Not-so-tristes tropiques: Latin american psychoanalysis

The unconscious, of principal interest for psychoanalysis, is atemporal. But is it also stateless?

—Silvia Heimburger

Books on psychoanalysis in Latin America have the daunting task of describing to their readers how a global profession, theory, and practice as fluid and dynamic as psychoanalysis assumes a particular shape within the physical and cultural geographies of an equally liquid part of the world. Others have come before this massive volume (see, e.g., Litman 1966; Lemlij 1993; Lewkowitz and Flechner 2005), but none with the same breadth of theory, creativity, and originality as Fernando Martín Gómez and Jean Marc Tauszik’s Contemporary Latin American Psychoanalysis: Volume One. This book is essential to the library of any psychoanalytic institute whose members and candidates are interested in immersing themselves in the vital pulse and deep history of this Latin American psychoanalytic moment.

It is both a pleasure and a challenge to review a work of this magnitude. This first volume alone spans 1,388 pages and contains seven sections, each housing anywhere from nine to eleven papers. The informative and finely written two-part introduction by the editors frames a rich array of selected work from some of the region’s finest minds. In doing so, they present a slice of the Latin American intellectual psychoanalytic milieu and reveal the interwoven layers that sediment what can only broadly, with no pretense of conclusive delimitation (p. 31), be characterized as a distinctly Latin American psychoanalysis.

A cartography of any sort runs into a number of problems, the first of which is selecting the features of the objects to be mapped. For this purpose, the editors combined the efforts of two institutions, the Publications Committe of the Argentine Psychoanalytic Association (APA) and the platform Latin American Psychoanalytic Thinking (PPL in Spanish) of the Psychoanalytic Federation of Latin America (FEPAL). The PPL ran three workshops (in Cartagena, Colombia, in 2016; Fortaleza, Brazil, in 2017; and Córdoba, Argentina, in 2018) to explore just what Latin American psychoanalysis comprises. From these discussions, many of the lines of this cartography were projected. The reader is barely halfway through the introduction when the magnitude of this project becomes apparent: more than sixty representative authors from diverse latitudes and longitudes, “moving through an extensive network of parallels and meridians” (p. 40), including Argentines, Brazilians, Colombians, Chileans, Mexicans, Peruvians, Uruguayans, and Venezuelans. The result is a master volume divided into six topographies—Metapsychology, Technique and Clinical Practice, Theoretical Lines, Interdisciplinary Studies, Research, and Panoramas—covering each of these national groups.

This format immediately poses the reviewer’s major challenge: Its broad scope precludes any general and coherent argument being made, or any satisfying organizing theme to give the book shape for the reader. There are just too many directions, too many lines of flight, to borrow badly from Deleuze and Guattari, between topics and aims within and among the book’s sections. It must be noted, then, that the through-lines I will attempt to chart are but a few of many possibilities and that a reviewer with a different perspective might take another tack. After all, as Mitchell Wilson (2020) puts it, drawing on Freud and Lacan, “the ego is a narcissistic structure that tends to corral disparate experiences into false kinships and resemblances” (p. xv). That noted, I have chosen in this essay to focus less on elaborating the theoretical content of each chapter, too wide and varying a task to be satisfactorily done, and instead will familiarize the reader with the various themes and ideas proposed by different authors representative of their geographical zones. However, I will concentrate my efforts in describing for the reader the historical and contemporary contexts of the psychoanalytic scenes presented in the Panoramas section in the closing chapter. With these words as prologue, we are better positioned to begin.

To start the interregional dialogue, Claudia Borensztejn, former president of the Argentinian Psychoanalytic Association, makes a statement that I will paraphrase as a question: Does each region contain its own local and international, social and personal, artistic and scientific genetic code, reflecting all psychoanalytic tendencies and expanded with its own regional signature? Almost as an answer, Virgina Ungar writes that, as is true of any region taken as a totality, Latin America is not a homogeneous territory from which arise particularities. Rather, it is a locus of interconnection for a large number of singularities that connect, listen to each other, and contend, in this way creating a space of constant revision, production, and effort. This book sets out to trace some of these connections.

One of the editors, Martín Gómez, draws on Mikhail Bakhtin (1986, 1989), and his interlocutors Tzvetan Todorov (1981) and Julia Kristeva (1997), taking up their notions of intertextuality ¹ to theorize points of connection between the authors in each section. All psychoanalytic discourse is constructed “from a mosaic of references, each text an absorption and transformation of another” (Kristeva 1997, p. 3). The cartography here presented has multiple points of entry, each remitting to another point without the need to follow a linear model. Instead, the editors propose the model of the rhizome, theorized by Deleuze and Guatarri (1980), to account for trans-species, hybrid connections in place of a traditional hierarchical genealogy that would render a false narrative of exclusive linearity, easily prey to dogma and orthodoxy.

The editors take us into the discussions at some of the PPL workshops, and we hear the voices of many of the participants as they untangle questions of psychoanalytic and geographic identity. Lila Gómez, an Argentinian analyst from Mendoza, raises the issue of the mestizaje (from the word mestizo) of ideas as a feature of Latin American psychoanalysis, including the production of new and ongoing syntheses, the tolerance of diversity, and the coexistence of different theories and techniques (pp. 61–65); however, Marta Labraga (Uruguay) only partially accepts the notion of a Latin American psychoanalysis, given the lack of reflexive and theoretical unity due to the diverse cultural transformations of the region (p. 58). The reader begins to notice the inherent instability in the term Latin American itself. Consider the following three related lines of thinking, captured in Tauszik’s introduction: According to Alberto Cabral (Argentina), “it is problematic to postulate an identity, determined by a shared geographic belonging, to the forms of conceiving and practicing psychoanalysis . . . [It is a more fertile approach to] find patterns and epistemological filiations that contextualize and offer a frame for clinical work and each analyst’s ways of conceptualizing it” (p. 60). Carlos Frausino (Brazil) wonders if the only way to conceive of a Latin American psychoanalysis is by referring to distinct ways of conceiving the analytic function, the therapeutic process, and the analytic method. He questions the possibility of this type of specificity (p. 60). Narrowing the reader’s focus on the psyche and the psychoanalytic experience, by contrast, Roosevelt Cassorla (Brazil) argues that “the vicissitudes of unconscious conflicts and problems with symbolization are the same in any culture, but the forms in which they manifest, transforming themselves in the analytic field, is influenced by context” (p. 60). I am leaving out the contributions of dozens of participants in this worthy and nuanced dialogue, expertly digested for us by the editors. It is for the reader to engage in this debate on the viability of psychoanalytic geographies that has, at its heart, the burning contemporary question of identity, not specific to, but of primary concern to, Latin America.

