Psychoanalysis In Argentina Research Articles

Naming Argentina: The Subject of Torture and the Ethics of Psychoanalysis

Abstract: The concurrent diffusion of Lacanian psychoanalysis in Argentina and the state’s deployment of torture and disappearance during the most recent military dictatorship have led many critics to interpret the turn to Lacan as a cerebral substitute for political protest after the coup d’état. This essay examines how the ruling junta’s specific forms of violence provoked a crisis in the relationship between psychoanalysis and humanism, erupting in the literary field through the figure of the desaparecida . In tension with human rights discourses prevailing in the 1980s, Luisa Valenzuela’s experimental fiction explores the subject’s fragmentation under conditions of state terror and the ethical ambivalence of humanitarian efforts to repair the ego in the wake of torture.

The Influence of Argentine psychoanalytic culture in Italy

In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, many Italians emigrated to South America, especially to Argentina and Brazil, in search of a better life than the one they were living in a country tormented by social and economic unrest. Later, with the advent of a political situation in Argentina strongly marked by instability, especially with the coup d’état that sanctioned the rise to power of General Videla in 1976, those who could boast even distant ties of kinship in Italy chose that destination instead to continue to build their lives. Among these were several who had been trained in psychoanalysis in Argentina. Once they started working in Italy, they necessarily passed on their training background influenced by a psychoanalysis that, in Argentina, had already started to think in terms of “field” and begun to be applied to groups and institutions.

Historical reconstruction of Latin American psychosomatic medicine: the exchange between psychoanalysts from Argentina and Brazil, 1942-1959.

This article reconstructs the origins of psychosomatic medicine in Latin America through the history of the institutionalization of psychoanalysis in Argentina and Brazil. The study focuses on the exchange between Argentine and Brazilian psychoanalysts from 1942 to 1959. The analyses indicate similarities and differences between the two projects of dissemination and theoretical production of psychosomatic medicine in both countries. The conclusions indicate that the Argentine group of psychoanalysts had the intention of strengthening psychoanalysis while, in Brazil, the main disseminator of psychosomatics, Danilo Perestrello, supported a profound transformation of traditional medicine.

Does the Unconscious Influence Our Ethnography? Psychoanalysis during Fieldwork in Argentina

SummaryEthnographic fieldwork is an emotional research practice because of its intersubjective nature and empathic embrace of the actor’s perspective. This intersubjectivity also involves the fieldworker’s unconscious, which influences ethnographic encounters and anthropological interpretations. Two years of psychoanalysis in Argentina revealed the influence of the unconscious on my fieldwork about political violence and trauma through dream analyses and the analyst’s interventions. This understanding improved the rapport with research participants and opened an alternative road to reflexivity.

Marxism, Structuralism and Psychoanalysis

Abstract Althusser’s reception within Argentinian psychoanalytic culture assumed a variety of different forms. For the purposes of delimiting mediations between Marxism, structuralism and psychoanalysis in Argentina during the 1960s and ’70s, this work seeks to reconstruct historical readings of Althusser according to his reception within three distinct interpretative communities. The first group, centring on the figure of Oscar Masotta, concerns Althusser’s role in the development of Argentina’s incipient Lacanian groups. For the second group, primarily dissident-psychoanalytic and Freudo-Marxist, the reception of Althusser will be considered in tandem with ensuing debates between Freudo-Marxism and Althussero-Lacanism. The third group asks us to consider the role of Althusserianism in discussions around the professionalisation of psychology, where the careers of Carlos Sastre and Roberto Harari showed the strongest connections to Althusser’s work.

A New Woman’s Exile in Buenos Aires: Grete Stern’s Photomontages between Feminism and Popular Culture

The focus of this article will rely on the work of the photographer Grete Stern, who had to flee Germany in 1933 due to her Jewish background, and later emigrated to Argentina. Special attention will be given to her photomontage series Sueños (Dreams) for the women’s magazine Idilio, which the artist produced between 1948 and 1951, and which played an essential role in the modernization of Argentinean photography. Moreover, today these photomontages are known for having had a fundamental influence on the dissemination of psychoanalysis in Argentina, as well as on feminist art in general. As these photomontages were published together with the psychoanalytic column “El psicoanálisis te ayudará” and negotiated different aspects of psychoanalytic theory, they were often interpreted within the tradition of surrealist photography.[1] In this article, however, I would like to propose an alternative, perhaps complementary reading of these images and embed Stern’s Dreams in a broader context—the context of her experience as an exile in Argentina, the context of the magazine, and the context of Peronist visual culture. As I will argue, this allows these photomontages to be read as multilayered aesthetic, political, and feminist interventions in a time when more and more restrictions dominated artistic practices in Argentina. In the following, I will provide an insight into Stern’s formation and work in Germany, and the ideas of femininity that influenced her art before and after emigration. After that, I will discuss the politically enforced changes in the field of Argentinean visual culture. And finally, I will analyze Stern’s photomontages in the context of the magazine and their impact beyond, on the modernization of photography in Argentina.

