Episode 58: This Machine Kills Fascism

Summary

Podcast Summary: Between Us – Episode 58: "This Machine Kills Fascism"

Date: September 3, 2025
Hosts: John Totten, Mason Neely
Guest: Sue Grand (Psychoanalyst, author, expert on relational psychoanalysis, trauma, and fascism)

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Episode Overview

This episode delves into the psychological underpinnings of fascism, hatred, and the cycle of trauma—both individual and societal. Through a wide-ranging conversation with psychoanalyst Sue Grand, hosts John Totten and Mason Neely examine how ideals of masculinity, compliance, identity, and political division play out in modern America and how psychotherapy can offer tools for resistance and repair. The discussion draws from psychoanalysis, history, philosophy, and personal reflections to explore how "evil regenerates," why alliances are so difficult across social and political divides, and how examining our own hatred can ultimately be a tool for healing.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

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1. Hatred, Fascism, and the "Perpetrator Fragment"

(Main discussion: 01:18 – 13:18)

• Who do we hate?
  • Sue Grand reflects on her complex feelings of hatred, especially towards politicians who, despite knowing better, have capitulated to Trumpism:
    • "What I hate the most... is the complete passivity and compliance and lying of the Republicans who have hated Trump... and just have rolled over completely." (Sue Grand, 08:17)
    • Expresses betrayal by white women who continue to vote for Trump, despite his documented misogyny and criminal behavior.
• Empathy vs. Schadenfreude:
  • Grand describes moments of pity for politicians like Marco Rubio, noting their oscillation between humiliation and complicity within fascist structures, especially through a lens of emasculation and toxic masculinity.
    • "You see him in these meetings... he looks like a beaten child... at the same time... happy to implement all this stuff... are you that ambitious that you’ll sell out everything?" (Sue Grand, 10:08-11:13)

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2. The Psychological and Cultural Roots of Fascism

(Major Focus: 13:18 – 31:47)

• Masculinity and Fascism:
  • Grand references scholarship on how fascist systems create strict gender hierarchies, promising borrowed "phallic power" to men who comply, but always under threat of humiliation.
    • "There’s this fantasy that your masculine integrity is being bolstered... while there’s always this backflow of being humiliated, dominated and castrated." (Sue Grand, 14:48–15:14)
• Umberto Eco’s Analysis:
  • Totten summarizes Eco’s idea of fascism as "fuzzy totalitarianism", a structure of control promising contradictory things to different groups, resisting reflection.
    • "Fascism prefers its status as a floating signifier. It thrives on not meaning anything." (John Totten, 16:40)
• Deleuze & Guattari and the Attraction to Fascism:
  • Mason Neely introduces the idea that fascism is not just imposed by authority, but something we (collectively) may desire because it offers the relief of certainty, order, and belonging—even as it restricts.
    • "Fascism... provides this beautiful unity... the hope that there is someone there who knows me so well they can order this society and they can make it make sense. Produces a sense of relief." (Mason Neely, 25:07–26:12)
  • "What fascism offers is velocity. What it promises is urgency towards the future, but it can never deliver on it." (Mason Neely, 26:55–27:27)
  • "What really happens for all of that promise? Everything gets narrowed down into a very small spectrum of choice and of behavior and of options for agency. And that's the cruel side of it." (Mason Neely, 28:19–28:54)

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3. Trauma, Masculinity, and Perpetration

(Around 32:07 – 49:15)

• Cycle of Trauma:
  • Grand discusses how trauma does not always create perpetrators, but certain conditions (especially lack of positive attachments) make this more probable.
    • "Traumatized people don’t always traumatize others... most traumatized people actually are in their daily interactions... devoted... their inner goodness is amazing." (Sue Grand, 32:18–32:49)
    • The process of "identifying with the aggressor" is more likely if abuse is combined with isolation, lack of empathy, colonial/structural violence, and especially rigid models of masculinity.
• Protective Factors:
  • Empathic attachment—even with one figure (like a teacher or a younger sibling)—is a powerful protective factor against perpetration.
    • "If there's even one person in their lives... with whom they have a bond of empathy, connection, recognition... that is an enormous bulwark against becoming a perpetrator." (Sue Grand, 41:36)
• Concrete Example:
  • The importance of a child experiencing joy and encouragement from caregivers—"fertilizer on the sense of self"—is illustrated in a story about a mother openly encouraging and celebrating her daughter (49:09–49:46).

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4. Political Hatred, Reflection, and the Risk of Becoming What We Oppose

(Starts ~37:50; deepened at 58:31)

• Owning One’s Hatred:
  • Grand recounts her struggle as a progressive psychoanalyst contending with the hatred she feels—a hatred so intense she fantasizes about violence.
    • "I am filling up with hate and I find myself wanting a gun. No, let's tell the truth. I fantasize about an assault rifle...” (Sue Grand, quoted by Totten, 37:50)
  • The critical move is using reflection and introspection to learn from one’s hate rather than being consumed by it.
    • "At the core of my political hatred, I can see my impotence and my despair... But where there was no reflectivity in my hatred, now reflectivity has arrived... I sense a clarity, strength and fortification that is distinct from Nazi sadism.” (Sue Grand, quoted by Totten, 59:46)
• Therapeutic Use of Anger:
  • The line between destructive and transformative anger is highlighted, notably through group therapy work with clients on probation, reframing anger through the lens of Malcolm X:
    • "Is anger bad? ... Was Malcolm X angry? ... One of the things that we would start to do... is really understand that anger has a use and, like, try to figure out what the use is." (Co-host/JT, 57:01-57:38)
  • Exploring hatred and anger purposefully, rather than seeking to suppress or split off, is central to true change.

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5. Division, Race, and the Construction of American Identity

(61:15 – 67:55)

• Divide-and-Conquer:
  • Grand explores American history and the deliberate construction of racial categories to split labor and prevent class-based alliances.
    • "There was a totally conscious intention to split them... So that they could not form these alliances." (Sue Grand, 62:10–63:23)
    • The privileges granted to white indentured servants (not real improvement of conditions, but ceremonial dignity) were designed to prevent unified labor resistance.
  • The American Dream myth further erodes class consciousness:
    • "Americans don't hate rich people; they want to be a rich person... There really is a huge problem around class consciousness... you’re stuck, and you’re struggling to begin to analyze the structural forces in our society...” (Sue Grand, 65:04–66:41)

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6. Liberalism, White Guilt, and the Limits of Dialogue

(73:36 – 79:17)

• White Liberal Guilt & "Manic Reparation":
  • The need for white liberals to feel "good," to overcompensate for inherited privilege, can be counterproductive.
    • "You can't define yourself by the worst thing you've ever done, and you can't define yourself by the best... You have to have ordinary human caring and goodness and recognize that you can injure people and just go forward and do your best." (Sue Grand, 75:05–76:32)
• Beyond Mutuality: Reparative Justice:
  • Dialogue is important, but material reparations and structural changes go further than mere recognition or apology.
    • "It isn't enough to just listen, you need to make material changes." (Sue Grand, 78:31)
    • "Maybe 'beyond mutuality' is a better way of describing it... Beyond mutuality towards reparation." (Co-host & Sue Grand, 78:47–78:49)

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Notable Quotes & Moments

• On the attraction to fascism:
  • "Everybody wants this. And if you think you don't, you’re wrong. By the very nature of being these kind of desire-producing machines..." – John Totten (28:57)
  • "What they see the fascist Project is, is constantly limiting those processes [of becoming]... And they would go, no, that's fascism. Fuck that. We must escape that in all its forms." – Mason Neely (30:47)
• On using hatred constructively:
  • "How do you not become them when you are hating them? That's the question. And how can you use your aggression in a way that empowers change?" – Sue Grand (58:31)
• On the failure of alliances:
  • "We have differences with each other. We can be mad at each other, but that's private... we're never going to get anywhere if we don't form these strong alliances." – Sue Grand (61:15)
• On restorative justice:
  • "It's not just about hearing, it's about listening to what the other needs, what kind of repair they need." – Sue Grand (78:29)

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Timestamps for Key Segments

• 01:18 – Topic intro: Hatred and perpetrator fragments
• 08:17 – Grand on hatred for political capitulation, betrayal by women voters
• 10:08 – Empathy and pity for complicit politicians
• 13:18 – Masculinity, humiliation, and fascist structures
• 16:40 – Umberto Eco on fascism as a "floating signifier"
• 22:48 – Neely on the psychoanalytic and philosophical readings of fascism
• 25:07 – Fascism as psychological relief from chaos and disunity
• 28:54 – Dynamism, gender binaries, and the narrowing of agency under fascism
• 32:18 – Cycle of trauma, identification with aggressor
• 41:36 – Protective power of empathy and connection
• 49:09 – Experiences from work with clients on probation and anger management
• 58:31 – Using hatred reflectively, not becoming what we oppose
• 61:15 – Alliances, race, and American history's divide-and-conquer strategy
• 73:45 – White liberal guilt and challenges of "being good"
• 78:31 – The need for reparative justice, beyond mere recognition

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Summary Assessment

This episode gives profound, clinically informed insight into how fascism operates on psychological, cultural, and political levels, and how individuals can resist its pull—not just in society, but in their own psyches. Sue Grand’s reflections on hatred, empathy, trauma, and the possibility of repair ground a nuanced, challenging discussion. Throughout, the hosts maintain an earnest, reflective, and sometimes vulnerable tone, underscoring that the biggest work may begin inside ourselves.

