Hacia fines del 2001, la Argentina sufrió su más severa crisis de las últimas décadas. La misma se manifestó en un desastre económico sin precedentes, en la pérdida de legitimidad de los grupos gobernantes y de los políticos en general, y en una consiguiente crisis de representación que culminó con el escenario turbulento que eclosionó el 19 y 20 de diciembre, y que dejó como resultado una veintena de muertos y la caída del gobierno de Fernando de la Rúa. Se desencadenó así una crisis política y económica profunda, en las cuáles la pérdida de confianza en los políticos y en la política tradicional se combinó con la protesta popular creciente y la aparición de algunas nuevas formas de debate y participación públicas. Esta situación crítica promovió la formulación de discursos y diagnósticos desde diversos saberes sociales, provocando una reconfiguración de las posiciones relativas de prestigio de los mismos, y de sus practicantes. Mientras algunas formas de referencia a la realidad social eran percibidas como ineficaces, otras --más notablemente el ensayo histórico de tinte revisionista y la literatura de denuncia--, satisficieron mejor las demandas de explicación generadas en la sociedad. En general, lo que se percibió en esos años fue una proliferación de intentos de interpretación de la crisis provenientes de diversos espacios del campo intelectual.
Although the reception and early circulation of psychoanalytic ideas and practice in Latin America have been largely ignored by most ‘global’ histories of psychoanalysis, in some major cities of the region psychoanalysis was known, discussed and practised earlier than in many European major cities. Today, some Latin American cities are considered as world centres for the practice and diffusion of psychoanalysis. Acknowledging that both ‘Latin America’ and ‘psychoanalysis’ are complex and polysemic concepts, this paper delineates some common characteristics of the process of reception of psychoanalysis in the region. Among other issues, I focus on: (a) the lack of a well-established psychiatric (or, more generally, scientific) tradition in Latin American countries at the beginning of the twentieth century that could offer strong resistance to the entrance of new theories. This provided conditions of possibility for a syncretic reception of psychoanalysis and other European theories; (b) the fact that, unlike other psychiatric theories that circulated in the early twentieth century, psychoanalysis was grounded in a strong theoretical apparatus (whether right or wrong, empirically demonstrable or not). Moreover, its theory could be applied not only to explain and treat many ‘mental disorders,’ but also to analyse social issues; (c) psychoanalysis, with its emphasis on unconscious desires, could be used as a battering ram against positivism at a moment in which Comte’s and Spencer’s theories were in crisis. Finally, the paper offers some reflections about a possible research agenda on the emergence of local ‘psychoanalytic cultures’ that take into consideration some Latin American cultural specificities.
Stephen Frosh and Belinda Mandelbaum start their thought-provoking article by pointing out that it is not “an attempt at writing history,” but an “inter- vention into the history of psychoanalysis from the point of view of psychosocial studies.” However, in this important piece, the authors address a series of critical issues (some of which have been discussed in previous articles; Frosh and Mandelbaum, 2017; Rubin, Mandelbaum and Frosh, 2016) associated to the pro- blems inherent to writing the history of psychoanalysis. I must confess that I am not really familiar with the field of psychosocial studies, and therefore my comments will be grounded on the point of view of a historian (I am not a psychoanalyst either, as the authors suggest in another piece: cf. Rubin, Mandelbaum, and Frosh, 2016). It seems to me, however, that the purpose of analyzing “the processes of construction of psychoa- nalysis and [...] [of] understanding the stories it tells itself about that construction” –which according to the authors constitutes the goal of psychosocial studies– is perfectly compatible with what cultural and intellec- tual historians usually do. Frosh and Mandelbaum ́s point of departure appears to be a certain feeling of perplexity originating in two issues: first, the fact that in Brazil psychoa- nalysis and repression existed alongside during the dictatorship. As the authors point out, not only did the brutal social and political policies implemented by the military not generate any form of criticism on the part of the official psychoanalytic institutions, but there were documented cases of actual connivance between members of those institutions and the regime. This passivity or complicity of the psychoanalytic insti- tutions towards a murderous military regime con- tradicts, according to the authors, the “progressive” ethical dimension that they attribute to psychoanaly- sis. Social and political progressivism are “true to the psychoanalytic mission as a whole, as they derive from its conditions of formation in the social revolution of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and also reflect its potential [...] to disturb the comfort of the status quo.”
