psychoanalisis in buenos aires [bass]

7/28/2019 Psychoanalisis in Buenos Aires [Bass]

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IN EXILE FROM THE SELF 433

Abstract It has been estimated that Buenos Aires has more psychoanalysts per capita

than any other city in the world. Middle-class porteos (as inhabitants of Buenos Aires

are known) typically do not associate involvement with psychoanalytic therapy with

depression or mental illness but, rather, often view it as a type of healthy self-exploration.

This article explores how painful issues surrounding national belonging and Argentine

identity often emerge as central topics of discussion during psychoanalytic psychotherapy

in the consulting room. Additionally, this article also examines some of the historical,

social, and cultural conditions since the 1950s that have promoted the massive popular-ization of psychoanalysis among middle-class porteos. I argue that psychoanalysis has

been a particularly attractive practice and ideology for many porteos who have main-

tained a European transnational identity and particularly for those during the 1960s and

1970s who were alienated from Argentinas growing political authoritarianism.

[Argentina, Buenos Aires, psychoanalysis, national belonging, middle class]

Foreign visitors to Buenos Aires are often surprised by the extent to whichpsychoanalysis has come to permeate contemporary Argentine urban culture.Psychoanalysts host TV shows, mainstream newspapers feature weekly sectionsdevoted to psychoanalysis, and magazines feature op-ed articles in whichpsychoanalysts interpret various aspects of contemporary Argentine life. Notonly has psychoanalysis achieved a permanent presence within the media, butmost middle-classporteos(as inhabitants of Buenos Aires are known) considerinvolvement with psychoanalytic therapy to be a natural activity. Whereas the

ETHOS, Vol. 34, No. 4, pp. 433455, ISSN 0091-2131, electronic ISSN 1548-1352. 2006 by theAmerican Anthropological Association. All rights reserved. Please direct all requests for permission to photocopyor reproduce article content through the University of California Presss Rights and Permissions website,http://www.ucpress.edu/journals/rights.htm.

In Exile from the Self: National

Belonging and Psychoanalysisin Buenos Aires

Jeffrey Bass


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practice of psychoanalysis has been in decline in many other parts of theworld, this has not been the case in Argentina.

It has been noted that Argentina can boast of the worlds second-largestcommunity of psychoanalysts affiliated with the International Psychoanalytic

Association (second only to the United States) and the worlds second-largestLacanian psychoanalytic community (second only to France [Alonso 1996;Plotkin 2001; Roudinesco and Plon 1997]). These statistics become all the moreremarkable when one considers that the population of Argentina is only one-eighth that of the United States and less than two-thirds that of France. Buenos

Aires, with almost a third of the countrys 36 million citizens, is the largest cityof Spanish-speaking South America. It has been estimated that it has morepsychoanalysts per capita than any other city in the world (Hollander 1990).

In this article, I contend that the massive popularization of psychoanalysisamong middle-class porteos and the emergence of psychoanalysis withinporteo popular culture can be correlated to their growing anxiety concerningnational belonging and identity. Furthermore, I contend that psychoanalysis

has offered (and continues to offer) a means by which porteos can addressfrustrations directly related to issues surrounding their Argentine identity.

The prominence of psychoanalysis is not the only characteristic that makesArgentina culturally distinct from much of the rest of Latin America. More sothan its neighbors, Argentina is a country constructed largely through massiveEuropean immigration. Indeed, from 1820 to 1932, Argentina received signifi-

cantly more European immigrants than any other Latin American country. In

fact, it received more Europeans than all other Spanish-speaking Americancountries combined (Moya 1998).Argentine elites had hoped that these Europeanimmigrants would form the primary material and vital core of a newly con-structed Argentine national identity. Nevertheless, since the mid20th century,

Argentines have sometimes found their immigrant past to be a source of nationalanxiety rather than a bastion of national self-confidence and patriotism.

Although I found that there is a strong positive nationalism in Argentina, the

porteo descendants of European immigrants often still closely identify withtheir parents and grandparents countries of origin. It could be said that someof these middle-class porteos see themselves as Europeans lost on a Latin

American continent. This identity crisis has been aggravated by Argentinas


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economic and political decline, which began during the 1930s and was accom-panied by a growing sense of national failure. By the 1960s, Argentina hadgone from being a relatively democratic country, whose standard of living wasequal to that in many European countries, to a country that more closelyresembled its politically unstable Latin American neighbors.

