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Over its history, psychoanalysis has had a complex relationship to both the political left and social activism. Originally viewed as avant-garde, early psychoanalysis was often associated with radical and bohemian movements. It was not by accident that the anarchist Emma Goldman was among Freud's audience at Clark University, that the Bloomsbury authors were interested in it, or that the first academic chair in psychoanalysis was at Budapest Medical School during the Communist Bela Kun's four months in power in 1919. And, as Jacoby (1983) explained, an impressive number of second-generation, European analysts were men and women of the cultural and political left, a significant minority of whom identified with the radical Left.
At the same time, historically, few psychoanalysts have simultaneously been social activists. The most well known exception was Wilhelm Reich, who organized the SexPol (Sexual Politics) movement in early 1930's Germany (Reich, 1972). By and large, however, like many left-wing intellectuals, at least in the United States and Europe, those psychoanalysts attracted to left-wing ideas wrote social critiques and theorized about social change, while leaving actual activism to others.
This book, Uprooted Minds: Surviving the Politics of Terror in the Americas, calls attention to groups of Latin American psychoanalysts who in the 1970s constituted major exceptions to this divorce between theory and practice. These analysts pursued social change with the same passion that they learned and practiced psychoanalysis. Author Nancy Hollander complements her account of Latin American psychoanalytic activism and its political and social contexts with a discussion of neo-liberal and authoritarian tendencies in post-9/11 United States and nascent efforts by psychoanalytic activists here to put their