ABSTRACT
In the context of the corrupt political culture of the Bush era, Hollander delineates the philosophical and ideological foundations of neoliberalism as a strategy to maintain U.S. capitalism and shore up the country’s floundering hegemonic position in the world. Hollander explicates how neoliberalism, as political philosophy, economic policy, and hegemonic ideology is internalized to become a core aspect of normative subjectivity and intersubjective dynamics that disabled a collective opposition to the slow encroachment of authoritarian rule by an elected government. With Hedda Bolgar as an interlocutor, she analyzes the shift from the privatized origins of psychoanalysis in this country and its isolation from larger social questions to the emergence during the Bush war culture of psychoanalysts and psychoanalytic projects identified with values of social responsibility. This chapter provides a unique opportunity to learn about psychoanalysts in the U.S. who came to mirror the concerns and social commitments of their Latin American counterparts, including through their activism within the American Psychological Association in opposition to the participation of some of the organization’s members in the U.S. military’s “enhanced interrogations” (aka, torture sessions) of political prisoners.