The popularization of psychoanalysis among middle-class porteos that began

during the 1950s is historically correlated with a growing recognition among

Argentines of their countrys economic and political decline. In 1945, there were

fewer than 20 psychoanalysts in Argentina, all in Buenos Aires (Baln 1991). By

the early 1960s, however, the dramatic growth and unique cultural characteristics

of Argentine psychoanalysis were being documented in the popular media. The

cover article of a popular weekly news magazine argues that the growing popularity

of psychoanalysis among middle-class Argentines did not reflect a pervasiveness

of mental illness. Instead, the article points out, those Argentines who get

analyzed see analysis as a sign of health and maturity (Primera Plana 1962:19).

The author describes how patients, rather than conceal their involvement with

analysis, openly discuss it with friends and relatives, who tend also to enter analy-sis. The article links the rapid popularization of psychoanalysis to surveys

revealing that Argentines are experiencing a crisis of confidence in which seventy

percent of Argentines lack faith in their government and have found little else

in which to invest their faith (Primera Plana 1962:20). Today, as in the 1960s,

middle-class porteos do not tend to associate psychoanalysis with depression or

mental illness but, instead, see participation in psychoanalysis as a type ofhealthy self-exploration.

I conducted fieldwork in Buenos Aires for almost two years on various tripsbetween 1997 and 2000. My original research was focused on the unusuallyprominent political and social roles played by psychoanalysts and their profes-sional organizations during the period of the Dirty War (197683) and inpostdictatorship Argentine society (Bass 2000). The fieldwork was based onparticipant-observation (ranging from involvement in group therapy to theattendance of training seminars, classes, and conferences of psychologists and

psychoanalysts), archival research, and interviews. Most of my formal inter-views (more than 30) were conducted with three generations of psychoanalysts.I found, to my surprise, during these life history interviews with psychoanalysts(and in conversations with middle-class patients) that the consulting room



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served as an important arena for people to address not only issues of personaltrauma but also issues concerning national belonging.

In pursuing this secondary topic of national belonging, I expanded my researchto include participant-observation in an Italian foreign cultural association inBuenos Aires and interviews with some of its members and members at severalother associations. Some of these members were previous contacts who werealso psychoanalysts or clients of psychoanalysts. In this context, I was able toexplore how some middle-class porteos addressed issues surrounding nationalbelonging in a context very different from that of the consulting room.

My study of the cultural strategies that middle-class Argentines have used toaddress their experiences of national belonging and national disappointmentreflects some areas of relatively recent interest within anthropology. My under-standing of how identities can be stretched across national boundaries has beeninformed by Appadurais (1996) exploration of experiences of transnationalism.Other anthropologists have also addressed issues surrounding national experiencesof decline or failure. Ferguson (1999), for example, has explored how Zambians

have reacted to the disappointment of Zambias failure at modernization sinceindependence with a painful introspection that he describes as abjection.

Fergusons use of the concept of abjection, borrowed from Kristeva (1982), tocapture Zambians sense of having been left out of modernizations progress canalso be applied to the perceptions of many Argentines. As Ferguson describes it,Zambians experience of abjection is not about being merely excluded from astatus to which one had never had a claim but of being expelled, cast out-and-down

from that status (1999:238). Although Argentines experience of nationaldisappointment is not nearly as desperate as the experiences of those in Africa,

Argentinas failure to fully enter the First World has promoted a similarintrospective dynamic. Through an examination of several case studies, I arguethat in Buenos Aires the complex relationship that many people have with their

Argentine identity often emerges in surprising ways in relation to the types ofthings people actually talk about in analysis or therapy.

Argentine Immigration and Nation Formation

Soon after independence from Spain in 1816, Argentine political elites based

their project of nation formation on plans for large-scale European migration.

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These intellectuals were influenced by attitudes current in Europe that assumed

that the mestizo population of the Americas would never foster national

progress and development. Argentine leaders planned to solve the perceived

racial problem by whitening the population through the large-scale mixture

of local residents with European immigrants (Helig 1990). It was assumed that

the foreign-born population would promote not only economic development

but also political stability and cultural progress. Domingo Sarmiento, a futurepresident of Argentina (186874), argued that only European immigration coulddrown in waves of industry the Creole rabble, inept, uncivil, and coarse, that

stops our attempt to civilize the nation (Castro 1970:53). By the 1870s, the federalgovernment had begun to attract European immigrants on a massive scale.

Various factors, however, discouraged immigrants from assimilating and adoptingArgentine national identity and citizenship. Immigrants natural tendency toretain their European identity was fortified by the tendency of Argentine elitesto extol the virtues of Europeans while simultaneously denigrating the culturalpossibilities of the resident population (Veliz 1980:174180). In Argentina,

assimilation lacked cultural prestige.The vast majority of these European immigrants settled in metropolitan centers,primarily Buenos Aires. This amalgam of European immigrants created auniquely cosmopolitan porteo community whose culture was significantlydifferent from much of the rest of the country but, nevertheless, would form thebasis of their national identity. The inhabitants of the interior of the countrydeveloped a very different understanding of their national identity, and eventoday there is a significant porteo/interior cultural divide.

