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In this comprehensive social and cultural history, Mariano Ben Plotkin offers a thoroughgoing exploration of what made Buenos Aires a mecca for psychoanalysis. Noting that Argentina has one of the highest concentrations of psychoanalysts in the world, he writes in his introduction, “From politicians to bank clerks, … soap opera stars to cab drivers, and even a few generals—everybody seems to use psychoanalytic language to express the concerns of everyday life” (p. 1).
The author, who directs the New York University site in Buenos Aires, grew up there with the idea that monthly expenses included rent, food, clothing, and a four-times-a- week psychoanalysis! It was only later, while a graduate student in the United States, that he realized how unique to his native Argentina such an assumption was. Intrigued, he set about to do research and write a book whose aim was to explain “the diffusion of psychoanalysis in a specific society as a general cultural phenomenon and to analyze the conditions for its dissemination” (p. 4).
A detailed and thoughtful writer, Plotkin at times tells his story chronologically; at others, thematically. He traces the history of Argentine psychoanalysis from its early appearance in the 1910s through the post-military dictatorship period of the mid 1980s, all the while attending to such specific topics as the emergence of psychology as a discipline and its close relationship to psychoanalysis. He explores the complex convergence of psychoanalysis and Marxist thought and praxis within the context of the highly politicized environment of Argentina. He discusses the Lacanian challenge to Argentine Kleinianism by situating it in the political crisis that ended in the seven-year Dirty War and produced the most repressive military dictatorship in its history.