Power, Trauma and Resistance: Psychosocial Perspectives on Subjectivity from Latin America
When:
—
Venue:
Birkbeck Main Building, Malet Street
No booking required
Nancy Caro Hollander is a Latin American historian and Professor Emerita of History at California State University, Dominguez Hills. She is a Research Psychoanalyst and a member and faculty of the Psychoanalytic Institute of Northern California with a private clinical practice in Oakland and Los Angeles, California. She is past President and current Board member of Section 9, Psychoanalysis for Social Responsibility, the Division of Psychoanalysis of The American Psychological Association.
Over the past four and a half decades, Hollander has lived and travelled in Latin America, researching and writing about the subcontinent’s power structures and peoples’ resistance movements. She lived in Argentina during the late sixties and seventies and was forced to leave on the eve of that country’s military coup that launched its dirty war against its own citizens. She has returned many times to Argentina as well as other Latin American countries suffering similar experiences where she has witnessed and researched the ongoing traumatic sequelae of extreme political repression on individuals, families and large groups.
Hollander has been an award-winning documentary filmmaker and producer/host for 16 years of a bi-weekly one-hour radio program in which she broadcast programs related to feminism, neoliberal policy and culture, Latin American political developments and psychoanalytic engagement with social issues in Latin America and the United States.
Over the years, her experiences with a network of Latin American psychoanalysts, especially from the Southern Cone, committed to struggles for social justice, have contributed to her analyses of what she calls “liberation psychology”, a transdisciplinary approach to understanding the reciprocal impact of social forces, ideology and unconscious individual and group fantasy, affects and defences. She is primarily interested in the factors that promote identification with power and those that facilitate the emergence of subjects capable of resistance to hegemony.
Hollander’s books include Love in a Time of Hate: Liberation Psychology in Latin America; Uprooted Minds: Surviving the Politics of Terror in the Americas and as co-editor and contributor, Psychoanalysis, Class and Politics: Encounters in the Clinical Setting. Recent journal articles include: “Torture and the Problem of the Bystander”; “Mapping Aggression and Hegemony in the Neoliberal Era”; “Who Is the Sufferer and What Is Being Suffered? Subjectivity in Times of Social Malaise”; “Trauma as Ideology: Accountability in “The Intractable Struggle;” “The gendering of human rights: Women and the Latin American terrorist state”; “Anti-Muslim Prejudice and the Psychic Use of the Ethnic Other.”
In this presentation, Nancy Hollander explores the psychosocial dynamics of Power and the processes by which subjects adapt to or resist their insertion into its hegemonic command. Her analysis emerges from decades of engagement with a network of Southern Cone psychoanalysts whose radical theory and praxis were shaped in the context of political authoritarianism and neoliberal forms of oppression. Hollander elaborates how bearing witness to social trauma and resistance in Latin America has shaped her understanding of subjectivity in the Global North, where we now share with our Latin American counterparts an increasingly traumatogenic environment, characterized by the multiple threats of climate crisis, precarity, militarism, and proto-fascist and white supremacist terrorist threats to democratic institutions and culture.
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Psychosocial Studies