Uprooted Minds

Surviving the Politics of Terror in the Americas

Nancy Caro Hollander

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• eBook ISBN: 9781135468736
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Mental Health in Psychology
• Index: Psychology

In our post-9/11 environment, our sense of relative security and stability as privileged subjects living in the heart of Empire has been profoundly shaken. Hollander explores the forces that have brought us to this critical juncture, analyzing the role played by the neoliberal economic paradigm and conservative political agenda that emerged in the West over the past four decades with devastating consequences for the hemisphere's citizens. Narrative testimonies of progressive U.S. and Latin American psychoanalysts illuminate the psychological meanings of living under authoritarian political conditions and show how a psychoanalysis "beyond the couch" contributes to social struggles on behalf of human rights and redistributive justice. By interrogating themes related to the mutual effects of social power and ideology, large group dynamics and unconscious fantasies, affects and defenses, Hollander encourages reflections about our experience as social/psychological subjects.

Chapter 1

Scared stiff

Social trauma and the post–9/11 political culture

May you live in interesting times.

—Chinese proverb

Vengeance is a lazy form of grief.

—Silvia Broome
The Interpreter (Pollack, 2005)

“I left Vienna on March 15, 1938, the very day Hitler himself entered the city as part of the official Anschluss. I remember that it was a beautiful, sunny, cool day, and a spontaneous popular celebration of the Führer’s arrival had erupted. The streets were packed with wildly cheering crowds waving Nazi flags. I knew I would be arrested and wouldn’t survive because I had published many anti-Nazi articles in magazines that had circulated in Paris and Amsterdam. Besides, because of what I had learned growing up in my highly politicized family and from my training at the University of Vienna, I was really clear about the horrors that lay in store for everyone under Nazi rule.” So begins Hedda Bolgar’s response to my question about how her experiences as a young woman living in Europe as it succumbed to fascism have influenced her reactions to the increasing threats to our democracy by the Bush administration’s “war on terror.”

It is a sunny day in July 2006, and Hedda, now 97 years old, is a psychoanalyst and social activist who still has a full-time practice. She is a training and supervising analyst at the Los Angeles Institute and Society for Psychoanalytic Studies, which she cofounded in the 1980s. Hedda’s comfortably elegant Brentwood home serves as a hospitable hub for many of the institute’s functions, and she hosts a salon on the first Wednesday of the month for colleagues to discuss a variety of topics ranging from clinical and theoretical psychoanalytic issues to the psychological implication of social problems. She and I are sitting in her earth-toned, informal living room, walls covered with original paintings and framed posters, many of which are visual representations of Hedda’s commitment to the significant political struggles of the last half century. Her gracious charm is reflected in the sumptuous gardens that surround the entranceway and the enticing fruits and pastries spread before us to energize our discussion. She periodically utters playful side comments to her beloved cats as they wander in and out, lazily curious about what their doting owner is up to now. In this same room, along with eight other psychoanalytic colleagues, Hedda and I have met on a monthly basis over the past three years, organizing a series of conferences for mental health professionals and the community at large that feature psychoanalytic perspectives on the crucial social issues of our times. On this day, as I listen to Hedda recount the details of her life, I am reminded once again about her finely tuned memory, which is the envy of her “younger” colleagues in our 50s and 60s. Each of us has had the experience during one meeting or another of struggling to remember a specific name or date and invariably turning to Hedda, who always amazes us with her reliable instant recall of all kinds of details. We are accustomed to chuckling every once in a while when, as we settle into our evening’s agenda and heave exhausted sighs after attending to patients all day, Hedda’s alert attentiveness is blunted as she mentions that she is a bit tired, having had a full schedule of patients on the heels of a rigorous, weekend, out-of-town conference. When we demand to know what accounts for her boundless energy at the age of 97, her answer is always the same: “Diet,” she responds. “I’ve been a vegetarian for 85 years.” And then she adds with a twinkle in her eye but quite seriously, “Oh, yes, and being engaged in the world, always fighting for the truth.”

Now the two of us are involved in the specific project of this book. Like my Latin American psychoanalytic colleagues whose personal testimonies illuminate my analysis of their countries’ traumatogenic political and economic crises, Hedda has agreed to share aspects of her history and self-reflections that help to contextualize my interpretation of the subjective experience of the drift toward authoritarianism and economic catastrophe in the United States since 9/11. Her lifelong social concerns mirror the commitments of much of the political activism that has emerged among psychoanalysts in the post–9/11 environment. I am intrigued by Hedda’s narrative in that much of it parallels Marie Langer’s experience of growing up in the cultural ferment of the interwar years in Europe. Both were forced to flee their homeland and, as immigrants in new countries, to integrate their progressive political views with their psychoanalytic theory and practice—Marie Langer in the context of the turbulent conditions of third-world Latin America, and Hedda in the less extreme circumstances of the U.S. superpower.

