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An interview with Nancy Hollander who is an internationally recognized criminal defense lawyer in the New Mexico firm of Freedman Boyd Hollander Goldberg & Davis is presented. Topics include talks about describing his background, his work as an attorney, and share why they chose to represent prisoners held at Guantanamo Bay.

The author explores torture as one component of the regressive policies implemented within the context of political authoritarianism. She illustrates her contention with two disparate examples: the Argentine military dictatorship from 1976 to 1983 and U.S. constitutional democracy in the post 9/11 era and the post-Trump electoral victory. She analyzes the social matrix of neoliberal ideology and institutions that are internalized to become aspects of psychic reality. The bystander phenomenon is examined in light of how psychological dynamics intersect with social forces and hegemonic ideology to create passive citizens who tend to behave in their own self-interest rather than respond to the suffering of others. The psi professions are interpreted as resources for hegemony unless practitioners are critically committed to an ethical stance capable of challenging the prevailing status quo. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

I appreciate the opportunity to engage in this virtual dialogue with Dorothy Evans Holmes and Eyal Rozmarin, both of whom in this issue offer thoughtful discussions of my paper that in some instances questioned and in others expanded my analysis of neoliberal hegemony and subjectivity. My response to their commentaries touches on the following themes: the connection between instincts and hegemonic ideology and discourses; the nature of neoliberal culture in light of the history of group violence, sacrifice, and scapegoating; and the role of nostalgia in critical interpretations of neoliberal society and its vicissitudes. I also offer an addendum to my paper, written before the 2016 election, to comment on how neoliberalism produced the current political crisis, in which social malaise has been punctured by authoritarian politics, populist activism, and ideological polarization. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper encourages clinicians to consider how patients’ conflicts and symptoms reveal not only familial etiology but the internalization of hegemonic structures and ideology. It explores how the subject evolves within the cultural matrix of neoliberalism, the contemporary hegemonic system that shapes unconscious fantasy, conflicts and defenses. Several clinical case vignettes illustrate the benefits to both analyst and patient of exploring within the transference and countertransference how neoliberal hierarchical arrangements of class, race and gender affect subjective and intersubjective experience. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

It is important to understand how three registers - the psychological, the political and the ideological - converge to frame unconscious life in ways that either inhibit or facilitate individual and group capacities to exercise free speech and free association. Here a model for assessing how these registers of human affect and behavior either facilitate these freedoms of expression or sabotage them in favor of submission to authority is suggested. The discussion is positioned in the context of two traumatic periods in Argentine history, namely the military dictatorship's Dirty War (1976-1983) and the country's complete economic collapse in 2001. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores several paradigmatic approaches to understanding the causes of the intractability of the Israeli/Palestinian conflict. It elaborates a perspective that illuminates how the traumatic histories of both peoples construct a victim state of mind, whose paranoid schizoid mechanisms are exacerbated by the ongoing traumatogenic environment of violence and war, thus foreclosing capacities for peacemaking. After critiquing the trauma paradigm's assumptions of psychological symmetry and shared responsibility for the conflict, the paper develops an alternative social psychoanalytic model that situates the unconscious processes produced by trauma within the specificities of history, large group identity, ideological hegemony and power hierarchies that shape the psychological experience of both peoples and account for the complex systemic asymmetries that impede the possibilities for a just reconciliation of their tragic conflict. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article posits that social trauma is to be understood from a social psychoanalytic perspective that takes account of the complex interface and mutual impact of social forces and unconscious dynamics. Its argument, that politics and psychology are inevitably interwoven as the foundation of subjectivity, is explored through an autobiographical journey that inexorably took the author from political activism to psychoanalysis. The author's personal, professional and political encounter with the traumatogenic conditions of Latin American state terror, and her involvement in a progressive movement within psychoanalysis that aligns the profession with activist struggles on behalf of social justice, is proposed as a significant model for psychoanalysts in the Global North as well as the Global South. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article analyzes the psychopolitical dynamics of the bystander phenomenon in the context of Argentine state terror. It explores the population's adaptation to the military's Official Story through psychological defences that resulted in losses of individual and group identity. It depicts the factors that potentiate disengagement from a coercive power and its culture of fear. These themes are examined in Luis Puenzo's 1985 Academy-award winning film, The Official Story, whose story portrays the psychological and ideological characteristics of the bystander and the capacity of the subject to emerge from self-deception to tolerate the complex truths of psychic and social reality. Copyright © 2011 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The author expresses opinion on the psychoanalytic construct of "the psychic uses of the ethnic other" as a way of understanding the features of anti-Muslim prejudice in the U.S. and its implications on U.S.-Middle East policy. She analyzes the roots of U.S. anti-Muslim prejudice which it claims to have sprung from White racist cultural tradition in the U.S. and the prominence of Christianity. She explains how the September 11, 2001 terrorism attacks in the U.S. raised antagonism against Arabs and Muslims.

