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

Arizona Journal of Hispanic Cultural Studies 275 choanalytical criticism gives recurrent impetus to feminist and gender studies that analyze literary female protagonists and elucidate contemporary social problems. In the final article Diana de Armas Wilson treats Cervantes's unsuccessful efforts to emigrate to the New World, American images in his work, don Quijote as conquistador and the conquistadores as quixotic. For her, the relationship between don Quijote and the conquistadores presents a form of triangulation that operates among the fictional heroes of the books of chivalry, the real-life conquistadores who imitate them and don Quijote who imitates both. In Don Quijote the adventure of the Enchanted Boat, which ends with a note of despair, can be read as an allegory of Cervantes's foiled transadantic desires. Cascardi is to be commended for compiling and carefully editing a collection of stimulating essays whose solid scholarship, refreshing variety of approaches and imaginative interpretations will delight specialists and generalists alike. Robert L. Fiore The University of Arizona Argentina on the Couch: Psychiatry, State, and Society, 1880 to the Present University of New Mexico Press, 2003 Edited by Mariano Plotkin One recalls the icons of Argentine culture that the rag-tag Argentine exiles in Paris recall in Julio Cortázar's Rayuela (1963): the tango, mate, duke de leche, but I don't recall their referring to one of the most interesting Argentine icons of all: psychoanalysis. Indeed, Argentina may well be the only place left in the world where psychoanalysis retains its importance as an intellectual property, as a social force, and as a personal commitment . Potkin, in his introduction, describes the complex strands of psychoanalysis in Argentina and its relationship with an earlier somatic psychiatry. If the latter played an important role in the development of a discourse of social modernity , the former, with all of the glory of its Freudian master narrative, exercised an influence on an Argentine—well, mostly Porteño (i.e., pertaining to Buenos Aires)—intellectual discourse, such that a particular collective view of human experience in Argentina is inseparable from the psychoanalytic heritage. If psychoanalytic discourse has virtually disappeared in the United States (or, if it has degenerated into a superficial psychobabble that tends to agglutinate around various social issues ), it remains strong and vibrant in Argentina as a complex grid used both to interpret individual psyches and the national one (hence, the title of the book). Six essays examine this cultural ideology. Two opening essays fall into the category of social history, as they examine, first (a study by Julia E. Rodriguez), the ideologeme of the hysteric and, second (a study by Kristin Ruggiero), that of sexual aberration—mental and sexual hygiene are of enormous importance to modernity's concept of the individual body as a synecdoche of society as a body. Unfortunately, it is with the second essay that the bibliographic limitations of these essays for cultural studies becomes evident, as diere is no reference to Jorge Salessi's superb monograph Médicos makantesy maricas; hygiene, criminobgia y homosexualidad en b construcción de b nación argentina (BuenosAires: 1871-1914) (1995), where these issues are directly related to the cultural production , which is a much more abiding record than the professional documents of the day (note the rhetorical importance of Salessi's underpunctuated main title). That is to say, it requires archival research to recover these documents, whereas the cultural production that, as Salessi indicates, has an enormous intertextual relationship with them, are now a part of the cultural canon that is still very much in evidence today as major and minor works ofart and literature. A second section is devoted to two studies on psychiatric hospitals in twentieth-century Argentina (a study by Jonathan D. Ablard) and—of particular interest in terms of a text-based production—the production of scientific biographies of criminals (a study by LiIa Caimari). Ablard's study falls short of the interests of the student of culture in that one 276 Arizona Journal of Hispanic Cultural Studies would have liked some reference to the Instituto Borda, which has become elevated almost to a metaphor of Argentine culture, in films like ElÃ-seo Subidas 1986 film, Hombre mirando...