A Brief Communication From Brazil

It is with great pleasure that I share this brief communication with my colleagues, many of whom I have not met, but with whom I feel connected through our common interest in developments within self psychology that have taken an increasingly relational approach within the larger psychoanalytic world. As a new international editor of the International Journal of Psychoanalytic Self Psychology and since I live in Brazil, quite geographically away from most of you, I would like to offer a short overview of the various influences that impacted my personal and professional experience.

At the end of the 1960s, while my generation was going through the initial stages of our psychoanalytical pathway, the reality of the political situation was quite different from what we experience today. At that moment of our history, the threatening shadows of dictatorship and the political–intellectual censorship contributed, though indirectly, to the practice and transmission of psychoanalysis with repressing and authoritarian elements as well, at least from my point of view. Even before that time, given my sensibility, I already had realized my discomfort with violently imposed elements of our culture. It would be worth mentioning that the political repression,

as well as meta-psychoanalysis, contributed to my youthful uneasiness that led me toward a radical contextual approach.

Therefore, we should use a magnifying glass over the initial presence of self psychology, as conceived by Heinz Kohut, in our country. That means focusing on the psychoanalytic environment to which I belong, the community of Rio de Janeiro, where my base is established and which is the departure point for a common motivation toward expanding self psychology in Brazil. As a historical point, I want to note the fact that Kohut visited Brazil once for a speech in 1966 on his way back home from a South American Congress, held in Argentina.

Already in the 1970s, some papers by Kohut were presented in Br