Unique to this volume, and connected to these questions of identity, is the inclusion of informal self-portraits of a few pages written by each of the authors and presented before their papers, describing something of their background and first encounters with psychoanalysis. Read in juxtaposition to the author’s paper, these brief portraits bring another dimension into focus, illuminating threads in the text between cultural background, experience, psychoanalytic identity, and key elements of the author’s conceptual contributions to the field.

But now to the core of the book. The first section, Metapsychology, includes papers spanning a range of themes, including the narcissistic dimension of the oedipal configuration, fantasies, dreams, external reality, representation, preconceptual traumas, and the constitution of the superego. The Argentine Norberto Marucco postulates a linking principle that claims an object and summons the analyst to open up space in his representational world, stimulating the creation of psychic tissue, comprising fantasy and el fantasma, generated in the space between primary and secondary processes. This linking principle activates the analyst’s imaginative countertransference (Green 1986) and relates to the Botellas’ figurability (1997) and Bion’s reverie (1966). As a premise, Marucco maintains that external reality—particularly today’s realities—constitutes a fourth psychic structure, on a par with ego, id, and superego, capable of generating its own pathologies apart from the resignification of past traumas. His contribution to this section reminds us that the psychoanalysis of the twenty-first century has to take us “beyond the representable” (p. 100) and should hold Freud in reference, but not in reverence (p. 105). Continuing this focus on representation, the Brazilian Renato Mezan describes how metapsychology is a form of witchcraft that binds together and summons shapes for nebulous ideas generated in our work. The analyst mobilizes the representations offered by his metapsychology as a way of organizing or serializing psychic elements, saving him from the sacralization of fantasy that can result when the analyst mistakes the raw images that form from within his spirit, so to speak, for direct translations of the patient’s unconscious fantasy. A writer probably more familiar to the general readership, Haydée Faimberg (Argentinian and French), describes the intergenerational transmission of a narcissistic mode of conflict resolution between parent and child (p. 90), involving après-coup and a rethinking of notions of temporality in the psyche. Other talented writers and thinkers of the region, like the Argentinians Rafael Paz, E. Cesar Merea, the late Luis Kancyper, the Brazilians Marion Minerbio and Luiz Meyer, and the Venezuelan Rafael López Corvo round out this first part of the book, placing the reader on firm footing for section 2: Psychoanalytic Theory and Technique.

In this second section, analysts such as the late Janine Puget extend their ideas, sometimes radical in the way they rethink key psychoanalytic concepts such as the centrality of the transference as vessel for the hegemonic displacement of identificatory models and oedipal conflicts. Puget’s work (with Isidoro Berenstein), it should be remarked, extended Enrique Pichon-Rivière’s concept of vinculo, in English link, which is different in varying degrees from related psychoanalytic concepts such as relation, Ogden’s analytic third, or Bion’s use of projective identification. The vinculo (link) emerges in the exchange between two subjects, and, like the analytic third, subjugates the individuals to a matrix of newly generated meanings. It accounts for the presence of radical alterity in the relation, and otherness; yet it is also a conduit of transference of the similar, the represented, and the projected. Transference and interference are in permanent tension (p. 293): two presents, one representational and the other presentational (p. 292). Already we see that if there is a thread connecting the metapsychology of the first section with the clinical writing of section 2, it is an insistence on accounting for the formative currents of the social on the psyche. In fact, Juan Tubert-Oklander (Mexico) deems it obvious that “the minimum unit of study . . . in psychoanalysis is comprised of two people” (p. 310). Channeling Bion, he explains that when two or more people come together with the intention of doing analysis, unexpected, uncontrollable, and completely unknown phenomena arise. These are driven mental phenomena, unconscious, enigmatic, and strange to the ego and constitutive of a particular object relation in line with Bion’s thoughts without a thinker or, again, Ogden’s third. Tubert-Oklander makes use of the concepts field and process to integrate these object relations with the social, cultural, and political dimensions, processes that, their being transpersonal, he considers mental processes without a subject. This section on technique is completed by papers from innovative writers such as Roosevelt Cassorla on acute and chronic enactments, the late Hugo Bleichmar on the treatment of narcissism, and Otto Kernberg on schizoid states, among many others.

Section 3, Theoretical Lines, contains a paper from the late Néstor Braunstein, a Lacanian analyst not usually cited in mainstream journals despite his being a gifted and prolific writer. However, his paper here is a pleasant inclusion for this reader for other reasons. I first heard Braunstein speak in 1993 when I was living and studying in San José, Costa Rica. An Argentine living in Mexico, he had come to lecture on his recent book, Goce (1990), but by then he had already risen to fame in our local Lacanian circle through his earlier work, Psiquiatría, Ideología, y Ciencia (1975). His rhetorical style was mesmerizing, his echoing of Lacan’s judgmental criticisms of those who strayed from Freud were blistering, and it took me at least several more years to recognize his caricatures of Melanie Klein and Anna Freud for what they were. But to a young psychology undergraduate he was thrilling to read. Regard the opening sentences of his introductory self-portrait here, where, in my opinion, he’s lost none of his youthful appeal:

It is an arduous task writing about oneself, because the oneself doesn’t exist; it is marked by others since the moment of its constitution and destitution. This is especially so if one is a psychoanalyst and has understood that one cannot totally liberate oneself from the individual myth and family romance that necessitate distrust and repudiation of the first person singular (Le moi est haisable. Pascal). Yet, here I am [p. 569].