El libro reseñado aquí ofrece un análisis matizado y conceptualmente sofisticado de la emergencia y desarrollo histórico de lapsiquiatría en Río de Janeiro. Su foco está puesto en las complejas relaciones que se desarrollaron a lo largo de un siglo entre el saber y la práctica psiquiátrica, por unlado, y el Estado imperial así como otros protagonistas del el otro.
The volume under review proposes to rethink Cuban history from the vantage point of the Havana psychiatric hospital known as Mazorra. According to the author, the hospital “incarnates the glories and failures of the Cuban state” (p. 6). Inaugurated as the Casa General de Dementes in 1857, when the island was still a Spanish colony, Mazorra has occupied since then a central place in the Cuban political and social imagination.Madhouse is an ambitious book. It offers an institutional history of the hospital, an exploration of the process of professionalization of psychiatry in Cuba, and, in more general terms, a discussion of the history of the Cuban state and politics over a period of almost one century. The history of the hospital, like the history of Cuba in general, has been deeply influenced by US politics. Lambe's historical narrative thus starts in 1899 with the first US military intervention in Cuba. By the turn of the twentieth century, members of the Cuban political and intellectual elite considered Mazorra's modernization and improvement to be a patriotic imperative, but, paradoxically, Cubans relied on the impulse (and the funding) provided by the US occupation to carry it out.Lambe shows that the history of Mazorra converged with the development of psychiatry as an autonomous specialty. Psychiatrists claimed for themselves the monopoly on deciding on people's institutionalization as well as determining criminals' legal responsibility. The struggle for the medicalization of madness and marginality also invaded the walls of the hospital. Thus, Mazorra became the first hospital in Cuba to dismiss the Sisters of Charity, who were replaced by professional nurses trained at the hospital.The problems that plagued Mazorra were—at least until 1959—similar to those endured by most psychiatric hospitals in Latin America: high levels of corruption among the staff, nepotism, overcrowding of patients, budgetary restrictions, and the coexistence of modern therapeutic techniques with openly repressive measures. A case in point is the emphasis on labor therapy. While it was considered a means of therapy, at the same time it served as a source of funding for the hospital as well as for certain unscrupulous members of the staff who literally rented patients out to work at sugarcane plantations without any compensation for the patients themselves.The second half of Madhouse gradually shifts the focus from Mazorra itself to more general topics such as the debates over sexuality taking place in Cuba before and after the revolution of 1959, exploring Cubans' perceptions of homosexuality and masturbation. Homosexuality has occupied a central place among the preoccupations of the revolutionary government. In order to cure it, the post-1959 government applied a great variety of measures, ranging from Pavlovian therapies to openly repressive methods, including forced internment.The revolution had a profound impact on Mazorra, as it did on all other aspects of Cuban social, political, and cultural life. Material conditions improved considerably and the rate of patient mortality diminished dramatically during the early years of the Fidel Castro government. Work therapy was reintroduced at the hospital, but in a deeply reformed format. Thus, Mazorra became a community of working patients who participated, alongside other Cubans, in different forms of voluntary (and remunerated) collective labor.The last two chapters of Madhouse go beyond the confines of Mazorra and concentrate on topics such as the nature of the sociopsychological research carried out under Castro's government, the emergence of new debates about the place of psychiatry within the Cuban universe of psy practices, and the exportation to the United States of Cuban perceptions on mental diseases via the post-1959 wave of emigration. Lambe pays particular attention to the episode from 1980 known as the Mariel boatlift, when the Castro regime was accused of emptying mental hospitals and prisons and encouraging the migration to the United States of people interned there.Madhouse is a fine piece of scholarship. However, it has some weaknesses. As happened in other countries with a large population of African origin, in Cuba the rituals and forms of religiosity of the black population were pathologized and criminalized. It is unfortunate that such issues related to ethnicity are not dealt with in depth throughout the book. The volume would have also benefited from the introduction of some comparison with other countries such as Brazil, where there is an extensive secondary literature on these topics.In summary, Madhouse is the result of an ambitious project. Its strength and weaknesses are, in part, the result of its broad scope. As the author herself acknowledges at the end of the volume, in many cases the sources necessary for the research were difficult to access or simply not there. The reader will probably miss an analysis of clinical histories, which were not to be found. However, the book constitutes a very solid text that reflects the author's enormous effort. Madhouse is destined to become mandatory reading for all of those interested in the history of psychiatry in Latin America and also, more broadly, for the general public interested in Cuban history.
