytic Thinking ◽  
Family Analysis ◽  
The Social ◽  
Original Family ◽  
Kurt Lewin ◽  
Social Applications

Enrique Pichon-Rivière, a pioneer of psychoanalysis, worked and wrote in Argentina in the mid-twentieth century, but his work has not so far been translated into English. From the beginning, Pichon-Rivière understood the social applications of analytic thinking, centring his ideas on "el vinculo", which is generally translated as "the link", but could equally be translated as "the bond". The concept that each individual is born into human social links, is shaped by them, and simultaneously contributes to them inextricably ties people's inner worlds to the social world of family and society in which they live. Pichon-Rivière believed, therefore, that family analysis and group and institutional applications of analysis were as important as individual psychoanalysis. Many of the original family and couple therapists from whom our field learned trained with him. Because his work was centred in the analytic writings of Fairbairn and Klein, as well as those of the anthropologist George Herbert Mead and the field theory of Kurt Lewin, his original ideas have important things to teach us today. This article summarises some of his central ideas such as the link, spiral process, the single determinate illness, and the process of therapy.

Objective meaning: The formation of self in Mead and Sohn-Rethel

2018 ◽  
Vol 62 (1) ◽  
pp. 34-46
Author(s):  
Magnus Granberg
Keyword(s):  
Social Processes ◽  
Unintended Consequence ◽  
The Self ◽  
George Herbert ◽  
George Herbert Mead ◽  
Commodity Exchange ◽  
The Social ◽  
Objective Meaning ◽  
Self Formation ◽  
Interpretative Sociology

This analysis of the work of George Herbert Mead and Alfred Sohn-Rethel compares their respective accounts of the formation of the self. The analysis proceeds from two important similarities: the effort to understand self-consciousness not as primordial but as the product of social processes, and the view that these processes form a circuit: the self arises from consciousness’ return to itself, concluding a movement whereby consciousness is first externalized onto objects and then internalized, taking on the insular shape of self-consciousness. What sets the two accounts apart is the site from whence the self returns: objects. In Mead, the self returns from meaningful objects, and this same (intersubjective) meaning is entangled with the process of self-formation. In contrast, for Sohn-Rethel, the self returns from objects whose meaning is not established intersubjectively but objectively: the self is the unintended consequence of commodity exchange. In Mead, interaction among people affords meaning to objects and thus evokes the self; in Sohn-Rethel, interaction among commodities evokes an objective meaning that renders people as selves. Interpretative sociology should attend to the objectively and unconsciously meaningful forms analyzed by Sohn-Rethel. To illustrate this conclusion, reference is made to a certain experience of the social under neoliberalism.

George Herbert Mead. Philosopher of the Social Individual

1946 ◽  
Vol 43 (11) ◽  
pp. 302
Author(s):  
Herbert W. Schneider ◽  
Grace Chin Lee
Keyword(s):  
George Herbert ◽  
George Herbert Mead ◽  
The Social

Becoming a Person

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kai Erikson
Keyword(s):  
Early Childhood ◽  
Social Order ◽  
Social World ◽  
Early Years ◽  
George Herbert ◽  
The Social ◽  
Total Institutions ◽  
The Way

This chapter examines the process of socialization, of becoming a person—the way we become aware of the social world we are a part of and learn to participate in it. It first considers the lessons of early childhood and how a child learns a particular language before discussing George Herbert Mead's views on childhood learning. It then analyzes the processes that occur when people are removed from the larger social order and confined to total institutions and “becoming a person once again,” also known as “secondary socialization” or “resocialization.” It suggests that, whether one is speaking of “becoming a person” in the early years or repeating some part of that process later, members of a society live by an informal grammar.

George Herbert Mead (1863–1931)

2014 ◽  
Author(s):  
Barbara Simpson
Keyword(s):  
Human Experience ◽  
Social Processes ◽  
George Herbert ◽  
George Herbert Mead ◽  
Continuity And Change ◽  
Human Conduct ◽  
The Social ◽  
Temporal Continuity ◽  
Organizational Literature

During his lifetime, George Herbert Mead published more than a hundred critical commentaries, reports, and original articles exploring how consciousness and mind arise in human conduct. Even so, his seminal thinking about the social processes of human experience remains significantly under-utilized in the organizational literature. In this chapter I argue that the synthesis of intersubjectivity and temporality, which Mead achieves by using the notion of sociality, offers an unparalleled access, both theoretically and methodologically, to the dynamics of emergent practice in organizations. In particular, his formulation of human experience as the passage of events, or present moments, emerging from the interplay between reconstructed pasts and imagined futures, invites a radical re-examination of the notion of temporal continuity and change. The chapter also positions Mead’s work in relation to other pragmatist philosophers and the hermeneutic and phenomenological traditions more generally, while also emphasizing the relevance of his ideas to contemporary organizational living.

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