You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
The peculiar development—in both extension and depth—of psychoanalysis and its practice in Argentina, has been the object of interest and curiosity in diverse spheres. Inquiry into the determining factors of the phenomenal expansion, in this corner of the planet, of an avant-garde discipline requiring such sophisticated practice is an ongoing project. This article is necessarily an informal chronicle that may contribute, if incidentally and modestly, to answering questions better addressed by historians and social scientists.
Argentina is quite different from most other Latin American countries. A large portion of its population had its origins in European immigration, and as a result of the struggles to organize the country as a nation, the porteña1 current associated with European cultural values and ideals of progress prevailed in the country from the second half of the nineteenth century. During that period, the ruling classes that governed the nation were imbued with liberal democratic intellectual ideals. For instance, a law making secular education universal and obligatory has been in force since the 1880s. Moreover, the country enjoyed an enviable prosperity from the last decades of the nineteenth century up to the 1930 world economic crisis. Buenos Aires was therefore a natural site for the introduction of avant-garde ideas being developed in Europe.
The history of psychoanalysis in Argentina may be divided, perhaps a bit arbitrarily, into five periods: (1) a preinstitutional period, (2) a pioneering period, (3) a period of consolidation, (4) a period that comprises the crisis of the 1970s, and (5) the present.