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Recommended for:
Psychotherapists, clinicians, social theorists, students of history or politics, and anyone grappling with the emotional complexities of our polarized era.

Transcript

[Sue Grand]

Hi.

[Co-host or Interviewer]

Hi.

[Sue Grand]

Tell me a little bit about you. Oh, and your podcast, what you're doing.

[Soldier or Historical Figure (voice clip)]

I don't know about y', all, but I sure as hell didn't come down from the goddamn smoky Mountains, cross 5,000 mile of water, fight my way through half of Sicily and jump out of a fucking airplane to teach the Nazis lessons in humanity. Nazi ain't got no humanity. They're the foot soldiers of a Jew, Hatin. Mass murdering maniac. And they need to be destroyed. That's why any and every some bitch we find wearing a Nazi uniform, they're gonna die. We will be cruel to the Germans. And through our cruelty, they will know who we are. And they will find the evidence of our cruelty in the disemboweled, dismembered, and disfigured bodies of their brothers we leave behind us. And the German won't be able to help themselves but imagine the cruelty their brothers endured at our hands and our boot heels and the edge of our knives. And the German will be sickened by us. And the German will talk about us. And the German will fear us. And when the German closes their eyes at night and they're tortured by their subconscious for the evil they have done, it will be with thoughts of us that they are tortured with. Sound good?

[Sue Grand]

Yes, sir.

[Soldier or Historical Figure (voice clip)]

That's what I like to hear.

[John Totten]

I'm John Totten, and this is between us.

[Co-host or Interviewer]

You know, I'll start with something very specific.

[John Totten]

Your article on hatred.

[Co-host or Interviewer]

Who do you hate right now?

[Sue Grand]

Oh, you know, my husband and I, when we were on long road trips, one of the. Our favorite activities on long road trips were, okay, so if you could have 10 people eliminated to make the world better, who would they be? Right. And you only have 10. So now I feel like 10 is just not enough. Okay, we have maybe top 10, and then the next year and the next year. So it oscillates. The thing that I've been working on since I wrote the unhate paper, which was all these issues around fascism. So I wrote another paper on fascism.

[John Totten]

I want to start today by talking about a book that has been really impactful on me. It's not by our guest today, but our guest today has written other impactful works on the topic of traumas and how they regenerate. But this book that relates in my mind, it weighs heavily over the next few episodes. The journalist Peter Beinart, he wrote this book called Being Jewish after the Destruction of Gaza. Beinart, who was raised in South Africa and is a devout Jew, has a lot to say about the kind of cultural violence he saw in his home country growing up and what we're seeing today. But he starts the book off with a bit of theological exegesis about the story of Purim, the Jewish holiday. Essentially, Beinart describes how on the holiday of Purim, the Jewish people celebrate the way that Esther saved the Jews from genocide by marrying the Persian king and convincing him to kill his anti Semitic general, Haman. The king then replaces Haman with Esther's uncle, Mordecai. Beinart writes that that's where we stop telling the story on the holiday of Purim. But what happens after is crucial. Before his death, Haman issued an edict to exterminate the Jews, and the king cannot revoke this edict even after Haman is dead. So instead, the king empowers Mordecai's people to defend themselves, and in one day, the Jewish army kills 75,000 people in what is modern day Iran. What Beinart is telling us is that the story of God's people is not a continuous story of persecution as much as it is one that oscillates between victimhood and perpetration, and that the work of God with the Jewish people hasn't always been one of saving them from others. It also includes times in which God strives to save them from their own worst impulses. Now I don't know if there's a God I lean towards. No. But the idea of myself being saved from myself and my worst impulses is an idea that causes me to cling desperately to this life that we explore on this show, the reflective life. It causes me to distrust or lash out at those who aren't able to show their introspective work. Our guest today shows her introspective work in an article titled On Hatred, Perpetrator Fragments and Totalitarian Objects, published in Psychoanalytic Dialogues two years ago. The psychoanalyst Sue Grann writes on the current political what do we do when history renews itself and our own perpetrator fragments become manifest? What if we ourselves feel overtaken by the totalitarian fever that we hate? These questions are not typical for a progressive psychoanalysis concerned with social justice. We oppose the contemporary totalitarian turn. It is grounded in splitting, projection, hate and dehumanization. We have tried to understand and empathize with the psychosocial history and contemporary conditions that have led to this fever. Nonetheless, if we are honest, we really regard this fever as other. We think we should humanize that other, and we try to recognize ourselves within them. We advocate for Depressive reflectivity, complexity, and the ability to see ourselves and the other as flawed human subjects despite difference. We recognize ourselves, of course, as human splitting and paranoid schizoid projection. The the doer done to not. These are certainly a recurrent place of collapse, but the doer done to knot is something to unpack, not a place to live. We can understand why so many Americans want to live there. In psychoanalysis, the arc of healing always trends toward depressive mentalization, inter subjectivity and mutual recognition. This is our analytic ethic for ourselves, for our patients, and for our world. I'm not suggesting we turn away from these ideals, but I gotta say, right now, Buber and Levin us. I'm just not feeling it. I'm thinking that this arc of healing may require a detour. I have to put my ideals on pause so I can listen to the perpetrator fragment living inside me. The detour sue is talking about is the detour through hate. Sue grand is a psychoanalyst and author who is foundational in the contemporary relational movement whose work predates it. She's been writing on topics such as transgenerational trauma and violence for over 40 years. Her work can often serve as a sort of bridge between relational psychoanalysis and cultural critique. And that is exactly why I wanted to talk to her.

[Sue Grand]

What I hate the most. Tough choice, but I think the thing that I hate the most is the complete passivity and compliance and lying of the Republicans who have hated Trump. Never wanted Trump saw who he was more or less and just have rolled over completely. Yeah, and in the early days, it wasn't that dangerous to stand up. I mean, we had a couple of people who stood up. They couldn't sell their souls. It wasn't so dangerous then.

[Co-host or Interviewer]

Right.

[Sue Grand]

They've sold us all out. And I think that many of them are horrified by who he is. One of the things that I feel deeply betrayed by and violated by is the white women who have consistently voted for him, even after what they knew about him being convicted for, you know, they couldn't call it rape, but it was rape. And all of his foulness, I mean, aside from the fact of who he is and his policies in general, the way he is about women, and they're still voting for him. So those are my. Of course, Trump is, like, probably number one.

[Co-host or Interviewer]

Is there pity there for you?

[Sue Grand]

You mean pity for the people that I hate? Like the people in Congress I just described?

[Co-host or Interviewer]

Well, when you describe someone who, like, really sells out their values, the first person I thought of was Marco Rubio. When you see Marco Rubio, he looks like he's in physical pain all the time.

[Sue Grand]

Right.

[Co-host or Interviewer]

And I guess I just showed a moment of schadenfreude by laughing at it.

[Sue Grand]

But do I also feel some empathy even?

[Co-host or Interviewer]

Yeah.

[Sue Grand]

I mean, that's a really good example that where he's arrived at. You see him in these meetings with Trump and Vance or Trump and Musk and Vance, and he looks like a beaten child.

[Co-host or Interviewer]

Yeah.

