Freud in the Pampas: The Emergence and Development of a Psychoanalytic Culture in Argentina (review)

Mariano Ben Plotkin. Freud in the Pampas: The Emergence and Development of a Psychoanalytic Culture in Argentina. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2001. xiii + 314 pp. $60.00 (0-8047-4054-2), $24.95 (paperbound, 0-8047-4060-7).

The history of psychoanalysis has been famously aflame in recent years, with the so-called Freud Wars filling pages in learned and not-so-learned journals. One battle over Freud's legacy has revolved around the impact of social context on the origins and development of psychoanalysis. Internalists have long argued that Freud's Viennese surroundings were of relatively trivial import to the making of his theory, while others have looked to social and political context so as to understand the making of this discipline. Carl Schorske, for instance, argued that psychoanalysis represented an inward retreat from the hopes for political reform in fin de siècle Vienna (Fin-de-Siècle Vienna: Politics and Culture, 1980).

If Schorske and his followers have examined how Vienna helped create psychoanalysis, others have tried to elucidate how in later years psychoanalysis continued to to be shaped by and in turn shaped aspects of twentieth-century Western culture. Mariano Ben Plotkin takes up this historiographic strategy so as to examine the reception and spread of psychoanalysis in Argentina. Argentina makes an especially interesting case study, since that nation now boasts more psychoanalysts per capita than any country in the world.

In clear and concise prose, Plotkin lays out the early importation of psychoanalytic ideas into Argentina, the relationship of the analysts to the local medical culture, the founding of nascent organizations such as the Argentine Psychoanalytic Association in 1942, and the critical role of "diffusers"—that is, those who via popular culture made psychoanalysis a kind of common sense in Argentina. In the process, Plotkin introduces a number of interesting historical figures such as José Bleger, Oscar Masotta, Marie Langer, and Enrique Pichon Rivière. All of this makes his book a fine addition to the national histories of psychoanalysis that have been written on, for instance, France, Russia, and the United States.

That having been said, I have a few reservations regarding Plotkin's analysis. For this reader, there are two central questions that a book on the development of a "psychoanalytic culture in Argentina" must take up. First, why Argentina? Plotkin is very interested in this question, and he marshals much data to give us insights into the determinants that in his view made psychoanalysis so extremely popular in this country. Nonetheless, this question, it seems to me, cannot be fully answered without a comparative model. That is, claims that great social, political, and cultural change created a demand for psychoanalysis are meaningful only if these upheavals are specific to Argentina. Plotkin does mention comparative developments in Brazil (pp. 83-84), but I would have wished for more that cast light on how Argentina differed from some of its less psychoanalytic, but also rapidly modernizing, neighbors.

The second major historical question that a historian of psychoanalysis would ask with regard to Argentina is, why Klein? For the rise of psychoanalysis in Argentina was the rise of a very particular orthodoxy, one that, interestingly, was reviled by a competing orthodoxy in the United States. Kleinian psychoanalysis came to Argentina, Plotkin shows, via a few chance encounters by child therapists, and took root as "the result more of random episodes and basic technical options than of deliberate decision" (p. 67). He considers the rivalry with the United States, the import of orthodoxy as a source of professional identity, and personal relations between some Argentine child therapists and important Kleinians such as Paula Heimann. To my mind, this is not a sufficient explanation for why this theory (rather than, say, the adaptive, ego-psychological model of Heinz Hartmann and Anna Freud) gained such a singular...