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Lene Auestad Karnac Books, London, 2014, pp. 256, $39.00 paper, ISBN: 978 1 780491028
In considering the topic of nationalism within psychoanalysis, we do well to appreciate the danger of Wilhelm Reich’s confidence in his now abandoned Orgone boxes, alongside the wisdom of Ulysses’ appreciation of his own limits in binding himself to the mast. Simply put, the journey into discernment, in this case of psyche and social malfunction, is not one for the faint of heart. Fortunately, this collection of papers, published in the New International Library of Group Analysis series and edited by Earl Hopper, affords some helpful guidance. Herein is a record of a conference that took place at the Norwegian Psychoanalytic Society in March 2011. The aim of this gathering was to question the recent revival of neo-nationalist policies. In the appendix of the volume under review is an interview conducted by Steffen Kruger with Norwegian philosopher and volume editor Lene Auestad and Mexican psychologist Jonathan Davidoff. That they speak at some length in regard to their respective personal development is significant, as such personal speech stands in direct contrast to the dehumanizing environments of denial and distrust that they aim to critique.
The book’s title presents the evocative observation that an increase in ethnocentrism and xenophobia exists in the west. This observation affords association to the real danger born of rigidity, and the increasing need to meet rigidity’s intolerance with scholarship that fosters the development of capacities to tolerate differentiation. This sort of thinking is an amplification and reworking of Freud’s observation (Freud, 1914, cited p. 82) that love requires frustration tolerance, as the brittle intolerance of ethnocentrism