[Sue Grand]

Like a humiliated, shrunken person. At the same time that he also doesn't just sit there, but he's melting off and embracing all of these missions in a really, really shocking way. He doesn't seem to be just passively complying. He seems to be happy to implement all this stuff. There are these moments when I look at him in the Oval Office, and I both feel, stand up for what's right. Who are you? Are you actually that craven and that ambitious that you'll sell out everything? Did you ever have any principles around anything? Are you just a psychopath? And then, yeah, sometimes I look at him and go, how'd you fall down this rabbit hole so that you wind up here where you're being publicly humiliated all the time and castrated?

[Co-host or Interviewer]

Your work for decades has centered around how evil regenerates itself, transgenerational trauma. How did he end up there?

[Sue Grand]

Right. I don't know. Marco Rubio, it seems to me when he was originally running for the Republican nomination against Trump, it was something going on about little Marco. There was a real theme of emasculation. So Marco Rubio, I think, came back at Trump with some kind of equally vulgar reaction about Trump having small hands or something like that, which was an implication, of course. He then came out with kind of an apology that he had sunk to this level, and it was vulgar. There's a great book by Wieland on fascism, the way masculinity constructs fascism. Of course, fascism has to castrate and neutralize and own and dominate anybody in its ranks so that the leader is all powerful, and it does it by carrots and sticks, this seduction of, you'll be one of us. You'll get power, flattery, and also terrorizing them. So there's this carrot and stick thing where if you're one of us, you're able to borrow the phallic power of the leader.

[Co-host or Interviewer]

Right.

[Sue Grand]

And if you don't, you're going to be completely castrated and humiliated and dominated. He gets closer and closer to power and closer and closer to being able to join this phallic, patriarchal fascistic force.

[Co-host or Interviewer]

Right.

[Sue Grand]

He gets there and he's just being castrated all over again.

[Co-host or Interviewer]

Right.

[Sue Grand]

That's what it looks like to me. That there this oscillation around masculine narcissistic humiliation.

[Co-host or Interviewer]

Right.

[Sue Grand]

And shame and this restitution.

[Co-host or Interviewer]

Right.

[Sue Grand]

By actively the macho fascism force.

[John Totten]

I think what makes me feel pity.

[Co-host or Interviewer]

Or empathy, and maybe it's as a man that there are these deals that are made along the way when like.

[John Totten]

In reality, I think, well, none of.

[Co-host or Interviewer]

You guys are like, poor. I would retiring from all of it and going and fishing on a lake sounds good. Would be a more realistic way of achieving your masculine integrity.

[Sue Grand]

Exactly, exactly. There are these morally corrosive deals that you making, and they're often in small increments that feel like the ends justifies the means. This is not so bad. I'll be able to do some really good things that I really believe in if I just do this. And you don't notice that you're losing all your integrity and all your autonomy, and it pulls you in more. And then there are more things that you don't want the public to know.

[Co-host or Interviewer]

You talked about the gender split and how it plays out in fascist societies. But in a way, it feels like the. The way culture feminizes of the feminization.

[Sue Grand]

Yeah.

[Co-host or Interviewer]

Which is the irony, because they think that they are releasing themselves from or, you know, they're. They're establishing their masculinity. But it is in many ways the.

[Sue Grand]

Lack of autonomy that they're all completely owned.

[Co-host or Interviewer]

Yeah.

[Sue Grand]

Right. And owned by a sadistic, slash charming, phallic leader who will give you a little. Little arena of power as long as you always know he's got his boot on your head.

[Co-host or Interviewer]

Right.

[Sue Grand]

I mean, here's where the pathos is that I think that you are. You're asking about do I ever feel that pity. The pathos is. Is this. Once they got their hooks into you, they completely control you psychically and in every other way. So there's this fantasy that your masculine inte is being bolstered and restored and enhanced.

[Co-host or Interviewer]

Right.

[Sue Grand]

While there's always this backflow of being humiliated, dominated and castrated. Kennedy is just appalling. One of the first things that Trump did with him when he was appointed is he took Kennedy on Air Force One and made him eat cheeseburgers or something from McDonald's. Everything he's against, we photographed it. Right. And this is, I own you. I broke you.

[Co-host or Interviewer]

Right.

[Sue Grand]

And I'm making it public. Your complete subjugation to me. What. What you said before is how pathetic. And what price we're paying for some of these men who instead of associating strength with, I'm not going along with that and I don't have to. And going off fishing. They have enough money. They'll get another job, whatever. They're all hooked into this. There were a couple of people when Trump first became president. They didn't go back on what they said about Trump when he was a nominee and they could see the future. And they left. And I what they're doing now.

[Co-host or Interviewer]

Private.

[Sue Grand]

Right. But they haven't sold their souls to the devil with this fascism and the lies and the infinite levels of corruption. It's just stunning.

[John Totten]

We've spoken about these sort of floating signifiers on the right, like wokeism and identity politics. They're words that I make fun of because they don't mean much, or they mean whatever the person who's angry about them wants them to mean. And in this interview, we discuss a word that can sometimes fall into the same trap on the left, the label of fascism. And so I think the answer is to talk more about these words and their meanings. But there is an inherent trick to talking about the word fascism. The Italian philosopher Umberto Eco, who grew up in Mussolini's Italy, in his seminal essay on fascism ur fascism, describes fascism as a fuzzy totalitarianism, a structure of control more than a central ideology, one that promises many contradictory things to different groups of people. This is called syncretic, a philosophy that will use any sort of ideology to get what it wants. It promises prosperity to the working class, purity to the bigots, a golden age to the artists, power to the wealthy, and a return to the past for the melancholic. It disincentivizes reflection, especially about its own mechanisms. It operates as a cult of tradition as opposed to learning. Fascism prefers its status as a floating signifier. It thrives on not meaning anything. In an essay for the online journal Room titled Fascism's Erotic Register, sue writes, Eco argues that fascism has no particular ideological essence. The content of its ideologies differ, but its structure reoccurs. He lists 14 features that characterize eternal fascism. Many of these coexist in unquestioning contradiction. Because fascism disdains thought and reflectivity, thinking is considered passive, effete, and is feminized. Fascism is a muscular cult of action for action's sake, in which life is permanent warfare. To echo fascist violence is an erotic register of machismo, the predations of hyper hetero masculinity, the contempt for women, the assault on sex Ed and gendered variants, the attribution of perversion to racial ethnic minorities. All of this is bedrock to fascist structures. End quote. The historian Robert Paxton describes fascism as iterative. The structure returns time and time again throughout history. He tells us that the KKK was a version previous and less successful to Mussolini. In Italy, the KKK fed into white Christian nationalism in the 1930s. These were pro Nazi movements infected with the virulent antisemitism that characterizes the alt right today. In these regimes, real men fight and good women mother. The righteous are sanctified. They are pure and they are ascendant. Homosexuals. The blacks and the Jews, these are considered perverse and subhuman. It's perfectly within the framework of psychoanalysis to discuss fascism from a framework of lack the way in which Freud and Lacan both talk about desire as the result of something missing and being sought. There is another framework here, and I don't expect psychoanalysts to rush to it because the French psychoanalyst Felix Guattari was a sort of anti analyst. He and his collaborator Gilles Deleuze had a different way of thinking about fascism. Not as something being sought that has been lost, but actually as a product of the people's desires. In this framework, we all crave fascism. It's the very syncretic nature of fascism that would imply that it's not something imposed on us from a strong daddy, giving us the safety we crave from the past, but it's something we do to ourselves. In all fairness, my co producer Mason Neely has been patiently waiting for me to take Deleuze and Guattari seriously over a few episodes. Now, as you've probably heard. Let's check in with him.

[Co-host or Interviewer]

Hey, Mason.

[Mason Neely]

Hiya, John.

[Co-host or Interviewer]

First of all, is there anything or anybody that you hate right now?

[Mason Neely]

Don't. I think there might be. I think there might be.

[Co-host or Interviewer]

Jack.

[Mason Neely]

I'm not gonna alpha. I'm almost certain that. Yes.

[John Totten]

You don't want to talk about it, though.

[Mason Neely]

I think it's probably best we don't talk about my hate. That's just for me.

[John Totten]

They're real life people.

[Mason Neely]

Maybe it's best we don't talk about my hate, but can we talk about my interest in Italian fascism instead? This is a particular point of interest for me. I gotta put some cards on the table now. It's important to know. I think you have after 30 years. Normie, I am not a fascist. I just want to go on the record. This is a pretty edgy take. Not a fascist. That said, I have A particular interest in Italian fascism. It's a sentence that you just don't hear said enough.

