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.
This fascinating history on the origin and development of psychoanalysis in Argentina was inspired, Plotkin writes, by a conversation with his aunt, an Argentine psychoanalyst, when he was a foreign graduate student at Berkeley. His aunt's surprise that he and his American fellow students were not in therapy, in contrast to Argentine students, sparked a long-standing interest on Plotkin's part in understanding why psychoanalysis became so popular in Argentina, a country where ‘politicians, bank clerks, soap opera stars and cab drivers, seem to use psychoanalytic language to express the concerns of everyday life’ (p. 1), and where one in every 200 inhabitants of Buenos Aires is a psychologist. Plotkin, a historian, takes us on a scholarly historical journey through the whole of the last century in Argentina, and provides us with a meticulously detailed account of the political and social events that shaped the complex context in which psychoanalysis developed.
Plotkin argues that the popularity of psychoanalysis in Argentina is accounted for by two main factors: very passionate proponents and an especially receptive people—the latter resulting from unique historical and sociological factors. Plotkin states:
Argentina, a country of immigrants, had been a success story until the 1920s. By the 1930s the long period of stability came to an end. In the following decades Argentines suffered dictatorship, violence and war. In the 1970s a feeling of crisis and disappointment became widespread among intellectuals and was followed by one of the most repressive military governments of the continent. Given this history, a variety of factors explain the development of a psychoanalytic culture in Argentina. Among them we find the European background of most of the population and the crisis of identity provoked by its foreign roots; the presence of a large Jewish community; a permanent feeling of disappointment and the national tradition of the tango and the gauchos (p. 7).
This is a