Prologue: Latin Voices

I feel deeply humbled by the daunting task of assembling this issue of Latin Voices. Although this is only a small sample of the enormous range of psychoanalytic work published across the Americas and Caribbean countries, I hope it provides a taste of the richness of the Latin psychoanalytic culture. Most are translations from the Spanish and Portuguese. I feel that it is important to publish the articles in their original language as well as in English, to make available the nuances and textures that can only be expressed in an author’s mother tongue. These versions are available online.

Latin Voices inevitably tells stories about migration and its enormous impact on the identity, community and culture of Latin people in the U.S. However, the issue also gathers voices from authors outside of the U.S., and where different types of concerns affect them, and where the psychotherapeutic culture offers different theoretical perspectives native to unique environments and sensibilities. But here too we hear echoes of America and of the European colonizing influence.

We start our journey with an article written by Francisco Jordan Moore, from Chile, who invites us to consider how “violent imagination,” manifesting particularly in youth violence, arises when the developing mind becomes disconnected from a human need for stable and strong community that is a baked into the human ethogram.

Ignácio Paim Filho et al., from Brazil, reflect on the perspective of white bodies “living under the aegis of conflicts that do not belong to us” and the need for self-delineation from a Black perspective. Paim and the Sankofa group inquire about the types of psyche displacements and accommodations that their ancestors endured to survive enslavement and dehumanization. They affirm that “the Black body is here to demand another listening and another look.

Cynthia Azevedo and Leandro Santos, from Brazil, take us to Rio de Janeiro and let us in on their encounter with Laura, a young woman who live