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This 400 page volume is an impressive work that weaves history, psychoanalysis and memoir with a discourse on the social, political and economic forces that affect many aspects of contemporary life in the Americas. The author, a Los Angeles-based psychoanalyst and Professor Emeritus of Latin American history at California State University is also the President of the section of Psychoanalysis for Social Responsibility of the American Psychological Association.
The book is comprised of 10 chapters. The first chapter sets the stage by describing the backdrop to the origins of this book in a three-day conference held in 2004 to discuss the impact of 9/11, where the author presented her work on the relationship between trauma, ideology and psychic defenses in the context of state terror in Latin America from the 1960s to the 1990s. She traces her views on the relationship between the psyche and the larger social order to the work of group theorists such as Bion and Foulkes and others such as Lacan and Laplanche. She addresses herself particularly to the issue of how the less privileged people in a society come to identify with a world view that is not in their objective interests, and what feeds the disinterestedness of the general population in the miscarriage of social and moral justice wrought by practices such as those exemplified by the CIA's (Central Intelligence Agency's) “extraordinary renditions” or Guantanamo Bay.
She then moves on to an engaging, quasi-biographical description of the time she spent in Latin America and gives the reader a historian's insight into the turmoil that engulfed Argentina, Chile and Uruguay, each of which fell prey to state terror that was abetted by the exploitative policies of succeeding US governments. This chapter also provides insight into her own transition from historian to psychoanalyst as she became increasingly familiar and intimate with the exiled community of psychoanalysts from these countries and, especially, the Argentin