Freudian Slips: On the complicated—and lingering—legacy of psychoanalysis in Argentina

In 2016, Jorge Ahumada, a 76-year-old psychologist in Buenos Aires, suddenly became famous: His photograph was featured on the covers of popular magazines and he was interviewed in newspapers. His celebrity came about after President Mauricio Macri, who had been inaugurated in December 2015, revealed that he had been undergoing psychoanalytic treatment for the last 25 years with Ahumada. Macri had started analysis in 1991 when, as a young entrepreneur and a member of one of Argentina's wealthiest industrialist families, he was kidnapped. Traumatized by this experience, Macri started twice-a-week "ultra-Freudian" psychoanalytic therapy, an approach that focuses on sexuality and the unconscious. After his patient became the president of Argentina (Macri had previously been chief of the government of Buenos Aires), Ahumada decided that their routine should proceed as usual. He refused to hold sessions in the presidential mansion, so Macri continued his treatment at the psychoanalyst's office.

Of course, Macri is not the only famous Argentine who is or has been in psychotherapy. A few months ago, Pope Francis vented in an interview with a French sociologist that when he was in his early 40s he sought the services of a female psychoanalyst in order "to clarify certain things." (He declined to make her name public, though he did say that she was Jewish.) Although the treatment only lasted six months, Pope Francis considers his therapist, in addition to his mother, "one of the women of his life."

In the early 1960s, Argentina—particularly the Buenos Aires metropolitan area, which is home to roughly 25 percent of the country's total population—experienced a "psychoanalytic boom." The number of practicing analysts and people in analysis skyrocketed. There are no precise statistics on how many people have undergone psychoanalysis, but we do know that in 1995 one of every 198 porteños (as Buenos Aires residents are called) was a psychologist. Even now, Argentina boasts one of the largest psychoanalytic communities in the world, and terms such as psicopatear (to manipulate someone as a psychopath would) or histeriquear (to behave like a Freudian hysteric) are part of everyday speech. Being in therapy is considered normal for middle- and upper-class porteños, while talking about one's traumas and psychological problems is standard fare at social gatherings. Growing up in the late 1960s and the early 1970s in a Jewish, middle-class family, I was sent to a child psychoanalyst when I was 6 years old. Most of my friends at school had similar experiences, and going to therapy was as much a part of childhood for my social milieu as playing soccer or studying English.

Having said that, many Argentines have never spent time on a couch, especially since in the last few decades, psychoanalysis has had to compete with new forms of therapy and spiritual practice. However, in part because of the adoption of psychoanalysis by the public mental-health system in the 1960s, and more recently by some psychiatric wards within the prison system, a certain "psychoanalytic mode of thinking"—that is to say, the belief that unconscious, mostly sexual, desires play a central role in determining our behavior—is far more common in Argentina than probably anywhere else in the world.

The fact that Buenos Aires experienced such a boom in the 1960s is not surprising: Many major cities flirted with psychoanalysis during that decade. In some Western cities, it was associated with the sexual liberation movement, as it was seen as a doctrine that permitted people to investigate repressed desires and understand hidden aspects of the self. An interest in psychoanalysis as therapy also converged with a general fascination in Freud's ideas as a social theory. What is surprising, however, is that in Argentina the massive dissemination of psychoanalysis took place while the country was ruled by violent dictators. Th e Argentine—and to some extent, the Brazilian—case contradicts the popular idea that psychoanalysis can only flourish in free and democratic environments. What the histories of Argentina...