Freud in the Pampas

"I’m not normally a fan of academic books and this one is pretty dry. But there is always lots of amateur café/bar theorising about psychoanalysis in Argentina and how it’s because there are a lot of Jewish people around, but Plotkin goes for the straight facts. He talks about the arrival of psychoanalysis with immigration and how the language of it actually spread through the media, especially women’s magazines. Then the University in Buenos Aires began to teach it and in the 1960s the Argentine Psychoanalytic Association was formed. Then with the dictatorship in 1976 psychoanalysis came to be seen as quite subversive and a lot of psychoanalysts were tortured and killed. The regime appropriated some of the language and theories, though, and used them for their own ends of indoctrination. Get the weekly Five Books newsletter Psychoanalysis is one of the ways urban Argentinians can feel different from other Latin Americans – I have never lived in a city where it is so ordinary to go for therapy. They love to talk and to confess and perhaps analysis is just a controlled environment for them to do what they would be doing anyway. I saw a Lacanian analyst in Buenos Aires and I remember looking out at the swimming pool and wondering if it might not be better value to just come over and use the pool every day. They use the words histeria and histérica a lot to describe people and I thought of it like the English word, hysterical, which usually means laughing wildly. I know it comes from the word uterus but in Argentina it actually means a need to be popular and be praised, to make people like you. It makes sense because in nightclubs in Buenos Aires you see a sea of histeria, with everyone looking at each other so avidly, sort of gushing. They gush about everything but when it’s somebody else’s new boyfriend it starts seeming sort of inappropriate. February 17, 2010. Updated: December 9, 2022 Five Books aims to keep its book recommendations and interviews up to date. If you are the interviewee and would like to update your choice of books (or even just what you say about them) please email us at [email protected] Support Five Books Five Books interviews are expensive to produce. If you've enjoyed this interview, please support us by donating a small amount ."