Nancy Caro Hollander, Ph.D.

     Nancy Caro Hollander is a Latin American historian,  Professor Emerita of History at California State University, Dominguez Hills. She is a Research Psychoanalyst, a member and on the faculty of the Psychoanalytic Institute of Northern California and a faculty member of NYU Post Doctoral Program in Psychotherapy and Psychoanalysis.  She is past President and Board member of Section 9, Psychoanalysis for Social Responsibility (Division of Psychoanalysis, The American Psychological Association) and has a clinical practice in Oakland California.

    Over the past five decades, Hollander has lived and traveled in Latin America, researching and writing about the subcontinent’s power structures and peoples’ resistance movements. She lived in Argentina during the late sixties and seventies and was forced to leave on the eve of that country’s military coup that launched its Dirty War against its own citizens. She has returned many times to Argentina as well as other Latin American countries suffering similar experiences, where she has witnessed and researched the ongoing traumatic sequelae of extreme political repression on individuals, families, and large groups. Hollander has been an award-winning documentary filmmaker and producer/host for 16 years of a bi-weekly one-hour radio program in which she broadcast programs related to feminism, neoliberal policy and culture, Latin American political developments and  psychoanalytic engagement with social issues in Latin America and the United States.

     Over the years, her experiences with a network of Latin American psychoanalysts, especially from the Southern Cone, committed to struggles for social justice, have contributed to her analyses of what she calls “liberation psychology”, a transdisciplinary approach to understanding the reciprocal impact of social forces, ideology and unconscious individual and group fantasy, affects and defenses. She is primarily interested in the factors that promote identification with Power and those that facilitate the emergence of subjects capable of resistance to hegemony. 

As a decolonial psychoanalyst she is critical of how the profession's traditionally Eurocentric theories and clinical praxes locate the etiology of our own and our patients' symptoms and conflicts, pain and suffering, almost exclusively within family etiology rather than the larger social context of hierarchically organized structures of power-based intersectional class, race, sexual and gendered relations that are internalized to frame unconscious dynamics. Hollander’s published work in national and international journals, as well as her presentations in Latin America, the U.S., Europe, and Israel/Palestine, explore different aspects of this general topic in the context of cultural and temporal specificities. Her books include  Love in a Time of Hate: Liberation Psychology in Latin America (Rutgers,1997; co-editor and contributor,  Psychoanalysis, Class and Politics: Encounters in the Clinical Setting (Routledge, 2007); Uprooted Minds:  A Social Psychoanalysis for Precarious Times (Routledge, 2023).  Recent journal articles include: “Torture and the Problem of the Bystander”; “Mapping Aggression and Hegemony in the Neoliberal Era”; “Who Is the Sufferer and What Is Being Suffered? Subjectivity in Times of Social Malaise”; “Trauma as Ideology: Accountability in “The Intractable Struggle.”

    Over the past four decades, Hollander has presented her work at professional conferences in the U.S., Europe, Latin America, and Israel/Palestine.

Executive Committee of the Board, Office of the Americas, 1990-2019.

Member, Faculty and Chair of Psyche & Society, The Psychoanalytic Institute of Northern California, 2013-present.

Member and Faculty, Los Angeles Institute and Society for Psychoanalytic Studies, 2006-2012.

Past President, three terms, Section IX (Psychoanalysis for Social Responsibility), Division 39 (Psychoanalysis), The American Psychological Assoc.

Professor Emerita of History, California State University, Dominguez Hills, 1972-2006.

Member, Board of Directors, Los Angeles Institute and Society for Psychoanalytic Studies. 2009-2012

Co-Chair, Trauma Center, Los Angeles Institute and Society for Psychoanalytic Studies, 2010-2012

Member, Organizing Committee, Inter-Institute Conference, The Uprooted Mind:  Psychoanalytic Perspectives on Living in an Unsafe World, Los Angeles,  2004-2012.

Robert J. Stoller Foundation Essay Prize, “Psychoanalysts on the Witness  Stand: Trauma and Memory in Latin America,” August 2000.

Plumsock Fund Grant for Research on psychoanalyst Marie Langer, 1986.
     Gold Medal, (Feature Documentary Film): Communique from Argentina, Germany, 1979.

First Prize, (Feature Documentary Film): Comminique from Argentina, Spain, 1978.

Chancellor’s Multi-Campus Grant: Latin America Media Project, CSU, 1976-78.

Woodrow Wilson Dissertation Fellowship, 1969-70.

Fullbright-Hays Fellowship, 1969-70.

Uprooted Minds: A Social Psychoanalysis for Precarious Times (second edition).  (Routledge, 2023).

“Torture and the Problem of the Bystander: Commentary on Philip Cushman’s “The Earthquake That Is the Hoffman Report on Torture: Toward a Re-Moralization of Psychology”, (2018). Psychoanalysis, Self, and Context, 13(4):368-377.