[John Totten]

It's an academic interest.

[Co-host or Interviewer]

That's not that weird.

[Mason Neely]

Yeah, it's an academic interest, but I think there's something about Italian fascism.

[John Totten]

It's the Ferrari of fascism.

[Mason Neely]

Well, it's not like, oh, Italian fascist was cool, or because there's espresso involved, it's like a bit more palatable. No, it's. It's a fucking authoritarian regime. But there's elements of the construction of Italian fascism which delineate itself from National Socialism, but also speak to some of the things. If we're going to take a more specific lens and see the productive qualities of fascism. Italian Fascism points to, I think, some unique characteristics which are worth exploring. Because what's really the argument here? What does the loser Guitari have to add to this discussion? The history of, you know, the psychoanalytic framing of fascism is always rooted in lack. So as to say there's something in the body politic that is so deficient, either from a developmental perspective, a intellectual perspective, a cultural perspective, there is something just missing in them.

[John Totten]

Like the economic disillusionment of Trump voters is what led them to.

[Mason Neely]

Or they're too fucking stupid, or they're just simpletons in Morgantown, West Virginia. Or we can reduce all of this to some crisis of attachment or unmet needs or fucking developmental trauma.

[John Totten]

Desire for a daddy in some ways.

[Mason Neely]

We don't want to discount that. But that's not the whole story.

[John Totten]

This is complicated because this is also, even though fascism full of false promises, oh, this is also what it is selling, which is like a return to the past.

[Mason Neely]

Absolutely. So to say that, oh, there's not like an attachment element to this. Absolutely not. For me, the two great theorists that I always go back to that have shaped both my theory of people and the world, but also of practice, are Eric Fromm and Deluza Guitari. And they have different understandings of fascism, but really complementary in the same way. And Fromm, I think of the Frankfurt School, starts to ask the question, well, let's start to think about what the fascist project does. And his framing of it was okay, it does something pretty remarkable because the assumption is, well, you've got the leader, the authoritarian and the populace. What the leader wants is to consume the population. And what the population want is really signing up to their own death.

[Co-host or Interviewer]

Right.

[Mason Neely]

But from begins to have a way more sensitive reading about this, which is, oh, yeah, but fascism does something for people think about the emergence of Fascism as an intra war phenomenon. We can liken this to our own time. The order was exhausted in terms of what could be achieved. The total disaster of the First World War at every level of society. You left with this, like, deadened society. It's a world in which there are so many choices but so few answers. I feel this in my own life in terms of like, to achieve some sort of change. It's kind of a lost time in a lot of ways. With that crises of agency comes an anxiety. Fascism does something. It provides this beautiful unity. Now he's writing in more of a psychoanalytic mode, but he's an influence on Deleuze, Guentari. What does it do? The hope that there is someone there who knows me so well, they can order this society and they can make it make sense. Produces a sense of relief. And what's the relief? The joy of someone else has this.

[John Totten]

Yeah, I'm with you.

[Mason Neely]

People sign up to the project and.

[John Totten]

Really what I think what we're building is the capacity for understanding people that we can understand. That might create an avenue towards some kind of alliance in the future. That's my most ambitious hope.

[Mason Neely]

This is where the Loser Guitari are interested in. And this is also their model of subjectivity, of the self. We've got to get beyond like any essential qualities about anything, but more like, how do these things come together? What do they do?

[John Totten]

We've talked about how their understanding of desire is not something that is chasing an answer to lack, but that it is actually something produced by the connections that everything has.

[Mason Neely]

Fascism, since its inception creates dynamism. It creates this sense that shit is happening. In some ways, yes, we're trying to restore that, but don't worry about that. It's now, it's the future. It's. Something is happening and something's happening at speed. If you look at, say, what Trump has done, as brain dead as he is, what has he done? Every day something happens. So what fascism offers is velocity. What it promises is urgency towards the future, but it can never deliver on it.

[John Totten]

Well, it's promising contradictory things that's inherent in the structure. Yeah, it's promising everything to everyone.

[Mason Neely]

And we're also going to return not just to an imagined past, but we're going to return to. And this is part of Deleuze and guitarist critique. If we're going to have empathy for it, what is all that dynamism promising? It's going, yeah, I know everything's fucked up, but we have right now, everything right now. But what do they really take, with all that energy, they channel things into very specific roles for human beings. If we're going to define maga as a, like a, a normative phenomenon, as in like the rules, normative behavior, what you're supposed to do, what is it? Grass fed beef, trad wifing, have a bunch of kids, you know, sort of the ascendant of masculinity, which is a through line from all fascist projects, through all the iterations.

[John Totten]

That's one of the few, all the.

[Mason Neely]

Iterations, even for something like the Italian project, which is absolutely all in for the avant garde and releasing artistic expressions.

[John Totten]

But men are men and women are women.

[Mason Neely]

But men are men and women are women. All this dynamism, everything is just now, now, now, more, more, more. There's no tomorrow anymore. He might be talking about an imagined past, but everything's erased. But what really happens for all of that promise? What really happens is everything gets narrowed down into a very small spectrum of choice and of behavior and of options for agency. And that's the cruel side of hand of it.

[John Totten]

What's notable to me about the framework.

[Co-host or Interviewer]

That Deleuze and Guattari are offering is.

[John Totten]

That everybody wants this. And if you think you don't, you're wrong. By the very nature of being these kind of like desire producing machines that we are drawn to, to what it is offering.

[Mason Neely]

This is why people make bad decisions and do destructive things. It's. It's exciting.

[John Totten]

So what is the offering from Deleuze and Guattari's framework? Because I know that what they're not saying is that fascism is great and cool, but from their framework, what they would call, I guess, schizoanalysis as opposed to psychoanalysis, what is the idea of progress or healing or whatever you would call it?

[Mason Neely]

What's schizoanalysis? It's trying to have an understanding of subjectivity. Again, there is no inside, there's only the outside. The outside's being folded in. Not just in terms of, oh, we're taking in these flows of fucking capitalism or experience or whatever, but the normative behaviors, who I'm supposed to be, we take those on. What Deleuze and Guattari propose is they are trying to put forward an anti fascist ideology. They're talking about this notion of any order which is hoping to constrain and channel and limit the capacity of the individual to make new connections in their life. They see the entire world as what is the project of any organism. It is to engage in processes of becoming. And what they see the fascist Project is. Is constantly limiting those processes.

[John Totten]

And they would even say that psychoanalysis in its traditional form limits the process of becoming that. To place people in these categories of the Oedipal triangle, for example, Y is a fascist kind of organization into these.

[Mason Neely]

Limited roles, because what is it doing? It's channeling desires, it's channeling options for connections, for agency, etc. It's going to capture whatever's in here and fix it according to hierarchical structures. And for them, they would go, no, no, no. Once they've done that, once they've. Once they've captured your desire, whatever you are, they've captured that. So what are we wanting to engage in but processes of what they call lines of flight? Lines of flight, meaning like, can we do something else here? Can we. Can we escape whatever this rigidity is, the project as they see it, it's not about chasing authenticity. It's about can we pursue a life of becoming and of difference? Because what does fascism seek? The same. Always the same channeling of desires, always the same. The same restrictive roles, and always the erasure of the individual absorbed into the demands of the body, the polis or the leader. And they would go, no, that's fascism. Fuck that. We must escape that in all its forms.

[John Totten]

Hear, hear. Thanks, Mason.

[Mason Neely]

Ah, thank you, Jim.

[Co-host or Interviewer]

I often think the sentence traumatized people. Traumatized people. And does that relate here? Again, we can't psychoanalyze these people, although, you know, sometimes they are these very public kind of textbook cases. And I think from. Is very prescient.

[John Totten]

Like how.

[Co-host or Interviewer]

How. How do people support at least someone like this? How is that even possible? The level of denial.

[Sue Grand]

Yes. And the split inner splits. Right.

[Co-host or Interviewer]

Yeah. Yeah.

[Sue Grand]

First of all, I just want to say traumatized people don't always traumatize others.

[Co-host or Interviewer]

Sure.

[Sue Grand]

Just be clear. And there are an awful lot of traumatized people I work with clinically or you know, we all know. Who have these incredibly golden hearts.

[Co-host or Interviewer]

Yeah.

[Sue Grand]

Actually are in their daily interactions. They may be over caretaking others or sacrificing themselves too much, but they're devoted, whether it's to social causes or just their inner goodness is like, amazing.

