"First, we are going to kill all of the subversives; then their collaborators; then their sympathizers; then the indifferent; and finally, the timid". -- General Iberico Manuel Saint-Jean, governor of Buenos Aires province, 1977Nancy Caro Hollander profiles ten Argentine, Chilean, and Uruguayan psychologists and psychoanalysts who experienced firsthand, and later strove to comprehend, the crushing political and social oppression that occurred under the military dictatorships in these countries during the 1970s and 1980s.She recounts how psychoanalysts employed what she calls "liberation psychology" to understand the systematic exploitation suffered by the populace under fiercely repressive regimes and then to help themselves and others to confront and survive a culture of intimidation, coercion, and torture. As Hollander writes in the introduction, the men and women profiled "have striven to understand the interrelationship between alienated personal existence and social relations, between individual anomie and social oppression, and between individual mental health and collective empowerment".-- Introduction to liberation psychology, a new psychological methodology.-- Examination of psychological effects of state terror.

Biography
Nancy Caro Hollander has a unique background that provides a multidisciplinary approach to her writing that integrates her training as a psychoanalyst and an historian, as well as her experience as a documentary filmmaker and a radio producer and host.

Hollander is Professor Emerita of Latin American history at California State University and a Research Psychoanalyst in private practice in Los Angeles. She was host of Pacifica Radio's "Just a Minute" for 13 years. Hollander's keen insights into the contemporary crises we face in the U.S. have been deeply affected by her experiences since the late 1960s in Latin America, where she has lived and studied the intimate and personal experiences of people suffering the conditions of extreme political polarization and economic dislocation. She shows how we in this country are now facing the challenges characteristic of the Global South right in the heart of empire.

In her latest book, "Uprooted Minds: Surviving the Politics of Terror in the Americas", Hollander explores the psychological meanings of the critical social, economic and political crises that we face in the U.S. as this country loses its hegemonic position in the world and its democratic institutions and culture at home. Her analysis is illustrated with the personal stories of self-reflective politically-engaged psychoanalysts in Latin America and the U.S., whose psychological expertise sheds light on the emotional experience people have to an increasingly terrifying social reality.