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Renos Papadopoulos's article is in response to a seminal paper by published in the British Journal of Psychotherapy, 1998, 2, pp. 201-17. Both papers explore the challenges to psychodynamic and psychoanalytic theory posed by political situations of such terror as Hollander describes. Psychodynamic theory is formulated, in the view of both authors, largely within a pathology model, and tends to ignore the violent forces at work in the turbulent upheavals of the external world. Papadopoulos acknowledges Hollander's use of attachment theory, with her own modifications to it, as a relevant contribution to the subject, and he describes her writing as ‘moving, personal and poetic’. His article develops some ideas about the importance of shared narratives to psychic survival, and how these can extend understanding about Bowlby's concept of the ‘secure base’.
Hollander writes about the meaning of exile to those who suffered torture and violations of their human rights in Central and South America. In particular, she draws from the personal experiences of two psychoanalysts. Marie Langer emigrated to Argentina following her participation in the Spanish Civil War, and in 1974 was forced to flee to Mexico City after her name appeared on the death lists. Marcelo Vinar was a psychoanalyst in Uruguay in the 1960s, and was imprisoned and tortured because of his progressive politics. Hollander argues that in the pre-migratory state the oppression caused by the ‘terrorist state's culture of fear’ produces as a strategy of survival the development of a false self. She points out how many individuals come to disavow their deeply held beliefs in order to escape annihilation from the external environment. She believes that this throws many back to paranoid, disintegrative and schizoid states. Papadopoulos suggests it is also possible, in so far as the ‘false self’ is a tactical device, that it may be a skilful survival mechanism that can emanate from the successful fighting sel