Although in absolute number fewer immigrants came to Argentina than to theUnited States, their numbers in relation to the resident population were muchgreater. As a percentage of the national population the native Argentines weresignificantly outnumbered by the foreign born, especially in Buenos Aires. Incontrast to the Argentine situation, foreign-born immigrants never constituteda majority in the United States, not even in New York where they were mostconcentrated. Immigrants to the United States were more likely to assimilate to

American values and culture. In Argentina, the opposite sometimes occurred,and the dominant national culture instead found itself assimilating many of theattitudes of its recent immigrants. Although the children of these immigrantsadopted Argentine citizenship (sometimes as part of a dual citizenship), recent



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the endemic economic and political problems of their neighbors. As the 20thcentury progressed, porteos were increasingly forced to confront certain realities;they had not lived up to their own self-image and lofty expectations, and thesource of this failure seemed to be located within themselves.

Beginning in the 1950s, a whole genre of publications and discourse emergedthat was devoted to exploring and explaining the various dimensions of

Argentinas perceived failure. The translated titles alone of some of the bookspublished by Argentines about Argentina convey this sense of disillusionmentand failure: The Argentine Crisis (Berman 1965), Argentina in the Dead End

(Halpern-Donghi 1994), Argentina: A Country without a National Destiny?(Deheza 1972), What Has Happened to the Argentines? (Aftalin and Mora 1985),and Why Does Argentina Not Work? (Roth 1987).

Contemporary Porteo Identity

In contemporary Buenos Aires, many middle-class descendants of immigrantsstill have a complex relationship with their national identity. During my fieldwork,

I consistently came across people whose ethnic European identity played avery prominent role in their daily lives and in the construction of their personalidentities. There are several strategies that Argentines have adopted to addressthis type of transnationalism.

One characteristic of this dual psychological identification is the tendency ofsome porteos to obtain a second passport. This is especially true amongmiddle-class descendants of Italians who can more easily obtain a foreign passport

than descendants of immigrants from some other European countries.1 In fact,when I questioned middle-class porteos with Italian heritage as to whether theyhad dual citizenship, I almost always found that they had at least investigated thepossibility of obtaining Italian citizenship. Although dual citizenship is perhapsmost common among descendants of Italians, the descendants of immigrantsfrom other European countries show a similar tendency. Even those who neveractually use the new passport often find that mere possession of the documentforces them to evaluate the meaning of their Argentine identity. Argentinasendemic political and economic instability has been the source of many Argentinesmotivations to seek a foreign passport. During periods of political repression,from the 1960s to the 1980s, having a foreign passport served as a type of emergencyexit and life insurance. Moreover, in addition to Argentinas political instability,



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the countrys economic decline has encouraged Argentine professionals to seekemployment outside the country. In the recent past, political and economicmotives were often mixed, and there was a tendency for those who had left

Argentina for professional reasons to sometimes emphasize their political motivesinstead. This form of Argentine self-representation of being in exile becameextremely common during the 1970s and 1980s.2

An exception to this mode of self-representation seems to prove the rule. Aporteo architect, who lived abroad in Spain and Venezuela during the last dic-tatorship (197683) for purely professional reasons, related to me how he had

frequently had to explain to his foreign associates that he was notin exile andhad merely chosen to work abroad. Through their interactions with other

Argentines, his Spanish and Venezuelan colleagues had already modeled theirprototype of an Argentine in the exterior as exiled.

The middle-class porteo trait of strongly identifying with a second country isalso reflected in the prominent role that foreign cultural associations play inthe lives of many Argentines. In the Buenos Aires metropolitan area alone,

there were more than 270 registered Italian cultural associations during the1990s (Schneider 2000). Almost all the members of these associations were notimmigrants but, in fact, their descendants. I involved myself in the activities ofone of these Italian cultural associations and interviewed some members ofother associations. These associations generally organize an array of socialactivities ranging from language classes to ethnic dinners. People often join tomeet others who share their interests in their ancestral homeland. Theyexchange family stories, tips on traveling or looking for employment in thesecond country, or advice on overcoming obstacles in obtaining citizenship.

This intense ethnic interest among porteos can be contrasted to the relative lackof interest that some Americans have in relation to their European ethnic heritage.

A member of an Argentine Italian cultural association recounted to me his trip tothe United States to visit some relatives. During the 1930s, his Italian father hadimmigrated to Argentina, whereas his Italian uncle had come to the United States.

After years of correspondence, he traveled to visit his uncles and cousins families.He was surprised that unlike him, his American relatives of his own generation didnot speak Italian and had very little interest in their Italian heritage. Ethnicheritage played far less prominent a role in the lives of his Italian Americanrelatives than in his life and the lives of his Italo-Argentine family members.

