209 - “The fear is of something to come that is really an agony over what has already transpired. Those words capture a phenomenon that seems to lurk on the periphery of many of the world’s current political troubles, depending on one’s point of view: an anxiety of impending disaster, whether from suicide bombers bent on destruction, immigrants over-whelming borders, temperatures reaching catastrophic levels, and reactionary and fearful citizens shredding safety nets and imposing draconian policies on those who would threaten their ways of life.” 213 - “Winnicott observes that more disturbed patients will sometimes express deep anxieties of a coming breakdown, which is at bottom a fear of ‘a breakdown of the establishment of the unit self.’7” 225 - “The names of the defenses that arise against these collective primitive agonies are familiar: anarchism, authoritarianism, total- itarianism, nationalism, nativism, fundamentalism, even neoliberalism, along with sexism, ableism, and racism. I suggest that these are all in one way or another levied against collective primitive agonies of a fear of breakdown that already occurred but was not experienced.” 229 - “Rather than clinging to a fantasy of a perfect and unassailable ‘we’ and demonic ‘others,’ there needs to be political processes for mourning loss and working through such syndromes of ideality, for deliberation that gets to the central issues of identity and belonging and squarely addresses the fragility of having any kind of ‘we.’”
- “It is time we start learning from each other and move toward thinking about how communities can actually get past, that is, work through, their fears of breakdown. A critical social theory that is informed by psychoanalysis, including the negativity that Freud identified, can focus ‘on the dynamic reworking of affect,’ as Allen suggests, which could make ‘social transformation possible.’43”
Questions: What does collectively working through fear look like in practice? Why does the author emphasize the fear of breakdown as the crux of the many -isms? Is it too simplistic to assign these -isms to fear of breakdown? And how does one define breakdown?