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Marilú Pelento (1932-2014), a renowned Argentinian child and adolescent psychoanalyst, is remembered for her work on loss and bereavement linked to abductions and disappearances during Argentina's Dirty War, as well as for her work with groups of marginalized youth. Apart from her clinical work, Pelento was an active participant in her country's human rights movement, with a particular interest in the return of children removed from their families during the dictatorship.
Although Pelento wrote many articles throughout her career and was sought after as a lecturer, she never wrote a book. Marilú Pelento, Psychoanalyst of Our Time is a posthumous collection of articles and lectures, many of them unpublished in her lifetime, compiled by three of Pelento's colleagues and longtime friends: Janine Puget, Julia Braun, and Marité Cena.
Each of the book's chapters is devoted to a different topic. Subjects range from the effects of violence and state terrorism on children and families, to tattoos and body modification techniques, to the effects of cultural changes on the practice of psychoanalysis. Although the texts are all stimulating and thought-provoking, the reader is often left wishing that the topic at hand had been further developed. Pelento's work is suggestive and evocative rather than conclusive; she avoids synthesis and resists a strict order of discourse. Indeed, to comment on Pelento's work, I feel compelled to abandon my expectations of synthesis and to proceed in a manner that is unavoidably partial, leaving aside a number of matters that would otherwise merit attention.
In chapter 1, “Beliefs and Myths,” Pelento looks at what shapes our beliefs, noting how the degradation of the social fabric affects
our relationship to knowledge. She points to the increasingly common situation of individuals who believe in contradictory paradigms and switch from one to the next with no apparent conflict: “the same person who comes out of a scientific institution can go get