ABSTRACT
Hollander elaborates a social psychoanalytic conceptualization of how the subject is constituted by the social matrix that frames psychic experience and how intrapsychic and intersubjective dynamics affect the social world. This theoretical discussion provides the context for her analysis of the U.S. response to 9/11, in which this country’s cultural traditions, prevailing ideologies, and asymmetrical power relations overdetermined an aggressive domestic and international agenda that continues to dominate contemporary politics. Hollander explores the politically repressive trends within the Bush administration and the variety of psychological defensives, including denial, that U.S. citizens employed to deal with the multiple threats of a culture in crisis, producing a bystander population that yielded to the government’s anti-democratic policies. The chapter’s themes emerge through Hollander’s exchanges with her interlocutor, Swiss-born Hungarian psychoanalyst Hedda Bolgar, then in her late nineties, who offers comparisons between her firsthand witnessing of the advent of European fascism during the 1930s and her experience managing the dangers posed by the post–9/11 U.S. political culture’s drift toward authoritarianism. The chapter traces how conjunctions of social power, hegemonic ideology, social location, and unconscious processes organize subjective response to political extremism.
