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The theory and practice of psychoanalysis, like every human endeavor, is embedded in politics. From its early days in Victorian Vienna to its current diversified manifestations, psychoanalysis has challenged political ideologies with its implicit radicalism. The attribution of unconscious motivation to human behavior, the lifting of repression, and the liberation of sexuality are just as much psychological statements as they are political. These statements reflect the subversive if not revolutionary subtext of Freudian thinking. Psychoanalysis aims at liberating the psyche from its oppressors and persecutors. To be a psychoanalyst is to be a critic of the social order, its value, and its demands for conformity. Psychic conflicts may be understood as pathological configurations which grow out of the struggle between the pull to conform to social demands and the wish to rebel against them.
Although numerous presentations and publications have unveiled the dilemma confronted by analysts in Europe before and after World War II, little attention has been paid to the fate of Argentine or South African analysts during and after suffering the most oppressive dictatorship of the second half of the twentieth century.1
Unlike Argentina, where the development of psychoanalysis mirrored the vicissitudes of the discipline in Europe (particularly England and France), and where its place on the cultural map was firmly established for decades prior to the military dictatorship,2 in Apartheid South Africa psychoanalysis was characterized by the paucity of its contributions and its limited and restricted applications. The latter is not surprising since South Africa was the land of silence for centuries, and therefore all social disciplines, if allowed to develop, did so at the service of Apartheid. Psychoanalysis became a forbidden fruit which could only be purchased in foreign lands. England and America became the training grounds for those mental health practitioners who wanted to tra