Montreal, Quebec, Canada
| Naomi Klein | |
|---|---|
|
|
| Born | May 8, 1970
Montreal, Quebec, Canada |
| Occupation | journalist, author, activist |
| Subjects | alter-globalization, anti-corporatism, anti-war |
| Spouse(s) | Avi Lewis |
| Official website | |
 |
Wikimedia Commons has media related to: Naomi Klein |
Naomi Klein (born May 8, 1970) is a Canadian journalist, author and activist known for her political analyses and criticism of corporate globalization.
Contents[hide] |
Klein was born in Montreal, Quebec and brought up in a Jewish family with a history of left-wing activism. Her parents moved to Montreal from the USA in 1967 as war resisters to the Vietnam War.[1] Her mother, documentary film-maker Bonnie Sherr Klein, is best known for her anti-pornography film Not a Love Story.[2] Her father, Michael Klein, is a physician and a member of Physicians for Social Responsibility. Her brother Seth Klein is director of the British Columbia office of the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives.
Her paternal grandparents were communists who began to turn against the Soviet Union after the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact and had abandoned communism by 1956. In 1942 her grandfather Phil Klein, an animator at Disney, was fired as an agitator after the Disney animators' strike,[3] and went to work at a shipyard instead. Klein's father grew up surrounded by ideas of social justice and racial equality, but found it "difficult and frightening to be the child of Communists," a so-called red diaper baby.[4]
Klein's husband, Avi Lewis, comes from a similar leftist background. He is a TV journalist and documentary filmmaker. His parents are the writer and activist Michele Landsberg and politician and diplomat Stephen Lewis, son of David Lewis, one of the founders of the Canadian New Democratic Party, son in turn of Moishe Lewis, born Losz, a Jewish labour activist of "the Bund" who left Eastern Europe for Canada in 1921.[5]
Klein and her husband live in Toronto.
Klein spent her teenage years as a mall rat, obsessed with designer logos.[6] As a child and teenager, she found it "very oppressive to have a very public feminist mother" and she rejected politics, instead embracing "full-on consumerism."
She has credited her change in paradigm to two crises. One being, when she was seventeen and preparing for the University of Toronto, her mother had a stroke and became severely disabled.[7] Naomi, along with her father and brother, took care of Bonnie through the period in hospital and at home, making educational sacrifices to do so.[7] That year off prevented her "from being such a brat".[6] The next year, after beginning her studies at the University of Toronto, the second event unfolded. The 1989 École Polytechnique massacre of female engineering students proved to be a wake-up call to feminism.[8]
Klein's writing career started with contributions to The Varsity, a student newspaper, where she served as editor-in-chief. After her third year at the University of Toronto, she dropped out of university to take a job at the Toronto Globe and Mail, followed by an editorship at This Magazine, the Canadian equivalent of the American magazine, The Nation.[4] In 1995, she returned to the University of Toronto to finish her degree.[citation needed]
In 2000, Klein published the book No Logo, which for many became a manifesto of the anti-corporate globalization movement. In it, she attacks brand-oriented consumer culture by describing the operations of large corporations. She also accuses several such corporations of unethically exploiting workers in the world's poorest countries in pursuit of greater profits. In this book, Klein criticized Nike so severely that Nike published a point-by-point response to perceived inaccuracies.[9] No Logo became an international bestseller, selling over one million copies in over 28 languages.[10]
In 2002 Klein published Fences and Windows, a collection of her articles and speeches written on behalf of the anti-globalization movement (all proceeds from the book go to benefit activist organizations through The Fences and Windows Fund). Klein also contributes to The Nation, In These Times, The Globe and Mail, This Magazine, and The Guardian.
