The Freud Museum in London hosts an exhibition dedicated to the impact of Freud’s ideas on culture, society, art and the spread of Psychoanalysis in Latin America. The exhibition can be visited until mid-July 2024, and the material was carefully translated into Spanish and Portuguese. Visitors will be able to picture how the “plague” reached beyond North America, going further than what Freud himself predicted. Even though Freud did not personally venture into the South of the Americas, his science found much more fertile ground there than the father of Psychoanalysis could witness
Currently, the city of Buenos Aires has the largest number of psychologists per capita in the world: there is one professional for every 71 people. In 2017, a national survey showed that 32% of Argentinians had already undergone some type of psychological consultation. These significant figures lead us to question how Freudian theory became renowned and significant enough to etch itself into the imaginary of an entire population.
One of the explanations for this is that psychoanalysis transcended both the clinical sphere and the private experience of the couch to be culturally absorbed. It became an intrinsic part of daily life, presented in popular entertainment in newspaper articles, novels and even radio programs, percolating society unlike anything else that happened in Europe at that time. In 1931, the Argentine newspaper “La Jornada” introduced a section inviting readers to send dream narratives that would be analysed by someone who signed as “Freudian”. Thus, Psychoanalysis became an accessible way of interpreting the world. Historian Xochitil Marsilli Vargas identified a unique way of listening and communicating that was widespread in this country. The population is so familiar with psychoanalytic listening due to the ability to understand beyond what is said, to a persistent curiosity regarding the unsaid, and to search for meaning that transcends the obvious.
It was with amazement and delight that I observed these Argentinian traits during a cab ride in Buenos Aires, in which the driver interpreted me. Upon noticing a group of psychoanalysts discussing whether the destination of the journey would be Ezeiza airport or Aeropark, already late and almost missing the flight, the taxi driver tells us: “It seems to me that the ladies are not just confused about the airport, it seems that you don’t want to leave Buenos Aires.” We all laughed, and I replied: “Your comment makes a lot of sense; in fact, you speak like one of us, like a psychoanalyst…” he continued: “I didn’t graduate in Psychoanalysis, but after a long analysis, I got used to listening to what it’s not said. And I witnessed free access to the unconscious in the daily life of the “portenõs”.
Argentine culture allows this “daring”; Argentinians are direct and authentic; a dialogue like this, with strangers in a taxi ride, would never happen in countries that are characteristically more rigid and closed; the driver’s comment would be considered highly invasive and inappropriate, reflects Marsilli-Vargas. Another critical factor in disseminating Psychoanalysis was its intense presence in public Universities. From the 1930s onwards, there were not many teaching psychologists. The academic responders for spreading psychoanalytic knowledge were philosophers, doctors, and self-taught people with prior psychoanalytic knowledge or analytical experience. The media also played a fundamental role in disseminating Psychoanalysis in both creative and controversial ways: from psychoanalysts analysing celebrities on TV programs to commercials using the analyst figure as the main character, things that became popular with the general public. Psychoanalysis arrived in Brazil in 1899; as Patricia Jasiocha says: “In his way, through words and letters, Freud was in Brazil”, showing his enthusiasm with the founding of the Psychoanalytic Societies of São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro. As a boy, Freud learned Spanish by reading Don Quixote in the original language. He ventured learning Portuguese at 72 just to read the Brazilian Journal of Psychoanalysis edition. In a letter to Dr Julio Porto-Carrero dated 1928, Freud pontificates that: “Without overcoming obstacles, there is no success”, perhaps pre-empting the typical resistance to the receptivity of his method. The fact is that psychoanalysis was not readily accepted in most countries, but the obstinacy of its precursor found more permeable ground in Latin America, especially in Argentina. The exhibition is an ode to the broad cultural reception of psychoanalysis in Latin America and is worth visiting.
Thalita Gabinio – Psychoanalyst and Psychotherapist
References:
Freud Museum
Data from the World Health Organization, 2019.
Data from the TNS Global Survey, 2017
Marsilli-Vargas, Xochitl (2022). Genres of Listening: An Ethnography of Psychoanalysis in Buenos Aires. Durham: Duke University Press Book.
Jasiocha, Patricia (2023). Valsa e Samba. In: Com Freud em Viena: Reflexões sobre desamparo e liberdade. Rio de Janeiro: Ateliê de Humanidades Editorial.