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Although the country more closely resembles its South American neighborsthan other First World countries, Argentines still strenuously maintain thatthey are different from other Latin Americans. This Argentine exceptionalismis reflected in the way in which Argentines, especially porteos, interact withforeigners. Porteos are eager to highlight how their country is similar toEuropean countries. For example, a visitor to Buenos Aires will invariably hearfrom porteos how their city, with its broad avenues, numerous outdoor cafes,and highbrow culture, is the Paris of South America (see Schneider2000:137). Argentines are also quick to distinguish how they are different from

their neighbors, as reflected in the following Argentine refrain: The Mexicansdescended from the Aztecs; the Peruvians, from the Incas; but the Argentines,they descended from the boats. Argentines often see themselves as Europeansstranded on a Latin American continent.

This exceptionalist self-image that porteos sometimes present to foreignershas caused irritation among their Latin American neighbors who at times see

Argentines as arrogant. Across Latin America a whole genre of Argentine jokes

has arisen in which an Argentine sense of inflated self-importance is the centralfeature, for example,

How do you fit ten Argentines into a Fiat Uno? You deflate their egos.3

What would be the easiest way to become a millionaire? To buy Argentinesfor what they are worth and to sell them for what they think they are worth.

Why did the Argentine leave his home during a lightning storm wearing atuxedo? He thought God was taking pictures of him?

Some of the national characteristics discussed above would seem to combine togive middle-class porteos an Argentine identity that is inherently contradictoryand unstable. Their sense of self-importance (which other Latin Americansperceive as arrogance) seems to contradict their feelings of national failure. Thisapparent contradiction is somewhat mediated by the outward European orien-tation of many Argentines. By claiming to be European, they can distancethemselves from Argentinas failures. Their participation in foreign culturalassociations is another strategy by which they mediate this contradiction withintheir national identity. As I argue below, psychoanalysis has emerged as anothercultural form through which they are able to address or mediate some of theseexperienced contradictions.

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Psychoanalysis and National Identity

The national identity crisis that many porteos began to experience by the 1950snot only entered the content of discussion in the psychoanalytic consultingroom but may have also created the social conditions that attracted Argentinesto psychoanalysis. Several scholars (e.g., Homans 1989; Rieff 1987; Turkle 1992)have suggested that psychoanalysis is most readily adopted within societies in

which previously prevailing social ideologies are in decline or crisis. Under thesecircumstances psychoanalytic ideas become particularly attractive because theyprovide people with alternative symbols by which they can think about and

interpret their lives. My fieldwork with patients and psychoanalysts supportsand provides evidence for some of these claims but also highlights some of thelimitations of these understandings of peoples relationship with psychoanalysis.

These scholars have generally argued that the adoption and popularization ofpsychoanalysis are a response to the failure of traditional religious and politicalideologies. Rieff (1987), for example, has argued that psychoanalysis was onlyable to take root and flourish in Europe during a period of what he calls

deconversion. For Rieff, it is the faith that people attach to traditional religiousand political ideologies that provides them with a sense of psychological stability.Periods of deconversion, in which people lose this sense of psychological stability,are usually followed by a period of conversion to a new ideology (or ideologies),in which people find new meaningful symbols they can use to talk aboutthemselves. In this context, psychoanalysis can take the place of a discreditedreligious or political ideology. A crisis of faith about ones national superiority orones place in the world system can potentially be of the same magnitude as a

religious or political crisis. In all three instances, the traditional symbols thatpeople use to identify and understand themselves are lost.

Rieffs basic schema can be found in the works of other scholars exploring theorigins and popularization of psychoanalysis. McGrath (1986) and Homans(1989), for instance, argue that Freuds creation of psychoanalytic theory andits acceptance among his Jewish followers were made possible by the sense ofloss that accompanied their secularization and their disillusionment with the

failure of liberal politics in turn-of-the-century Vienna. In essence the authorsexplanations for the invention of psychoanalysis follow Rieffs model and posita necessary and creative conversion that followed the deconversion associ-ated with Jewish secularization and political disillusionment.



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These authors provide provocative ideas concerning the conditions that canpromote the widespread adoption of psychoanalytic practices, but their analyseslargely ignore how these conditions could have provoked other responses. Psy-choanalysis is presented as a natural response to the religious and politicaluncertainties associated with modernization. This approach is overly deter-ministic and ignores why it is psychoanalysis and not some other ideology thatis attractive under these circumstances.

