Response to Commentaries on Psychosocial Histories of Psychoanalysis

Abstract


 
 
 We are very grateful for the close attention paid to our paper Psychosocial Histories of Psychoanalysis by Mariano Ben Plotkin, Jane Russo and Mauro Pasqualini. It is a privilege to have one’s work taken seriously by such distinguished historians of psychoanalysis, and to be able to participate in constructive debate with them. We are pleased that all three seem to have found points of interest in our article, even though they also have important differences from us. In the space we have available here for a response, we will focus on some of these differences and try to explore how our views might be reconciled, or at least maintained in the kind of productive tension that can advance our understan- ding of the Brazilian psychoanalytic situation during the 1964-1985 dictatorship, and perhaps of the question of psychoanalysis’ institutional response to authoritaria- nism more generally.