[Co-host or Interviewer]

Sure.

[Sue Grand]

That I've seen most traumatized people. So just wanted to say that. But yeah. So my first book, the Reproduction of Evil, looked at this clinically, always embedded in the political and social and in history. Right. So I think in the case of some of the things that we're looking at now that we're talking about in terms of gender, the patriarchy and gender binaries have Damaged people profoundly, men and women, that the struggle around what is masculine and how do I feel confident and secure in my masculinity is a very difficult one, culturally, collectively, and personally for men. So I think that there's culture trauma for men around, you know, these rigid tropes of masculinity.

[Co-host or Interviewer]

Yeah.

[Sue Grand]

And best men I know have a kind of not literal gender ambiguity, but in their souls, in their psyches, they are gender fluid, let's put it that way, in the terms of our culture.

[Co-host or Interviewer]

Right.

[Sue Grand]

And have struggles that are very painful because to maintain their empathy, their ability to relate to people emotionally, to prioritize bonding, to experience interdependency, all those things puts them in conflict with dominant culture or with their cultures or with their jobs or the guys at the bar or whatever.

[Co-host or Interviewer]

Right.

[Sue Grand]

I think that in terms of traumatizing culture, and then there are these epochs where Germany between the wars, where the experience of massive cultural impotency, shame, castration, poverty, was ubiquitous.

[Co-host or Interviewer]

Yeah.

[Sue Grand]

And Whelan talks about this. The restitution becomes an enactment where you enact the most brutal, most cruel forms of toxic masculinity. So I think that that's like something that's rampant in our culture now. Not only we have a black man in the White House, but we have a black man who doesn't perform masculinity in these traditional terms. He's very empathic. He's very intellectual.

[Co-host or Interviewer]

This is the way I think about it. There became, like, a masculinity on the left versus a masculinity on the right. I've never once had an insecurity about, like, am I manly? But I think about being smart all the time. Like, I think about being intellectually powerful all the time.

[Sue Grand]

Yeah.

[Co-host or Interviewer]

I was young when his star rose, and I thought, there's a guy that I could be like, you know, that.

[Sue Grand]

I would like to be, like a benign ideal. Right. He's intellectual, he's empathic. He has a good capacity to relate to the other. He's thinking, right. All these things, you know, in terms of transgenerational transmission, of trauma, traumatized people perpetrating others, which is what my book was about. You know, there's so much biographical material about Trump that people have talked so much about him identifying with the aggressor. He had a brother who was relentlessly attacked by this vicious, dominating, autocratic father. And Trump took a look at it and said, I don't want to be the one who's attacked. So he affiliates with his father and becomes the attacker exhorted to be the killer. And his brother dies young and Trump becomes president.

[Co-host or Interviewer]

Yeah. And he had a very negative view of his brother and that's why he doesn't drink.

[Sue Grand]

And he probably had complete contempt for his brother joining with his father. His brother drinks. His brother died young from the impact of alcoholism.

[Co-host or Interviewer]

Yeah.

[Sue Grand]

Yes. He joins completely with the father's hate, contempt and torture. Aside from other issues, like if you watch Fox News and that's all you watch, this has really affected people terribly. You believe everything they say and you join with them. Your need to believe in the president that you have voted for and you need to deny everything that's in contradiction to Fox and to Trump and to hold on to this lie is enormous. And perhaps more so when things are bad because he's out of it. He's doing exactly what he needs to do. Everything will be great. The economy is perfect. You desperately need to tell yourself that not to have your faith shaken in Trump. And it's bolstered by Fox News. So right.

[John Totten]

In her article on hatred published in psychoanalytic dialogues in 2023, sue writes, My pacifist ideals are faltering and my depressive container is fraying. I don't want to humanize and to speak to to a political opponent who will not humanize me. Martin Luther King has always been my hero, but I am filling up with hate and I find myself wanting a gun. No, let's tell the truth. I fantasize about an assault rifle so when they come, I can take them out. I know this is the paranoid schizoid position the progressive psychoanalyst are not supposed to live in. I am not advocating for this position, but right now the paranoid schizoid lens feels like the only realistic mode of perception. The homeless are everywhere, climate disasters are quick and deadly, and Bezos can buy another planet that corporate greed hasn't destroyed yet. We are increasingly held hostage to the Christian nationalist persecution conflict complex in this country. Our persecutors keep howling about being our victims.

[Co-host or Interviewer]

Yeah.

And we're talking about how do everyday regular people end up in support of that. That is an area that from has a lot to teach us about. I'm also interested in your work around how does a victim become a perpetrator? When I say traumatized people. Traumatized people. It's an important distinction to point out that most of them probably don't. My original kind of community clinic days were with men who were on probation. And this is the first place that I started to really think about these things. Because you would find people who had been profoundly victimized by violence then becoming perpetrators of sometimes the same exact kind of violence. And in the most kind of extreme cases, we're talking about victims who were children. I got really used to this pattern of, like, history repeating itself.

[Sue Grand]

Right. You must have seen it a lot in that context. I just want to go back to your comments about from. Because FROM is so important now.

[Co-host or Interviewer]

Yes.

[Sue Grand]

Roger, FY just put out a book. It's a wonderful book in which he interweaves the biography of Fromm, his history during and after the war. And it's a wonderful, wonderful book, and I really recommend it in terms of looking at Fromm's relevance to now and the way he looked at the genocidal and fascistic forces and is always considering. Yeah, okay, so you've got a few people who are mobilizing that. The problem is always that good people do nothing, get swept away. Paxton talks about this. Umberto Eco talks about this in his essay Or Fascism. And this is a lot of what my new essay on fascism is about. I write a lot about the erotic fever operates between the charismatic, seductive, exciting leader and the field that he creates with his followers that creates a kind of very perverse erotic web where there are excitements and perversions and prohibitions and where Eros is linked to cruelty. So there's a lot there. I'm glad you keep bringing in from, in terms of, you know, the work that you did, seeing these people who had been so profoundly abused, and they then perpetrate this on others, whether it's rape or battering, you know, and then they're stuck in this system. There's, of course, so many things that go into this, but one of the things that goes into this is if there's even one person in their lives, and sometimes it can be a teacher, that they have one teacher for one year. If there's one person in their lives with whom they have a bond of empathy, connection, recognition, appreciation, that is an enormous bulwark against becoming a perpetrator. The thing that we all need the most and developmentally clearly, is bonding and attachment. And if the only attachment figures are the ones who are abusing you, and that's all you see in your world is neglect and abuse, and you're a child and you need them desperately, then you're more likely to identify with the aggressor.

[Co-host or Interviewer]

Right.

[Sue Grand]

And dissociate and split off into your different self states, your victim experience, instead of ever identifying with your victim experience or integrating it.

[Co-host or Interviewer]

Right.

[Sue Grand]

Empathy for it, you bury it in unbearable affects, in shame and self contempt. Right. Put it off. And then there's often a compulsion, there's a kind of compulsion to relive the profound, disturbing dynamic, relocating your victimhood in another where you're in this very complicated psychic network of bonding, engagement, extruding your victimhood into the other, extruding your fear and your torment and your helplessness or whatever, into the other, identifying, as I said, with the aggressor, being in the perpetrator self who feels power. I've discovered in the course of working with some of these people that there are moments and ways that they experience some of their victimhood through this perpetration. And they actually can feel the person's fear, not just in a sadistic way, but that they have breakthrough experiences of what might become empathy, what might be ethical horror at what they're doing in touch with what actually happened to them. I mean, it's very mysterious why some people are very abused, have good souls as much as they're tormented, and other people become perpetrators. Certainly, as we've been talking about, the construction of masculinity tends to move male victims more in the direction of repurpiting. Right. Because the experience of being helplessly abused is a sissy identity. So. But the other thing that I think makes a big difference, and actually Donna Orange talked about this somewhere, not sure where, if you have in this family where you being abused another, let's say this younger child, and you are able to bond with the younger child and be a protector, a caretaker, that you can experience your own goodness and your own capacity to love. Let's say you're a 10 year old kid who's being abused with another 5 year old kid in the family who you're able to love and care for, maybe protect, maybe some of the abuse in order to protect the younger child, make sure they get fed, make sure they do their homework, whatever. This is also a very protective factor, the experience. One of the things that is so pernicious about childhood abuse is that you grow up feeling so profoundly defective about yourself.