In the end, Braunstein’s paper, “Gozologia” (a David Lynchian word that he admits could only be translated into the almost unpronounceable Jouissanceology), situates his thinking squarely in the Lacanian view of psychoanalysis, to which he has dedicated his career, and shares as a minimum common denominator with other schools a view of psychoanalysis as a theory of sexuality indissolubly linked to the theory of the unconscious (p. 573). It is safe to say that most contemporary analysts, even in Latin America, have not completely abandoned, but at least have moved beyond, this view of psychoanalysis as erotology. But have they surpassed the rhetorical style of Lacanian writers like Braunstein? Or that clear-eyed and single-minded focus that only a devoted Lacanian with Braunstein’s talents can offer? In “Gozologia,” as in the earlier writings of my undergraduate days, Braunstein remains a galvanizing writer, one who pushes you to read on and who, in spite of yourself, forces you to touch that electrifying current that pulses through Lacanian thinking when channeled through masterful hands. ²

But Lacan is in the minority in these chapters, and the section Theoretical Lines is rounded off by work from Arnaldo Chuster (Brazil) on the differences between Bion, Freud, and Klein; Carlos Nemivrosky (Argentina) on his own personal style of psychoanalysis, which includes influences from Erikson, McDougall, and Balint, along with Kohut and Winnicott; Elías and Elizabeth da Rocha Barros (Brazil) on symbolism; and others.

The choice and breadth of topics in section 4, Interdisciplinary Studies, deepens the connection between Latin American psychoanalysis and the sociocultural but extends beyond it. In a remarkable and beautifully illustrated paper on a topic that doesn’t often come to one’s attention in recent psychoanalytic literature, Moisés Lemlij from Peru writes on power and the representation of women in pre-Columbian Andean societies. From Brazil, Joel Birman writes on sexuality, gender, and desire, while the Colombian Oscar Espinoza Restrepo explores Thomas Mann and Freud. Others handle more traditional currents, such as analogical hermeneutics and psychoanalysis (the Mexicans Mauricio Beuchot Puente and Ricardo Blanco Beledo), or language (the Brazilian José Renato Avzaradel). Nelson Ernesto Coelho Jr. from Brazil puts Ogden in dialogue with Maurice Merleau-Ponty; Paulo Cesar Sandler, also from Brazil, extrapolates on the nature of truth and Bion’s “O,” and ends with a touching tribute to his friend James Grotstein. The Argentine Julio Moreno, a Sigourney Prize winner, writes about the place of the singular in psychoanalysis, whatever is emergent, undetermined, immanent, while Lía Ricón from Argentina evaluates the role and relevance of six disciplines subsidiary to psychoanalysis: psychopharmacology, neuroscience, statistics, sexology, quantum physics, and philosophy.

Ricardo Bernardi (Uruguay) begins section 5, Research, taking up Freud’s assertion of psychoanalysis as an investigative tool and method, and distinguishing between clinical and extraclinical research. The former is conducted in the consulting room, the latter outside it using rigorous qualitative and quantitative methodologies. He proposes and describes his 3-LM method, his psychodynamic case formulation ideas (Bernardi et al. 2016), and other advances as ways of furthering the systematization and validation of clinical knowledge. Recognizing that “everything begins with a problem,” Patricia Álvarez and María Sverdlik, from Argentina, attempt to complicate aspects of “subject” and “object,” using complexity as a paradigm and viewing clinical theory and the concept of the frame as an active matrix for the production of psychoanalytic knowledge. Also from Argentina, Rubén Zuckerfeld writes about prejudices and legitimizations, along with other problems in psychoanalytic research. His paper contains a fascinating example: twenty-two analysts were asked to evaluate the same paper, first without the author’s name attached and then, a month later, with the author’s name displayed (it was André Green). Bar graphs illustrate how the second round of evaluations yielded higher marks across all axes: relevance, clarity, originality, argumentation, and interest. Samuel Zysman (Argentina) explores the unconscious theories of the analyst while analyzing; the Chileans Juan Pablo Jiménez and Carolina Altimar make use of the former’s angst at the difficult reconciliation he felt, as described in his self-portrait, between the rewards of his psychoanalytic training and his academic aspirations. Their paper, focusing on the psychoanalytic process, contributes a “bottom-up” approach to research that adds to theoretical and clinical/supervisory knowledge. A paper by David Maldavsky (Argentina) operationalizes and investigates enactment. Other papers in this section cover the topics of psychodynamic diagnosis (the Argentine Susana Vincour Fischbein and collaborators); Bernardi’s 3-LM model in an analysis of the conscious and unconscious voices of patient and analyst in a group setting (María Altmann de Litvan, Uruguay); and psychoanalytic knowledge produced from research at an individual versus group scale (Rogerio Lerner, Brazil). Finally, the late Italian-Argentine Jorge Canestri examines our ideologies and idols and their impact on the premises, sometimes fantasmatic, of our psychoanalytic observations and conclusions.

Contemporary Latin American Psychoanalysis closes, as I have noted, with a final, sixth section, titled Panoramas, in which nine analysts give an overview of the psychoanalytic scene in their own country, past and present, as well as projections into the future. This is the richest section of the volume, for the historical analyses and contexts the authors provide, and the invaluable archive each chapter preserves for future generations. I will spend the remainder of my review on these chapters.

