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In chapter three, Herzog (2016) traced the history of PTSD; it’s development and application in psychoanalytic work. Herzog began his history by presenting the debates about trauma and holocaust survivors. PTSD was not fully acknowledged by the psychoanalytic community until the 1980s. This was after decades of discussion and revelations coming out of the war in Vietnam. Herzog presented the complex history of PTSD in relation to political developments. He also highlighted the narrow frame that tied trauma to childhood development.

Reminds me of the people derisive of wokeness today: “Schäffer also liked to complain that no one was willing to break the taboo against criticizing the reparations project for fear of being accused of antisemitism.17 But the taboo was, inevitably, broken all the time, as invoking the idea of taboo was precisely what facilitated the talk” (96)How moral outrage by itself can obscure ideological ghosts: “While there is always a battle over the truth, this battle is especially acute in the aftermath of great horror.

"Overlooking the role of the Holocaust’saftermath in the history of PTSD means that we have also missed just how multifaceted indeed contradictory –would be the invocations and uses of the psychoanalytic tradition within the convoluted transnational interactionsamong psychiatrists which eventually shaped the specific form which the diagnostic category of PTSD was to take." Pp.91"Ultimately it took Vietnam to bring the Holo caustfully into focus.  As manifestly different as the cases of soldiers and survivorswere, the incontrovertible fact is that the growing public discussion

What an interesting history. The simultaneously held views of rejectors and sympathizers - the admonishment of Freud, the rejection of his Semetic origins, the reverance and perverse utilization of childhood trauma - highlight such a powerful proclivity for cognitive dissonance in psychological science. I was really struck by the ways in which the debate over Holocaust PTSD was both informed by and reproduced anti-Semetic rhetoric based in stereotypes of greediness, deceit, laziness, neurosis, hypochondria, and weakness.

"To put it another way: psychoanalysis's own conflicted relationship to sex explains a great deal both about its fortunes and about the ever-evolving contents of its most cherished concepts.

Herzog traced the history of the psychoanalytic community’s relationship to homosexuality in chapter two. The psychoanlytic community was particularly threatened by the implications of Kinsey’s research on human sexuality and homosexuality, as it undermined the theories of psychoanalysis. Ultimately, Herzog argues that sex has been so central to pyschoanlysis. Therefore changing conceptions of sexuality has challenged the field. The work of Freud and his emphasis on sex, has both hurt and helped the political realities of psychoanlysis.

“These are not simply methodological issues: in psychoanalysis transference and countertransference are the points at which clinical practice meets the theorization of psychic dynamics.“Central to this perspective is the idea that processes such as projection and introjection, splitting and fragmentation, occur routinely, if variably, within institutions at the level of the dynamics of group culture, rather than simply due to the aggregate dynamics of individual members.” –“Thus while individuals' internal states will have an impact on the institutional culture, the latter cannot be reduced

"Despite limitations, the founding insight of the group-relations approach remains, supported by synchronic empirical studies: that psychic defense mechanisms may inhere as properties of collectively held cultural systems." (373)"Splitting, then, involves a reductive form of thinking: objects are either all good or all bad. The integrity of the object is fragmented, as is the perception of it and the ambivalence that it evokes. In this state simple difference becomes imbued with extreme evaluation.

"questions of pathology haunt the work. It is time to drop the problematic of pathology" (373)"psychoanalysis bequeaths a set of tools for analyzing the complete spectrum of human states... psychoanalysis may be generalized and used as part of a hermeneutic process of gaining critical insight into sociocultural phenomena without imputing either judgments of clinical pathology or questions of practical intervention" (373)I like Born's instrumentalization (or the more neutral toolificaiton) of psychoanalysis to understand sociocultural phenomena.

"Kleinian and Lacanian approaches also differ in terms of their ontologies and epistemologies (Frosh 1987: ch. 5; Rustin 1991: ch. 7, 1995).