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A few years ago, a student of mine shared a story in class. She was in Buenos Aires, heading back to the airport after attending a psychoanalysis conference in the city. Chatting to the cab driver amidst intense road traffic, she told him she was running late for her flight back home and was afraid she might not make it in time. The driver, listening to that, responded: ‘Perhaps you do not really want to go back’. The room, full of psychoanalysis students, broke out in laughter.
This story could very well be part of Xochitl Marsilli-Vargas's latest book, Genres of Listening: An Ethnography of Psychoanalysis in Buenos Aires, in which she sets out to investigate ‘la cultura psi’, or psychoanalytic culture, in the Argentinean capital. For a period of six years, Marsilli-Vargas, who is Mexican, spent several months in Buenos Aires with the initial aim to unveil the ‘mystery’ of why psychoanalysis still has such relevance in Argentina, while its popularity had come to be overshadowed by neuroscientific and cognitive-behavioural practices elsewhere. However, what her ethnography led her to theorize was that psychoanalysis is, in fact, a ‘genre of listening’, one in which what is said by someone may conceal all sorts of other meanings only an external listener could apprehend. Just like my student's taxi driver, who was able to point out that she really wished to stay; or, in the running theme of Marsilli-Vargas's book, a psychoanalytic genre of listening is alive in Buenos Aires, and its logic is: ‘when you say x, I hear y’.
In 1933, Freud wrote that the unconscious and its drives are our own mythology. After at least five decades of biological psychiatric hegemony and the exponential rise in the medicalization of psychic distress, psychoanalysis is having a comeback in our times (Bernstein, 2023). In this context, embarking on a mythical pilgrimage to Buenos Aires – the city with the highest concentration of psychoanalysts and psychologists per capita in the world – is no