Streets of Minneapolis
What has been seen and heard about the fascist displays and killings on the streets of Minneapolis in the winter of 2026 is, tragically true. What is unfolding constitutes a collective trauma, both physical and moral. Terror has been inflicted upon nonviolent civilians, not only through lethal force but through the deliberate shattering of shared reality. The people of Minneapolis have responded with spontaneous acts of resistance to what they experience as murderous impunity exercised by federal law enforcement. Their actions represent an effort to preserve both life and meaning, and to protect Somali immigrants and other vulnerable communities from detention or removal without criminal cause by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP), both agencies operating under the authority of the Department of Homeland Security.
Citizen-recorded smartphone videos documented the killings of Renée Good and Alex Pretti. These recordings function as acts of witnessing in the psychoanalytic sense: attempts to transform overwhelming experience into perceivable form. The transformation allows psychological processes to be thought, felt, and shared. Yet the almost immediate response of the Trump Administration, issuing false, contradictory, and morally perverse accounts that blamed the victims themselves constituted a second trauma. This maneuver did not merely deny responsibility; it attacked the public’s capacity to know what it knows. The implicit message is “Who are you going to believe, us, your protectors, or your own eyes?”
Such assaults on reality are not episodic but cumulative. They operate as ongoing salvos aimed at overwhelming the American psyche, saturating it with unprocessed emotional hypocrisy and debris. A solipsistic president and his inner circle appear driven by displays of omnipotence, greed, and cruelty, functioning less as leaders than as generators of psychic disorganization. In this sense, authoritarian power does not merely govern bodies; it colonizes inner life.
The concept resistance carries multiple meanings across disciplines. In its most general sense, it signifies opposition to force, intrusion, or domination. In material science, resistance refers to a predictable physical property; in medicine, it describes the body’s capacity to combat infection. In classical psychoanalysis, resistance denotes unconscious processes that interfere with making the unconscious conscious. In contemporary psychoanalysis, resistance is understood as meaningful communication and a way of coping, an expression of the patient’s fears regarding change, safety, and relational rupture. In the political sphere, resistance often takes the form of collective disobedience in response to authoritarian or totalitarian power, serving to preserve moral continuity under conditions of coercion or destruction. In cultural expression, resistance functions as memory-work: a refusal to allow violence, erasure, or lies to pass unmarked. Art becomes a container when institutional containers fail. It may take the form of a film, painting, play, poem, symphony, or song.
History offers sobering illustrations of this psychic-political wound. On November 4, 1956, Soviet tanks entered Budapest in overwhelming force, crushing the Hungarian Revolution, extinguishing a democratic uprising at the cost of thousands of lives. The following day, Albert Camus wrote, “There is in this world, running parallel to the forces of death and subjugation, an enormous force of persuasion. It’s called culture.” Camus argued for a measured, ethical rebellion grounded in moral limits. His insistence that 2 + 2 = 4 represents what might be called a moral minimum—the lowest boundary beyond which truth itself collapses. George Orwell gave this idea its starkest literary formulation in 1984, where the annihilation of this simple truth signals the psyche’s final surrender. “If this goes,” Orwell’s character insists, “nothing remains.” Similarly, the playwright and dissident Václav Havel articulated the concept of “living in truth” as the foundation of the Czech people’s resistance, culminating in the Velvet Revolution of 1989. For Havel, resistance often consisted of small, quotidian acts of honesty carried out even when no immediate change seemed possible.
Culture and the arts thus operate as a parallel institution of truth-telling when official discourse is corrupted or weaponized. Artists have borne witness to injustice—directly and obliquely—for centuries. In the American context, figures such as Paul Robeson, Bob Dylan, and Joan Baez exemplify this tradition of artistic resistance. For this writer, however, the Greek composer Mikis Theodorakis stands as an especially compelling example—not only as a creator of sublime melodies but as a moral and cultural force whose work has inspired Greeks, the global Greek diaspora, and countless others who have yearned for personal and political liberation.
For decades, Theodorakis was a tireless voice against cultural and political oppression. Collaborating with poets from across the ideological spectrum, he championed an ethos grounded in freedom, equality, and human dignity. His biographer Gail Holst-Warhaft observes, “As a political figure in modern Greece, Theodorakis embodied the spirit of resistance to the abuse of authority, from the Nazi occupation of his country and the ensuing civil war to the military dictatorship of 1967–1974.” Perhaps most remarkable was his capacity to create music and poetry under conditions of despair—during repeated incarcerations and episodes of brutal torture inflicted for his political beliefs. His life and work testify to the indomitable spirit of the artist confronting political repression. Few doubted his defiant declaration in exile, “Your tanks will rust. Our songs will last.” Indeed, the junta’s tanks now sit in junkyards, while his songs endure as anthems of resistance, mourning, and survival.
On January 28, 2026, the acclaimed rock musician and activist Bruce Springsteen released a striking music video titled “Streets of Minneapolis”. The song remains steadfastly aligned with truth and resistance. It functions simultaneously as witness and mourner. Rather than explaining or rationalizing violence, it helps metabolize overwhelming grief and brutality.
Through its lyrics and imagery, the song names and describes what occurred during that cruel January in Minneapolis. It is difficult to know how long such a work can endure in a climate saturated with terror and disinformation. Yet for many who have encountered this protest music video, it offers a fragile but vital drop of hope and a suggestion that even the darkest winter may not last forever.
Spyros D. Orfanos, PhD, is the former Director (2019-2025) of the New York University Postdoctoral Program in Psychotherapy and Psychoanalysis (NYU Postdoc). From 2004-2018, he was the Clinic Director of NYU Postdoc. A Fellow of the American Psychological Association (APA) and the International Psychoanalytic Association, (IPA) he is past president of the Society of Psychoanalysis and Psychoanalytic Psychology (SPPP) of the APA, and the International Association of Relational Psychoanalysis and Psychotherapy. In 2016, he was co-editor with Elliot Jurist of the special supplement of Psychoanalytic Psychology (APA) on “Psychoanalysis and the Humanities.” In 2017, he founded the NYU Human Rights Work Group. In 2023 he received the SPPS Award for International Activism for Social Justice. In 2025, he curated Why Theodorakis Matters, a centennial scholarly video (long form) archive on Mikis Theodorakis, cultural memory, resistance, and collective mourning.
