Occult Couches in the Pampa: Reviewing Three Recent Books on Twentieth-Century Argentina

Argentina on the Couch: Psychiatry, State, and Society, 1880 to the Present. Edited by Mariano Plotkin. (Albuquerque, NM: University of New Mexico Press, 2003. Pp. 287.)

Evil, Madness, and the Occult in Argentine Poetry. By Melanie Nicholson. (Gainesville, FL: University Press of Florida, 2002. Pp. xxi+201.)

Freud in the Pampas: The Emergence and Development of a Psychoanalytic Culture in Argentina. By Mariano Plotkin. (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2001. Pp. 314. $60.00 cloth, $24.95 paper.)

Mariano Plotkin's 2001 study, Freud in the Pampas: The Emergence and Development of a Psychoanalytic Culture in Argentina is an important and necessary book that continues in greater depth and with more systematic rigor the work begun by Jorge Balán (Cuéntame tu vida. Una biografía colectiva del psicoanálisis argentino, 1991). Its starting point is the need to explain the historical causes of the "enormous presence of psychoanalysis" in urban Argentinean culture, which has meant that, as Plotkin facetiously points out, "anyone who questions the existence of the unconscious or of the Oedipus complex at a social gathering in any large Argentine city is made to feel as if he or she were denying the virginity of Mary before a synod of Catholic bishops" (1). The use of the metaphor of Mary's virginity to explain the importance of psychoanalysis in Argentina is surely no accident in this introductory remark, since it allows Plotkin to set himself up as the heretic who will rightfully question the (supposedly) dogmatic belief system of Argentinean culture. Plotkin then proceeds seriously to explain how his project fills a scholarly gap. He argues that only a historical approach to the subject will be up to the task of answering the question of why Buenos Aires is the world capital of (particularly Lacanian) psychoanalysis today. He defines as historical an approach that, unlike a sociological one, studies the subject in its transmutations through time and understands the phenomenon as "a unique combination of social, cultural, economic, intellectual, and political factors" (6).

Essentially, Plotkin shows that in Argentina, not unlike in France, psychoanalysis was initially (roughly in the first three decades of the twentieth century) not taken seriously as a theory (and much less as a method) because of the overwhelming dominance of positivist thinking that cast psychoanalysis as empirically weak. He convincingly shows (alongside scholars like Hugo Vezzetti or Jorge Balán) that the heyday of Freud's ideas began after the military coup against Perón's government in 1955 (the so-called "Libertadora"). Interestingly, he speculates that the psychoanalytic practice generated sophisticated private environments that could serve as a non-repressive and "modern" response to the increasingly militarized and violent political sphere. I must admit that, from the perspective of someone who is not a historian, the truly exciting moments of the book are those where Plotkin speculates. And he often does so with keen intuition.

The section that most directly addresses the reception of psychoanalysis by the (intellectually dominant) political Left in the 1960s is titled "When Marx Meets Freud." This section starts with a brief sketch of the historical aftermath of the Revolución Libertadora, which had created a short-lived alliance between Communists, Liberals and Conservatives that quickly broke down to reveal the truly repressive character of the military regime that had removed Perón from power. One of the puzzling features of Peronism that the Left was never quite able to figure out was why the working class remained Peronist after 1955 or, if anything, became even more Peronist, instead of assuming its historical revolutionary mission, which would have afforded the leftist intellectuals the role of revolutionary avant garde. The failure of the Marxist intellectuals to direct or influence the working class in Argentina led to a wholesale self-interrogation of the basic tenets of orthodox Marxist political theory. Relying on Sartre...