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A psychoanalyst must make use of diverse perspectives to engage with the patient: he or she must recognize the transference scenes in which familiar characters in the life of the patient are played out and gain unconscious meanings. These early object relations are replayed within a sociohistorical and sociocultural context, both past and present, as both analyst and analysand share the present context. Nancy Caro Hollander's book accomplishes what analysts rarely do: she immerses us with intelligence and force in the sociohistorical context in which a number of psychoanalysts suffered, in their own flesh, the ravages of state terrorism in Latin America. Via her selection of cases paradigmatic of the suffering that ensued from such policies and practices, we can explore the effects of the social context on the analytic setting and on the mind of the analyst. We can then realize how it is possible to achieve a degree of psychological freedom and sublimation. The author writes about the lives of psychoanalysts in Argentina, Chile, and Uruguay whom she interviewed extensively. At times the book reads like a novel, allowing us to penetrate the vicissitudes of minds immersed in a violent milieu. We can understand the particular setting in which each of her subjects lived and the effects of the political practice of extermination and cruelty, which involved the participation of other nations. She also allows us to extrapolate and compare the ferocity of the Latin American context to the situation in nations of the Northern Hemisphere, where violence is manifested in different ways that must also be taken into consideration by psychoanalysts.
In general, psychoanalytic theory lacks a theory capable of explaining how a subject construes a sense of social belonging. In consequence, it is easy to isolate the transference-countertransference field from what may be called social reality. In this way our practice