Reflections on Hollander’s “Hegemonic Mind” and How to Treat It

"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." Pp.653"Hollander’s two cases are chock full of good examples of how to understand and work with patients’ psychodynamics in the sociopolitical spaces in which we and they live. In the case of “L,” Hollander astutely engages L to analyze that she, an upper-middle-class White woman, uses hernanny, a working-class Latina, as a repository for “L’s dissociated and denigrated emotional states ofvulnerability” . That is a convincing formulation. In addition, might it be considered and named as such that “L” envied the nanny who was teaching L’s daughter Spanish, a skill L did not have? I think envy is important to bring out as explicitly as possible as a part of the treatment because we often conspire not to recognize assets in those of a different class, caste, race, or ethnicity becausewe think of them as being of lesser value." Pp.654