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Is it possible to maintain hope, when massive forces are arrayed against us? Reading Nancy Hollander's Uprooted Minds: Surviving the Politics of Terror in the Americas, this question comes to mind. In this formidable work, Hollander peels away our remaining illusions about a just world. Interweaving history, politics, political/economic/cultural critique, and psychoanalysis, she exposes the covert power structures operative for decades in the Americas. These are ruthless forms of capitalism that deprive their citizens while immobilizing them with hatred and terror. To Hollander, these forms of government have dominated both North and South America. She makes this case persuasively. Hollander is both a psychoanalyst and a social activist. She has spent many years exposing, and examining, the authoritarian regimes of South America. In this, and in her prior work (Love in a Time of Hatred), she unpacks the inner workings of these authoritarian regimes. She asks hard questions. How do torture regimes gain force and power? How do they terrorize, bewilder, starve, and immobilize an entire populace? In studying these questions, Hollander applies an interdisciplinary lens. Freudian and Kleinian theory is used to illuminate the structure, and functioning, of these governments. But this author also has a very thorough grasp of economic, social, and political history; for Hollander, this history is inseparable from her psychoanalytic investigation. Indeed, this book makes a formidable, if secondary argument: that psychoanalysis had its origins in social consciousness, and cultural critique. This author would say that she is not creating a new methodology, however, but rather applying the forgotten tools of psychoanalysis.
Hollander argues that neoliberal power structures are plundering the planet, eviscerating democracy, sanctioning torture, violating human rights, eradicating the social contract, starving the poor, and impoverishing the middle class. To Hollander, these practi