Armed against Unhappiness: Psychoanalytic Grammars in Buenos Aires

An overview of the development of psychoanalysis in Latin America, (especially Argentina) that underlines the relationships between clinical and cultural forms of psychoanalytic experience.

Psychoanalytic Inquiry: A Topical Journal for Mental Health Professionals , 2015

Psychoanalysis in Spain has a plural history. Rooted in the Freudian and Kleinian traditions, it has developed in different directions and incorporated trends from contemporary psychoanalysis. The impact of socio-political factors forced several migratory movements that came back to Spain under the form of criticism to classical psychoanalysis, following ideas that were emerging from Latin America (e.g., Pichon Rivière) and North America (Cultural and Interpersonal Psychoanalysis, Self Psychology, and Intersubjective System theories) that enriched psychoanalytic thinking, and promoted new psychoanalytic institutions. Finally, Steve Mitchell’s relational perspective plays a crucial role among present developments.

Pavón-Cuéllar, D. (2024). Decolonisation of psychoanalysis and Mesoamerican conceptions of subjectivity. Psychotherapy & Politics International, 22(2), 1-14., 2024

In this article, situating myself in the context of Mexico and Central America, I critically reflect on psychoanalysis in relation to coloniality, cultural intercourse, native peoples, their ancestral knowledge, and their conceptions of subjectivity. I highlight the cohabitation of psychoanalysts and traditional healers in the Mesoamerican context. I interpret this cohabitation as an expression of the coexistence of European and Mesoamerican cultures. The coexistence of cultures leads me to the question of mestizaje, which, conceived as a cultural-symbolic and divisive-conflictive process, can be reconsidered in the light of a psychoanalytical specialisation in the division of the subject with its edge structure. I acknowledge the problematic aspect of the Freudian legacy as part of the colonial inheritance, but I also highlight some of Freud’s theoretical and methodological contributions that may be useful for exploring and countering coloniality, including the eternal present of the past, unconscious knowing, the difference between knowledge and truth, and the principles of abstinence and listening. Claiming an essentialism that is not only strategic, I detect resonances between psychoanalysis and Mesoamerican ancestral knowledge in the consideration of desire, the singular, the corporeal, the affective, the symbolic, and the external psyche, but also dissonances associated with Freudian drifts such as verticalism, individualism, and speciesism-anthropocentrism. I conclude by cautioning against a colonial use of psychoanalysis and proposing its horizontal dialogue with Mesoamerican ancestral knowledge.

This article is part of a larger research project, the aim of which is to understand the discursive conditions of access and adherence to an outpatient mental health service at a public hospital in Buenos Aires, Argentina. The focus is on the historical conflict between medical discourse and psychoanalytical discourse as it emerges in the negotiation of treatment and diagnostic sequences at first consultations. It can be seen that patients who are socialized in medical discourse – and even in psychiatric discourse– expect the usual procedure in which a diagnosis, however transitory, is offered first and then followed by a treatment recommendation. However, psychoanalysts, in contrast, tend to reject diagnostic labels and offer treatment without further justification. This has an impact on the adherence of patients, and we can argue for the need to negotiate with medical discourse in order to guarantee engagement and continuity in treatment.

A B S T R A C T This article explores the mediatized nature of the circulation of psychoanalysis in Buenos Aires, Argentina, by focusing on psychoanalytic talk and listening practices, inside and outside the clinical setting. It shows that mediatization processes, which link institutional practices to processes of communication and commoditization (Agha 2011a), are key for understanding how psychoanalytic knowledge (including its lexical register) and its therapeutic practice get reproduced in fractionally congruent forms within everyday interactions across Buenos Aires. Specific emphasis is placed on the many uptake formulations of psychoanalytic practice that are observed today, on the scale-changing effects of media-tization, and on changes in the propinquity of interactants in psychoanalytic encounters.

2017

Drawing on a new critical history of psychoanalysis in Chile, this paper analyses the appropriations of psychoanalysis in the Chilean political field, particularly in the field of Marxist theory, as it appears in the work of two important intellectuals who published their contributions from the 1930s to the late 1950s. These two case studies are of Juan Marín Rojas, a medical doctor, writer and diplomat born in Chile in 1900, and of Alejandro (born Alexander) Lipschütz, an endocrinologist, physiologist and anthropologist born in Latvia in 1883 and who migrated to Chile in 1926 and naturalised as a Chilean citizen in 1941. This study provides the context and looks at the interactions, debates and problems that arise at the crossroads of psychoanalysis and Marxism in Chile between the 1930s and the 1950s, and it consequently opens the door for new perspectives from which to address the local history of psychoanalysis.

