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In June 2004, during my tenure with Paul Williams as Joint Editor-in-Chief of the International Journal of Psychoanalysis, the journal sponsored a conference in Rio de Janeiro chaired by our editor for Latin America, Elias da Rocha Barros. This congress was dedicated to identifying the unique features of Latin American psychoanalysis in the service of improving crosscultural dialogue throughout the larger world of psychoanalytic clinicians and scholars. In subsequent issues of the journal, we published a series of papers stemming from the Rio event. Accompanying the first set of papers was an editorial written by Elias, Paul, and me to place the papers in context. In this editorial, we drew on the Latin American literary tradition (Barros, Gabbard, and Williams 2005). We noted that great writers of fiction, such as Jorge Luis Borges, steadfastly refused to accept an isolationist view of an “Argentinean tradition” of literature. Rather, Borges insisted on claiming the universal as opposed to the singular, specifically noting that the Argentinean literary style had always been influenced by Western literary traditions.
In keeping with this theme, we suggested that one of the identifying features of Latin American psychoanalytic thought is “the production of an original clinical and theoretical synthesis resulting from a well-developed Latin American capacity to assimilate new and foreign ideas” (2005, p. 611). In the context of a longstanding concern about