Turkle (1992), for example, examines more specifically how periods of ideologicalcrisis (deconversion) in postwar France led to a conversion first to existentialism

and only later to psychoanalysis. She argues that ideologies or theories most easilypass into popular culture when they offer a way for people to think through acollective issue of political and social identity (1992:xxiv). For example, sheexplores how the French existentialist writers began writing before World War II,but it was only during the postwar years that French social conditions caught up

with them. Existentialisms philosophy of creating meaning through individualaction was resonant with the French experience of the Occupation and Resistance.

Part of existentialisms popular appeal was that it provided a way to think throughthe issues of choice and individual responsibility that had been raised during thewar years: the question of whether to collaborate or resist.

Twenty years later, the failure of traditional leftist politics during the summerof 1968 created a similar moment of deconversion among Frances leftists.During this period, Lacanian psychoanalysis offered a way for people whothought of themselves as being leftist to continue their subversive under-standing of culture and politics while allowing them to distance themselvesfrom the traditional leftist politics associated with the Communist Party. TheFrench had previously proven to be resistant to the psychoanalytic movement,and in 1960 France had only about 150 psychoanalysts. Turkle (1992) estimatesthat by 1989 there were more than 15,000 psychoanalysts in France.

Turkles study is an advance on previous studies, in that she specifically examines whypsychoanalysis and not other introspective practices was adopted during a specifichistoric moment. She identifies how French leftist intellectuals used psychoanalysisto move beyond a political dead end.4 However, Turkle (1992) herself seems toimplicitly recognize that the use of psychoanalysis as an ideology, which providesideas and metaphors for political thought and action, seems to be far more preva-lent among its practitioners (and intellectuals) than among most of its patients.

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I found that, at least in the Argentine context, patients are far less aware of theideological dimensions of psychoanalysis than its practitioners are. When I beganmy fieldwork I was surprised and frustrated to find that most of the psychoanalyticpatients to whom I spoke had a rather limited knowledge of psychoanalysis andoften did not even know what type of psychoanalytic therapy they were involvedin. For instance, I asked one friend, who had undergone several years of analytictherapy, what type of psychoanalysis she was involved with. She replied that shethought that her analyst was a Lacanian psychoanalyst. I asked her to make sureby asking the analyst about her theoretical orientation. The following week my

friend informed me that she had found out that her psychoanalyst was not apsychoanalyst at all but, in fact, a systemic psychologist.

Like the woman described above, most porteo patients demonstrate relativelylittle interest in the theoretical content of their therapy and only rarely employpsychoanalytic metaphors in discussing politics and national identity. Nevertheless,they do find that within the context of analysis or therapy, they can discusspainful feelings concerning their sense of national belonging. The consulting

room provides a vital space within which patients can explore issues that theymight not be able to articulate elsewhere. Through this articulation of previouslyunverbalized feelings, they often achieve a more complex understanding of theirnational condition. In a later section of this article, I identify several themesconcerning porteo Argentine identity that patients consistently raise andexplore within the psychoanalytic context.

In the United States, psychoanalytic ideas quickly began to enter mainstreamthought as early as the 1920s. Several writers have linked the surprising earlyreceptivity of Americans to psychoanalysis to the relative rootlessness thatcharacterized 20th-century urban American culture (Berger 1965; Cushman1995; Turkle 1992). For these writers, a country such as the United States, withits fluid social mobility and its ethic of individualism, is seen to have providedfertile ground for the entrenchment of an introspective individualistic psycho-logical ideology. If this is true, it may have only been the resilient strength of

American national identity and patriotism (more ambivalent in Argentina) that

acted as an impediment to the creation of an even more pervasive psychoana-lytic culture.

In Buenos Aires other social conditions seem to have converged to create theconditions that allowed for an unprecedented explosion of psychoanalytic



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discourse and culture beginning in the 1950s. Unlike in the American context,in which first-generation Americans sense of rootlessness may have beencompensated by a strong sense of American national identity and culturalconfidence, first-generation porteos could find no self-confident patrioticlocal culture that they could easily adopt.

Forms of National Self-Reflection:From the Tango to Psychoanalysis

Several scholars have explored how during the early decades of the 20th century,

immigrants to Buenos Aires found in tango lyrics a forum for psychological intro-spection through which they could reflect on their experiences of loss, dislocation,and nostalgia (e.g., Taylor 1998) and how the development of the tango alsoreflected the evolving dynamics of Argentine national identity (Savigliano 1995).

Argentine immigrants found in the tango a space for psychological introspectionand identity formation that was in some ways analogous to how the porteochildren and grandchildren of these immigrants would later adopt psychoanalysis.

Although the tango arose during the height of Argentine political and economic

success, and psychoanalysis was adopted by a later generation dealing with feelingsof national failure, they both provided spaces within which Argentines couldreflect on collective national experiences. One of the elderly informants inEduardo Archettis anthropological study of the tango explicitly acknowledged thetherapeutic value of these tangos when he observed that in the past we hadtangos; the texts of the tangos were a kind of therapy (1999:152).