[Co-host or Interviewer]

Yeah.

[Sue Grand]

And. And the ability to love, even to have a dog, a pet.

[Co-host or Interviewer]

Yeah.

[Sue Grand]

The ability to experience your own capacity to love and to be, have goodness inside you.

[Co-host or Interviewer]

Right.

[Sue Grand]

Is very protective against perpetrating.

[Co-host or Interviewer]

It was her story.

[Sue Grand]

That's right. It was her story because she was one of many, many children.

[Co-host or Interviewer]

She was the oldest of 11 with very abusive parents.

[Sue Grand]

Right, that's right.

[Co-host or Interviewer]

She was parenting at like three years.

[Sue Grand]

Old, which is an enormous burden, but it connects you to love your loving capacity. This is one of the things that I find is so ubiquitous in my patients. I'm not talking about a severely traumatic childhood, just a difficult childhood. Right. That the internal experience of being bad and defective is so common. The difficulty experiencing your own loving capacity and your own inner goodness is a miracle. A loving capacity and inner goodness, that's not perfect, not saintly, it's not perfect, but it's there. I think that that really probably enormously contributed to who Donna became. Her passions and her ethic and her kindness and her care for the other. But she found the philosophy that she lived as a three year old.

[Co-host or Interviewer]

Right.

You have me thinking about my own childhood and how you say it doesn't need to be traumatic, it can just be hard also sometimes just like hardship can mean just not getting some of the good things you needed, like that kind of affirmation and that.

[Sue Grand]

Right.

[Co-host or Interviewer]

You know, I think in my own life it set me on this kind of chase. I'm chasing being a good boy. I'm trying to establish that constantly.

[Sue Grand]

Exactly. In early development, you need to feel the joy of your parents regard.

[Co-host or Interviewer]

Yeah.

[Sue Grand]

And you need to feel that they're intrigued and recognizing and facilitating as they discover you growing. And nobody can do this perfectly. But that's kind of basic actually. You know, it's so funny because this field we spend so much time hearing about and having had difficult childhoods. Right. But then you watch families and they're not necessarily brilliant psychologically or anything. They have joy about their children. I, you know, they just love, they are amused and interested in. Oh, wow, my kid's good at that. She likes to do that. I was taking a walk here in Teaneck a week ago around a track and behind me was this woman. She has two little girls. One of them is in a stroller. She three. And mother's pushing her in the stroller. Mother also has a dog. The little girl wants to get out of the stroller. She gets out of the stroller. Mother takes the little jacket and the girl takes off running. And the mother is cheering that her little girl is active and she's running fast and she's strong and she's free. I'm beaming because here's a mother who just is joyous that this little girl's taking off running.

[Co-host or Interviewer]

Yeah.

It's like fertilizer on the sense of self. All the nutrients for a good sense of self.

[Sue Grand]

And I'm thinking about this little girl who's three years old going into a woman who has self confidence, who can take adventures, who can risk things, who can try things, and she's got a mother who's saying, go for it. And if you get frustrated, if you get hurt, if it doesn't go well, I'll comfort you and we'll will find another way to keep going. Right. I'm going. Yes. Great running. You know, now the mother and I are cheering together. This is what it should be like. And maybe it's not that complicated. Shouldn't be that complicated.

[John Totten]

In the book Decentering Relational Theory, in a chapter titled Trauma as Radical Inquiry, sue writes, I am imagining a relational field theory that expands on the two person analytic field so well theorized by Lou Aron. To do this, I think we need to liberate the psychoanalytic family from its origins in 19th century bourgeois Vienna. If we can return to the radical humanism of Erich Fromm, incorporate the sibling of horizontal relations and social justice, and integrate a social ethical perspective with the political cultural critiques made by relational psychoanalysts, we may be able to make this turn. I can sense this turn coming. It is in the ever widening lens of relational theory, in the dissolution of disciplinary boundaries, in the porous border of our office, in our inclusive vision of subjectivity, in our link to human collectivities, and in our passion for social justice, gender, race, class, intersectionality. Social conditions are increasingly recognized in the shaping and the wounding of the psyche. We have been disentangling oppressive social edicts from the ethics of Buber and Levinas and claiming the I thou ethic that has always existed in psychoanalysis. Where once we ignored big history, we now honor it through the study of transgenerational transmission. If ever psychoanalysis was poised to rewrite the psychoanalytic family, it is now. This complex web of relations would be mutually influencing. They would be situated paradoxically within, beyond and outside of the maternal dyad in the Oedipal triangle, incorporating siblings, cohorts, history, politics, culture, and the generations, all engaged in processes of containment. This theory would be situated within and outside of the nuclear family. It would have intimate and collective features, a multiplicity of subjects, movable states and affects that would be excluded exclusively defined by dyadic mentalization. In such a system, there would be a heightened awareness of what Lynn Layton describes as our mutual responsibility for the other's suffering.

[Co-host or Interviewer]

Well, so that takes me also to like, where society comes in. I'm raising two girls and my oldest is a kindergartner and she's very into science and dinosaurs, and she wants to be a dinosaur scientist. When she Grows up. She came home one day, and I forget the context, but she said something like, I want to be a scientist, but girls aren't scientists.

[Sue Grand]

Oh, God.

[Co-host or Interviewer]

Even now, you know, she's in a public school in Seattle. I guarantee she didn't hear it from her kindergarten teacher. I don't know where she. She might have heard it on the playground. But I. I said, where did you hear that? That is not true. I mean, not only.

[Sue Grand]

Right.

[Co-host or Interviewer]

Is it not something I want her to believe is true. STEM fields are actually feminizing.

[Sue Grand]

Yeah, Right.

[Co-host or Interviewer]

And one of. One of the places where it's successfully feminizing. But it was like such a moment of like, man, this shit gets in there.

[Sue Grand]

Was it ever? Right, Right. But if you've got a dad at home, that's not true. And you love this stuff, and we want you to go for it. Yeah, just keep going.

[Co-host or Interviewer]

True.

What you're really also pointing out is back to my original clients and the criminal justice system. Is that what's profound about that is how many people don't have anyone like.

[Sue Grand]

That, don't have anyone. And not only don't they have anyone to bond to like that, but the system is horrific. So, you know, if you had kids who were being abused in a system that had resources, and who knows, maybe their parents have no resources. They're working 15 hours a day, and they're really struggling, and they had hard childhoods and they have no resources. You know, we have a culture that, especially given the racism and class that you have kids who are really suffering at home and there is no world to turn to. I did have once, I had a patient Hispanic woman who was in horrific conditions and was sexually abused, and it was just. It was horrific. She was probably a very quiet little girl, very smart, and she had one teacher who really saw her and cared about her. And when I started seeing this patient who was. When she was about 30, she was telling me about this teacher. And the teacher enabled her to see a future and to see another way and enabled her to see what was good inside of her and smart inside of her. People don't have that, and they don't have resources. I mean, the criminal justice system, if you ever thought you were bad from being abused, you are in a world that doesn't offer you any compassion, doesn't nurture you Right. Very early, is regarding you as bad. Were you able to help some of these people?

[Co-host or Interviewer]

I think that was one of the things that really contributed to burnout, is that over time, you start to just feel like You're a babysitter in a system. You're a cognitive.

[Sue Grand]

Yeah.

[Co-host or Interviewer]

I do think that there were clients who found what I was offering to be valuable or profound. You know, people who were like, they just needed someone to see them, like that teacher, you know? But then the system works on the clinician.

Right.

Like it, you. You end up with secondary trauma. You end up with burnout. And, you know, I think two years was kind of impressive for me at the time that I did it.

[Sue Grand]

Did you experience with some of these people that they did have times when they looked at themselves and wondered, why did I do that? Or I. I wish I hadn't done that.

[Co-host or Interviewer]

Yeah.

[John Totten]

There was a lot of guilt and.

[Co-host or Interviewer]

Shame, a lot of remorse and guilt and shame. I. One of my favorite parts of that job is that I finagled my way into being the anger management group leader. Back then, probation didn't allow domestic violence abusers to do anger management because they found that it was teaching ways of hiding. So, for example, if your anger management technique is to count to 30 so you calm down, they were finding that people who did that were better at manipulating their victims. One of the ways that I was doing it differently was, which was, you know, from more of our perspective, which is, I'm trying to understand why I'm angry, not just how to hide it.

