To the Editors:

I read with embarrassment what to me sounded like a defense of the Argentinian government by Dr. Arcangelo D'Amore in the last issue of the Newsletter. For a civilized person and a fellow psychoanalyst to defend a dictatorship seems rather strange to me. It would be preferable to keep silent than to identify oneself with the forces of repression no matter how justifiable these might be.

Embarrassed as I felt, however, I sensed that Doctor D'Amore had a point. But I could not quite tell what his point really was until I came across Sir Andrew Huxley's words to the British Association for the Advancement of Science as quoted in a recent issue of Science: “The persecutions of the present day are not directed against scientific doctrines or against scientific enquiry as such; they are directed against individual citizens who have had the courage to speak up against oppressive features of the regimes under which we live. Among those brave individuals there are, for example, writers and medical men as well as scientists.”

Doctor D'Amore's contention, based on personal experience and information from Argentinian acquaintances of his, contradicts some of the information contained in the letter to the government of Argentina and the resolution approved by the members of the American Psychoanalytic Association last May in Atlanta, Georgia. But the resolution should remain as valid and desirable concerning all those persecuted, imprisoned, tortured and secretly executed by the Argentinian regime, among them, reportedly a number of fellow psychoanalysts.

Peter Hartocollis

Topeka, Kansas