/tag/relatedness

3 quotes tagged 'relatedness'

How Our Lives Become Stories: Making Selves
Author: Paul John Eakin
Publisher: Cornell University Press (1999)
52

According to Benjamin, 'most theories of [infant] development have emphasized the goal of autonomy more than relatedness to others.' They accept Margaret Mahler's 'unilinear trajectory that leads from oneness [with the mother] to separateness,' 'leaving unexplored the territory in which subjects meet' (25). As a corrective to Mahler's model, Benjamin stresses accordingly the 'intersubjective dimension' (49) of individuation and its central paradox: 'at the very moment of realizing our own independence, we are dependent upon another to recognize it' (33). Thus, because the assertion of autonomy is dependent on this dynamic of recognition, identity is necessarily relational.


The Origins and History of Consciousness
Author: Erich Neumann
Publisher: Princeton University Press (1954)
116

This being opposite and no longer contained in the womb is the dark feeling that pervades consciousness wherever the ego finds itself isolated and alone.\n\n It is the mark of man to be pitted against the world, it is his sorrow and his speciality; for what at first seems loss turns out a positive gain.  But not only that; on a higher level there falls to man, and to man alone, the essential mark of 'relatedness,' because he, as an individual, enters into relations with an object, be it another man, a thing, the world, his own soul, or God.


To Have or to Be?
Author: Erich Fromm
Publisher: Continuum Impacts (2005)
0

Love is not primarily a relationship to a specific person; it is an attitude, an orientation of character which determines the relatedness of a person to the world as a whole, not toward one 'object' of love.  If a person loves only one other person and is indifferent to the rest of his fellow men, his love is not love but a symbiotic attachment, or an enlarged egotism.  Yet, most people believe that love is constituted by the object, not by the faculty.  In fact, they even believe that it is a proof of the intensity of their love when they do not love anybody except the 'loved' person.  This is the same fallacy which we have already mentioned above.  Because one does not see that love is an activity, a power of the soul, one believes that all that is necessary to find is the right object - and that everything goes by itself afterward.  This attitude can be compared to that of a man who wants to paint but who, instead of learning the art, claims that he has just to wait for the right object, and that he will paint beautifully when he finds it.  If I truly love one person I love all persons, I love the world, I love life.  If I can say to somebody else, 'I love you,' I must be able to say, 'I love in you everybody, I love through you the world, I love in you also myself.