Argentina, this volume claims, is the “world capital of psychoanalysis” (p. 2). More than a therapeutic approach, psychoanalysis represents a “filter of intelligibility” for contemporary Argentines, a framework for understanding culture, politics, and society (p. 221). These essays explore the historical context for this development, resulting in a volume that historians and students interested in twentieth-century Argentine intellectual culture and the globalization of mental healthcare will find worth reading, despite a few nagging problems.
Editor Mariano Plotkin sets two goals for the volume: to map the historical trajectory of “Argentines’ passion for Freud” and to use the history of the psycho-sciences to explore the Argentine state and “the reception and adaptation of European ideas” in Argentine society (p. 3). The book achieves these goals with uneven success. Adopting a Foucauldian stance, essays in the first two parts (on degeneration and gender, and institutional psychiatry) interpret the development of psychiatry as...
