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The official contribution of the Uruguayan Psychoanalytic Association to the Nineteenth Latin American Congress of Psychoanalysis (Montevideo, Uruguay, August, 1992), this paper is by an important theorist in contemporary Latin American psychoanalysis. Bernardi uses as background a similar paper he wrote in 1982, in which he raised similar questions. What are the origins of the malaise in psychoanalysis? Are they related to psychoanalytic institutions, their difficulties in growing and, in some countries, their involution? Or are they related to the nature of the profession, the increasing competition from other therapeutic techniques, and the growing number of psychoanalytic groups developing independently of the official institutes? Finally, is Latin America, with its special social, political, and economic characteristics, the source of the malaise?
In the 1982 paper, Bernardi focused on the growing difficulties of psychoanalysis as a science. But in his 1992 paper, he thinks that we can no longer talk about the malaise of psychoanalysis without also speaking of its well-being—that there are reasons to dwell on both. Bernardi proposes to explore the causes of malaise in three areas of analysis: as a treatment, as a theory, and as a research method.
Psychoanalytic practice is difficult, requiring the analyst to keep exposing his or her psyche throughout his or her professional life, making it easier to become an analyst than to keep on being one. Still, the practitioner works with passion and idealizes the profession. This passion and idealization has beneficial effects, but also creates problems in analytic institutions and in society at large. Regarding the problems