From Argentina, Abel Fainstein reminds us of what most analysts already understand: to live in Buenos Aires is to be assured that your taxi driver doesn’t need to use Waze, the global positioning system, to get to the Argentinian Psychoanalytic Association. In a country where, as he writes, anyone from politicians to the person on the street touts the benefits of having been analyzed, one cannot be surprised that Argentinian analysts do not seem to get hung up—in my reading—on strictly defining the boundaries of psychoanalytic practice. Fainstein describes how far from the Uruguayan, French, and Eitingon models are the ad hoc training arrangements found in many IPA component societies in Argentina, and suggests this as something in need of further research. My impression from his chapter is of a more relaxed atmosphere to training and practice than one usually associates with institutional psychoanalysis. In any case, Fainstein describes his third analysis, conducted twice weekly after his qualification as an analyst, as the most fruitful, despite his positive regard for the first two. He conveys a wide, and to me refreshing, appreciation of the benefits of psychoanalytic work without institutional constraints. He explains how psychoanalysts in Argentina typically incorporate many modalities in their practices, from individual work conducted one to four times weekly, to couples, group, and family therapy.

The history of psychoanalytic ideas in Argentina is immensely rich, and much of his chapter is dedicated to tracing the threads between influences, key protagonists, people behind the scenes, and figures who left for far-flung territories to return with foreign ideas that rapidly germinated throughout the country. Of course, there were battles for hegemony: the Kleinianism that held sway during the initial decades (under the influence of Pichon-Rivière, León Grinberg, Horacio Etchegoyen, Arminda Abestury, the Barangers, and others) gradually gave way to Freudian, Lacanian, and Winnicottian thinking. Winnicott in fact was one of the few English analysts to have had influence in Argentina until recently. The introduction of Lacanian ideas by Oscar Massotta and Pichon-Rivière himself ushered in a wave of Lacanian influence that still dominates most university psychology departments and to a great extent drives much of the resistance to British ideas. Notwithstanding, visits over the past few decades by Donald Meltzer, Ronald Britton, and more recently David Bell, Bob Hinshelwood, and Catalina Bronstein have reignited interest in the contemporary English school, though not to the extent that, for instance, Wilfred Bion’s work caught fire in Brazil. Primarily, the French schools of psychoanalysis are what nurture contemporary Argentinian analysts, although it must be said that this is true mostly of those who are affiliated with the IPA. Most Lacanian groups—not to be confused with mainstream French psychoanalysis—are not IPA-affiliated.

Fainstein carefully traces the intercontinental connections that together weave the deep basket of riches that is Argentinian psychoanalysis, and in this basket there is mention of the great Silvia Bleichmar, who died young in 2007. To anyone who has read her, the clarity, breadth, and brilliance of her thinking—which owed much to her collaboration and friendship with Laplanche—was key to her enormous influence, in particular on the topics of masculinity, sexuality, and culture. I was surprised that the editors chose not to include a sample of her work in this volume.

Kleinian thinking has been a consistent presence in Brazilian psychoanalysis, and this might have something to do with what Claudio Eizirik describes as the close tie his country has always had with Argentina. As I noted above, contemporary Brazilian analysts show a deep appreciation for, and a dedication to expanding, the work of Bion, one among a group of post-Kleinian analysts that includes Winnicott, John Steiner, Hanna Segal, and Betty Joseph. With Bion has also come an appreciation for the work of Antonino Ferro and Ogden, the latter one of the few North American analysts to make an impact in this part of the world. Of course, the trajectory of psychoanalysis in Brazil needs to be rooted squarely in Freud to be understood, the first Portuguese translations having made their way into the hands of Brazilian analysts as early as 1919. Yet reliable translations of the Standard Edition have been made available only in recent decades. And as in most parts of Latin America, the influence of Lacan in Brazil has also been widespread, mainly, though not exclusively, in thirty institutes outside the IPA. But within the IPA in Brazil, post-Lacanian French thinkers are studied, most notably André Green and Jean Laplanche. As for the IPA-affiliated institutes themselves, there are 2,200 members in the Brazilian Federation of Psychoanalysis, distributed among sixteen states and thirteen psychoanalytic societies. There are three IPA-recognized study groups, with two more applying for status even now. In Eizirik’s view, psychoanalysis in Brazil has lost its initial, almost submissive reverence to Freudian dogma and is presently a swirl of cannibalized, digested, and assimilated ideas from French, Argentinean, Italian, and English currents, without the fanaticism that can come with parochial adherence to great masters. Along the same lines, Eizirik observes that Brazilian analysts, compared to colleagues from other countries, tend to be more spontaneous in their interaction with patients, less formal, and more direct in how they speak to them. Silence plays less a role in treatment in favor of the continuous establishment of active, reciprocal analytic fields, the co-construction of forms of communication and understanding of unconscious meaning in the here and now, with connections to the past and to the open future (p. 1246).

