Nancy Caro Hollander

Trauma as ideology: Accountability in the “intractable conflict”

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.

Social trauma, politics and psychoanalysis: A personal narrative

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.

Who Is the Sufferer and What Is Being Suffered? Subjectivity in Times of Social Malaise

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.