A Political Mind Special - The American Dream

The American Dream

Renée Danziger

Chaired by Angela Joyce

Tuesday 4th February 2025
8:15pm - 9.45pm (GMT)

Online via zoom
Recording available for 1 week

Announcing his withdrawal from the 2024 Presidential election in July, President Joe Biden looked back wistfully at his path to the White House, and, with a certain amount of emotion, he declared:

“Nowhere else on Earth could a kid with a stutter from modest beginnings in Scranton, Pennsylvania…one day sit behind the Resolute desk in the Oval Office as President of the United States. [And yet] here I am. That’s what’s so special about America. We’re a nation of promise and possibilities. Of dreamers and doers. Of ordinary Americans doing extraordinary things.” (21 July 2024)

Biden was speaking in a language familiar to many Americans: the language of ‘rags to riches’, and ‘log cabin to White House.’ It is the language of the American dream: a dream that if you work hard and with sufficient determination, you will achieve a better life.

Renée Danziger’s paper explores from a psychoanalytic perspective this American dream after spending time researching in the US

Renée Danziger is a psychoanalyst in private practice and a Fellow of the British Psychoanalytic Society.  She is a training analyst for the Independent Child and Adolescent Psychotherapy Training (IPCAPA) and for the Tavistock Child and Adolescent Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy training.  She is a social scientist by background and has a D. Phil in Politics. 

Angela Joyce is a fellow, and Training and Supervising Psychoanalyst and Child Psychoanalyst with the British Psychoanalytical Society (BPAS). She trained as a child analyst at the Anna Freud Centre, worked there for 20 years and was a founding member of the pioneering Parent-Infant Project applying psychoanalysis to working with babies and their families and jointly led the child psychotherapy service. She has recently retired from full time analytic practice in London.

Please note: This lecture will be recorded and available for 1 week to all registered participants.

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