ABSTRACT

This timely collection asks the reader to consider how society’s modern notion of humans as rational, isolated individuals has contributed to psychological and social problems and oppressive power structures.

Experts from a range of disciplines offer a complex understanding of how humans are shaped by history, tradition, and institutions. Drawing upon the work of Lacan, Fanon, and Foucault, this text examines cultural memory, modern ideas of race and gender, the roles of symbolism and mythology, and neoliberalism’s impact on psychology. Through clinical vignettes and suggested applications, it demonstrates significant alternatives to the isolated individualism of Western philosophy and psychology.

This interdisciplinary volume is essential reading for clinicians and anyone looking to augment their understanding of how human beings are shaped by the societies they inhabit.

chapter |13 pages

Introduction

1Intergenerational Strains

chapter 1|20 pages

Open Wounds

Discerning, Owning, and Narrating Deep History

chapter 2|12 pages

Frantz Fanon and Psychopathology

The Progressive Infrastructure of Black Skin, White Masks

chapter 3|27 pages

American Cultural Symbolism of Rage and Resistance in Collective Trauma

Racially-Influenced Political Myths, Counter-Myths, Projective Identification, and the Evocation of Transcendent Humanity

chapter 4|17 pages

Neoliberalism and the Ethics of Psychology 1 2

Jeff Sugarman

chapter 5|18 pages

Black Rage and White Listening

On the Psychologization of Racial Emotionality

chapter 6|24 pages

Jouissance and Discontent

A Meeting of Psychoanalysis, Race, and American Slavery

chapter 7|19 pages

The Nasty Woman

Destruction and the Path to Mutual Recognition

chapter 8|12 pages

Another Voice from Radical Ethics

Denmark’s Knud Løgstrup

chapter 9|17 pages

Identity-as-disclosive-space

Dasein, Discourse and Distortion

chapter 10|18 pages

Finding the Other in the Self

Nancy McWilliams

chapter 11|16 pages

After the World Collapsed

Two Culturally Embedded Forms of Service to Others Following Wide-Scale Societal Traumas 1