Psychology and psychoanalysis in Argentina: Politics, French thought, and the university connection, 1955-1976.

The hegemonic place acquired by psychoanalysis in the Argentinean psychotherapeutic field is recognized by friend and foe alike. Nevertheless, the historical process leading to this situation is less well known. In this article, I focus on 2 periods crucial to understanding the unusual scope of Freudian ideas and practices in that country. The first one (1955-1966) corresponds to the professionalization of psychology and was marked by projects such as those of Bleger and Pichon-Rivière. Their ideas involved an alliance between psychology and psychoanalysis within a larger synthesis whose philosophical framework was French existential phenomenology. This eclectic "psychoanalytic psychology" found an amazing sounding board in the newly created university psychology programs, in which it was adopted by future psychologists who took psychoanalysis as their primary theoretical and practical reference. The second period (1966 -1976), however, after the reception of French structuralism (mainly via Jacques Lacan and his local interpreters, such as Oscar Masotta), implied an exclusive disjunction: either psychoanalysis or psychology. Psychoanalysis was presented as a return to the Freudian sources. Therefore, it was supposed to replace a psychology that "ignored" unconscious determinism. Thus, paradoxically, Lacanianism, which found its main audience in psychology programs, invited psychologists to relinquish their own professional identity to become psychoanalysts. My hypothesis is that the prominent position that psychoanalysis still holds in Argentina can be best understood by considering the history of its relationship with academic psychology and situating that connection in an intellectual and political context in which French thought has always been crucial. (PsycINFO Database Record

Editor’s Note

It’s rare right now to hear the terms “nationalism” and “free speech” outside the context of partisan politics. These have become loaded ideas, ones increasingly used as pretexts for silencing opposition or doubling down on ironclad beliefs. The most extreme interpretations not only set the tone of a country’s political climate, but also influence how society functions. In the United States, both politics and society are radically polarized, with each side seemingly unable to comprehend the other, much less engage in conversation. This unfortunate state of affairs was on my mind when I began thinking about the spring issue, and wondering what question I could ask that would provide an entry point into how a country understands itself, and which legacies its citizens value—or conspicuously don’t.Benedict Anderson famously defined nations as “imagined communities,” and part of the inspiration behind this issue was to explore the mythologies that bind a nation, the useful fictions people share. When commissioning, I asked writers to consider how societies around the world define themselves in terms of what citizens are—and aren’t—allowed to say and represent. It was revealing to see how this deliberately open-ended prompt was interpreted. Hiroaki Sako wrote about the novelist Yukio Mishima and the history of homosexuality in Japan, which has traditionally been accepted in practice, though not in law; Jennifer Wilson surveyed the unlikely bedfellows of the Polish far right. Many contributors reflected on national histories that had in some way been overlooked: Mariano Ben Plotkin examined the role of psychoanalysis in Argentina during and after its authoritarian regime, Kwame Dawes read Jamaica’s roots-reggae revival as a return to a tradition of musicians providing social commentary, and Dan Fox wrote about Britain’s New Age Traveler movement, a freewheeling 70s-era subculture whose impromptu festivals shaped the development of U.K. public-space laws.Other writers looked ahead to make sense of today. In her piece on the development of an Emirati space program, Rahel Aima read Dubai’s plan to send a mission to Mars as reflective of the United Arab Emirates’ fascination with the future—which conveniently distracts from thinking about the present. Sarah Leonard and Yasmin El-Rifae discussed the future of international feminism and what the #MeToo movement can learn from the activists involved in the Egyptian revolution. In our features section, Samira Shackle reported from Jordan on how female refugees are adjusting to life without male breadwinners, and how this might affect gender dynamics in the Middle East. Finally, Kirsten Han reported on how the Singaporean government has framed its efforts to supress free speech as a way to create a “business-friendly” environment.Among the most remarkable pieces in this issue is a conversation between the Iranian film scholar Jamsheed Akrami and the renowned filmmaker Jafar Panahi, who has continued to surreptitiously make movies in Iran despite being banned from doing so by an Islamic court. Over a series of three conversations, Akrami and Panahi discussed the landscape of censorship in Iran, Panahi’s own experiences with it, and the country’s underground film networks. Equally striking is an essay by the Salvadoran novelist Horacio Castellanos Moya about his homeland’s “tragic identity,” which has been defined by punitive U.S. foreign policy, a devastating civil war, and, most recently, the proliferation of gangs.Regular readers will note a number of changes in this issue. South African journalist Antjie Krog is the inaugural writer for our new column, “Last Word,” in which contributors take an expansive view to address social or political issues. And on the very last page, we debut the first of many original cocktails designed by our cocktail editor, Eben Klemm. The mix of the magazine may seem eclectic, but we hope that’s part of the appeal. There’s no one way to consider our title subject, but the range of cultural, historical, and political responses presented here offer many possible starting points. To quote George Eliot, “it is a narrow mind which cannot look at a subject from various points of view.”

