You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
Those of us who work with survivors of child abuse will know of its corrosive effects on the psyche. The sense of imminent catastrophe, the ever-present sense of a betrayal of trust, the heightened sensitivity to boundary transgressions, real or imagined, and the hyper-vigilance demanded of the psychotherapist to provide a holding environment, make such work demanding. Think then if this culture of fear, with its concomitant authoritarianism, aggression, hate and paranoia, becomes part of the larger political and social fabric, to the extent that civil life is destroyed, and the reliance on the predictability of the every day with its known rules and regulations no longer holds.
Such devastation is described, analysed and interpreted in Love in a Time of Hate, by Nancy Hollander, an American professor of history and a political scientist, who in the process of researching for her book on the psychological impact of living life under the brutal rule of the military juntas in the Southern Cone of Latin America, that is, Chile, Uruguay and Argentina, found neither her radical political nor feminist