In Colombia, the psychoanalytic scene is mixed. From the start of his chapter, Luis Fernando Orduz paints a picture of a psychoanalytic history that mirrors the fractious and divisive conflicts between political factions and leaders at the birth of the Republic. Although the country enjoys the presence of three IPA-affiliated societies (the Colombian Psychoanalytic Society, SOCOLOPSI; the Colombian Psychoanalytic Association, APC; and the Freudian Psychoanalytic Society of Colombia, SPFC), the contemporary situation poses many hurdles. To begin with, membership is low, with the first of these three claiming the largest share (eighty members) and the last two split evenly with twenty members each. Orduz thinks this indicates a structural tendency toward fragmentation in the Colombian psychoanalytic environment. Impediments range from a lack of properly organized reading materials for candidates and society members, to the transgenerational inheritance of futile conflicts between psychoanalytic ancestors, ensuring atomization and lack of communication between groups. So the battle for legitimacy between Lacan and the IPA, or over Lacan’s soul between Jacques-Alain Miller and Collette Soler, rage while the rest of the psychoanalytic world moves on. Orduz lays much of the blame here on the IPA’s lack of presence in university departments and a certain elitism in training, which is located almost exclusively in Bogotá, the nation’s capital. Thus, many prospective candidates from cities like Medellín and Cali seek out psychoanalytic ideas, tending to be Lacanian, in university departments, where they easily proliferate in psychoanalytic masters and doctoral programs among a younger generation of students hungry for intellectual satisfaction. There are other institutions as well that provide training in psychoanalytic psychotherapy, but like the academic programs these tend not to lead to full psychoanalytic training along an IPA model, much less within an IPA institute. As for non-Lacanian and more institutionalized psychoanalysis, the three IPA groups in Bogotá might as well be in Macondo, ³ and what has been preserved of psychoanalysis in non-IPA institutions such as hospitals and psychiatry departments is due to the efforts of an aging and increasingly inactive cohort from a bygone era. Orduz reasonably finds this alarming, and more than once in his chapter warns that the IPA’s historical elitism and centralization of training structures has hollowed out a younger and intellectually dynamic source of trainees who flock to courses on Lacan in university departments that easily enter dialogue with the social sciences. Hence, many become Lacanian analysts with nonpsychological, social science backgrounds that enrich their readings of psychoanalysis but exclude them from training at the IPA institutes. Lacanian teaching is thus absent, along with these potential candidates, from these institutes. At the same time—and this I can personally attest to from having given a talk there to colleagues at the APC in early 2023— Colombian analysts show great interest and enthusiasm for the work of Bion, Klein, and Winnicott.

Pablo Santander’s chapter on the state of analysis in Chile, to me was one of the most readable, and in some ways, riveting. A clear writer, his narration avoids the long list of details and the obsessive inclusion of each and every protagonist that other chapters in Panoramas did not avoid. He writes of a sad history driven by conflicts and hurt feelings that nonetheless have led to a passionate and lively, if not fractious, current analytic scene. The sadness, though, seems to start at the very origins, when, having acknowledged the Chilean Germán Greve, the first ever Latin American author of a psychoanalytic paper, presented at a medical congress in Buenos Aires in 1910, Freud, apparently thrown off by the author’s first name, mistakenly wrote that Greve was German. Ever since, issues of identity seem to have plagued Chilean psychoanalysis. In Chile presently, there is one IPA society and institute, the Chilean Psychoanalytic Association (APCH), and a study group, the Santiago Psychoanalytic Association (ASPAN), made up of members who left the original IPA group for a variety of reasons—theoretical, clinical, and historically personal. What theoretical lines were to be included in the curriculum, how psychoanalytic practice was defined in terms of frequency in sessions, who got to claim the title of training analyst, and so on were the kind of concerns that led to the schism. Several other seccessions have weakened what had in the 1960s been a rather strong connection between psychoanalysis and the provision of mental health through the training of psychiatrists, thanks to the leadership and commitment of Ignacio Matte Blanco. But with the biologization of psychiatry and the eclecticization of psychology, the ties between psychoanalysis and institutional and academic life were attenuated. Making the situation worse, there had always been strong disagreements between psychotherapists and psychoanalysts over rights of ownership, leading to the breaking off of analyst members from APCH to form psychoanalytic psychotherapy institutes such as the Chilean Institute for Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy (ICHPA) and the Psychotherapeutic Corporation of Salvador. These seccessions brought with them the painful exodus of leading and influential figures, as when Jaime Coloma left APCH for ICHPA.

In fact, exodus has long been part of the painful Chilean analytic experience, as when Otto and Paulina Kernberg left in the 1960s for the United States and, later, Matte-Blanco himself immigrated to Rome.

The influence of Lacan should not be underestimated, and, as is often the case, this influence proliferates mostly on the margins and outside the IPA. The World Association of Psychoanalysis (AMP), the Lacanian conglomeration of institutes and societies from around the world founded by Jacques-Alain Miller, has a base in the New Lacanian School in Santiago, but various other Lacanian institutes stand in opposition to Miller. Interestingly, when Kernberg was president of the IPA, he attempted a rapprochement with the Lacanian groups. Unfortunately, that didn’t get far.

Jorge Bruce’s tale of misunderstanding at the very foundation of Peruvian psychoanalysis stands out as particularly absorbing. A man who would have been the father of Peruvian psychoanalysis, a self-taught psychiatrist and first Peruvian analyst by the name of Honorio Delgado, scaled the heights of mutual idealization with Freud in the early 1920s only to sink to the depths of devaluation shortly after visiting the man in person. Having written in 1919 the first book on psychoanalysis ever published in the Spanish language, and receiving high praise for this work in both Peruvian psychiatric society and internationally from Abraham, Rank, Jones, Sachs, and Pfister, Delgado was poised to launch Peruvian psychiatry into the psychoanalytic future. However, a combination of factors conspired to sow seeds of discord between organized psychoanalysis and the great Peruvian, who went on to become one of the pillars of biological psychiatry in his home country. Bruce describes how the close affinity of Latin American psychoanalysis with socialist ideals and its engagement with issues of class lay at the heart of Peru’s early misunderstandings with Freudianism. Delgado, steeped as he was in an elitist society financed by British capital and known as the Aristocratic Republic, could not benefit from the kind of social exposure necessary for the development of the kind of existential sensitivity that psychoanalysis encourages. In short, Freud’s forays into culture and society left him cold, and his initial interest in Adler’s socialist ideas didn’t last. Bored as he listened to Jones, Wilhelm Reich, and others at the IPA Congress in Innsbruck in 1927, he ditched the program in favor of swanning around with Marie Bonaparte, swept away by her aristocratic ways. In this personal context, a combination of increasing elitism, conservativism, religiosity, and lack of formal training sealed his disinterest in Freud. From his platform as one of the most highly positioned Peruvian psychiatrists, Honorio Delgado now railed against psychoanalysis.