The Diversity of Sexologies in Latin America: Emergence, Development, and Diversification

ABSTRACT This article presents a comparative analysis of the major results of the international project “Sexuality, Science, and Profession in Latin America,” which looked at the situation of sexology in Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Mexico, and Peru. The analyses examined the process of the medicalization of sexology by highlighting three phases that characterized the development of these sexologies since the middle of the 1960s and that were marked in certain countries, such as Argentina, Brazil and Chile, by the rise and fall of military dictatorships. Initially, there was a construction phase, based on family planning policies in Mexico and Colombia and the influence of psychoanalysis in Argentina and Brazil. Then, a consolidation phase featured the alliance between gynecologists and psychiatrists and focused on women sexuality and the well-being of the couple. The final phase was characterized by the increasing influence of the pharmaceutical industry, the development of sexual medicine, and a new interest in the treatment of male erectile problems/disorders. While in the first two phases, a process of diversification of these sexologies according to country-level specificities and particularly the political climate was observed, the last phase is characterized by a process of homogenization of discourse and practice, the establishment of international professional and ethical norms/standards, and the coming together of regional and international organizations. The perspective of sexual rights appeared in the margins of this mainstream sexology, in the feminist and lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and intersexual movements and as a complementary alternative to the development of sexual medicine.

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

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

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

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.

Freud in the Pampas. The Emergence and Development of a Psychoanalytic Culture in Argentina

Preface Introduction 1. The beginnings of psychoanalysis in Argentina 2. The founding of the apa and the development of the Argentine psychoanalytic movement 3. Social change and the expansion of the psychoanalytic world 4. The diffusers' role in the expansion of the psychoanalytic realm 5. The encounter between psychoanalysis and psychiatry 6. Psychologists take the stage 7. When Marx meets Freud 8. Politics, lacanianism, and the intellectual left 9. The aftermath Notes References Index.

Freud in the Pampas. The Emergence and development of a Psychoanalytic Culture in Argentina. MARIANO BEN PLOTKIN: Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2001.

This study stands in opposition to some of the generally accepted views of the history of this discipline, including those seeking to pinpoint the "real" current in psychoanalysis. By contrast, Mariano Ben Plotkin adopts a "historical approach" that focuses on the many ways in which different cultures affected the reception of psychoanalysis in Argentina. Accordingly, the author rejects a reconstruction of the past that assumes that psychoanalysis was necessarily meant to become the culturally influential phenomenon that we can observe nowadays. Although Plotkin shares this anti-teleological view with Hugo Vezzetti, he provides a different interpretation.

Dictatorship, Human Rights, and Psychoanalysis in Argentina: One Discourse or Three?

(2003). Dictatorship, Human Rights, and Psychoanalysis in Argentina: One Discourse or Three? Journal of Latin American Cultural Studies: Vol. 12, No. 1, pp. 71-82.

Tell Me Your Dreams: Psychoanalysis and Popular Culture in Buenos Aires, 1930-1950

How does one write the history of psychoanalysis? Although the question seems too broad it is still pertinent. In countries like Argentina, where psychoanalysis has become a Weltanschauung, traditional approaches from the history of science, the history of ideas or institutional history are insufficient to give a full account of its cultural implantation. There is a level of cultural reception that is unaccounted for by those approximations but which is, nevertheless, a constitutive component of the history of the discipline. Although some authors have identified a common “latin pattern” in the reception of psychoanalysis, national differences sometimes overcome similarities. Whereas psychoanalysis, for instance, started to be discussed in Argentine medical circles as early as in the 1910s, it did not have the influence in avant-garde literature that it had in France or Brazil. However, since the early 1920s psychoanalysis had an impact in popular magazines and publications in Buenos Aires. Only a multilayered analysis can provide a good understanding of the different patterns of reception of psychoanalysis. Elsewhere I dealt with the impact of psychoanalysis in the medical profession and in the teaching of psychology in Buenos Aires. My goal here is to analyze another area of diffusion of psychoanalysis: popular periodical publications. Although the massive diffusion of psychoanalysis in Argentina began in the 1960s, since the late 1920s popular magazines and publications introduced discussions on psychoanalysis and its creator, thus defining a space through which the discipline inserted itself in the culture of the city of Buenos Aires. It seems clear that in Argentina publications aimed at an expanded lower-middle class public, outside and beyond the restricted circle of the “republic of letters,” constituted an earlier path of reception for psychoanalysis than what is usually considered high literature.

Psychoanalysis in Argentina

Psychoanalysis in Argentina

L’incidence sur la psychanalyse du contexte social en Argentine

The effect of the social context on psychoanalysis in Argentina. The study of the social context due to state of terrorism during the Argentine military dictatorship between 1976-1983 is used to understand the mental representation of social context and its influence on the psychoanalytical setting. This state of “social catastrophe” is characterized along its social violence axis by tracking down some observational items : silence and silencing, the information-disinformation axis referred to ignorance, madness and false expectations, the creation of bastions and myths as well as a state of constant threat and torture. An extreme significant was the “desaparecido”. A trial is made to detect the repercussion of this items on group treatment using two group’ sessions.