“I had been studying for my Ph.D. at the University of Vienna,” Hedda continues, now focusing on what life had been like before the Nazis extended their power into Austria. “I majored in psychology, and although the department was not psychoanalytic, nor were we involved in Freud’s free clinics,¹ some faculty had connections to Freud’s Institute. It was the 1930s, during the time that Vienna was exploding with all kinds of wonderful social and cultural programs supported by the progressive Social Democratic municipal government, including much of the mental health enterprise, some of it related to the work at the university’s psychology department. Many of the faculty were Marxists, members of the Socialist Party and the youth movement, and they were very much committed to social issues. The work was very intense. We studied child development, the importance of the mother–child relationship, and even the social effects of unemployment on communities. The orientation was one of understanding the individual in the context of family and community, and this reinforced in me a sensitivity to the internal and external—or the psychic and social—continuum in human experience. The department also had connections to American universities, and because I was interested in clinical training, which was not offered there, colleagues suggested I apply for a postdoctoral fellowship at the University of Chicago. My successful application turned out to be a life saver, because I was accepted just as Social Democracy was being vanquished by the Austro-fascist movement that later merged with the even more repressive Nazi Party. Many of the psychology faculty were arrested in the process.”

I ask Hedda what it was like living in the transition to fascism. “During the time the political situation worsened,” she says, “I noticed that as a manic defense people often joked about the really terrible events occurring all around us. We lived in an increasingly schizophrenic Vienna, with rising unemployment, poverty, and even homelessness for the first time. People were really suffering, but the opera and symphony and galleries were still operating, as was some semblance of informative news reportage for the middle and upper-middle classes. The privileged could often easily deny the frightening signs of terrible social dislocation and the looming political threat. For me, it was the writing on the wall, and I knew we had to leave. My fiancé, Herbert Bekker, was resistant to leaving. Like many others I argued with, he thought that since he was not publicly political, he would encounter little trouble with the Nazis and would therefore have plenty of time to take care of his family before departing. So he would emigrate later, and I would have to flee alone. I packed a small suitcase and set out to negotiate the labyrinthine Nazi-dominated border crossings and train routes that would take me to the coast of France, where I would set sail for New York.”

As Hedda describes in a matter-of-fact manner the often terrifying details of her flight, the images in my mind are like a cinematic thriller. I interrupt her to ask how she was able to tolerate what I imagine must have been intense anxiety given the personally threatening situations she frequently found herself in during her journey. How had she not been unbearably frightened? “No, I wasn’t scared,” she responds. “I wasn’t supposed to be scared of anything. I was raised not to be frightened.” She recalls how as a child just after World War I, her Marxist parents had been deeply involved in the short-lived leftist revolution that had brought socialism to Hungary for some brief months. “That was a very exciting period for me, even when as a nine-year-old my first real party was cancelled because my parents had to make the revolution. When I told my father that he had ruined my party, he said to me with a straight face, ‘I’m so sorry; I wish you’d have told me, and we would have postponed the revolution!’ But even with that major upset, I also remember it being glorious. My parents weren’t scared; they were remaking the world, and their attitude was, ‘If there’s a problem, you solve it; a need, you meet it.’” But there were also the more difficult aspects of experience during these tumultuous times, and Hedda’s early life was characterized by overstimulation, loss, and even depression. She has described the multiple losses she suffered brought on by war, her parents’ divorce, her frequent family moves from one country to another, and the loss of her first nanny. Although the political and social environment was exciting, Hedda (2001) has written that “…life during those years now feels like a manic defense against the chronic mourning everybody in the family was constantly feeling…today I know that what I knew not consciously then was that very little was experienced deeply” (p. 41).