Others, fortunately, were there to take his place. José Carlos Mariátegui’s ⁴ work on Freudo-Marxism (1928) kept psychoanalysis alive in the intellectual vanguard, and soon Carlos Alberto Seguín returned from analytic training in the States to influence Saúl Peña, Carlos Crisanto, and Max Hernández, all of whom left for London to train as IPA analysts. But it was another fifty years or so before Peruvian psychoanalysis would experience a new beginning. Upon return of this first generation from England, what was ultimately the Peruvian Psychoanalytic Society (SPP) underwent the usual evolution from center to IPA study group and finally Society and Institute. Along the way, Peruvian society itself experienced drastic political and social evolutions, with Lima becoming an enormous political, social, and ethnic epicenter as indigenous populations flocked to a capital whose residents in turn spread out into the country and surrounding mountainsides. Insularity did not render the SPP immune to the inevitable tensions that resulted. What was an initial reverence for the British analysts who influenced the Peruvians (Bowlby was present at the SPP’s founding), namely, the Independent School, gradually transformed into a questioning of the society’s ties to and inheritance of colonial and British intellectual capital. In a sense, the SPP was beginning to feel like the old Aristocratic Republic, and conflict brewed between the newer generations and what they felt were the remnants of an older, authoritarian guard still in charge of training candidates.

Ultimately, this led to a democratization of the society and institute, the inclusion of psychologists and more women in training, and a turn toward the intense psychoanalytic study of culture and society, which can be discerned from Bruce’s text to be the hallmark of a genuinely Peruvian psychoanalysis. Key to these developments was the editorial work of Moisés Lemlij, along with Max Hernández and Alberto Péndola, who founded seminars, publications, psychoanalytic graduate studies, and university affiliations. Historians, ethnologists, and anthropologists have all taken part in the development of an outward-looking psychoanalysis with an intensely inward-directed gaze at what it means to be a Peruvian, a sociocultural psychoanalysis that would have pleased Freud and irritated Honorio Delgado. Bruce’s own 2007 book on psychoanalysis and race, Nos habíamos choleado tanto: El psicoanálisis y el racismo, is itself a best seller in Peru, having sold more than fifty thousand copies. So what is the misunderstanding Bruce alludes to in the title of his Peruvian panorama? He thinks, ultimately, the misunderstanding rests in the assumption, held as we know by some in increasingly smaller psychoanalytic circles, that we can analyze without taking into consideration the historical and sociopolitical coordinates that frame our psyches and those of our patients.

But misunderstandings know no boundaries in Latin American psychoanalysis, boundaries the reader may already have determined to be fluid, to say the least. The Mexican misunderstanding on which psychoanalysis took root was based on its primary adherence to the ideas of Alfred Adler. Alfredo Valencia Mejía explains how again, socialism and social ideals shaped the early currents of psychoanalytic thinking in a nation undergoing massive political and social upheaval. Adler’s repudiation of infantile sexuality and psychic bisexuality were fertile ground for the construction of a postrevolutionary Mexican identity. After the 1910 revolution, psychoanalysis entered the culture as “a general theory that explained the Mexican self” (p. 1300), and the Mexican State, interested in creating a program that would craft a sense of national identity, embraced Adler’s framework for the construction of a virile revolutionary self, promoting an ethic of virility and humanity that channeled mankind’s instincts for the common good rather than suppress them. Valencia Mejía gives an interesting example of just how tied psychoanalysis in Mexico was to revolutionary socialist ideals: When the Mexican press got wind of the danger Freud was in as the Nazis squeezed Austria, President Lázaro Cárdenas, who already had offered shelter to Republicans fleeing Franco in Spain, received numerous appeals from national trade unions, from educators to electricians, to extend asylum to Freud, “the greatest researcher of the different manifestations of the spirit, demolisher of all prejudices, and the creator of the basis for a new, universal, morality” (p. 1301). Due to one of socialism’s more stubborn features—bureaucracy—Freud’s expatriation never saw the Mexican light of day.

Nonetheless, herein lay the basic misunderstanding at the root of Mexican psychoanalysis. According to Valencia Mejía, from the start Freud was conflated in the Mexican imaginary with the fashionable analysts of the day—Adler early on and, in the 1960s, Erich Fromm. Consequently, psychoanalysis was misunderstood as an ethic offering the foundations of a new and universal morality and national identity. Over time and more broadly, the academy and the arts also absorbed psychoanalysis as a form of therapeutic anthropology. Identity, therefore, lay at the core of the psychoanalytic experience in Mexico and is the vertex through which Valencia Mejía analyzes the Mexican psychoanalytic panorama.

