Surviving Autocracy: Compliance, Dread, Resistance

Sue Grand, PhD

Sunday, December 14,2025

10:00am-1:00pm EST

Live Interactive via Zoom

Zoom Invite Will Be Sent on December 13, 2025

Co-Sponsored with NJSCSW (New Jersey Society for Clinical Social Work)

3 CEs for Counselors, Psychologists and Social Workers

CEs accepted by many states - check with your local boards.

Sue Grand, PhD

Dr. Sue Grand is faculty and supervisor at the NYU Postdoctoral Program in Psychotherapy and Psychoanalysis; faculty, The National Institute for the Psychotherapies; faculty, The Mitchell Center for Relational Psychoanalysis; visiting scholar, The Chicago Center for Psychoanalysis; visiting scholar, The Psychoanalytic Society of Northern California. She teaches internationally about the intersection of politics, culture, psyche and trauma. She is on the boards of Psychoanalytic Dialogues and Psychoanalysis, Culture and Society. She is the author of:  The Reproduction of Evil: A Cultural and Clinical Perspective and The Hero in the Mirror: From Fear to Fortitude. She is the co-author of Trans-generational Transmission: A Contemporary Introduction. She has co-edited multiple volumes on relational theory and trans-generational transmission. She is in private practice in NYC and in New Jersey.

Workshop Description

We are living in a world of radical precarity. The present is menacing; the past is being rewritten, and the future fills us with dread. We are struggling with helplessness and paralysis. We are witnessing climate disasters and the return of fascism. Our trans-generational legacies are being ignited, and our empathy is being challenged. Where do we find agency and hope? Can we find an ethical and self-protective relationship to ourselves and the other? In this seminar, this intimate, existential trouble will be probed in the context of psychoanalysis, history, and critical social theory. What dynamisms give birth to fascism? Can thinking psychoanalytically help us to undo these dynamisms? We will seek the insights, and experiences, of our psychoanalytic forebears, as they reckoned with similar times. Ultimately, we will discover this: autocracy has always been a continuous, dissociated feature of liberal democracy. We will examine the white phallic supremacy that is at the very core of Western democracy, ever resurgent in fascism. In the psychic/interpersonal register, we will reflect on what Bollas calls, ‘the fascist state of mind’.