The Lobo-Cabernite Affair

March 17, 2000. Helena Besserman Vianna is an outstandingly courageous person. Her willingness to publicly expose Leão Cabernite's egregious behavior as a training analyst in Rio de Janeiro during the military dictatorship—his covering up the nefarious conduct of his training analysand Amilcar Lobo, a military psychiatrist complicit in the torture being inflicted on political prisoners (his role being to keep the torture victims alive so that the questioning could continue)—and to do this at real risk of arrest and worse, has properly won the admiration of her informed psychoanalytic colleagues, both in Brazil and around the world. It therefore saddens me that her book recounting her experience of this shameful episode in psychoanalytic history—psychoanalysis, Dictatorship, and Torture: Don't Talk About It—is indeed replete with misunderstanding and distortion of the efforts of the IPA and its elected officers, as I have known these efforts, to bring an honorable conclusion to the strife and turmoil that has characterized the Psychoanalytic Society of Rio de Janeiro, (SPRJ), also known as Rio I, for over three decades now, and to remove Cabernite from participation in that society.

I have already responded twice to reviews of Besserman's book, once in the January 1999 Bulletin of the British Psychoanalytical Society to a review by Peter Hildebrand, and once in JAPA (47/3) to a review by Janine Puget. I felt that both reviews had repeated, unchallenged, some of what I felt were unfounded allegations impugning the role of the IPA and its elected leaders in the handling of the Cabernite affair. Besserman wrote a rebuttal to my commentary in the Bulletin, which was published along with my response in the March 1999 issue. She has now written a rebuttal to my commentary in JAPA, and the editors have asked that I write a response to that. In this response I will limit myself to statements made by Besserman in this issue of JAPA; those interested in a fuller version of thes