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The unconscious, of principal interest for psychoanalysis, is atemporal. But is it also stateless?
Books on psychoanalysis in Latin America have the daunting task of describing to their readers how a global profession, theory, and practice as fluid and dynamic as psychoanalysis assumes a particular shape within the physical and cultural geographies of an equally liquid part of the world. Others have come before this massive volume (see, e.g., Litman 1966; Lemlij 1993; Lewkowitz and Flechner 2005), but none with the same breadth of theory, creativity, and originality as Fernando Martín Gómez and Jean Marc Tauszik's Contemporary Latin American Psychoanalysis: Volume One. This book is essential to the library of any psychoanalytic institute whose members and candidates are interested in immersing themselves in the vital pulse and deep history of this Latin American psychoanalytic moment.
It is both a pleasure and a challenge to review a work of this magnitude. This first volume alone spans 1,388 pages and contains seven sections, each housing anywhere from nine to eleven papers. The informative and finely written two-part introduction by the editors frames a rich array of selected work from some of the region's finest minds. In doing so, they present a slice of the Latin American intellectual psychoanalytic milieu and reveal the interwoven layers that sediment what can
only broadly, with no pretense of conclusive delimitation (p. 31), be characterized as a distinctly Latin American psychoanalysis.
A cartography of any sort runs into a number of problems, the first of which is selecting the features of the objects to be mapped. For this purpose, the editors combined the efforts of two institutions, the Publications Committe of the Argentine Psychoanalytic Association (APA) and the platform Latin American Psychoanalytic Thinking (PPL in Spanish) of the Psychoanalytic Federation of Latin America (FEPAL). The PPL ran three workshops (in Cartagena, Colombi