The Argentine children of these immigrants created their own strategies by

which they could interpret and work through their problematic relationshipwith Argentine national experience and identity. The sociological profile of themiddle-class children of these immigrants differed significantly from that oftheir parents. The parents were often of rural origin, relatively uneducated, andlower middle class or working class. In contrast, their children were very oftenurban, educated middle-class professionals. By the 1950s, the full extent of

Argentinas perceived political, economic, and cultural failures began to enterinto the consciousness of most Argentines. Psychoanalysis quickly emerged asan available way by which these descendants of immigrants, who alreadytended to see the tango as something folkloric, could address their own con-cerns. They found in psychoanalysis an intellectualized discourse that they feltto be more appropriate for educated and politically progressive professionals.

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Psychoanalysis allowed them to clearly articulate their frustrations and desireswithin a scientific and modern-sounding framework.

Additionally, from the mid-1940s through the 1960s, middle-class porteos whoheld liberal-progressive political values found themselves within an increasinglyconservative, nationalist, and nondemocratic national political environment. Incontrast, psychoanalysis was strongly associated with secular European cultureand liberal values. Although not openly persecuted by the government, during theregime of Juan Pern (194355) psychoanalysis was viewed as a suspect ideology.Uniformed police officers were present at all Argentine Psychoanalytic

Association meetings, and psychoanalysts were barred from the public system ofpsychiatric services (Baln 1991; Plotkin 2001). Involvement with psychoanalysis,as either a consumer or a practitioner, allowed progressive middle-class porteosto affirm a European cultural identity, liberal humanist values, and opposition to agrowing political conservatism. One of my older informants, a psychoanalyst,even related to me how his introduction to psychoanalysis as a teenager in the late1940s was intimately tied to the transformation of his political values and identity:

I guess that you could say that as an adolescent the few political beliefsthat I had were fascist. My father was a very conservative Catholic, and mymother, who was Italian, was an admirer of Mussolini and later Pern. Somehow, an anarchist who worked for my father took an interest in me,and we began to discuss a world of ideas that I did not know existed. I was16, and he opened my mind to a whole new world, and through him I firstheard about Freud. I remember looking Freud up in the encyclopedia.

And this began a process through which I began to question the values I hadgrown up with. In 1951, [when I was 18,] I entered medical school butI had already decided that this was the way to become a psychoanalyst.[Buenos Aires, August 1998]

Other Argentines found in psychoanalysis not just a reflection of their politicalvalues but also a way to negotiate their ethnic identity within Argentinas changingpolitical landscape. Jewish physicians were greatly overrepresented among psy-choanalysts until the mid-1960s, when psychologists were first allowed to practicepsychoanalysis. One psychoanalyst related to me a pejorative joke he heard duringthe early 1960s that defined a psychoanalyst as being nothing more than a Jewishdoctor who is afraid of blood. Another older Jewish analyst trained during the1950s related to me the following sentiments: You must understand that psycho-analysis for secular Jews of my generation became a type of religion. Many of the



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Jews of my generation had a certain shame about being Jewish and often tried tominimize their Jewish identity. In the practice of psychoanalysis we found a way toexcel, to become successful, and to overcome this inferiority complex. Later inthis interview he also described how psychoanalysis represented an escape fromauthoritarian and anti-Semitic trends in Argentine society:

The Pern regime was essentially a light version of fascism, and althoughit wasnt explicitly anti-Semitic, it seemed to tolerate anti-Semitism. For mygeneration, psychoanalysis represented humanist ideals that rejected thefascist tendencies within our society. I believe that it is because of this that

Jewish analysts are sometimes more dogmatic in how they applied psycho-

analysis in their practice. At least Catholic analysts make a better distinctionbetween those beliefs that they hold as a matter of faith and those that theyhold as a matter of science.

Clearly, there is a range of related political, national, and even ethnic meaningsthat are associated with psychoanalysis. Combinations of these often lie behindits attraction for many middle-class Argentines.

Porteo National Anxiety as Reflected

in Psychoanalytic TherapyI have argued that various anxieties concerning middle-class porteos Argentineidentity have been influential in promoting the popularization of psychoanalysissince the 1950s. My interviews with psychoanalysts and conversations with middle-class porteo consumers of psychoanalysis revealed that issues surrounding nationalbelonging still often arise within the context of psychoanalytic therapy. Several of thebrief case studies presented below emerged during interviews with psychoanalysts

when I questioned them as to whether issues of national belonging were raised intherapy. In other cases the examples cited came up spontaneously in conversation.