The article discusses the psychoanalytic view on the paradox of prejudice on the part of the U.S. as it created policies that favor Israel and the role of U.S. geopolitical interests in forming the nature of Israeli/Palestinian conflict. It emphasizes the importance of Israel to U.S. policies as the latter government fight against Arab nationalism that would pose a threat to its geopolitical interest and access to petroleum reserves. The author states the need to understand the role of the U.S. in the conflict within broader cultural matrix.

The author presents a psychoanalytic discourse on global warming and ecological destruction. She thinks that humans can suffer from many problematic aspects of social order without knowing the root of their discordant experience. She notes that humans defend themselves from anxiety and harsh reality by ignoring the threats to their existence. She expounds the concept of denial by referring to Sigmund Freud.

The paper consists of the online discussion of Nancy Hollander's ‘Psyche, Ideology, and the Creation of the Political Subject’, summarized. Copyright © 2008 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper consists of a discussion of Neil Altman's ‘Psychoanalysis and war’, which was conducted online through PsyBC in the fall of 2006. Discussants were a group of psychoanalytically oriented thinkers chosen by the author and Nancy Hollander, the author of the other paper included in the discussion. The paper represents the full discussion with only minor edits to correct typographical errors and improve clarity. Copyright © 2007 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses the influence of socioeconomic and ideological factors on the psychological reactions to the terror of the September 11 attack. The article argues that the public response to the terrorist attacks is paradoxical as they were experienced as cataclysmic and causes the shocking loss of innocent lives. On the other hand, the attacks could also be seen as a relief from the deepening division among individuals in the U.S. that seemed to disappear in the wake of the shared pain, terror and loss.

An account of the aims and genesis of Psychoanalysis, Class and Politics: Encounters in the Clinical Setting (Layton et al., 2006). The editors of the collection aim to convey a sense of what social and political concerns have shaped them as editors and why they were moved to produce the book. They each offer a personal piece that highlights particular themes in the book and in their lives as psychoanalyst-activists. Copyright © 2007 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The author explores the psychological meanings of the migration of women from the global South to the global North, especially when this experience is motivated by political repression as well as economic inequities characteristic of their countries of origin. The article focuses on Latin American women and highlights the psychodynamic complexities inherent in the stages of migration, which entail multiple psychological, as well as social, losses and adaptive challenges. It is argued that in capitalist globalization Third World women contribute a number of caregiving activities in low-waged and informal labor markets in which the individuals, families, and corporate structures of the global North that benefit fail to recognize and reciprocate for the emotional and material needs of the women on whom they increasingly rely for the care of their basic human requirements. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper, written by a Latin American historian and psychoanalyst, accounts for the factors responsible for current United States foreign policy, which is contributing to the intensification rather than the amelioration of dangerous political and military tensions throughout the world. It offers an interdisciplinary analysis of the growing contradictions in United States class society that represent the context for the particular ways that the traumatic events of 9/11 were experienced by citizens and used by the Bush administration in its manipulation of the public's fears and anxieties for its own ideological ends. It shows how primitive mental states among both leaders and citizens have profoundly thwarted the ability of the country to sustain democracy and national security at home or to fashion a strategy to diminish antagonisms toward the world's only superpower. The author analyses the history of exploitative United States attitudes and policies toward Latin America as the backdrop for assessing the prevailing critical views throughout the subcontinent of the United States 'war on terror', which is seen in part as the continuation of the drive to expand geopolitical and military control throughout the Global South. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper shows how in an interdisciplinary context psychoanalysis can illuminate the interface between ideology and mental states that produces citizens' identification with repressive political trends. It argues for a socially conscious clinical psychoanalysis that includes an awareness of and respectful exploration of the social as well as the psychic origins of patients' deep anxieties and conflicts. Copyright © 2008 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]