Truth, Reality, and the Psychoanalyst: Latin American Contributions to Psychoanalysis. Edited by Sergio Lewkowicz and Silvia Flechner. London:  International Psychoanalytical Association Press, 2005.  336 pp.

This book has succeeded outstandingly in presenting a dialogue among distinguished psychoanalysts of Latin America and other areas about theoretical, technical, and clinical aspects of the field, highlighting the distinctiveness, plurality, and universality of psychoanalysis. The relevance of Latin American analysis on professional, academic, research, and clinical levels, as well as its similarities and differences in relation to analysis as it exists in other parts of the world, are particularly emphasized in this book. Although challenging in the light of hugely different sociocultural realities, the search for truth remains a core psychoanalytic objective—one about which Freud himself was insistent.

Contributions by a number of thoughtful and knowledgeable authors reveal the complexity and depth of Latin American psychoanalytic thought. In their foreword, Daniel Widlöcher and Cláudio Laks Eizirik, former president and current president of the International Psychoanalytical Association, respectively, emphasize idiomatic limitations, which unfortunately function as scientific communication barriers when analytic writing is not translated.