It is important to understand how three registers - the psychological, the political and the ideological - converge to frame unconscious life in ways that either inhibit or facilitate individual and group capacities to exercise free speech and free association. Here a model for assessing how these registers of human affect and behavior either facilitate these freedoms of expression or sabotage them in favor of submission to authority is suggested. The discussion is positioned in the context of two traumatic periods in Argentine history, namely the military dictatorship's Dirty War and the country's complete economic collapse in 2001.