I have isolated three related themes raised during psychoanalysis that reflectan underlying anxiety concerning national belonging. First, there was a tendencyfor some porteos to transpose an isolated negative personal experience as beingdirect proof of a national failure. Second, they tended to interpret their negativeinteractions with strangers as a direct reflection of the deterioration of Argentinecivil society. Third, many porteos who have lived abroad, or considered livingabroad, found that they were forced to painfully weigh the value of their nationalbelonging. These issues are also discussed among friends and colleagues outside ofthe psychoanalytic relationship, but within the psychoanalytic relationship, patientsare often better able to focus on the psychological implications of these issues.

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Even outside of therapy, it is not uncommon for an isolated negative incidentto act as a catalyst for some porteos to express their frustrations about thenational condition. The porteo traveler whose domestic flight is suddenlycanceled might not just complain about the particular airline company. Thehousewife who is mistreated by a bank clerk may not unload her invectivesolely against the bank employee. Each one is likely to use the incident to makean overarching negative generalization about Argentina.

These types of incidents and the strong feelings they provoke about the national

condition are often raised during psychoanalytic therapy. For example, a psycho-

analyst related to me the following case, which can be seen as paradigmatic. A

patient of his was a prosecutor, representing the state, who was obliged by her

superiors to prosecute someone for petty theft. During the psychoanalytic session

she expressed her anger that she was forced to prosecute this petty crime while

those who carry out far more serious crimes remain immune from prosecution.

From this observation, she began to vilify Argentina as a nation.

Closely related to this tendency to interpret a particular and isolated incident as a

national characteristic is the tendency for patients to discuss incidents in whichthey were profoundly and emotionally affected by anonymous interactions withstrangers. During psychoanalytic therapy, people generally discuss experiences thatare somehow emotionally significant to them. Patients usually talk about experi-ences with individuals with whom they have personal or professional relationships.Some porteo patients, however, choose to discuss negative interactions withstrangers. It is notable that these encounters achieve a strong emotional resonancefor these porteo patients, demonstrated by the fact that they are seen to reflect aparticularly Argentine failure of civility and social solidarity.

The following cases highlight how many porteos commonly interpret acts ofsocial incivility and violation and how these incidents often invoke an emotionalresponse concerning the uncivilized nature of Argentines. A psychoanalystrelated to me the case of a patient who had, for economic motives, spent yearsliving in Spain during the last dictatorship. He returned to Buenos Aires afterthe end of the dictatorship in 1984 and for the last couple of years had habituallycomplained to his psychoanalyst about life in Buenos Aires. For example, in a typi-cal session he discussed an incident in which after he boarded a city bus, theautomatic ticket dispenser did not return his change. He pointed this out to the busdriver and asked for his change, but the bus driver responded to him aggressively.



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The patient saw a police officer standing next to him and asked him to inter-vene, but the police officer ignored him. Other passengers became annoyed thathe was delaying the bus. During the session, the patient complained that thistype of incivility would not occur in Spain, and he described this lack of socialsolidarity as particularly Argentine.

Another middle-class patient discussed with her psychoanalyst how her car brokedown in a neighborhood in which she felt unsafe. Her car had stalled in front of aconstruction site whose driveway she partially obstructed. She asked one of thelocal workers if she could use their telephone to call for help. Instead of assisting

her, the worker demanded that she get the car away from the driveway so thattrucks could pass through. Cars in the street honked at her even though it wasobvious that she could not move. The patient related to the psychoanalyst thatshe was extremely upset that these strangers could not empathize with her situa-tion and that she did not imagine that people in other countries act this way.

As in the above cases, porteos outside of analysis are also likely to interpret acts ofsocial incivility as reflecting an Argentine inferiority. Additionally, middle-class

porteos who have notspent time abroad appear to be almost as likely to make thiscomplaint (which involves a comparison of Argentina with other countries) asthose who have spent extensive time abroad. For example, in one case describedabove, the patient explicitly compared Argentinas lack of civility and social soli-darity to Spains civility. The patient had some frame of reference. In the next case,however, the patient with the stalled car had not traveled abroad but still com-pared Argentina to other countries, although in a more abstract manner. I haveheard other middle-class porteos I know make similar national comparisons

without having ever traveled abroad. When I asked them on what basis they canmake these comparisons, they often replied that they based their comments onthings they have read or anecdotes they have heard from better-traveled friends.

Another important characteristic of these national comparisons is that theporteos always take the First World as their implied referent. Even when some-one vaguely says that this would not happen in other countries, the listenerimmediately understands that the other countries are not Argentinas Latin

American neighbors but, rather, First World countries. In the context of thesecomplaints, only the latter are seen to be in the same league as Argentina. Thesetypes of comments reflect both the close identification andthe perceived distancethat Argentines have with Europe and the United States.