The International Journal of Psychoanalysis, 2017

This book is a compilation of articles by Carlos Sopena, a psychoanalyst of Uruguayan origin who lived and worked in Madrid from 1975 until his death in April 2012. His dual membership of the Uruguayan and Madrid Societies provided the freshness and vitality of Uruguayan psychoanalysis and his culture and openness to different psychoanalytic currents, together with his commitment to clinical work and teaching, represented a significant contribution to the development of analytic thought at the Madrid Psychoanalytic Association. This book, published posthumously, offers a modest homage to his memory. The choice of the chapters, by not following a chronological order, allows a gradual unfolding and harmonious interweaving of the themes studied by the author.

Psychoanalysis, Culture & Society, 2023

In Argentina, psychoanalysis has historically served progressive causes. Attuned to this tradition, in 2020, feminist psychoanalysts were vital to the passing of a federal law enhancing access to abortion. My article examines this recent case via intersectionality theory and claims that psychoanalytic discourses played a paradoxical role: They created combined categories of difference, such as ''the desiring woman,'' that contributed both to social justice and to marginalization. This case study furthers our understanding of the paradoxes of psychoanalysis in public life as well as challenges intersectionality's assumption that combined categories necessarily result in interlocking oppression. Keywords Argentine psychoanalysis Á intersectionality Á abortion Á desire Á feminism Argentines take pride in being the most psychoanalyzed population in the world. There are 154 analysts per 100,000 people in Argentina (which compares with 27 per 100,000 in the United States) and Buenos Aires ranks as number one for patients in treatment, surpassing Paris and even Vienna (Alonso 2012, p. 6). The popularity of psychoanalysis goes beyond the therapist's couch. Since the early twentieth century, the discipline has influenced the national culture on multiple fronts. It has permeated the medical profession as well as ordinary language, film, television, literature, radio, and academic discourse, creating what Mariano Plotkin calls ''a psychoanalytic culture,'' an entire culture whose metaphors and forms of thinking revolve around the discipline and that is one of the nation's distinct features (2003,

History of Psychology, 2018

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 "psy-choanalytic 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.

Anthropology and Humanism, 2020

Ethnographic 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. [Argentina, dreams, fieldwork, psychoanalysis, unconscious]

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.

Journal of Latin American Cultural Studies, 2022

This article studies the Argentine psychoanalytic discourses surrounding the passing of the laws of marriage equality and gender identity between 2005 and 2012. During those years, psychoanalysts shared their expertise on LGBTQIA + issues in journals, newspapers, television and radio programmes, and at the National Congress. Their favourable opinions influenced several legislators and led to them voting in favour of the laws. In this article, I argue that these psychoanalytic discourses enabled paradoxical ideologies. While psychoanalytic concepts provided arguments in favour of passing the laws, they also paradoxically reinforced heteronormative, racist, classist, and urbanised views on gender and sexuality. Drawing from an intersectional perspective and from post-structuralist, feminist, and queer critiques to psychoanalysis, the article examines how these paradoxical ideologies emerge in newspaper articles and in journals and books published by psychoanalytic associations and aiming at a general audience.

2020

This article examines the case of Palermo, Buenos Aires’s largest and trendiest neighbourhood, and claims that psychoanalysis has acted since the mid-1970s as one of the area’s gentrifiers. Based on the premise that temporality is embedded in spatial categories and that, therefore, cities are mobile phenomena, the article focuses on two interrelated spatiotemporal layers of psychoanalysis-based gentrification. It first examines the arrival and settlement of psychoanalytic associations between 1975 and 2005 to argue that analysts were important actors in Palermo’s real estate transformation. Second, it explores how contemporary real estate brochures, magazines, blogs, newspapers and tourist websites create the idea that analysts gave birth to the neighbourhood and thus erase the contributions of the Black population who had lived there in the nineteenth century and of the workers who had been a vital part of the area prior to the analysts’ arrival. The article also looks at the neigh...

Psychoanalysis, Culture & Society, 2008

The authors present five projects of the Program for Psychoanalysis and Social Interface of the Brazilian Psychoanalytic Society of Rio de Janeiro (PROPIS/SBPRJ-BRAZIL), developed together with several social institutions and outside the classical psychoanalytical setting. Despite the setting, these projects center on sustaining psychoanalytical rigor in technical innovations. The authors believe that projects such as these can contribute to improving mental health and social links in contemporary society.