Klein has written on various current issues, such as the Iraq War. In a September 2004 article for Harper's Magazine,[11] she argues that, contrary to popular belief, the Bush administration did have a clear plan for post-invasion Iraq, which was to build a completely unconstrained free market economy. She describes plans to allow foreigners to extract wealth from Iraq, and the methods used to achieve those goals.[12][13] The 2008 film War, Inc. was partially inspired by her article, Baghdad Year Zero.[14]
Klein's August 2004 Nation column "Bring Najaf to New York" argued that Muqtada Al Sadr's Mahdi Army "represents the overwhelmingly mainstream sentiment in Iraq."[15] She went on to say "Yes, if elected Sadr would try to turn Iraq into a theocracy like Iran, but for now his demands are for direct elections and an end to foreign occupation".[15] Marc Cooper, a former Nation columnist, attacked the assertion that Al Sadr represented mainstream Iraqi sentiment and that American forces had brought the fight to the holy city of Najaf.[16] Cooper wrote that "Klein should know better. All enemies of the U.S. occupation she opposes are not her friends. Or ours. Or those of the Iraqi people. I don’t think that Mullah Al Sadr, in any case, is much desirous of support issuing from secular Jewish feminist-socialists."[16] Christopher Hitchens, an advocate of the Iraq invasion, argued that Klein, Tariq Ali, and Michael Moore were "fellow travelers with fascism."[17]
In 2004, Klein and her husband, Avi Lewis, released a documentary film called The Take about factory workers in Argentina who took over a closed plant and resumed production, operating as a collective. The first African screening was in the Kennedy Road shack settlement in the South African city of Durban, where the Abahlali baseMjondolo movement began.[18]
Klein was criticized in Z Communications for her portrayal of Peron in The Take, which they felt made him appear to be a social democrat.[19]
Klein's third book, The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism, was published on September 4, 2007, becoming an international and New York Times bestseller[10] translated into 20 languages.[20] The book argues that the free market policies of Nobel Laureate Milton Friedman and the Chicago School of Economics have risen to prominence in countries such as Chile under Pinochet, Russia under Yeltsin, and the United States (specifically, the privatization of the New Orleans Public Schools after Hurricane Katrina). The book also argues that policy initiatives such as the privatization of Iraq's economy under the Coalition Provisional Authority were pushed through while the citizens of these countries were in shock from disasters or upheavals. It is also claimed that these shocks are in some cases, such as the Falklands War, created with the intention of being able to push through these unpopular reforms in the wake of the crisis. Klein identifies "shock doctrine", elaborating on Joseph Schumpeter, as the latest in capitalism's phases of "creative destruction."[21]
The Shock Doctrine was adapted into a short film of the same name, released onto YouTube. The film was directed by Jonás Cuarón, produced and co-written by his father Alfonso Cuarón. The video has been viewed over one million times.[10]
While many reviews were very positive, free market advocates fiercely criticized Klein's views in The Shock Doctrine (as with her earlier Fences and Windows). John Gray, reviewing for The Guardian, describes the book as "both timely and devastating"[22]. Joseph Stiglitz wrote for the New York Times, that The Shock Doctrine is an "ambitious look at the economic history of the last 50 years and the rise of free-market fundamentalism around the world."[23]
In contrast, In a report for The Cato Institute, Johan Norberg argued that Klein's analysis is flawed on virtually every level and her historical examples do not survive scrutiny. [24] Tom Redburn, in The New York Times wrote "she essentially accuses Friedman of being the godfather of a Mafia-like gang ... There’s a measure of truth about the dark side of globalization ... but [corporatism] is a lot to lay on poor Milton." He also claimed that Klein incorrectly groups neoconservatism with neoliberals like Bill Clinton as part of a single ideology.[25] In The Times (London), Cole, characterized The Shock Doctrine as "lucidly written and comprehensively researched" but also criticized it as "lean[ing] heavily on partisan contributions from the cuttings library and the blogosphere."[26] Jonathan Chait, senior editor of the The New Republic, criticized Klein for employing Marxist economism, ignoring facts that contradicted her thesis, and ignoring right-wing ideas.[27]
The publication of The Shock Doctrine
increased Klein's prominence, with the New Yorker judging her "the most
visible and influential figure on the American left—what Howard
Zinn and Noam Chomsky were thirty years ago." On
February 24, 2009, the book was awarded the inaugural Warwick Prize for Writing from
the University of Warwick in England.
The prize carried a cash award of £50,000.
Psychoanalytic theory refers to the definition and dynamics of personality development which underlie and guide psychoanalytic and psychodynamic psychotherapy. First laid out by Sigmund Freud, psychoanalytic theory has undergone many refinements since his work (see psychoanalysis).
History [This section is in need of editing]
Sigmund Freud, Melanie Klein, and Jacques Lacan are often treated as canonical thinkers by Lacanian psychoanalysts, although there are considerable objections to their authority, particularly from other psychoanalytical schools and feminism. Precisely in the interest of a theoretical approach to psychoanalysis, Lacan read Freud with G. W. F. Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit. Major thinkers within psychoanalytic theory in France include Nicholas Abraham[citation needed], Serge Leclaire[citation needed], Julia Kristeva[citation needed], Slavoj Žižek[citation needed], Jacques Derrida[citation needed], Jean Laplanche[citation needed], René Major[citation needed], Luce Irigaray[citation needed], and Jacques-Alain Miller[citation needed]; their work is anything but unitary — Derrida, for example, has remarked that virtually the entirety of Freud's metapsychology, while possessing some strategic value previously necessary to the elaboration of psychoanalysis, ought to be discarded at this point, whereas Miller is sometimes taken as heir apparent to Lacan because of his editorship of Lacan's seminars, his interest in analysis is even more philosophical than clinical, whereas Major has questioned the complicity of clinical psychoanalysis with various forms of totalitarian government.