A Lacanian analyst in Mexico, Valencia Mejía is sensitive to what identity means for his analytic compatriots, for whom these tensions bear directly on feelings of belonging vis-à-vis the IPA-affiliated Mexican Psychoanalytic Association (APM). This includes the author, who is an APM member, despite the fact that most Lacanian analysts are not members and so practice within that space of ninguneo, or nobodying, of those who “do not belong.” Within the APM itself, the acrimony between Kleinians and ego psychologists is superficially resolved by common membership. The discourse of identity—nationally but more specifically within psychoanalysis in Mexico—one in which an imaginary ideal serves to cover over what is singular about the self—was called into action to fortify institutionality at the expense of the production and diversification of psychoanalytic knowledge. But these politics of exclusion did lead to the opening up of other spaces, the expansion of psychoanalysis to nonmedical professionals, and increasing ties to social and cultural institutions. Here groups such as the CPM, the Círculo Psicoanalítico Mexicano (Mexican Psychoanalytic Circle), were key players. In the author’s description, each of the three founding institutes had its “authors,” though these did evolve over time, so the SMP (Mexican Society of Psychoanalysis) had Fromm, and the APM had the Anna Freudian side of English psychoanalysis and the American ego psychologists. This lasted until Kernberg and Kohut ushered in the study of narcissism, opening the door for the influence of Klein, Winnicott, and Bion at the APM in conflict with the status quo. The CPM, fertilized by analysts fleeing political oppression in the Southern Cone during the 1970s and 1980s, became centered on the study of Laplanche, Leclaire, Maud and Octave Mannoni, Aulagnier, and of course Lacan. With the arrival of these left-leaning analysts, political division increased, in particular between the CPM and allied groups against the IPA (and the APM), whose politics were deemed more conservative. Valencia Mejía describes an explosion of psychoanalytic movement and action during these times, much of it inspired by the electrifying influence of Lacanian analysts, and extending to university departments, the creation of degree-granting programs in psychoanalysis, and centers for the study of psychosis, mental retardation, and early intervention programs for children, all using psychoanalysis as a framework for social engagement and intervention. Today in Mexico, the APM is no longer hegemonic, and in Mexico City there are at least three more IPA-affiliated institutes among the half dozen or so societies and institutes that have proliferated throughout the country.

Uruguay is of course home to one of the three IPA-approved training models, and is the focus of a chapter written by María Cristina Fulco. The historical and sociopolitical context included in the other chapters of Panoramas is inserted here in Fulco’s brief self-portrait instead of in her main text. From this position she illuminates the context from which the Uruguayan model came to be. Twelve years of dictatorship saw Fulco flee Montevideo, where she was a young medical student attending her own group therapy sessions with Myrta Casas de Pereda and Juan Carlos Plá (who would later flee to Mexico), to Paris to continue her training, and back again to Uruguay only to exile herself once more to a border town where she was careful to live half a block away from Brazil. The trauma of the Uruguayan experience of dictatorship, the disappeared colleagues, classmates, and analysts, ensured that the Uruguayan Psychoanalytic Association wasted no time democratizing itself through and through. Fulco fills in the details of this remarkable experience, the features of which I can describe only briefly. But in the beginning, there were the Barangers—Madeleine and Willy, from France and North Africa respectively—living across the Rio de la Plata from Montevideo and teaching seminars and analyzing Uruguayans in their capital. From this grew a first generation who became training analysts with the functions of leading seminars, supervising candidates, and all else concerning institute life, including admissions. This concentration of power in the hands of a few was to see its decline in the period 1972–1974, almost two decades after the institute’s founding in 1955. However, reform has been constant, and internal revision and hard second looks remain an intrinsic feature of the Uruguayan model. Almost every aspect of institutional life is democratized, and the three basic functions previously monopolized by the training analysts are divided among three separate groups: the institute analyst group, the supervisor group, and the seminar instructor group. No one is allowed to be in more than one group at a time, and any qualified member is allowed to apply for entry to any group. The inclusion of candidates in all aspects of institutional life, from the integration of study groups to working committees, is emphasized.

In Venezuela, by contrast, the past two decades have brought the exact reverse of the situation in the Southern Cone institutes. As Serapio Marcano explains, if analysts from the south once fled dictatorship and misery north to Venezuela and beyond—among these Silvia Bleichmar’s brother Hugo and his wife Emilce Dio Bleichmar ⁵ —now the two Venezuelan societies in existence are seeing a similar immigration of their own members to the south, or west and north to Colombia, Panama, or the United States. The effects of the Chávez-Maduro dictatorships on the training and practice of psychoanalysts is discerned not only in the mass immigration of analysts (the current vice president of the IPA is the Venezuelan Adriana Prengler, now residing in San Francisco; Jean Marc Tauszik, one of the editors of the book under review, now lives in Argentina; and Marcano himself is writing from his adopted homeland of Panama), but in the devastation of the educational and health care systems, including the closing of graduate and postgraduate programs in psychiatry and clinical psychology, from which analytic candidates could emerge. Marcano traces these immigrations in meticulous, if somber, detail.

The political and social catastrophe that has befallen Venezuela stemmed the advance of what had been, for the fifty years before Chávez, the steady gallop of institutional psychoanalysis. In the early fifties, Venezuelan professionals roamed the globe out of a different kind of hunger. From the stability of a prosperous and sturdy society, they ventured out in search of extending their knowledge. Those among them who were to become the first and second generation of analysts traveled to Mexico and brought back ego psychology, or returned from Germany, England, Argentina, or Chile to seed their psychodynamic psychiatry courses at local universities with the innovations of Klein, the wild thoughts of Bion, and the synthesizing perspective of Meltzer. For years, luminaries such as Bryce Boyer, Otto Kernberg, Rafael López-Corvo, the Barangers—too many to list here—stirred the desires of local clinical psychology and psychiatry trainees, culminating in the formation of the Venezuelan Association of Psychoanalysis (Asovep), which in 1971 became a component society of the IPA. Outside the IPA, Diana Rabinovich brought Lacanian ideas into the fold, capturing the attention of many inside of Asovep who later left and joined the newly formed School of the Freudian Field (now called the New Lacanian School). ⁶ Conflict, of the type psychoanalytic institutes are prone to, meant that tensions between generations of analysts led to profound intolerance regarding teaching, administration, and scientific advancement. As a result, Marcano and others left Asovep and founded the Psychoanalytic Society of Caracas, which acquired IPA accreditation in 1995. Both societies continued their onward development until the political and social tragedy of a death foretold that was the Bolivarian Revolution ignited passions of a stranger nature, and doused fires of an extraordinary kind.

