let's have an expansive therapy toolbox

Malaise implies an overtaken state, leaving obscure who is doing the overtaking. I think it is more accurate to think of hegemony as something that results from an active process that is attractive to a great many people. (652)--> what to do about ill will?For me, the “deception” and the “hiding” are clues to an underlying motivation that guides and shapes economic policies and other structures in support of hegemony.So, how do I propose naming that motivation, more foundational even than the hegemonic one already described? It is humankind’s capacity for ill will, even in most dastardly forms—genocide, slavery and all the modern-day “isms.” Each of these, after all, has had its rationale and rationalizations and other complex psychological mechanisms to make their formulation, perpetration, and repetitions possible and persistent. It is my point of view that this “ill-will” factor is an elemental, irreducible component of human nature and that it cannot be eradicated. It is this aspect in all of us, with its derivatives, such as hatred, greed, avarice, envy, and excessive acquisitiveness that can appropriate our finer qualities (intelligence), making it possible for us to formulate policies and political ideologies that allow us to cover our ill will while imposing it on others. Freud (1930) had great wisdom on this point. In Civilization and its Discontents, he wrote,The element of truth behind all this, which people are ready to disavow, is that men are not gentle creatures who (only) want to be loved, and who at the most can defend themselves if they are attacked; they are, on the contrary, creatures among whose instinctual endowment is to be reckoned a powerful share of aggressiveness. ... The time comes when each of us has to give up as illusions the expectation which, in his youth, he pinned upon his fellow-men, and when he may learn how much difficulty and pain has been added to his life by their ill will.Thus, my view is that sociopolitical constructs (e.g., neoliberalism) and practices (the “isms”) are by-products of the ill-will factor. (653)For me, the value of examining M’s plight in terms of hegemony and interpellation is that those considerations help the therapist properly recognize despotic societal forces in the mind of the patient and what those forces require of the person’s identity and characteristic ways of living. (655)So, in understanding M, I found it necessary to make use of attachment theory, self-theories, and conflict-based theories, as well as sociopolitical points of view. I wonder if Hollander agrees that the complexities our patients face require us to engage a robust pluralism in terms of knowing and using conceptual and clinical tools to help our patients? I ask us all to keep in mind that clinicians of various theoretical persuasions are very engaged in including the community and its dynamics in understanding psychopathology psychoanalytically (e.g., White, 2016, from an interpersonal/relational point of view; Holmes, 2006, 2016a, 2016b, from a conflict theory perspective; Akthar, 2012, from a variety of perspectives). To valorize any one approach over another would short-change the effectiveness of our effort, in my view. (656)