I wonder aloud if the combination of political consciousness and manic defense learned early in life permitted her to endure with such equanimity the frightening conditions under which she fled fascist Austria. “Yes,” Hedda says, pondering the question. “The fear was probably there, but the terror and helplessness were really repressed. That was certainly the case for me as a child when the reactionary forces overturned the brief Hungarian socialist government and enacted a brutal backlash. Years later, when I flaunted my own safety to do some of the things I needed to do as I fled the Nazis, I didn’t permit myself to feel the fear either. On my way to France from Austria, for example, I took some risks going to Switzerland and Czechoslovakia and back into Germany to collect some of my father’s important papers and money from bank accounts that I knew would be needed later. In several potentially compromising situations when I was confronted by Nazi authorities, I remembered the lessons my father taught me about the importance of assuming a cool, disdainful demeanor with those in power, and I managed to save myself. On the other hand, I had a choice: I could have joined the resistance and stayed, but it never occurred to me. I don’t know why. I did not feel guilty about leaving because I had the conviction that after I left, I would be able to help more people than if I had stayed. It was true as it turned out, because I was able to bring a lot of people out and save their lives.”

This discussion stimulates associations for both of us to our present political environment in the United States and the omnipresent sense of threat that pervades the culture. We share the conviction that the Bush administration is eroding democracy by compromising civil liberties and the right to dissent, all the while legitimizing practices, such as torture and extraordinary renditions, that violate international and national law. His preemptive war policy depends on a military budget that is compromising our welfare at home and making the United States a rogue state internationally. We are worried about how the neoconservative discourse continues to dominate the media, disenfranchising critical voices as antipatriotic threats to national security. Hedda says she is reminded of the question that plagued so many in Europe as the Nazis eviscerated democracy from one country to another: When do you pack your bags and flee? It brings back painful memories for me, as well, memories of Latin American friends and colleagues who were forced to decide when the pivotal moment had arrived to make the life-altering decision to save themselves and their families by fleeing their countries’ state terrorist regimes. We ruefully agree that perhaps the scariest thing for us at this historical moment is that, in spite of so many citizens’ fantasies of moving to another country, in this globalized world, there is actually no place to escape to.

“After the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon,” Hedda is saying, “it was the first time in my life that I really allowed myself to be afraid. I’ve lived through all kinds of situations that were dangerous, and I always felt I had to—and could—do something. But after 9/11, I was suddenly scared to death. I couldn’t understand why, because Ground Zero was more than 3,000 miles away, and there was no real indication that something similar was about to happen here in Los Angeles. But I had the grim feeling, which I couldn’t put into words, that this was the beginning of something really bad. I just felt that Bush was going to use this tragedy in a very destructive way. It was nothing I could really consciously explain; it was just a general political mistrust. I was more afraid of the reaction to the terrorists than of the terrorists themselves, and that’s where I still am. What kind of a question is, ‘Why do they hate us?’ We know that for years the aim of this country’s foreign policy has been to control others’ resources and governments. And there is this split: The United States keeps doing what it’s been doing, and meanwhile we are caught up in this horrible trauma of 9/11 that is indelibly impressed on our psyches: the people who were in the towers burning to death, the dreadful images of those who leapt to their death, those who disappeared in the ashes that covered the city… and then the wonderful first responders. There is this constant battle: on the one hand, this terrible thing that has happened; and on the other, the retaliatory revenge strategy that was developed almost immediately, which I could not bear. I remembered how the Social Democrats caved in to the fascists in Vienna. Now I have this intense sense of complete helplessness in the face of something similar occurring among our elected representatives, Democrats and Republicans alike, in this government. We have to scramble even to get reliable information, and there is the feeling that we have lost whatever real democracy there was in the United States. Right after 9/11 I had the sensation that with the right wing in the White House, we were going to lose all the gains, like Social Security and other benefits of progressive state policies, that still existed. I had no idea then how bad it would actually get.”

These thoughts spark recollections of our work together that began in 2003, two years after the terrorist attacks. In response to 9/11 and Hedda’s urgent concerns about the problematic political realities she thought many citizens in this country were denying, including her psychoanalytic colleagues, she proposed organizing a conference on the reciprocal impact of psychic and social reality. She wanted to demonstrate that psychoanalysts have something to contribute to our understanding of how psychological experience is affected by and affects an increasingly dangerous world. When Hedda invited me to be a member of the committee that would organize the conference,² I was delighted because it represented in Los Angeles a bridge to the work I had been doing with my psychoanalytic social activist colleagues in Latin America. All the committee members wished to do something practical that would provide people with the opportunity to use their minds to think about the growing dangers of our new political reality that were emanating as much from domestic as they were from foreign influences. We wanted the conference to focus on how current social realities affect our individual psyches and how our psychic realities impact on and reorganize the larger social world. An additional goal was to help psychoanalysts and other mental health professionals think about external reality and social events as sources of their patients’ and their own profound anxieties rather than interpret them as if they were only symbolic of unconscious anxieties provoked by unresolved childhood conflict and trauma. After one year of intense planning, the three-day conference, “The Uprooted Mind: Psychoanalytic Perspectives on Living in an Unsafe World,” took place the last weekend of October 2004, on the eve of the highly contested 2004 national election. Keynote speakers included Robert Jay Lifton, who analyzed the U.S. experience of unprecedented vulnerability and its compensatory bellicose reaction to 9/11 as delineated in his book Superpower Syndrome: America’s apocalyptic confrontation with the world (Lifton 2003); Maureen Katz, who explored the multiple and paradoxical psychological meanings to U.S. citizens of the spectacle of Abu Ghraib (see Katz, 2006); Andrew Samuels, who conveyed aspects of his pioneering ideas about political subjectivity detailed in his Politics on the Couch (2007); and myself, with a presentation elaborating on my work on trauma, ideology, and psychic defenses, originally developed in the context of state terror in Latin America and now conceptualized in terms of the traumatogenic political culture of post–9/11 United States (see Hollander, 2006; Hollander & Gutwill, 2006).