Reasoning against Madness offers a nuanced and sophisticated analysis of the emergence and development of psychiatry in Rio de Janeiro, focusing on its complex and evolving relationship with the imperial and republican state. The book examines the evolution of Carioca psychiatry, from the process that led to the establishment of the Hospício Dom Pedro II (later renamed the Hospício Nacional de Alienados) in the mid-nineteenth century to the diffusion of psychoanalysis in the twentieth.The volume under review encompasses, at the same time, both more and less than what is usually expected from a history of psychiatry. It embraces more because, focusing on the historical evolution of a single mental institution, it offers a larger picture of social, political, and cultural developments taking place in Brazil during a century-long period. Although Manuella Meyer's analysis is not confined to the history of the Hospício Dom Pedro II, the asylum occupies, nonetheless, a central place in her narrative. However, the book offers relatively little information about issues that are considered crucial to the history of madness and its treatment, such as the evolution of specific psychiatric practices or the evolving procedures through which someone became a mental patient. Thus, the volume is more successful as a “sociopolitical history of psychiatry” than as an “intellectual and cultural construction of madness as a field of knowledge” (pp. 3–4).Reasoning against Madness starts by analyzing the reception of French psychiatric ideas in Brazil, the construction of a myth around Philippe Pinel's supposed abolition of physical constraints for the mentally ill, and the concomitant campaign for the creation of a mental asylum in the capital of the Brazilian empire. Meyer follows the conflicts developing between the incipient psychiatric profession and the well-established Catholic institutions around the care of the insane and the very definition of insanity. She shows that psychiatry developed in Brazil (as it did elsewhere) through a long process of conflict, accommodation, and permanent negotiation not only with the state and the church but also with other institutions and practices that claimed for themselves the power and ability to define and treat madness. Thus, the Hospício Dom Pedro II was born as a result of negotiations between Catholic institutions, the imperial state, and the medical community (p. 40).The process of ensuring legitimacy for psychiatry as a scientific approach to mental diseases was a long and difficult one. Psychiatrists saw themselves and their knowledge as protagonists in the process of social and state modernization, defining and secluding those members of society considered undesirable by the elites (mostly the black and the marginal poor). However, until the beginning of the twentieth century psychiatry had very little to offer in terms of successful therapeutic techniques. Only in the twentieth century did psychiatrists become accepted as experts who possessed a specific form of (useful) knowledge. Meyer focuses on the trajectory of two psychiatrists who were directors of the hospício and who played an important role in the modernization of Rio de Janeiro psychiatry: João Carlos Teixeira Brandão (the first psychiatrist to serve as the hospício's administrative director) and Juliano Moreira. The descendant of African slaves, Moreira overcame the social limits imposed by his ethnic origins in a racist society and was (and still is) considered as the main modernizer of Brazilian psychiatry. He introduced in Brazil the ideas of Emil Kraepelin and, more significantly, of Sigmund Freud. As Meyer argues (perhaps with some exaggeration), psychoanalysis would play an important role in the modernization of psychiatry during the first half of the twentieth century.During the imperial era, psychiatrists' struggle for professionalization and legitimacy was mainly directed against the Catholic Church. In republican times, other systems of belief, besides Catholicism, disputed psychiatry's legitimacy. The last chapter of the book—the most original one, in my opinion—focuses on the conflicting relationship between psychiatry and two forms of what Meyer broadly calls “spiritism.” While candomblé is a religion of African origins, Kardecist spiritism was born in France in the nineteenth century. Both forms of spiritism were popular in Brazil at the turn of the twentieth century and, according to Meyer, they (particularly Kardecist spiritism) promoted a hybrid combination of both modern and traditional cultural elements. Although candomblé was widely practiced by the black population, it also attracted (and still attracts) members of the social elite. Kardecist spiritism was mostly confined to the white, liberal, elite sectors. Candomblé and Kardecist spiritism had therapeutic claims regarding madness and therefore were perceived as competitors to psychiatry. It is no wonder that psychiatrists were, at least until the 1940s, at the forefront of the struggle to outlaw both spiritist practices.Reasoning against Madness is a fine piece of scholarship based on solid research. It will be mandatory reading for everybody interested in the history of psychiatry in Latin America and in the history of Brazil in general. It is unfortunate, however, that sprinkled throughout the book are an unusual number of minor factual mistakes that start at the very first line of the introduction, where we read “Pedro I” instead of the correct “Pedro II.”
