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The complicity of psychoanalysis with authoritarian political regimes is one of the signal facts in its history. The most important example is that of Sigmund Freud, Anna Freud and Ernest Jones who all sought to work with German psychoanalysis after it had been rendered Judenrein, that is, after the Jewish analysts had been expelled. Also of great significance was the cooperation of many American ego psychologists with the Cold War, even with McCarthyite repression. To be sure, the opposite is also the case. There were psychoanalysts who resisted Nazism and who stood up to Cold War bullying. Uprooted Minds is a study of both sides of this analytic conundrum, as applied to the Americas.
The latter phrase is the key to understanding the book. Although largely devoted to Latin America, Hollander's perspective places the US in the role of hegemon for the entire hemisphere. Nothing that happens in Latin America happens without US influence. Furthermore, in a brilliant turn, she takes the experiences of violence and oppression with which Latin American (especially Argentinean and Brazilian) psychoanalysis has been inflected, and turns those experiences back on the study of the United States. In particular, she uses Latin American analytic understandings of trauma, mourning and working through to examine the North American response to 9/11.
In 1991 Horacio Etchegoyen was elected President of the International Psychoanalytic Association. The election marked the recognition of the leading role that Latin Americans played in the global analytic profession. Brazilian analysis flourished, with perhaps 11 major institutes. Buenos Aires billed itself as the ‘world capital of psychoanalysis.’ When the IPA met there in 1991 it commanded a level of news coverage comparable to that which the International Chess Association commands in Moscow, or the World Series in New York.
Yet, ten years earlier, Jacques Derrida had written:
This that we would call from now on the Latin America of psyc