Psychoanalysis and State Terror in Argentina

Latin Americans live in a world that has inherited a centuries-long legacy of expropriation of its natural resources by the industrialized world and the imposition of political structures that ensure relations of domination/subordination between self-serving privileged elites and disenfranchised popular masses. Whenever these class relations are successfully challenged, and institutional and ideological control no longer suffice to contain social discontent, the elites turn to coersion-brutal military and paramilitary strategies-to reestablish the status quo. Countless examples from most Latin American countries could be given to illustrate the activities of the terrorist state, which targets a population it defines as the enemy of law and order, for kidnapping, imprisonment, torture, forced exile, and murder. The function, purpose, and strategies of the terrorist state in Latin America, as well as the nature of its deeply traumatic impact, have been analyzed by many psychoanalysts and other mental health professionals aligned with the struggle to end this contemporary holocaust.

In an effort to bring into focus this important phenomenon, I examine the specific experience of the Argentine military's “Dirty War” against its own citizens and 1 explore the fate of psychoanalysis under state terror.

When the military junta, which took over the government in March 1976, declared itself to be in the business of creating a nation infused with “Christian and Western values,” it set about to cleanse Argentine society of any evidence of the “ideological criminals,” Marx and Freud. “Marxism is the modern heresy,” wrote General Ramon Camps, “and what we are witnessing is the current chapter of the ongoing war between Good and Evil.'” With this banner, the military targeted not only militant trade unions and other working class organizations but went after the middle sectors: It directly intervened in universities, shutting down enti