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Middle-class porteos are also forced to reflect on their sense of belongingwhen they encounter professional opportunities abroad and are often forced toweigh the value of maintaining national ties. Decades after the beginning of itseconomic decline, Argentina has continued to produce highly educated middle-class professionals, many of whom are attracted to economic opportunities inEurope and the United States.5Those who decide to stay behind often see theirfriends in the exterior finding professional opportunities and enjoying a higherstandard of living. Many professional porteos, especially those with skills thatare sought abroad, at some point during their lives at least weigh the costs and

benefits of moving abroad.It is not uncommon for porteos to discuss within and outside the psychoanalyticcontext the dilemmas and frustration that they experience when confronted withforeign professional opportunities. An analyst related to me the frustrationexpressed by a patient, a prestigious Buenos Aires neurosurgeon, who had recentlyattended an international conference in the exterior. Although he had been, untilthen, satisfied with his economic position, he was now confronted by the eco-

nomic success of his foreign colleagues and of those Argentine colleagues whohad emigrated to Europe or the United States. During the following weeks thepatient found himself reevaluating his success and the quality of his life in Buenos

Aires. Another analyst recounted how the economic frustration of a patient, alanguage teacher, was augmented by her perception that because of her languageabilities she would feel as comfortable living in Europe or the United States asshe would in Argentina. The patients verbalized rhetorical question, So why amI still living here [in Argentina]? became a periodic refrain during the analysis.

Conclusion

Since the 1950s, middle-class porteos have found, within the space of the psy-choanalytic consulting room, a cultural setting in which they can explore issuessurrounding national belonging. The vast majority of porteos in analytic therapydo not associate psychoanalysis with psychiatric disorders or life crises but, instead,

with self-exploration and self-knowledge. I have argued that psychoanalysis in

Buenos Aires has served as a way to elaborate individual identity in a contextwhere other positive sources of individual identity are weakened or missing. Thisintrospective cultural practice has been able to fill the void left by an ambivalentnational identity and a pervasive sense of political and economic disappointment.



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Although it is difficult to definitively demonstrate that a national identity crisismay have been a factor in promoting the popularization of psychoanalysisamong middle-class porteos, there is a wealth of indirect evidence. As mentionedabove, the massive popularization of psychoanalysis coincided, during the early1960s, with a painful realization of national economic and political failure. Ialso demonstrated how even today, issues related to national belonging oftenpermeate the psychoanalytic context. It may be even more revealing, however,that during informal conversations, porteos frequently link the prominence ofpsychoanalysis in Argentina to issues surrounding their national identity. For

many middle-class porteos, participation in psychoanalytic therapy hasbecome as authentic a marker of what being Argentine is about as the tango ofGardel or thegaucho of the Pampas interior. And even though, when pressed,the connections they draw between psychoanalysis and their Argentinenational identity may be vague, their statements reveal an awareness and perhapsa desire to find in psychoanalysis a cultural characteristic.

JEFFREY BASS is Assistant Professor in the Department of Sociology and Anthropology

at Lake Forest College.

Notes

Acknowledgments. The field research on which this article is based was funded by a grant from the

Fulbright Commission, a Foreign Language and Area Studies Fellowship from the Center for Iberian

and Latin American Studies, a Hayman Fellowship from the University of California Interdiscipli-

nary Consortium, and a scholarship from the Friends of the International Center at the University of

California, San Diego. I would also like to thank James Holston, Shawn Bender, Michael Meeker, and

three anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments on various drafts of this article.

Editors Note. This manuscript was accepted under the editorship of Sara Harkness.

1. Italian citizenship laws, more so than the laws of other European nations, work to the advantage of

most Argentines. Without having spent any time in Italy, foreigners can petition for Italian citizenship

if they can document that at least one of their grandparents was Italian.

2. Kaminsky (1999:1617) has argued that the position of exile conveys to South American expatri-

ates a privileged status and moral high ground in relation to both those in the host country and those

who have stayed behind in the country of origin.

3. A 1999 East Los Angeles Spanish-language billboard that advertised a Toyota Camry sedan

roomy enough to fit five Argentines and their egos is a testament to the pervasiveness of this

joke and this perception of Argentines within L.A.s diverse Latino community.

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4.Turkles study on the political dimensions of Lacanian psychoanalysis in France informs my own

research, which examines the ways in which Argentine psychoanalysts have used psychoanalytic theory

to justify their own political activism and allowed them to come to the forefront of the Argentinehuman rights movements during the 1970s and 1980s (Bass 2000).

5.The emigration of professionals has at times reached such high levels that it has also become the

subject of jokes. One joke asks that the last Argentine to leave Ezeiza (the Buenos Aires international

airport) be sure not to forget to turn off the lights.

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