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Who Am I? Exploring Identity through Sexuality, Politics, and Art

Author(s) : Miguel Angel Gonzalez-Torres

Reviews and Endorsements

This extraordinary book provides a comprehensive, updated, and profound synthesis of psychoanalytic investigation of the conflicts between the individual and his/her social, political, and cultural environment. There are three vantage points organising this overview: in Part I, the direct influence of personality structure on the social, political, and cultural environment; in Part II, the particular social impact of unconscious masculinity and femininity; and, in Part III, the essence of the relationship between the individual and the world of art.

In contrast to the usual study of unconscious intrapsychic conflicts as determinants of personality structure and individual psychopathology, the emphasis in Part I is on the consequences of unconscious personality features on cultural values and conflicts, ideology and social myths, politics and intergroup – including international conflicts. The psychoanalytic findings about regressed large-group psychology are applied to the analysis of nationalism, social violence, and political leadership. Part II focuses on masculinity and femininity, conscious and unconscious, as influencing social conventionalities, cultural and ethical value systems and biases, and their impact on individual submission and rebellion to the social environment. Part III returns to the intrapsychic world of the individual as affected by the universal conflicts between love and aggression in the encounter with the world of art. Cinema, sculpture, painting, and architecture deliver examples of the emotional dialogue between the artist’s creativity and its challenging the recipient’s resonance to the shock of unavoidable conflict between love and aggression.
‘For the educated lay person, Miguel Angel Gonzalez-Torres provides the understanding of contemporary psychoanalytic object relations theory, the underlying analytic frame of this volume, as an original contribution to the existential analysis of identity (“Who am I?”). For the psychoanalyst and mental health professional, it is a unique integration between the psychological conflicts of the individual and the social arena in which these conflicts are experienced in the grand scale of social life and struggles.
Otto F. Kernberg, MD, Professor Emeritus, Weill Cornell Medicine; Training and Supervising Analyst, Columbia University Center for Psychoanalytic Training and Research

Who Am I? provides exciting and wide-ranging arguments on the essence of identity. Using his lifelong experience of working with individuals, Professor Gonzalez-Torres moves into the fray of collective identities. Exploring diverse contexts, he reflects on some of the common ways that we encounter and perform identity/ties. These diverse contexts move the reader through different scales of sociability ranging from sexuality to art, grounding us in specific examples. The volume is wonderfully engaging. It is driven by a desire to comprehend and is intellectually jargon-free, neither the “I” nor the “We” are boxed in. This is a debate about identity that is relevant not just to psychiatry but to anyone who wonders about how we are constituted.
Professor Marie Louise Stig Sørensen, Department of Archaeology, University of Cambridge

Sigmund Freud used the word “identity” only a few times in his writings. This book delves into psychoanalytic studies on both individual and collective identities, exploring their connections to immortality, sexuality, and the destructive aggression often directed towards perceived “strangers”. I find this book to be highly significant, not only for psychoanalysts and psychotherapists grappling with identity issues in their clients, but also for anyone interested in gaining a deeper understanding of collective dynamics within national and international relationships.
Vamık Volkan, MD, Professor Emeritus of Psychiatry, University of Virginia; past President of the International Society of Political Psychology, American College of Psychoanalysts, and the International Dialogue Initiative