I was in part concerned with the difficulty citizens in this country were having in recognizing the crisis of our democracy and the tendency to disavow reality because of the long-held ideological assumption that although authoritarian rule can occur anywhere else in the world, “it can’t happen here.” This attitude was an eerie reminder of what my friend and colleague Uruguayan psychoanalyst Marcelo Viñar had once poignantly told me about how it felt to be living in his country in 1971 during the several years before its century-long democratic rule was forcibly ended by a military coup. With painful irony, Marcelo had commented:

The process of political change and the capacity to subjectively absorb and understand this change operate at distinctly different rates…It’s as if I continued to believe in democracy when I was living in a country that was already totalitarian. I believe that it is characteristic of the period of transition between democracy and dictatorship that people function by denying reality.

I proposed that Marcelo’s observation of the tendency to deny a threatening reality could serve as a warning to us in this country as we, too, succumb to the wish to disavow the signs of our own transition toward an unprecedented centralization of political power and disenfranchisement of citizens. “The uprooted mind” was the metaphor for the painful and even traumatic impact of living in the post–9/11 environment permeated with dangers that were intensifying at a pace that felt overwhelming. The psychic residue of these social terrors, I argued, was apparent in our consultation rooms as patients experienced how the political is personal, the other side of the coin of the revolutionary idea proclaimed by feminists of the 1960s that “the personal is political.”

Since the “Uprooted Mind” conference, I have continued to extend my work on trauma, ideology, and psychic defenses as a construct to explain the subjective meanings of the political and economic crises that have become more profound and complex since 9/11. Like Hedda, I have been arguing that if we ever had any doubts, under the extreme social conditions in which we now live, it is no longer possible to speak of psychic and social reality as if they were two exclusively separate registers. Indeed, from my perspective, subjectivity is fashioned out of the intimate interplay between the imaginary dimensions of the unconscious, which is characterized by representations, drives, defenses, and affects, and a relational matrix that reaches out beyond the family to include the sociosymbolic order, composed of asymmetrical relations of power and force.

The Social Matrix of Psychic Experience

Psychoanalysts have been dealing for years from different theoretical perspectives with the concept of psychic reality and what role social reality plays in unconscious life. In the early 1990s, the International Psychoanalytic Association held its biannual congress in San Francisco, the theme of which was psychic reality. The invited presenters concurred that Freud’s concept of psychic reality, together with the theory of infantile sexuality, the unconscious, repetition, and transference, constituted the foundations of psychoanalysis. There was agreement that external reality had to be taken into account in any conceptualization of psychic reality, but external reality for most of the presenters meant essentially the intersubjective encounter between the analyst’s and the patient’s unconscious minds. For some, the mechanism of projective identification was the essential link between the subject and the external world. But others, most notably a group of Argentine psychoanalysts, argued that the components of the unconscious are not only ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Chapter 1. Scared stiff: Social trauma and the post–9/11 political culture
• Chapter 2. Political culture and psychoanalysis in the Southern Cone: Coming attractions of the Dirty Wars
• Chapter 3. A psychoanalysis for tumultuous times: The psyche and social revolution
• Chapter 4. The psychosocial dynamics of state terror
• Chapter 5. The culture of fear and social trauma
• Chapter 6. Exile: Paradoxes of loss and creativity
• Chapter 7. Neoliberal democracy in Latin America: Impunity and economic meltdown
• Chapter 8. U.S. neoliberal / neoconservative democracy: Psychoanalysis without the couch
• Chapter 9. Impunity and resistance: Saving democracy in the heart of empire
• Chapter 10. The future’s uprooted minds
• References
• Index