Some of the theoretical orientation of psychoanalyss in both German and French and, later, American contexts results in part from its separation from psychiatry and institutionalisation closer to departments of philosophy and literature (or American cultural studies programs). Psychoanalytic theory heavily influenced the work of Frantz Fanon, Herbert Marcuse, Louis Althusser, and Cathy Caruth, among others. The implications for these is exemplary in their dispersion; Fanon's interests were in racial and colonial identity, whereas Marcuse and represent distinct Marxist positions that, among other things, attempt to use psychoanalysis in the study of ideology, whereas Caruth, coming from a background in de Manian deconstruction and working in comparative literature, has articulated notions of trauma through literary studies informed by philosophy, psychology, neurology, and Freudian and Lacanian theory. Theory can be so expansive a container as to include the work of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, who believed psychoanalysis ultimately radically reductionist and strongly opposed the psychiatric institutions of their time.
Psychoanalytic theory sometimes heavily informs gender studies and queer theory.
Contents[hide] |
 |
This article needs additional citations for verification. Please help improve this article by adding reliable references. Unsourced material may be challenged and removed. (June 2009) |
Richard (Cory) Kostelanetz (14 May 1940, New York City) is an American artist, author and critic.
He was born to Boris Kostelanetz and Ethel Cory and is the nephew of the composer Andre Kostelanetz. After a lifetime in Manhattan and thirty-five years in its SoHo district, he has moved his studio christened Wordship to Ridgewood-SoHo, as he calls it, in Far-East Artists' Bushwick. He never remarried. He is a passionate defender of the avant-garde.
Contents[hide] |
He has a B.A. from Brown University and an M.A. in American History from Columbia University under Woodrow Wilson, NYS Regents, and International Fellowships; he also studied at King's College London as a Fulbright Scholar.
Grants have come to him from the Guggenheim Foundation (1967), Pulitzer Foundation (1965), DAAD Berliner Kunstlerprogramm (1981-1983), Vogelstein Foundation (1980), Fund for Investigative Journalism (1981), Pollock-Krasner Foundation (2001), CCLM (1981), ASCAP (1983 annually to the present), American Public Radio Program Fund (1984), and the National Endowment for the Arts with ten individual awards (1976, 1978, 1979, 1981, 1982, 1983, 1985, 1986, 1990, 1991). He also assumed production residencies at the Electronic Music Studio of Stockholm, Experimental TV Center (Owego, NY), Mishkenot Sha'ananim (Jerusalem), and the MIT Media Lab, among other entities.
He came onto the literary scene with essays in quarterlies like "Partisan Review' and The Hudson Review, then profiles of older artists, musicians and writers for The New York Times Magazine; these profiles were collected in Master Minds" (1969)'. Not one to shy away from controversy, he turned on his literary elders with The End of Intelligent Writing: Literary Politics in Ameroca (1974). SoHo: The Rise and Fall of an Artists' Colony (2003) evinces not the Latest but the Last.
Books of his radically alternative fiction include "In the Beginning" (1971) (the alphabet arranged in single and double letter combinations), "Short Fictions' (1974), "More Short Fictions" (1980, and Furtherest Fictions (2007)); of his mostly visual poetry, "Visual Language" (1970), "I Articulations" (1974), "Wordworks" (1993), and "More Wordworks" (2006).
Among the anthologies he has edited are "On Contemporary Literature" (1964, 1969), "Beyond Left & Rght" (1968), "John Cage" (1970, 1991), "Moholy-Nagy" (1970), Scenarios (1980), and The Literature of SoHo (1981).
A political anarchist-libertarian, he authored "Political Essays" (1999) and "Toward Secession: More Political Essays" (2008) and has since 1987 been a contributing editor for Liberty Magazine.
Uniquely among his literary contemporaries, Richard Kostelanetz has also produced literature in audio, video, holography, prints, book-art, computer-based installations, among other new media. Though he coined the term "polyartist" to characterize people who excel at two or more nonadjacent arts, he considers that, since nearly all his creative work incorporates language or literary forms, it represents Writing reflecting polyartistry. "Wordsand" (1978-81) was a traveling early retrospective of his work in several media.
