Among the countries of Latin America where Freudian psychology has achieved intellectual and social significance, the Brazilian reception has been the best studied and the Argentine the worst. For this reason, Jorge Balán’s book is especially welcome. Balán is a sociologist, and his study of the early circle of Argentine analysts focusing on small-group dynamics is the best part of the book, indeed its signal contribution to the general literature of the history of psychoanalysis. From a small group of friends, the psychoanalytic circle widened first to include wives, then relatives. The estrangement of psychoanalysis from medical institutions made it an attractive career for women whose entrance into medicine had been frustrated by the medical establishment. The initial pattern of intersecting training analyses, whereby wives of analysts would be analyzed by their colleagues, set up a tight, complex network of confidential relations that both strengthened the new profession and provided the basis for its internal political dynamics.
The boom in psychoanalysis extending from 1956 to 1964 was stimulated by the huge growth in university enrollments and the development of new career paths in psychology. Child psychology in particular attracted dozens of women, many of whom wanted to be analyzed as part of their training. Analysts were then drawn into hospitals and universities because of a social demand emanating from the new waves of university students. The boom produced a distinctive local psychoanalytic culture centered in the concentration of analysts’ offices on the Calle Florida, which was also the locale of avant-garde artistic activities. With the Ongania coup, everything that went on in this neighborhood became suspect, as did all psychologists and analysts.
The professional structure of Argentine psychoanalysis is similar to that of other Latin countries, particularly Brazil and France. In these countries institutional control by the orthodox Freudian association (the APA in Argentina) was resented by younger analysts and the broader psychological community, and that resentment fed the fire of new Lacanian schools. The 1970s were characterized by numerous splits within the orthodox Freudian community.
Balán is less concerned with the intellectual history of psychoanalysis than with its institutional history and social structure. He does, however, sketch out the early, preinstitutional phase of the reception of Freudian psychology in Argentina in the 1920S and 1930s, a period in which more than a few psychiatrists attempted to adjust their own therapies to accommodate Freudian ideas. Balán notes that all important Argentine psychiatrists of the first third of the century studied in France, where there was tremendous resistance to Freud’s ideas, and concludes that this explains a lag in Freud’s reception, at least on the institutional level, in Argentina. I am skeptical of the lag argument. In all Latin countries, Freud was first read by physicians and other intellectuals who knew German; they fomented a discussion of Freudian ideas among a narrow circle of colleagues. As the circle widened, demand for translation increased; and only when a substantial group of people were reading Freud in their own language did demand for institutionalized psychoanalysis arise. All this takes time. Given these requirements, I would not characterize the reception of psychoanalysis either in Argentina or in France or Brazil by a “lag.”
Balán’s main resource is a series of interviews with the founders of psychoanalysis in Argentina. Such persons always stress resistance and, in Latin America in particular, are hyperconscious of their isolation from the centers of European science. In Argentina, states Balán, resistance to Freud was due to the barrier imposed by medical professionalization and to the horror with which the medical community regarded lay analysis. But elsewhere in this important study he shows definitively how the analysts’ self-conscious strategy of breaking with official psychiatry and establishing their own profession was the major institutional reason for their success.
