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Daniel Gaztambide's People's History of Psychoanalysis takes the reader on a journey that starts from nineteenth-century Vienna and goes around the globe to Africa, North America and South America. It is a journey that traces Freud's influence on radical thinkers who were instrumental in sociopolitical movements to emancipate the oppressed in their respective nations. Contrary to the assumption that psychoanalysis is a clinical practice that is only pertinent to the white and wealthy, Gaztambide argues that Freud's work had a global impact on thinkers who were engaged in social justice work to radically alter oppressive societal structures. He writes that psychoanalysis has been instrumental to emancipatory work. It allowed the analysis of oppression while Lanham and Boulder seeking to “develop strategies and methodologies for reconciliation with, and resistance and rebellion against, Whiteness” (116). Throughout the book he sustains his argument that psychoanalysis can point out the distortions hegemonic structure produces, which condone violence against the Other for the purpose of maintaining power.
Although Gaztambide introduces many thinkers in his work, he is mainly interested in linking Freud with two other important thinkers: Franz Fanon and Paulo Freire. He adds the work of Ignacio Martín-Baró, who was instrumental in the creation of liberation psychology. Gaztambide argues that “Latin America stands at a crossroads of time and space, the result of a five-hundred-year-old wound that brought together European colonizers, captured Black people sold into slavery, and the indigenous people who inhabited this land long before” (119). Reading this I did wonder about the omission from his analysis of the massive immigration of Asians that changed the economic structures of Latin American countries. This wave of immigration was in the wake of the worldwide development of capitalism and imperialism in the nineteenth century contemporaneous to the decline and, finally