The Lobo-Cabernite Affair

April 18, 2000. I am grateful to JAPA for giving me the opportunity to revisit such an important matter as the Rio I, or Lobo-Cabernite, affair. From my point of view, this matter involves much more for the IPA than simply Rio I, even though it has a specific weight for Brazilian psychoanalysts. It involves not simply an ethical problem, but one fraught with sociopolitical significance. It seems evident that our institutions are not prepared to take into account and solve, as quickly as is necessary, this kind of ethical problem, perhaps because we know more about the analytic setting than about the institutional and political setting. The Lobo-Cabernite problem has been puzzling IPA officers since the very beginning, when we first began to know what was going on in Rio I. As tends to happen in this kind of serve ethical deviation, we all knew, but it was an ineffective knowledge. The same happened in Germany and in other countries where racial, ethnic, or religious differences have led to oppression and atrocities, and consequently to some very shameless decisions by psychoanalytic institutions. People knew but did not want to know, and so did not act in accord with the ethics of our profession.

Now we know much more. Rio I commands attention from JAPA, a concern that shows itself in the fact that my book review was thought to merit a response in the very issue in which it appeared. Now Helena Besserman Vianna answers Robert Wallerstein's commentary in JAPA 47/3, and Wallerstein again responds. JAPA has become a publication that enables us to discuss publicly the sort of ethical problems raised by Rio I; the present discussion sheds lights on the inability of IPA officers to resolve this kind of problem. This