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Noëlle McAfee's Fear of Breakdown: Politics and Psychoanalysis was released in 2019 as rising nationalism and polarization evolved in tandem with deep social pathologies evident in the escalating racism in police violence, anti-immigrant policies, and white supremacist terrorism.
McAfee's book was awarded the Courage to Dream Prize by the American Psychoanalytic Association, honoring “the book that best promotes the integration of the academic and clinical worlds of psychoanalysis.” The book is even more relevant now, as the disparity in Covid mortality and vaccination patterns highlights the nation's political and racial fault lines. Though the triumph of nationalism in the U.S. may have been averted, the paranoia underlying the denial of the presidential election results by so many indicates that political sectarianism, barring significant systemic change, will likely continue gaining strength. A model for transformative systemic change is what McAfee lays out in her book.
It seems that as psychoanalyst citizens we can no longer insulate ourselves from the larger culture or look away from our participation in these systems. Our dependence on others to prevent the virus from spreading, and to be reliable sources of information while relying on our government to equitably and efficiently deliver vaccines, spotlights the reality of how interdependent we are. Attesting this interdependence, psychoanalytic scholarship and activism increasingly look to neighboring fields to see what we can learn, and what we have discounted and enabled. In similar fashion, fields such as critical theory have looked to psychoanalysis to understand human irrationality at times of crisis, as when much of Europe turned to fascism after World War I and now again, as the world turns to populism and other movements, putting the planet and its citizens in rising danger. “Cultural theory,” McAfee writes “has been more bent on diagnosis than remedy. Critical theory has been attuned more towards