Argentina on the Couch: Psychiatry, State, and Society, 1880 to the Present

Abstract

Argentina, this volume claims, is the “world capital of psychoanalysis” (p. 2). More than a therapeutic approach, psychoanalysis represents a “filter of intelligibility” for contemporary Argentines, a framework for understanding culture, politics, and society (p. 221). These essays explore the historical context for this development, resulting in a volume that historians and students interested in twentieth-century Argentine intellectual culture and the globalization of mental healthcare will find worth reading, despite a few nagging problems.Editor Mariano Plotkin sets two goals for the volume: to map the historical trajectory of “Argentines’ passion for Freud” and to use the history of the psycho-sciences to explore the Argentine state and “the reception and adaptation of European ideas” in Argentine society (p. 3). The book achieves these goals with uneven success. Adopting a Foucauldian stance, essays in the first two parts (on degeneration and gender, and institutional psychiatry) interpret the development of psychiatry as an integral process of modern state building at the turn of the century. The four essays portray a positivist psychiatric establishment that positioned itself as a beacon of modernity on the periphery of a global scientific community but which was also beset by powerful contradictions. Julia Rodriguez and Kristin Ruggiero point to the tensions inherent in the medical framing of gender and madness: Argentine psychiatrists readily followed Italian and French degeneration theorists by privileging organic origins to psychological disorders, yet also turned to poorly conceived notions of “moral insanity” when organic explanations failed. And Lila Caimari’s study of the Argentine Institute of Criminology’s amassing of prison inmates’ “scientific biographies” reveals how state concerns about rehabilitation trumped psychiatrists’ preoccupations with the biological causes of crime, diverting scientific inquiry according to political need.Combined with Jonathan Ablard’s astute essay on the bureaucratic mishandling of overcrowded public hospitals, these portraits of a beleaguered Argentine psychiatric profession reveal a desperate need for reform—one potentially ameliorated by psychoanalytic approaches. Yet Freud and psychoanalysis are entirely absent from these essays, forcing the reader to imagine how the failures of Argentine psychiatry connect to psychoanalytic diffusion. More seriously, none of these essays sufficiently addresses Argentina’s particularities; the problems they outline pertain equally to European and North American psychiatry in the same period. Despite some useful remarks on how anxieties about immigration directed psychiatric attention to the purportedly criminal nature of foreign-born populations, there is little to explain what was specifically Argentine in this. The essays do tell an important set of stories about the development of psychiatry in Argentina, yet one wonders how European medical ideas may have been transformed, contested, or subverted in the Argentine context.The final two essays and the epilogue fare somewhat better, indicating the effects of Argentine intellectual and political culture on psychoanalytic theory. Hugo Vezzetti explores the popularization of psychoanalysis by Enrique Pichon-Rivière, a Swiss-born analyst who adapted Freudianism to Argentine needs in the 1950s and 1960s. Pichon-Rivière’s “operative groups”—a collective healing approach that promoted social, as well as individual, mental health and hygiene— drew on Gestalt psychology and Freudian notions of unconscious anxieties to reintegrate a politically and emotionally fragmented community. Better still are Plotkin’s essay and epilogue on the political significance of psychoanalysis in Argentina, largely drawn from his recent book, Freud in the Pampas. Plotkin outlines the reformist effects of psychoanalysis for Argentine psychiatry—including the destigmatization of mental illness—while usefully highlighting the multiple uses of psychoanalysis that operated in twentieth-century Argentina. The ideological crises of the Perón era and the military repression that followed in its wake exacerbated intellectual divisions forged in the interwar period: leftist thinkers saw in psychoanalysis a tool kit for social liberation, while conservatives saw a means to enhance social control over humanity’s natural egocentrism. Such popularization was not without its costs: Plotkin points to a “banalization” of psychoanalysis in present-day Argentina, one that (combined with pharmacological and neuroscientific advances) stands to strip the discipline of its therapeutic legitimacy.A technical matter: a number of the book’s photos and illustrations are mis-numbered and are often presented without much explanation, posing potential difficulties for non-Spanish readers. There is repetitive overlap between essays on some issues, while others—such as the urban-rural divide in Argentine politics and culture—receive too little attention. The book might rather be called “Porteños on the couch.” On a positive note, the volume contains a useful glossary of psychiatric and psychoanalytic terminology, and Plotkin’s able introduction highlights salient points in the history of Argentina and the psycho-sciences, rendering the book accessible to nonspecialists in both fields.