If I have been true to the merits of Martín Gómez and Tauszik’s opus, the reader will have rightly assessed that I am enthusiastic about their accomplishment. It gives me no pleasure, then, to point out some glaring and lamentable omissions. It is astounding to me that no mention at all is made of the Lobo-Cabernite affair, which certainly forms a part of the history of psychoanalysis in Brazil, concentrated at the time at what was then known as the IPA Society Rio 1. No small affair, there was always question of the complicity of IPA board members at the time in obfuscating the facts. It is legitimate to demand that a book of this scope, dealing with the social and political contexts of torture and dictatorship for psychoanalysis in this region, strive to paint as complete a picture as possible. I am reminded of when, as a candidate, I presented a paper to Polish colleagues in Warsaw. Some of my well-intentioned friends there kindly, but sadly, tried to dissuade me from visiting Auschwitz, as they did not want me to leave their homeland with such a heartbreaking impression. I can only imagine similarly complicated motivations for the editors’ omitting even the slightest comment on this sad chapter of Brazilian, but ultimately international, psychoanalysis, as it also involved the leadership of the IPA. ⁷

The editors also have neglected discussion of Central America, Cuba, and the South American countries of Bolivia and Ecuador, regions and countries with psychoanalytic histories of their own. Many if not all of these places lack IPA representation (the exception is Panama, where the Panamanian Association for Psychoanalysis has provisional IPA status), but, of course, not all the groups or historical movements covered in this volume are IPA-connected. The ubiquity of Lacanian thinking in Latin America and outside the IPA applies as well to Cuba, Ecuador, and Bolivia, where chapters of the New Lacanian School operate. Additionally, FEPAL, a committee of which worked on this book, collaborates with ILAP (the Latin American Institute of Psychoanalysis) in the training of candidates in Central America, in the past decade bringing Guatemala, Honduras, Nicaragua, and El Salvador into the fold. ⁸ Before this, however, the political philosophies of psychologists and other intellectuals in these civil war–wracked nations benefited greatly from psychoanalytic ideas. For example, Ignacio Martín Barós’s work on Liberation Psychology was greatly influenced by psychoanalysis. Marie Langer’s social-psychoanalytic community and group therapy work in Managua after the Sandinista Revolution is also well documented. The history of psychoanalytic ideas leading up to the present-day training of IPA and non-IPA analysts in these countries deserves mention.

In my country of birth, Costa Rica, up until the mid-1990s psychoanalysis was well-disseminated in university psychology departments, the main thinkers under study being Freud and Lacan. All psychoanalytic groups outside the university were non-IPA, as there has been no IPA presence in the country. These institutes were informal and dedicated more to study than training. For the most part, graduate psychologists could call themselves analysts having undertaken psychology degrees dense with courses in anthropology, sociology, philosophy, and Lacan (studies in Lacan were usually camouflaged under the titles Psychopathology 1 (neurosis), 2 (perversions and psychosomatics), and 3 (psychosis)). And most of our more influential and beloved instructors were exiled Argentinean Kleinians, who sooner or later metamorphized into Lacanians. At present, there is one main Lacanian group, the Costa Rican Association for Psychoanalytic Research and Studies (ACIEPS).

In the 1980s the Swiss-German analyst Ursula Hauser arrived in San José, Costa Rica, from the Zurich Psychoanalytic Seminar, a free-standing institute where she had trained with Fritz Morgenthaler, Paul Parin, and Goldy Parin-Matthèy, bringing the concepts of ethnopsychoanalysis ⁹ with her. Having spent time in Nicaragua supporting the Sandinista Revolution, she returned to San José and founded the Association for Socio-Critical Psychoanalysis (ASPAS). In 2004, ASPAS created the Center for Psychoanalytic Studies, an institute for training that follows the Eitingon model. The editors would have done well to reach out to some of these groups for their histories, which after all, belong to all of us.

Al Final Del Viaje: The End Of The JOURNEY

In his latest book, Marcelo Viñar (2014) writes of his conviction, forged in time through life, that one belongs more to the country where one chooses to die than to one’s country of birth. This is more or less true, I think, of psychoanalytic ideas. These belong to their countries of destination yet are in perpetual flight. Like the analysts that travel with them, after them, through them, they proliferate and die in expanding geographies, connecting nations, cultures, peoples and so, in that sense, they belong to no one. These countries and their thinkers only temporarily become the custodians of the clinical experiences and dreams of the widely and wildly traveled generations that passed through them. Within the cauldrons of their own political, ideological, personal, and historically traumatized experience, these ideas transform our knowledge and bring us forward together.

That said, analysts in each of these nations have produced theoretical and clinical lines of development that inevitably, if not initially, intersect and connect, strengthen and splinter off, between capitals within the Americas, and as intensely as between these and the capitals of Europe and North America. So Silvia Bleichmar and Néstor Braunstein are pivotal links for their native and host countries of Argentina and Mexico. So a generation of Peruvians are trained at the British Psychoanalytical Society. So Willy and Madeleine Baranger cross the Atlantic from Algeria and France into Buenos Aires, and then over the Rio de la Plata to Montevideo.

Latin American Psychoanalysis is a massive book that is clearly meant to be lived with rather than read systematically. I was grateful that the editors avoided the shortcuts common in such projects, where ethnic and cultural characterizations referring to colors, tastes, and temperaments sometimes lurk. But this book is not only intellectually satisfying. By bringing into clear relief the psychoanalytic panorama of this region of the world in its political, intellectual, cultural, and historical dimensions, the editors have done our profession a great service. Tauszik and Martín Gómez are to be commended for this, a sign of the respect and promise they and their contributors place in their cultures and in their readers. There is a saying in Spanish, “Nadie sabe para quien trabaja”—Nobody knows who they are really working for—which refers to the uncertainty of truly knowing who benefits from one’s labors, especially, one’s labors of love. It is a sad fact of the psychoanalysis of these not-so-tristes tropiques that Tauzik and Martín Gómez can never truly know who and how many of us they have worked for.

Rodrigo Barahona 1685 Beacon Street, Suite 3 Brookline, MA 02445 Email: rodbarahona@gmail.com