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In this article, I interpret Hezbollah’s birth and role in Lebanon’s sociopolitical life from a group and family psychoanalytic perspective. In particular, I examine whether Hezbollah, as one of Lebanon’s >children,< can be seen as the >designated patient< and >symptom< of its large family, nation-state >incestual< dynamics and complicated separation and individuation process. As a designated patient, Hezbollah performs the double-sided function of gluing its fragmented nation-state together while carrying the weight of being its breaking force. In this logic, Hezbollah’s paradoxical role in the Lebanese nation-state family would be similar to that of a >scapegoat/Messiah,< who carries both the family’s incestual dynamics and internal tensions and its hope for a solid and cohesive nation-state identity. To build a cohesive nation-state identity, Hezbollah’s ideology acts as a prosthesis for Lebanon’s narcissistic fragility, which replenishes the narcissistic hemorrhage of its perforated bodily and psychic envelopes. I also reflect on whether a national mediation process informed by a group psychoanalytic approach could help Lebanon constitute a more functional ego-nation-state and thus renounce the need for a designated patient. Hezbollah would be better capable of giving up its pathological ideological position.
Frankfurt School Critical Theory and the Persistence of Authoritarian Populism in the United States
(2022)
more universal psychological dynamics. If creative writing is interesting in itself, its failure can be fascinating. It is not unusual for some successful authors to find themselves unable to write. They suffer what is commonly known has >writer’s block,< a term coined by the psychoanalyst Edmund Bergler in his seminal study of blocked writers in the 1940s and 50s. This paper illustrates how the psychoanalytic study of >writer’s block< can go way beyond Bergler’s theorization. A writer who cannot write is also someone experiencing inner conflict, a self not living up to its expectations, a person that has lost the ability to play. Freudian, ego psychology, and object relations theory are some of the theoretical lenses used to look at >writer’s block,< and to show how this circumscribed phenomenon can shed light on more common struggles and muddles. A brief narration of the author’s experience of writer’s block is presented as an illustration of the parallels between psychoanalysis and writing, especially regarding the importance and use of reverie.
Shakespeare’s great play King Lear traces the downfall of a man who retired without sufficient insight into the impact of his decision. The author uses the play to frame questions about the course of her own retirement from psychoanalytic practice, on May 31, 2019. How might the decision to retire change the analyst’s sense of her own identity, and her patients’ perceptions of who she really is? What are some of the challenges of living in retirement, without the structure and purpose an analytic practice provides?
Critical Theory has traditionally been interested in engaging classical psychoanalysis rather than addressing postclassical thought. For the first time, this volume brings Critical Theory into proper dialogue with modern developments in the psychoanalytic movement and covers a broad range of topics in contemporary society that revisit the Frankfurt School and its contributions to psychoanalytic social critique. Theoretical, clinical, and applied investigations in social pathology are explored in relation to new directions in critical cultural discourse from a variety of psychoanalytic perspectives. In this volume, internationally acclaimed social political theorists, philosophers, psychoanalysts, cultural critics, and scholars of humanities examine contemporary issues in social critique that address a myriad of topics.