His work has been acknowledged at some length(s) in the following and additional works:
 BOMB Magazine Spring 2009 |
|
| Editors | Betty Sussler |
|---|---|
| Categories | Literary magazine |
| Frequency | Quarterly |
| Circulation | 14,000 |
| First issue | Spring 1981 |
| Company | New Arts Publications, Inc. |
| Country |  USA |
| Based in | New York City |
| Language | English |
| Website | www.bombsite.com |
| ISSN | 0743-3204 |
BOMB is a quarterly magazine edited by artists and writers. It is composed, primarily, of interviews between creative people working in a variety of disciplines — visual art, literature, music, film, theater, and architecture.
In addition to interviews, BOMB issues feature new fiction & poems, several 500-word "Artist on Artist" essays, and a reviews section.
Each Winter issue (on newsstands mid-December through mid-March) is an "Americas" issue focusing on a specific region of North America (south of the U.S.), Central America, or South America. Spring, Summer, and Fall issues are not themed.
BOMB is published by New Art Publications, Inc., a 501(c)(3) non-profit organization[1].
Contents[hide] |
BOMB magazine was launched in 1981 by a group of New York City-based artists, editor-in-chief Betsy Sussler among them, who sought to record and promote public conversations between artists without mediation by critics or journalists. One night, Sussler said, "Wouldn't it be great if we started a magazine where we talked about the artwork the way we talk about it among ourselves?"[2]
The name, BOMB, is a reference to both Wyndham Lewis's BLAST and the fact that the magazine's original editors expected the publication to "bomb" after one or two issues.
Shortly after its founding, BOMB became a 501(c)(3) non-profit organization.
As of June 2007, BOMB has published 100 issues and over 800 conversations between artists. Over 150 of these conversations are posted on the magazine's website.
BOMB has undergone significant editorial and design changes since 1981, but peer-to-peer interviews have always been a major focus.
In 2005, the BOMB offices moved from SoHo, NYC to Fort Greene, Brooklyn.
BOMB coordinates interviews between peers, often across genres or disciplines (i.e. a poet might interview a painter), in order to generate intimate, revealing, revelatory conversations that focus generally on the creative process and specifically on the subject’s oeuvre, but often focusing on the most recent and upcoming projects. Interviewers and interviewees are encouraged to participate in the editorial process, treating the raw transcript as a sort of blueprint but knowing that anything can be added or subtracted, expanded or rewritten, before publication.
In 2004, Columbia University's Rare Book and Manuscript Library acquired BOMB's archives, including 24 years' worth of audio recordings, raw & edited interview transcripts, manuscripts, galleys, and assorted ephemera.
"It will always be of inestimable historical value to have provided these intimate glimpses into the personal centers of the creative process. But the interviews will have that value just because they are not merely documents for future reference. The interviews refer to the culture in its fluid and formative state, and in this way contribute to its direction. In and through them the culture encounters itself... There are plenty of venues for interpretation, but the task that BOMB has preempted on behalf of the culture is to help it find its bearing through understanding those who are helping it change." —Arthur C. Danto
"Reading BOMB interviews was one of the ways that I began to conceive of myself as an artist." —Miranda July
"BOMB's brilliant juxtaposition of voices, mediums, and genres makes beautiful noise." —Jonathan Lethem
| Part of a series of articles on |
| Psychoanalysis |
 |
| Psychology portal |
Melanie Klein (March 30, 1882 – September 22, 1960) was an Austrian-born British psychoanalyst who devised novel therapeutic techniques for children that had a significant impact on child psychology and contemporary psychoanalysis. She was a leading innovator in theorizing object relations theory.
Contents[hide] |
Born in Vienna of Jewish parentage[1], Klein first sought psychoanalysis for herself with Sandor Ferenczi when he was living in Budapest during World War I. There she became a psychoanalyst and began analysing children in 1919. In 1921 she moved to Berlin where she studied with and was analysed by Karl Abraham. Although Abraham supported her pioneering work with children, neither Klein nor her ideas received much support in Berlin. However, impressed by her innovative work, British psychoanalyst Ernest Jones invited Klein to come to London in 1926, where she worked until her death in 1960.
Klein had a major influence on the theory and technique of psychoanalysis, particularly in Great Britain. As a divorced woman whose academic qualifications consisted of not even having earned a bachelor's degree, Klein was a visible iconoclast within a profession dominated by male physicians.
After the arrival of Sigmund Freud and his psychoanalyst daughter, Anna, in London in 1938, Klein’s ideas came into conflict with those of Continental analysts who were migrating to Britain. Following protracted debates between the followers of Klein and the followers of Anna Freud during the 1940s (the so-called 'controversial discussions'), the British Psychoanalytical Society split into three separate training divisions: (1) Kleinian, (2) Anna Freudian, and (3) independent. This division remains to the current time.
