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The “Lobo-Cabernite Affair,” which surfaced in the Rio de Janeiro Psychoanalytic Society (Sociedade Psicanalitica do Rio de Janeiro, or SPRJ, in Portuguese) in 1973 during the period of the severe military repression in Brazil, certainly constitutes one of the most shameful episodes of moral and ethical turpitude within the history of psychoanalysis, and Helena Besserman Vi-anna,1 who took so courageous a stand in exposing the profound perversion of basic human decency involved in this affair, and in so doing was pilloried and physically endangered, indeed emerges as an insufficiently heralded heroine of psychoanalysis. On that I fully agree with Lucia Villela and Bernard Rubin, whose articles I address in this commentary.
I also fully agree that however widely this entire story is well known, certainly in Brazil, and even throughout Latin America, and to a significant degree in Europe, especially in France, it has drawn very little, and grossly insufficient, attention in the English-speaking psychoanalytic world. The publication of Dr. Bes-serman's Portuguese book in French translation in 1997 did result in a very admiring review essay by Peter Hildebrand (1999a) in the January 1999 issue of The British Psycho-Analytical Society Bulletin, with an immediately following invited discussion by myself (Wallerstein, 1999a), followed in the February issue