Roosevelt Cassorla, 1945–2024

Roosevelt Cassorla, one of the most creative and influential psychoanalysts in Latin America and around the world, died on 22 September 2024 at the age of 79.

Cassorla was born in the southern Chilean city of Temuco, to a Sephardic family that had migrated from Spain to the Balkan region after escaping from the Inquisition. His father died when Roosevelt was seven years old, after which his mother moved the family from Temuco to Sao Paolo, Brazil, where they could be close to her relatives. Cassorla spent the remainder of his childhood there, receiving his medical degree from the University of Sao Paolo, and his analytic training at the Sao Paolo Psychoanalytic Institute. He then moved to the nearby city of Campinas, where he received a PhD in medicine and became an early member of the Campinas Psychoanalytic Study Group.

Temuco, the city of Cassorla’s birth, was and still is the centre of tensions around land ownership and cultural autonomy that shaped the relationships among residents of the small city, and the surrounding agricultural area. Roosevelt grew up exposed to the cultures of indigenous Mapuche people, Chilean settlers, and a small group of European immigrants. The mix of cultures, economic status and political affiliations, resonant as they were with centuries of family history and prefiguring his experience in Brazil during the years of dictatorship, led to the interest in social psychiatry and community mental health that shaped both his clinical practice and his academic contributions early in his career.

We can also see the ways in which this history plays out in Cassorla’s approach to psychoanalytic thinking, to which he turned his full attention after a number of years of practising psychiatry with a focus on community mental health. The meeting of different subjectivities and different cultures – sometimes harmonious, sometimes antagonistic – is never far from the surface of how he thinks and what he writes.

Consider how Cassorla characterised the id