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This book is a collection of 25 popular political essays (in the nature of op-ed articles and blogs) written by the California psychoanalyst Peter Wolson that appeared in select American newspapers. Twelve of them are from the Huffington Post, eight from the Los Angeles Times and a few from other publications, such as Counter Punch, International Psychoanalysis and Thomson Reuters (as well as one never before published). They begin with an early one (from 1972) about Thomas Eagleton, the erstwhile Vice Presidential candidate whom George McGovern chose as a running mate and who was then summarily dropped from the Democratic ticket when the media discovered he had undergone a course of ECT as a youth. And after a break of almost 30 years the essays continue on a variety of subjects, ending in a slew that touch on the years of George Bush, Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump. The last one appeared in 2017 and the book was published in 2019 so that the strange events that have taken place in the USA in the first impeachment of President Trump, the 2020 election and what happened afterward do not figure, although some of these events were anticipated by Wolson.
The essays are accompanied by text before and afterward in which Wolson explains about the background, process and goals of each essay. This background sometimes makes it rather difficult to recognize where the article ends and where the hindsight begins. Because they are so diverse (ranging from Barack Obama’s candidacy to the awful torture that America administered at the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq to the Penn State coach Joe Paterno’s failure to prevent his assistant Jerry Sandusky from raping young men) I only discuss some of the op-ed pieces here.
Wolson’s basic plea to US psychoanalysts is that we not shy away from speaking out to the public about political matters and that we have a moral duty to do so. He says:
Joining the media dialogue about the “breaking news of the day” could enrich and enhance American publ