Psychoanalysis Against Fascism: Fascism, Terrorism, and the Fascist and Terrorist Within

Abstract

With the rise of frightening and public xenophobia, racism, and anti-Semitism; the ubiquity of terror; and the spreading, cold indifference of globalization, we must ask ourselves: What is the social role of private, individual psychoanalytic psychotherapy? In this paper, I explore both the psychic structures of sociopolitical fascism and terrorism as well as the structures of fascism and terrorism within our psyches. Through the work of Gilles Deleuze, Félix Guattari, and other theorists, interlinked with clinical vignettes, I explore the potential for the psychoanalytic session to generate a resistant, enlivening response to the violence of subjugating political-psychic systems.

Keywords:

• Deleuze
• fascism
• politics
• schizoanalysis
• terrorism.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Eilon N. Shomron-Atar

Eilon N. Shomron-Atar, PhD, a recent clinical psychology doctoral graduate of The Derner Institute, Adelphi University, has been practicing psychoanalytic psychotherapy for the past two decades in Israel and in New York. He has explored clinical practice in parallel to academic pursuits in queer studies and gender studies (Gender, Bar-Ilan University) and critical theory and cultural studies (History of Consciousness, UCSC). Eilon is a current postdoctoral fellow at the National Institute for the Psychotherapies and is in private practice in Manhattan. He practices psychoanalytic psychotherapy as well as schizoanalytic psychotherapy, a cross-cultural modality of therapy he has been developing through the interdisciplinary weaving of the clinical and the social.