Commentary on “Psychoanalysis and State Terror in Argentina”

Nancy Caro Hollander's article raises substantial issues that go beyond events that have taken place in Argentina. For ours has been a terrible century; those who, starting in the Enlightenment and continuing through the Victorian era, looked forward confidently to social and political progress, would have to be shocked by events that have unfolded in our time. Hitler's coming to power in Germany is impossible to forget. But too many choose to gloss over the fact that he succeeded by means that were pretty fair-and-square; he did not seize power illegally, but was democratically elected under a parliamentary system. To make matters worse, more worrisome to friends of the ideal of self-government, the Weimar constitution, which governed Germany after World War I until Hitler finally did away with it, had been drafted by some of the best minds in modern social science. Tyranny and state terror have not just beset someplace like Argentina, about which most of us know little, but have afflicted a culture like Germany that has been so central to the Western tradition. Freud, along with so many others at the time, missed seeing the impending catastrophe: “A nation that produced Goethe,” he is reported to have observed, “could not possibly go to the bad.'”

I would argue that the practice of psychoanalysis, and psychotherapy too, becomes impossible under conditions of a modern authoritarian political regime. Just as I believe that Germany under Hitler lacked a legal system, since the “law” was administered by courts for such arbitrary and evil purposes, so I think that under such political conditions it is indecent even to think of carrying on something like psychoanalytic therapy.2 Of course there is such a phenomenon as heroism, and it is possible for human nature to be capable of rising to extraordinary heights. But most people try to get on with their lives, as they adapt to outside reality; and it is all too easy to slide into collaborating in nefarious social practices