Occult Couches in the Pampa: Reviewing Three Recent Books on Twentieth-Century Argentina

Abstract

Mariano Plotkin's 2001 study, Freud in the Pampas: The Emergence and Development of a Psychoanalytic Culture in Argentina is an important and necessary book that continues in greater depth and with more systematic rigor the work begun by Jorge Balan (Cuentame tu vida. Una biografia colectiva del psicoandlisis argentino, 1991). Its starting point is the need to explain the historical causes of the enormous presence of in urban Argentinean culture, which has meant that, as Plotkin facetiously points out, anyone who questions the existence of the unconscious or of the Oedipus complex at a social gathering in any large Argentine city is made to feel as if he or she were denying the virginity of Mary before a synod of Catholic bishops (1). The use of the metaphor of Mary's virginity to explain the importance of psychoanalysis in Argentina is surely no accident in this introductory remark, since it allows Plotkin to set himself up as the heretic who will rightfully question the (supposedly) dogmatic belief system of Argentinean culture. Plotkin then proceeds seriously to explain how his project fills a scholarly gap. He argues that only a historical approach to the subject will be up to the task of answering the question of why Buenos Aires is the