Publisher's Foreword As the present book is reissued, The American Mental Health Foundation celebrates its 86th anniversary. Organized in 1924, AMHF is ...

Man : wolf or sheep? -- Different forms of violence -- Love of death and love of life -- Individual and social narcissism -- Incestuous ties -- Freedom, determinism, alternativism.

Nothing less than a manifesto for a new social and psychological revolution to save our threatened planet, this book is a summary of the penetrating thought of ...

The point of departure used in the article is the statement that in the bourgeois character there is embedded a feeling, not always conscious, of profound impotence. Psychoanalytic experiences are presented to illustrate such feelings. In extreme cases the content of such feeling may be described as follows : „There is nothing I can influence ; nothing I can move ; nothing I can change by my will in the external {World or in myself. I have no power, I am (...) not taken seriously, I am for other people like air which no one notices.“The feeling of being without power may be in relation to other people, to oneself, or to things. Its most important psychological consequences are a feeling of inferiority, fear, and anger. A series of examples are described in which an attempt was made to soften the intensity of the feeling of impotence, or to eliminate it entirely. In this sphere rationalizations explain the impotence as the result of certain non-psychological conditions, rationalizations which console because of their belief in sudden miracles or changes over long periods of time ; finally, a reaction which consists in an attempt to hide this feeling in activity and mere routine.The social conditions of the origin of this feeling of impotence are found in two fields : first in the fact that the child in the bourgeois family, even if treated very favorably, is not really taken seriously, and then in the place the adult has in modern society, his helplessness and dependence on powers he cannot comprehend and control, in particular his position of impotence in a process of production governed by the principle of division of labor.At the end the author attempts to show this feeling of impotence and the rationalizations which covered it up in the political behavior of the European masses during the post-war period.L'article constate tout d'abord qu'un sentiment d'impuissance profond, encore que d'ordinaire inconscient, marque la vie bourgeoise. L'article utilise l'expérience que livre la psychanalyse des individus pour décrire ce sentiment d'impuissance. Dans les cas extrêmes, la description aboutit aux traits suivants : je ne puis exercer d'influence sur rien, je ne puis rien mettre en mouvement, ma volonté est incapable de rien changer ni dans le monde extérieur ni en moi-même, je n'ai pas de force, je n'existe pas pour les autres, je suis comme l'air qu'ils respirent. Le sentiment d'impuissance peut se rapporter aussi bien à d'autres hommes qu'à la personne elle-même, ou à des choses. Les suites psychologiques les plus importantes de ce sentiment sont : complexe d'infériorité, angoisse, colère. L'article décrit une série de tentatives pour adoucir, ou même chasser de la conscience la souffrance qui naît de cette impuissance. A cette catégorie appartiennent des rationalisations explicatives qui ramènent l'impuissance à certaines circonstances extra-psychiques ; des rationalisations consolatrices qui font croire à la brusque irruption d'un miracle, ou bien à des changements progressifs, fruits d'une longue durée ; enfin une forme de réaction qui, à force d'activité, de routine affairée parvient à couvrir le sentiment d'impuissance, qui reste inconscient. Deux ordres de conditions sociales favorisent la formation du sentiment d'impuissance : d’abord le fait que l'enfant dans la société bourgeoise, si affectueusement qu'il puisse être traité, n'est pas — au fond — pris au sérieux ; d'autre part, le rôle de l'adulte dans la société bourgeoise, sa propre impuissance et sa dépendance à l'égard de forces qu'il est incapable de maîtriser ou même de reconnaître, plus particulièrement sa position dans le procès de production, qui, par suite de l'extrême division du travail, lui enlève autonomie et efficacité. Pour terminer, l'article tente de retrouver ce sentiment d'impuissance et les diverses formes de rationalisations qui le dissimulent, dans l'attitude des masses européennes durant l'époque de l'après-guerre. (shrink)

Modern man's pathology of normalcy -- The concept of mental health -- Humanistic science of man -- Is man lazy by nature?.

Labelling schemes are practical arrangements aimed at making 'ethical' products widely available and visible. They are crucial to expanded development of ethical markets and hence to the addition of moral dimensions to the normally amoral behaviour linking consumers and retail and production businesses. The study reported here attempts to assess the contribution of UK ethical, social and environmental certification and labelling initiatives to 'sustainable' consumption and production. The research sought to assess the overall potential of initiatives to inject human values (...) into the supply-distribution chains, through a qualitative survey of 15 of the 26 main UK initiatives: in social justice, animal welfare and environmental sustainability from the agriculture, food processing, timber, aquaculture, textiles and personal care sectors. By analysing the basic characteristics and concepts of these labels and investigating the emergence of labelling initiatives, we assess whether labels help add an ethical dimension, or whether, in some respects, they also reduce such missions to the technical management of adding only another 'utility' to a product. The analysis assesses whether the gradual 'mainstreaming' of ethical initiatives such as 'Fairtrade' risks subsuming ethical goals within business participants' competitive and profit-oriented logics. However, the contrasting perspectives revealed between rival labelling initiatives show that the scope and functions of labelling projects go beyond the manifest ones of information communication between consumers and producer and actually introduce elements of socio-political regulation. These are essential for more sustainable and ethical business practices and are an integral part of any humanisation of business involvement. (shrink)

Erich Frauwallners Buch "Die Philosophie des Buddhismus" ist längst zu einem,Klassiker' geworden. Die Form der Darstellung ist glücklich gewählt; sie verknüpft allgemeine Überblicke, Einführungen in das Denken individueller buddhistischer Philosophen und lange Exzerpte aus philosophischen Werken des südasiatischen Buddhismus in wörtlicher Übersetzung. Das Buch bewegt sich also zwischen einem Einführungswerk und einer Anthologie. Die knappen Einleitungen zu den repräsentativen Texten sind informativ und klar und rücken die philosophischen Inhalte in das Licht ihrer historischen Entwicklung; die Übersetzungen aus den relevanten (...) Sprachen (Pali, Sanskrit, Tibetisch, Chinesisch) wiederum sind außerordentlich verlässlich. Der Neuauflage des Bandes wurde ein Vorwort von Eli Franco und Karin Preisendanz zu Frauwallners Leben und Schaffen beigefügt, ergänzt durch eine Bibliographie seiner Schriften und eine kommentierte Liste weiterführender Literatur zum südasiatischen Buddhismus. (shrink)

Guarded fragments of first-order logic were recently introduced by Andreka, van Benthem and Nemeti; they consist of relational first-order formulae whose quantifiers are appropriately relativized by atoms. These fragments are interesting because they extend in a natural way many propositional modal logics, because they have useful model-theoretic properties and especially because they are decidable classes that avoid the usual syntactic restrictions (on the arity of relation symbols, the quantifier pattern or the number of variables) of almost all other known decidable (...) fragments of first-order logic. Here, we investigate the computational complexity of these fragments. We prove that the satisfiability problems for the guarded fragment (GF) and the loosely guarded fragment (LGF) of first-order logic are complete for deterministic double exponential time. For the subfragments that have only a bounded number of variables or only relation symbols of bounded arity, satisfiability is EXPTIME-complete. We further establish a tree model property for both the guarded fragment and the loosely guarded fragment, and give a proof of the finite model property of the guarded fragment. It is also shown that some natural, modest extensions of the guarded fragments are undecidable. (shrink)