Search

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]

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 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]