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.
As the regional editor for South America, I have been invited to edit a special issue for International Forum of Psychoanalysis. My choice for the general theme of this issue has fallen upon “Brazilian Social Realities and Psychoanalysis” since Brazil is the only South American country that belongs to the IFPS and little is known about our tropical country besides soccer, coffee and Carnival.
Today, clinical psychoanalysis, practiced in the traditional analytic setting, has been threatened by two strong antagonists: pharmacology, on one hand, and the increasing belief in esoteric practices and solutions on the other.
The high prices of psychoanalytic treatments and the long period of time that they demand, make them inaccessible to a large part of our population. Many opponents of psychoanalysis even say that it is condemned to disappear.
Nevertheless, psychoanalysis cannot be considered as a mere method of treatment. As a theory of the unconscious, it brings light to the process that turns a living being into man, to the passage from nature to culture, to the wishes of humans for fulfillment, their illusions and their ways of behavior. The great Freudian works on culture illustrate all those points of view. In our contemporary world, the psychoanalyst is summoned to work in a large variety of public and private circumstances, in such different realms as: education, police departments, general hospitals, governmental institutions, ethnic conflicts, different forms of art and literature, and many other fields of human manifestations.
The survival of Psychoanalysis, in our postmodern world, will depend on its capacity to operate within the social framework, on its diversified facets, and on its encounter with the oncoming challenges. Psychoanalytic concepts are so amalgamated in our social environment that we cannot imagine the word without its influence. The dualistic model “analyst and patient” is just one of the ways (a very privileged one) in which Freud's creation ca