[Sue Grand]

Yeah.

[Co-host or Interviewer]

There was a really profound kind of perennial experience I had there where I would start off with a new group, and often the only white guy in the room, and I would say, is anger bad? And they would all say, yes. They had all ended up in these really difficult situations due to their anger. And then my next question would be, was Malcolm X angry?

[Sue Grand]

That's great.

[Co-host or Interviewer]

That's where the gears started turning.

Right.

And they, you know, they would say, well, yeah, okay, what did he do with his anger? And so one of the things that we would start to do that is such fantastic work.

[Sue Grand]

That's great.

[Co-host or Interviewer]

Thank you. We would start to really understand that anger has a use and, like, try to figure out what the use is.

[Sue Grand]

That's wonderful. Because the idea. They've been so bad, and it's because they're angry. So the anger is just destructive. And the idea is to just control your anger instead of looking at what your anger is really from and what can you do with it? That's good, right? I mean, people, Martin Luther King wasn't angry.

[John Totten]

Like, he was.

[Co-host or Interviewer]

Yeah.

[Sue Grand]

Guy. And he was right to be angry.

[Co-host or Interviewer]

Yeah.

[Sue Grand]

That was a fantastic intervention. And of course, it immediately connected you to the group.

[Co-host or Interviewer]

It worked on both ways, it would get us thinking about, like, anger is something useful, which is related to your article on hatred. Right. That one of the things that you are doing when you're examining your own hatred is trying to learn from it.

[Sue Grand]

Right. I mean, that was the core question that I was struggling with. Because if I hate the people who are fomenting fascism, I felt myself turning into. I could start to imagine whole categories of people that I just want excised from the universe. During COVID a lot of us felt like, well, these idiot Republicans who don't believe in vaccines and won't wear masks and don't believe in Covid. Okay, go ahead, die from COVID Right. And that was an understandable feeling, not a solution. It's an understandable feeling, but the real question was, for me, how do I make sure that while I'm hating the people who are fomenting fascism, that they didn't think Covid was real? And then they would get to the hospital deathly ill, and they would be told they have Covid and they wouldn't believe the healthcare workers and they're screaming at the healthcare workers while they're dying. And if you would just go get a vaccine, maybe that would help. So how do you not become them when you are hating them? That's the question. And how can you use your aggression in a way that empowers change?

[John Totten]

And on hatred, sue writes, I am coming late to this consciousness and I am coming to it through the conduit of my own political hatred. I can see now how we have all been written into this strategy of divide and conquer. I can see how many of us keep riding ourselves into this divisive project. At the core of my political hatred, I can see my impotence and my despair. How will we ever repair all these wounds and solidify our alliances so that we can stop full blown fascism in this country? How will we stop the escalating cruelty? But where there was no reflectivity in my hatred, now reflectivity has arrived. I have reclaimed history, my father's and that of my country. In my hating, raging body, I sense a clarity, strength and fortification that is distinct from Nazi sadism. And then later, I don't think we can sustain ourselves unless we are familiar with our own hatred with our own perpetrator parts.

[Sue Grand]

One of the things that I was really also working on that's also been a pet peeve of mine is our government and our history divides and conquers us. And I really wanted to look at the kinds of difficulties we have forming Alliances across Democrats on the left, with liberals, with all kinds of people who don't necessarily believe everything you believe, because we're never going to get anywhere if we don't form these strong alliances. We have differences with each other. We can be mad at each other, but that's private. You know, how do we really form these alliances? And so I was really looking at the way American history has constructed us, particularly through race, but through other things as well.

[Co-host or Interviewer]

Right.

[Sue Grand]

Each other and never align ourselves.

[Co-host or Interviewer]

What have you found? Because of my familial situation, having these relationships across red state, blue state.

[Sue Grand]

Yeah, what have I found? I personally don't feel that I have any ability to talk to a Trump supporter, depending on who they are. I have a neighbor here. I haven't really done it, but I could ask him in a very civilized way. So what do you like about Trump? What do you agree with? But you have to start there anyway. But one of the things I've been very interested in is colonial history and early history and the way these divisions, particularly around racism, were constructed so that very intentionally white indentured workers and African slaves. Well, they weren't even called white in the beginning. They were criminal trash sent from England, labor in the same bestial conditions as the Africans who were kidnapped. There was a totally conscious intention to split them. When there were early alliances, there was no racial concept. There were families, they were bonded. They helped each other and to split them and make sure that they could not form these alliances. Right. Which we all know. These are not the only places that these fissures were constructed, but they were cemented.

[Co-host or Interviewer]

Talking about an early example, and you write about this on hatred, an early example, where racialization is used to benefit neoliberalism. Labor is split, divided along lines of bigotry.

[Sue Grand]

Absolutely. I mean, from the very, very earliest colonial days, master class, the planter class, the conditions of labor were absolutely monstrous for the laboring class. And they were angry and they were forming alliances and resistances. And the only way to stop that was to construct race in such a way that indentured servants from England and Europe would be given a superior category of whiteness. Never had, and there was no such thing. And it was concretized in all kinds of laws at the time. For example, a white indentured servant couldn't be whipped in public naked without a justice determining that it was permissible. They had more rights of all kinds that separated them, that didn't give them better laboring conditions. What it gave them was some sense of. Of identification with the Planter class versus the black slaves. But the other thing is that it reduced their sense of shame, gave them more rights to dignity, social dignity.

[Co-host or Interviewer]

Yes.

[Sue Grand]

Than black people.

[Co-host or Interviewer]

This is how trickle down economics gets sold.

[Sue Grand]

Exactly is right.

[Co-host or Interviewer]

I'm more like them than you.

[Sue Grand]

Well, that's exactly right. And we have this trope in our country is that Americans don't hate rich people. They want to be a rich person. There's no class consciousness, not none, but very little class consciousness in our country, as opposed to Europe. So they don't hate the fact that these are billionaires running the government. They want to figure out how to be rich. They hear Trump saying, I'm going to make you rich.

[Co-host or Interviewer]

Right.

[Sue Grand]

So from the beginning, with this racial splitting and racial hierarchy, there's this de shaming of white indentured servants so that they can imagine that once they're freed from their indentured servitude, they can be like the person who they're laboring under.

[Co-host or Interviewer]

Right.

I have this dream that, like my furniture salesman father might one day understand that a black cab driver and him have far more in common than Elon Musk. That if those two people were in the same room, it would be the most awkward, unrelatable moment. Musk and my dad, it would be the most awkward, unrelatable conversation on the planet.

[Sue Grand]

Yes.

[Co-host or Interviewer]

And it's delicate because racialization has. Is real and has caused serious harm. That the cab driver and my dad have very different experiences, but that on the material realities of like, go clocking in and clocking out every day and trying to pay the bills and trying to get by, there's far more in common there.

[Sue Grand]

That's right. And there really is a huge problem around class consciousness, because one of the other American myths that we've been sold is we're a classless society. And from very, very early on, if you're white, we're in a classless society. Anybody can get to the American dream. When you've internalized that, then you are somebody who says, In 2020, things are better than they've ever been because he somehow identifies with Trump instead of having class consciousness. And of course, yes, you're absolutely right. The black cab driver is suffering from a whole other set of oppressions and persecutions and struggles. But in terms of class struggle, class predicament, that those rich people are not who you're going to become, that you're stuck, and you're struggling to begin to analyze the structural forces in our society and in capitalism that have been there since the colonial era. That became invisible because of this being bought off by whiteness.

[Co-host or Interviewer]

Right.

[Sue Grand]

I do think there was something that the Democrats, the left were doing that are very problematic and really weren't listening to people very well. True intellectual left position and language that people who were really having the experience that we're supposed to be caring about, they don't speak that language. We didn't talk well enough about it. I've been spending a lot of winters since COVID in Arizona years because of COVID I was driving across country and of course I didn't really get to talk to people because it was Covid. But all you have to do is drive through most of the country and you can see it's a very traditional country, it's a very religious country. And there is something about the way east and west coast elites, Democrats, leftists talk that forget about it. The people who get them are people who talk about what it's like to raise a family in neoliberalism and not calling it neoliberalism. Right. Bernie Sanders. How to talk to people. And a lot of us didn't and don't. And it's really obnoxious. We're not responsible for the crazy shit that the right wing and Fox News is telling people about Wokeness. Right. But we played into it in certain ways because we don't know how to talk to people.

