Psychoanalysis confronts the politics of repression: the case of Argentina

The armed forces that ruled Argentina from 1976 to 1983 considered progressive middle class professionals, including the mental health community, as well as working class militants to be a threat to the economic and social arrangements of dependent capitalism. In order to understand why the psychoanalytic community was an important target of the military's 'dirty war' against its citizens, the history of the psychoanalytic movement is examined within the context of political developments in Argentina from the 1940s on. Evolving their specific version of the convergence between Freud and Marx, in the early 1970s, a group of prominent psychoanalysts became directly engaged in activities that challenged the existing social order. Their critical analyses of the limits of psychological liberation within class society and their social projects are described, with attention paid to the ways in which the political environment in Argentina either encouraged or repressed the realization of a radicalized psychoanalytic enterprise. Finally, the psychological impact on individuals living in a state of terror, such as that existing in Argentina under military rule, is analyzed, as are the contributions of the political psychoanalysts to the strengthening of civil society subsequent to the ouster of the military in 1983. It is concluded that individual and collective psychological reparation are necessary in order for a people to recapture their capacity for political engagement and active involvement in fragile democratic institutions.