“Mapping Aggression and Hegemony in the Neoliberal Era”, (2017). Psychoanalytic Dialogues, 27(6):669-677.

“Who Is the Sufferer and What Is Being Suffered? Subjectivity in Times of Social Malaise”, (2017). Psychoanalytic Dialogues, 27(6):635-650.

 “The Freedom to Speak:  Psychopolitical Meanings in Argentine History.”  International Journal of Psychoanalytic Studies (2016). International Journal of Applied Psychoanalytic Studies, 13(3):224-232.

“Trauma as Ideology:  Accountability in “The Intractable Struggle,” Psychoanalysis, Culture and Society (2016), Special Issue on Israel, 21:1, 59-80.

“Social Trauma, politics and psychoanalysis: a personal narrative,” Psychoanalysis, Culture &, Society (2013), 18: 2, 167-183.

“Psycho-political Dynamics of the Bystander in Luis Puenzo’s ‘The Official Story’, The International Journal of Psychoanalytic Studies (2012). 8(2):147-161.

“The gendering of human rights: Women and the Latin American terrorist state”, in Harris, A & Botticelli, S. (Eds.) (2010), First Do No Harm. New York: Routledge.

“Anti-Muslim Prejudice and the Psychic Use of the Ethnic Other”, International Journal  of Applied Psychoanalytic Studies (2010). 7(1): 73-84.

 “A Psychoanalytic Perspective on the Paradox of Prejudice: Understanding U.S. Policy toward Israel and the Palestinians”, (2009). International Journal of Applied Psychoanalytic Studies, 6(3): 167-177

Psychoanalysis, Class and Politics:  Encounters in the Clinical Setting.  Contributor and co-editor with Lynne Layton and Susan Gutwill (Routledge, 2006).

Love in A Time of Hate: Liberation Psychology in Latin America (1997). New Jersey:   Rutgers University Press

“Megalomania:  A Psycho-Social Disease,” for panel: Megalomania in the American Psyche: Dangerous Influence in Conscious and Unconscious Life,” American Psychiatric Association Conference, May 2023.

“Psychoanalysis as Counter-hegemonic Practice,” for the panel: Ideology in Psychoanalysis, American Psychoanalytic Association, September 2021.

“Toward a Decolonial Psychoanalytic Theory and Praxis,’ Invited Keynote, Division 39, New York, March, 2021.

“The Border as Symbol of Psychic and Social Disequilibrium in the Neoliberal World Order,” panel Psychoanalysis at the Border in a Time of Hate, American  Psychoanalytic Association Annual Meeting, San Diego, June 23, 2019.

“Power, Subjectivity and Resistance:  Lessons from Latin America.  Keynote at Conference Calling Power by its Name, University of London, Birkbeck College, May 14, 2019.

“Settler Colonialism in Latin America,” Division 39 Annual Meeting, New Orleans, April 23, 2018.

“Subjectivity in Times of Social Crisis,” Invited Presentation, Reflective Spaces Material Places, Massachusetts Institute for Psychoanalysis, Boston, June 9, 2018. Boston June 2018

“La crisis social y subjectividad,”  Buenos Aires, Invited presentation, Asociación  psicologica de Buenos Aires, May 14, 2017.

 “What’s in the Frame?  Clinical Challenges in a Time of Social Malaise,” Invited paper, Psychoanalytic Institute of Northern California, January 22, 2014.

“A Psychoanalytic Perspective on Living in a Dangerous World,” Invited paper, Psychoanalytic Institute of Northern California, April 18, 2013.

“Uprooted Minds: Psyche and Society in Times of Crisis” and “Forced to Flee: The Mark of Trauma Among Female Refugees”, Invited Featured   Presentations, The Freud Conference, Australian Psychoanalytical Society Australian Association of Group Psychotherapists,” Melbourne, May 18, 2013.

“The Psychosocial Cost of Political Impunity,” Division 39 annual meeting, Boston, MA  April 27, 2013.

“Gendered Paradoxes of Migration,” Division 39 annual meeting, Boston, MA, April 24, 2013.

“Psychoanalysis Beyond the Couch in Extreme Social Situations,”  Division 39 annual   meeting, Boston, MA., April 25, 2013.

“The Politics of Psychoanalytic Neutrality,” Invited Presentation, Psicoterapia e   Scienze Umane', Bologna, Italy, October 18, 2012.

“Uprooted Minds: the Meanings of Social Trauma”, Invited Presentation, NYU Post-Doctoral Program in Psychotherapy and Psychoanalysis, Relational Track, March 30, 2012.

“Gender and the Migration Experience: Paradoxes of Loss and Creativity,”   Division 39 annual meeting, Santa Fe, April 19, 2012.