[Co-host or Interviewer]

Well, we don't challenge the premise, first of all. We like, we accept the premise. And then like I always think of like when Elizabeth Warren did the DNA test, I was like, what are you doing? He doesn't.

[Sue Grand]

Whether she had Native American blood.

[Co-host or Interviewer]

Trump was making fun of her and challenged her to do a DNA test. And then she did it. And I was like, no, the way you respond to that is you don't give a shit about Native American heritage. Like you challenged the premise.

Right?

[Sue Grand]

That's right.

[Co-host or Interviewer]

I mean, we did this years ago with homosexuality. We doubled down on this idea that it was inherent from birth, that it.

[John Totten]

Was DNA, that it was genetic.

[Co-host or Interviewer]

When really like it shouldn't. It shouldn't matter if it's a choice or if it's not a choice.

[Sue Grand]

None of your fucking business.

[Co-host or Interviewer]

It doesn't matter.

[Sue Grand]

That's the answer, right?

[Co-host or Interviewer]

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Choice, non choice, pre verbal influences that we can't control. Like who knows how a sexuality is developed, although we have some psychoanalytic theories.

[Sue Grand]

Should be none of your fucking business.

[Co-host or Interviewer]

Yeah.

[Sue Grand]

American citizens and we have rights. That's it.

[Co-host or Interviewer]

Right, Right.

It's always a good intention when we fight that fight that's right.

[Sue Grand]

It is a good intention.

[Co-host or Interviewer]

This is not good arguing.

[Sue Grand]

I think you're absolutely right. As we get trapped inside the rights argument, instead of saying none of your fucking business.

[John Totten]

You'Re hearing two colleagues vent about the political landscape. This isn't us with our academic hats on. This is us in the break room. And this is the kind of conversation I enjoy recording for this show. Two therapists talk, talking how we really talk. It's not that our political analysis is part of our therapy modality, but it is part of a larger framework for how we see the treatment room. I keep coming back to the syncretic nature of fascism, its denial of its own contradictions, the fuzzy totalitarianism of it all, the love for the floating signifiers, the dissuasion against reflectivity. Psychotherapy needs to be anti fascist. In psychotherapy, we explore contradictions. We mourn the past instead of trying to recreate it. We seek to understand that which is fuzzy. We push past machismo. We seek authenticity. This is how psychotherapy is political. It's not out on the streets protesting, it's not in capitol buildings legislating. And even if a psychotherapy podcast might be preachy, we don't preach in the treatment room. Take all of Umberto Eco's descriptions of fascism, his 14 points, and promote the opposite in your treatment room, and you will be a political psychotherapist. And also, hear me out. You can be a conservative person and practice this kind of therapy. I know plenty of good people and good psychotherapists who practice, for example, from a Christian framework. They're clear about it to their patients, and the clarity itself is anti fascist. They don't make false promises, their traditions aren't cultic, they aren't afraid of modernity or how culture moves through time. And most importantly, they aren't afraid to explore their own vulnerabilities. This isn't about whether you are a conservative or a liberal. The field needs both. But when people in our field thrive on obfuscation, on bad faith, on the fear of difference, on the hatred of progress, or the resistance to move our practice forward in time, then the field of psychotherapy is enacting fascism. And this is anti therapeutic.

[Co-host or Interviewer]

How much of that is wrapped up in white liberals trying to be good? I also think of like the white liberal is highly invested in being good as well.

[Sue Grand]

Yeah, this is a huge problem, that they are alienated from a lot of people's real experience, feeling guilty, of course, because they have white privilege and they're usually middle class Upper middle class, maybe wealthy. And so I would say that they're appropriately conscious and carrying a sense of responsibility around their white privilege and their class privilege. But you're right, the internalization of badness can make us overcompensate in really crazy ways to try to identify as good. And one of the things that was a great paper by somebody at NYU Postdoc, Jane Kaflish, is something like the ability impossible reparation. What she does is she looks at exactly this issue, that there is a sense of responsibility and guilt or shame for the inherited privilege that you have and a need to fix it and to do what she calls manic reparation. So you can't stand living in a kind of impossible situation where the heritage of what's happened around race in this country absolutely needs repair. We have to devote ourselves to repair. But no individual can feel that, I fixed it. I'm a good white person and I fixed it.

[Co-host or Interviewer]

Right, right, right.

[Sue Grand]

But people do all kinds of things, either fleeing from acknowledging their shared responsibility or doing other things that are just. But I'm good, I'm good, I'm good. Right. And, you know, we also just talked about that in terms of internalizing trauma and abuse. The dilemma of needing to feel like a good, flawed human being who messes up and makes mistakes, can do hurtful things, and is engaged in knowing that your goodness doesn't mean that you're perfectly good and you're not bad. Bryan Stevenson said something like, you're never as bad as the worst thing you've ever done. Something like that. Or, you know, really, you can't define yourself by the worst thing you've ever done, and you can't define yourself by the best thing you've ever done. You have to have ordinary human caring and goodness and recognize that you can injure people and just go forward and do your best. Right. I mean, one of the things that when we talk about what enables someone with trauma not to become a perpetrator is that the antidote to internalizing all the badness is being able to make acts of reparation, acts of love, acts of care, knowing that you can never do it perfectly, but that doesn't make you bad.

[Co-host or Interviewer]

It's very much tied into some of the other things we've talked about with other gas, including, you know, Laura Sheha, who talks about mutuality without reparation being impossible when material realities are so out of balance.

[Sue Grand]

Right.

[Co-host or Interviewer]

And that's very valid to me that, like when we talk about, I think, Judith Butler and her Change over the years has said, you know, talking about non violence benefits the status quo. You know, mutuality can benefit the status quo. And that if we're not interested in making.

[Sue Grand]

What do you mean by mutuality in this context?

[Co-host or Interviewer]

I think I mean like a mutual dialogue or mutual recognition that like sometimes I think the worry about it from the people who critique it, which I think is valid, is that it becomes a veil to hide, you know, to continue the status quo, not to make change. Yeah, exactly. That there are material realities that are literally unmutual.

[Sue Grand]

Oh, I see, I see. So this just an emphasis on dialogue, like hearing each other can fob people off. Instead of hearing each other and being committed to material change, we're both hearing each other and we both can share how we feel. And I'm listening to you in your oppression. Speak to me and I can hear you. And.

[John Totten]

And now we're good.

[Sue Grand]

And now we're good. Right. We don't have to make material change, we don't have to make reparations.

[Co-host or Interviewer]

Yeah.

[Sue Grand]

One of the things that I talk about in my first book is that perpetrators need to make reparations and that, you know, there was this big issue around forgiveness and is forgiveness good and people should forgive their perpetrator. And you know, the last, I think chapter is all about that perpetrators need to be engaged in making reparations. And that's at every level. So. Yeah. And that it isn't enough to just listen, you need to make material changes.

[Co-host or Interviewer]

Yeah, that's restorative justice.

[Sue Grand]

It's restorative justice. Right. And it's much beyond what you're calling mutuality. It's not just about hearing, it's about listening to what the other needs, what kind of repair they need.

[Co-host or Interviewer]

Right.

Maybe beyond mutuality is a better way of describing it.

[Sue Grand]

Yeah, that's a very good phrase for it. Beyond mutuality. I mean, that'd be a great paper, a name for a book, Beyond Mutuality towards Reparation.

[Co-host or Interviewer]

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

[Sue Grand]

See, I always think about mutuality as reparation fair. Just like in restorative justice, you don't just say, oh, I'm sorry.

[Co-host or Interviewer]

Right.

[Sue Grand]

It's really listening to what the victim needs and asking the perpetrator can they do it.

[Co-host or Interviewer]

Right.

[Sue Grand]

Yeah. This was a great conversation. We could go on for hours.

[Co-host or Interviewer]

I could. You're very nice to talk to. It's very, very nice to meet you.

[Sue Grand]

Wonderful.

[Co-host or Interviewer]

I've wanted to for a while and thank you so much for being on.

[Sue Grand]

The show and thank you so much for asking me. Great getting to know you and I love your work.

[Co-host or Interviewer]

Likewise.

[John Totten]

Take care. This has been Between Us. Our thanks to our guests guest Sue Grand. Between Us is produced by myself and Mason Neely, who also composes our music. Our research assistant is Rose Bergdahl. Find Between Us wherever you find podcasts and subscribe and if you like the show, leave a review until next time. Take care.