Apart from her professional successes, Klein’s life was full of tragic events. Allegedly the product of an unwanted birth, her parents showed her little affection. Her much loved elder sister died when Klein was four, and she was made to feel responsible for her brother’s death. Her academic studies were interrupted by marriage and children. Her marriage failed and her son died, while her daughter, the well-known psychoanalyst Melitta Schmideberg, fought her openly in the British Psychoanalytic Society. Mother and daughter were not reconciled before Klein's death, and Schmideberg did not attend Klein's funeral.
Although she questioned some of the fundamental assumptions of Sigmund Freud, Klein always considered herself a faithful adherent to Freud's ideas. Klein was the first person to use traditional psychoanalysis with young children. She was innovative in both her techniques[2] (such as working with children using toys) and her theories in infant development. Strongly opinionated, and demanding loyalty from her followers, Klein established a highly influential training program in psychoanalysis. She is considered one of the co-founders of object relations theory.
Klein's theoretical work gradually centered on a speculative hypothesis eventually accepted by Freud, which stated that life may be a fragile occurrence, that it is drawn toward an inorganic state, and therefore, in an unspecified sense, contains a drive towards death. In psychological terms Eros (properly, the life instinct), the postulated sustaining and uniting principle of life, is thereby presumed to have a companion force, Thanatos (death instinct), which allegedly seeks to terminate and disintegrate life. Both Freud and Klein regarded these biomental forces as the foundations of the psyche. These were human instincts ("Triebe") unrelated to the animal instincts of ethology. These primary unconscious forces, whose mental matrix is the "id," sparked the ego—the experiencing self—into activity. Id, ego, and superego—to be sure—were merely shorthand terms (like the "instincts") referring to highly complex, mostly uncharted, psychodynamic operations. Freud and Klein never abandoned the terms or the conceptualizations despite protests and controversies by many of their adherents.
While Freud’s ideas concerning children mostly came from working with adult patients, Klein was innovative in working directly with children, often as young as two years old. Klein saw children’s play as their primary mode of emotional communication. After observing troubled children play with toys such as dolls, animals, plasticine, pencil and paper, Klein attempted to interpret the specific meaning of play. She realised that parental figures played a significant role in the child’s phantasy life, and considered that the chronology of Freud’s Oedipus complex was imprecise. Contradicting Freud, she concluded that the superego was present long before the Oedipal phase.
After exploring ultra-aggressive phantasies of hate, envy, and greed in very young, very ill children, Melanie Klein proposed a model of the human psyche that linked significant oscillations of state, with whether the postulated Eros or Thanatos instincts were in the fore. She named the state of the psyche, when the sustaining principle of life is in domination, the depressive position. The psychological state corresponding to the disintegrating tendency of life she called the paranoid-schizoid position.[3]
Klein's insistence on regarding aggression as an important force in its own right when analysing children brought her into conflict with Freud's own daughter, Anna Freud, who was one of the other prominent child psychotherapists working in England at that time. Many controversies arose from this conflict, and these are often referred to as the controversial/scientific discussions.
Today, Kleinian psychoanalysis is one of the major schools within psychoanalysis. Kleinian psychoanalysts are members of the International Psychoanalytical Association. Kleinian psychoanalysis is claimed to be the predominant school of psychoanalysis within Britain, in much of Latin America, and with the possible exception of Lacanianism, in much of continental Europe. Within the United States of America, the Psychoanalytic Center of California is the major training center that follows the work of Melanie Klein. Kleinian psychoanalysis with adults is characterized by a very traditional technique using an analytic couch and meeting four to five times a week. Kleinian analysis focuses on interpreting very "deep" and primitive emotions and phantasies.
Melanie Klein's works are collected in four volumes:
Other books on Melanie Klein:
Melanie Klein was the subject of a 1988 play by Nicholas Wright, entitled Mrs. Klein. Set in London in 1934, the play involves a conflict between Melanie Klein and her daughter Melitta Schmideberg, after the death of Melanie's son Hans Klein. The depiction of Melanie Klein is quite unfavorable. In the original production at the Cottesloe Theatre in London, Gillian Barge played Melanie Klein, with Zoe Wannamaker and Francesca Annis playing the supporting roles. In the 1995 New York revival of the play, Melanie Klein was played by Uta Hagen, who described Melanie Klein as a role that she was meant to play.[4] The play was broadcasted on the British radio station BBC 4 in 2008 and revived at the Almeida Theatre in London in October 2009 with Claire Higgins as Melanie Klein.