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In 1964, a military coup deposed President João Goulart, a labour representative who tried to implement basic reforms in the fiscal, administrative, university and, mainly, agrarian areas. His proposals, especially those concerning agrarian reform, were opposed by large landowners and parliamentarians with the support of conservative sectors of Brazilian society, among them businessmen and a significant part of the urban middle classes. In this period of the Cold War, marked by intense political polarization, the Brazilian military coup was supported by the United States, which feared the hegemony of Soviet socialism in Latin America, especially after the 1958 Cuban Revolution. The successive governments of the dictatorial period imposed a series of institutional acts that constrained the Constitution and guaranteed that the military stayed in power. The first, AI-1, enacted in 1964, ended direct elections; AI-2, in 1965, closed political parties, maintaining only two, the National Renovating Alliance (ARENA) and the Brazilian Democratic Movement (MDB), the latter representing the permitted opposition that gave the government a facade of democratic legitimacy.
Helio Pellegrino presented the first version of his article ‘Oedipal Pact and Social Pact’ at a psychoanalytical congress in Chile in 1966. In 1968, AI-5 was enacted. This was the most terrible of the institutional acts of the dictatorial governments, closing the National Congress, prohibiting meetings and decreeing a state of siege. AI-5 inaugurated the period known as ‘the years of lead’, marked by intense repression, persecution, violence, torture, disappearance, and the death of those considered to be opponents of the regime. In reaction to this, protests grew throughout Brazilian society. The ‘March of the Hundred Thousand’ in Rio de Janeiro in 1968, in which Pellegrino spoke as a representative of the intellectual class, was one of the most significant demonstrations. Pellegrino was also part of a group o