Latin American States of Terror, Psychoanalysis, and the U.S.

Review Essay of Nancy Hollander, Uprooted Minds: Surviving the Politics of Terror in the Americas (New York: Routledge, 2010), xi-xvi, 403 pages, ISBN 978-0-88163-490-7.

Uprooted Minds is a tour de force, a book that covers so much territory and has so many themes that a review of this length cannot possibly do it the justice it deserves, so I will limit myself to highlighting a small selection of subjects. Uprooted Minds is written on two levels, focused on the transition in and out of states of terror in the Southern Cone, i.e., Argentina, Uruguay, and Chile, in the 1970’s and 80’s and the relevance of this sordid period of South American history for the contemporary United States. To bring the reader into the world of these terror states, Dr. Nancy Hollander uses in-depth interviews with socially active analysts who lived through the transformation of the three nations from democracies to

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brutal dictatorships. At a deeper level, the book examines the intersection of psychoanalysis and societal structures and practices, and presents a compelling case for a socially active psychoanalysis.

The horrors of living under states of terror are brought to life in Hollander’s writing, most poignantly through the experiences of the protagonists. Each interviewee struggled to maintain his/her professional and personal identity in the face of massive repression. The anxiety of living under a state of terror entered the consulting room as each analyst realized “neutrality” is not possible when the patient is reporting terror that is all too real and the analyst’s fears mirror the patient’s paranoid dreads. The brave protagonists sustained their social activism to the point of danger by denying the immanence of the threat to the country and themselves. A Uruguayan analyst, Marcelo Vina, spent several months in jail, and an Argentine analyst, Tato Pavlovsky, lived in arrogant defiance of the military until armed, hooded men broke into a group therapy session he was conducting, forcing him to escape through a window and live underground until he could leave the country. Each protagonist felt the relief and suffered the guilt of exile. When they were able to return to their countries, all felt that they, their friends, and their country had changed so much after years of terror and repressive rule that they were not coming home, but departing once again. These uprooted minds remained as such as the legacy of the terror endured.

The compelling stories of the targets of oppression are a means for exploring the complex relationship between psychoanalysis and society. Hollander argues that the impact of the terror state and its supporting ideology on analytic patients indicates that the analyst cannot understand the subjectivity of her patient without grasping the extent to which the dominant ideology is internalized in the patient’s experience. The success of the hegemonic ideology in penetrating the psyches of the citizens of each country played a major role in the acquiescence of the populous to authoritarian rule. That is a major reason for Hollander’s argument for the analyst’s involvement in activities beyond the couch. Analysis, in her view, requires societal freedom and respect for individual rights for the patient to elaborate her free associations and fantasies. Consequently, it is incumbent on the analyst to work for the kind of soci-

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ety that promotes, rather than impedes, social justice, democratic values, and freedom. Furthermore, Hollander shows that social justice movements can benefit from analytic input, as for example in the worker takeover of the Grissinopoli factory in Argentina. Two analysts helped the workers deal with their timidity in opposing authority and uncertainty about whether they were, in fact, capable of controlling their working lives.

Hollander argues that analytic ideas shed light on societal ills. She understands the mindset of the state terrorists as a primitive splitting of the psyche as the dissenters are reduced to subhuman poisons from which the body politic must be cleansed. Hollander notes that this bifurcation of a nation’s citizenry reflects a regressive paranoid-schizoid state of splitting and omnipotent control.

The implications of state terror in the Southern Cone for the U.S. are deftly portrayed. The contemporary consumer culture of quickly changing societal forms and needs is resulting in a loss of security and fosters anxieties of fragmentation and dislocation— fears that is, of uprooted minds. Hollander seems to be arguing that the contemporary consumer culture is a society of psychic homelessness and purposelessness, of vulnerable individuals desperate for a sense of security. She warns that the consequence may be a willingness to accept loss of freedom and even totalitarian practices. In the aftermath of 9/11 and the American economic crisis, there is a quickly growing political movement favoring the practices of a police state, such as torture and governmental spying. Those factors—along with the Bush Administration’s successful exploitation of 9/11 to justify the invasion of a sovereign country— demonstrate the willingness of many American citizens to give up democratic rights and principles in favor of what they believe to be security.

But, Hollander argues, such tradeoffs rarely pay off, even in their own terms. Authoritarian takeover of the Southern Cone nations resulted in terror, not security. Hollander notes that when the 1973 Chilean military deposed the democratic government, former president Eduardo Frei supported the coup, thinking that he would be back in power. The military held onto its police powers for 18 years, committing large-scale torture and genocide. Hollander

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notes that it is chilling to think of how easy it has been for the American people to acquiesce to torture and military aggression. Ultimately, then, this book is a call to American analysts to use their understanding to confront the authoritarian tendencies growing quickly in today’s political culture. To refuse to do so is to assume the defensive stance of the bystander, denying oppression and collaborating in the erosion of democratic values and of their nation and profession as they know it. The powerful message of this book that there is no neutrality, that the psyche and the social cannot be separated, is demonstrated so well and interwoven with so many valuable themes that reading it is a must for all who have an interest in socially active psychoanalysis.

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