Mystery, Recognition, and Revitalization: A Discussion of “Going to Where the World Ends: When the Bodies of Children Speak Who is Listening?”

Abstract

In this discussion of Peltz’s “Where the World Ends” (this issue) the author pursues the mystery of embodied communal protest in conditions of near death. This protest challenges the limits of psychoanalytic theories of subjectivity, inter-subjectivity, trauma and the body. The effectiveness of this protest also illuminates the narcissistic destabilization of contemporary liberal democracy. The particulars of this protest allow citizens to restore national narcissism through the pursuit of national ideals. Given the efflorescence of neo-fascism within neo-liberal democracies, psychoanalysts need to study how national narcissistic wounds can be repaired through recourse to ideals rather than through the extrusion of the Other.

This article refers to:

Going to Where the World Ends: When the Bodies of Children Speak Who is Listening?

View responses to this article:

The Song of the Silent Children: Reply to Durban, Grand and Tummala-Nara

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Notes on contributors

Sue Grand

Sue Grand, Ph.D., is Faculty and Supervisor at the NYU Postdoctoral Program in Psychotherapy in Psychoanalysis; Faculty at the Mitchell Center for Relational Psychoanalysis; a Fellow at the Institute for Psychology and the Other. She is the author of The Reproducion of Evil: A Clinical and Cultural Perspective and The Hero in the Mirror: From Fear to Fortitude. She is in private practice in NYC and in Teaneck NJ.