A partir del análisis de un suceso en apariencia menor: una polémica mantenida en 1903 por el entonces joven médico José Ingenieros con el director de la Biblioteca Nacional, Paul Groussac, acerca del uso del término "psiquiatra”, el artículo detecta y analiza procesos más amplios de renovación de la vida intelectual en la Argentina de entresiglos. Se toma este episodio como un “momento fuerte” que permita, en palabras de Carlo Ginzburg, “analizar entramados de tendencias históricas profundas”.
This article lays out an agenda for research on the establishment of psy cultures in Latin America. It begins by analyzing some of the debates on the nature of psychoanalysis, a discipline located between the sciences, philosophy and common sense. It argues that the place of psy cultures needs to be problematized as emerging out of modernity in a cultural space like Latin America, where the very concept of modernity differs greatly from that of central countries.
Since its origins in 1945, Peronism has generated an enormous interest among scholars both Argentine and foreign. Juan Perón’s first two terms in office (1946–1955) constitute the most studied period of Argentine modern history. Lately, new sources that had been previously considered lost were unearthed, giving scholars an additional impulse to study the period. Creating Charismatic Bonds in Argentina: Letters to Juan and Eva Perón is an example of this impulse. Although Donna J. Guy is not the first scholar to utilize the letters written by ordinary people to Juan and Eva Perón, this is, to my knowledge, the first book-length piece focusing entirely on this potentially rich source. The book consists of six chapters, plus an introduction and a short conclusion. Each chapter focuses on letters written for different specific purposes. Thus, chapter 2, for instance, concentrates on letters requesting pensions for the elderly and infirm. The following two chapters focus on letters sent to Perón with suggestions for the Five Year Plans for government. Although writing letters to those in power was not a Peronist novelty, what was new is that Perón actually requested that citizens write to him with suggestions for the government’s Five Year Plans. Chapter 5 looks at poor parents who requested aid to educate their children. Finally, chapter 6 concentrates on the tensions existing between a growing state bureaucracy and the charismatic dimension of the Peronist regime, showing instances in which state departments refused to carry out Perón’s orders. Thus, for instance, prison authorities failed to free a number of prisoners to whom Perón had granted a presidential pardon. Here, as well as in the chapters dealing with the correspondence associated with the Five Year Plans, the book opens new windows into the nature of the Peronist government.
The life of Italian-Argentine scientist and intellectual José Ingenieros (1877–1925) has been considered a clear example of the potential for upward social mobility based on talent that existed in Buenos Aires at the turn of the 20th century. Born Giuseppe Ingegnieros in Palermo, Sicily, from a working-class family, Ingenieros was able to become both one of the most internationally renowned Latin American intellectuals and scientists—his scientific and philosophical works were translated into several languages—and also a socialite of high visibility befriending some of the most prominent members of the Argentine social elite. His trajectory seems to be an example of unparalleled success. Nevertheless, a close look at recently unearthed sources, particularly his private correspondence, not only shows a different picture of Ingenieros’s life and works, but also forces us to reconsider accepted knowledge about the possibilities offered to immigrants by turn-of-the-century Argentine society. His trajectory constitutes an excellent case study for the analysis of both the potentials and the limits of social mobility in Argentina at the time, as well as the relationship between intellectuals and power during the transition from the oligarchic republic established in 1862, after the unification of the country, to the really democratic republic based on universal (male) suffrage introduced in 1912. An analysis of the context of production of his most popular work, El hombre mediocre, provides an opportunity to contrast his public image with the social insecurities he expressed to his relatives and friends.
Omar Acha, Crónica de la Argentina peronista. Sexo, inconsciente e ideología, 1945-1955, Buenos Aires, Prometeo, 2014, 408 páginas
This article analyses the failure of the Proyecto Marginalidad (Marginality Project), which the Ford Foundation financed in the 1960s, and the political and academic conflicts that it provoked. It takes into consideration the viewpoints of the principal actors involved (the director of the project, the Ford Foundation, and its critics). The original aim of the Marginality Project was to study the conditions of marginality of urban and rural populations in various Latin American countries, but it generated few results. The article shows that this outcome resulted from a series of ‘structural misunderstandings’, due to the fact that the different actors did not share what, in the words of Marc Angenot, might be called ‘social discourse’. In other words, their assumptions about what was thinkable and sayable in the Latin American context in the late 1960s and early 1970s diverged significantly, giving rise to a series of conflicts about the objectives and conduct of the project.
