The Return of the Repressed in Brazil

On October 7, 1995, at a meeting of the Society for Psychological Anthropology in San Juan, Willy Apollon gave a talk on “Questions Posed by Psychoanalysis to Anthropology.” His premises were that for anthropology these questions were basically political, having to do with the specific and the contingent; for psychoanalysis they were basically ethical, having to do with universals, such as the ethics of being human. However, for each individual subject, that ethic of being human could only be articulated through the specificity of a given culture. Mental illness—and, we might add, its social counterparts, such as oppression and violence—is a sign that the articulation of the universal to the specificity of a culture was somewhat damaged for a given subject.

Apollon reasserted and expanded the tenor of Freud's and Lacan's discontent with our current postcolonial civilization in the following terms. The defect of language, its inability to express the real, and the demands and defect of the Other, make what Lacan calls “jouissance” (the immediate and total satisfaction of desire) impossible for the speaking being; in order to hold its members together, a society must offer some compensation for the loss of total and immediate satisfaction that we assume non-speaking animals have. The problem is two-fold: on the one hand, a society must veil as best it can the fact that its norms are arbitrary, in order to maintain its credibility; on the other, it must somehow compensate its subjects for the impossibility of ever attaining the jouissance we seek. The inability to do so creates a climate of such negativity that it results in the loss of credibility of the tenets necessary for the stability and cohesion of the society.

I'd like to tell you about the loss of credibility in a number of societies linked to each other by ideological rather than political or geographical ties—societies that though linguistically different have one language in common, that of psychoanalysis. Al