Prologue

This Issue is the Third of Psychoanalytic Inquiry Devoted to psychoanalysts in their odysseys to become the practitioners they are today. The first issue in this series was devoted to psychoanalysts trained in institutes of the American Psychoanalytic Association. The second issue in the series was dedicated to psychoanalysts trained in institutes outside the American Psychoanalytic Association.

In the Epilogue of the second issue, I wrote, “Perhaps my observations of a common theme in the experiences of psychoanalysts trained inside and outside the association suggest that each educational approach was incomplete and led to disappointments that were transformed into further development and creativity.” Thecapacity to use pain, especially humiliation, as a motivator for further development is basic to psychoanalytic understanding of human life.

The place of society and culture is also basic to the psychoanalytic understanding of human life. Society and culture contribute to the matrix of personality and dynamics. The prism to perceive reality is polished by culture and society. How then do society and culture contribute to the way psychoanalysts think and approach their patients? We hope that inviting psychoanalysts who are not North American to write about their journeys in becoming the psychoanalysts they are today will help us in answering this question.

For this issue, we have turned to a talented group of South American psychoanalysts. Paulo Sousa from Brazil writes about the South American personality:

Living south of the Equator has its bewildering side: Garcia Marquez (1982), in his lecture at the Swedish Academy on the occasion of the Nobel prize award, spoke about Latin America. He told the audience an anecdote about a Peruvian general who ordered a state funeral for his own leg, which he had lost in a battle! Such things create an atmosphere of surprise and curiosity, which

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are the components of the free thinking so necessary for writers, poets, and psychoa