hollander, psicoanálisis, represión, argentina

Sot. SC;. Med. Vol. 28, No. 7, pp. 751-758, 1989 Printed m Great Britain

0277-9536189 53.00 + 0.00 Pergamon Press plc

PSYCHOANALYSIS CONFRONTS THE POLITICS OF REPRESSION: THE CASE OF ARGENTINA

NANCY CARO HOLLANDER Department of History, California State University, Dominguez Hills, Carson, CA 90747, U.S.A.

Abstract-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 197Os, 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.

Ke_v words-repression, political violence, Argentina, psychoanalysis

INTRODUCTION

Many of us are familiar with the broad outlines of the state of terror that characterized Argentine society from the mid-1970s to the early 1980s. We know that from the time the military took direct control over the government in March of 1976, imprisonment, forced exile, torture. disappearance and murder were the fate of many thousands of Argentines. Almost 10,000 people are still missing. their whereabouts have never been discovered. Out of a total population of 26 million. 2 million people sought or were forced into exile, not simply as refugees from the profound economic crisis of the period, but as citizens fleeing their homeland in profound dread.

When the military junta declared itself to be in the business of creating a nation infused with “Christian and Western values”, it set about to cleanse Argentine society of any evidence of the “ideological criminals”. Marx and Freud. With this banner, the military targeted not only militant trade unions and other working class organizations, but went after the middle sectors: it directly intervened in universities, shut down entire departments in the liberal arts and social sciences and burned many thousands of books thought to be subversive to the “traditional spiritual and cultural values symbolized in God, country and home”. Great numbers of teaching faculty lost their positions. which were then taken over by military officers. Hundreds of university employees and thousands of scientists in research institutes were dismissed. Under the statutes of the Law of Repres- sion and Terrorism, it became a crime at many universities to read the works of Marx, as well as those of Freud, Piaget and other psychological theorists. Courses on psychiatry, psychology and psychoanalysis were prohibited. In addition, thousands of psychologists, psychoanalysts, physicians and social workers were fired from positions in

hospitals and mental health institutions. Many day hospitals and even the Center for Assistance to Children with Learning Problems were closed due to the firing of entire professional staffs [ 1.21.

It is easy on the face of it for us to understand why a military government that saw itself as the protector of a dependent capitalist society, whose economic and political benefits were distributed inequitably in favor of the traditional elites and their international allies, considered Marx and Marxism enemies of ‘civilization’. But how is it that Freud and psychoanalysis came to be viewed as antagonists to the exploitative class relations and politically repressive politics of Argentine society, and how, therefore, did mental health professionals become an explicit target of military and para-military terror in that country? In order to explain this phenomenon, it is necessary to trace the history of psychoanalysis in Argentina and to examine how this mode of thought and many of its practitioners came to represent a challenge to the bourgeois order and the military dictatorship that was its self-proclaimed guarantor.

PSYCHOANALYSIS AND POLITICS

First, a comment about the history of psychoanalysis in general. Since the early 192Os, a rich intellectual and political tradition has existed in which individuals interested in personal and social liberation have sought to integrate the basic tenets of Marxism and psychoanalysis as two modes of thought capable of providing an understanding of the institutional and subjective limits on human prod- uctivity and pleasure. For example, during the culturally fertile inter-war years in Europe, artists, writers, social scientists, Marxists and psychoanalysts looked to aspects of Marxism and psychoanalysis for systematic approaches to analyzing the sources of

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752 NANCY CARO HOLLANDER

oppressive social relations throughout history and within the specificity of contemporary industrial capitalism. While Marxism dissected the nature of the essentially contradictory and exploitative class relations of capitalism, psychoanalysis furnished a critique of the repression of libidinal drives in the adaptation of the unconscious life of the masses to a fundamentally frustrating and unrewarding reality. Psychoanalysis diagnosed the family as the central institution generating the neuroses that anchor the basic structures of bourgeois society firmly within the individual personality in all social classes. Both modes of thought contained a radical challenge to the existing order, as well as strategies for liberation.

By the late twenties and early thirties, intellectuals in Berlin, Vienna and Frankfurt interested in the convergence of psychoanalysis and Marxism responded to their tumultuous era by attempting to integrate economic and psychological theory in an analysis of the complex forces responsible for the rise of fascism [3]. The Frankfurt Institute for Social Research, for example. produced important works identifying the cultural and psychological aspects of mass society that promoted adaptation to authoritarian rule, and its members participated in progressive and leftist politics confronting the emerging fascist movement 143. Wilhelm Reich, perhaps the best known psychoanalyst who was an active Communist as well. wrote brilliantly of the manner in which the receptivity of the masses to the brutality of authoritarian politics was rooted in the culture of sexual repression and the autocratic tradition of the patriarchal family. However. from the mid-thirties on, fascist governments, taking hold throughout Europe, crushed all aspects of progressive intellectual and political activities. thus putting an end for a time to the prolific and multifaceted attempts to integrate the emancipatory aspects of both these revolutionary modes of thought. In the immediate post Second World War Two era, Marxism became widely re- duced to one of its central preoccupations, political economy. and psychoanalysis functioned as a psychology of adaptation to the very society it had once so masterfully exposed. Only in the 1960s with the development of the New Left and feminism, was there a resurgence of a theoretical discourse intent on examining the mutual interaction of economic, psychological and ideological factors in the maintenance of social structures characterized by relations of domination/subordination. Just as all significant European. and many North American cultural and political currents since the nineteenth century, have been reflected in Argentine intellectual life, the historical experience and concerns of psychoanalysis in Europe and the United States found resonance within the Argentine psychoanalytic community. However, the specificity of Argentine class relations and politics from the late 1960s to the early 1980s provided the context in which a self-consciously politicized psychoanalysis became a target of military repression in that country.

INSTlTIJTlONALlZATlON OF PSYCHOANALYSIS

In the early 1940s. among the anti-fascists forced to flee the spread of Nazism. a small group of promi-

nent psychoanalysts from a variety of European countries arrived in Argentina. In Europe, they had witnessed the attack on Freudian ideas and institutes by the fascists [S]. and their own political experiences dovetailed with those of many Argentine psychoanalysts who had been opposed to the pro-Axis policy of the Argentine government since the late 1930s. While culturally. Buenos Aires offered a pro- pitious environment for the creation of a center for the study, training and practice of psychoanalysis. when six individuals from among the immigrants and the Argentines founded the Argentine Psychoanalytic Association (APA) in 1942. they must have wondered how their institute would fare in the turbulent political climate of that country. From the beginning. there were divisions within its membership regarding the direction the profession should take that at least partially reflected tensions regarding the very nature of the psychoanalytic enterprise. Those individuals who came from a psychiatric orientation that integrated a concern for social and political issues with the study and treatment of mental illness wished to maintain an involvement in public hospitals because of the contact with medical training programs and a working class patient population that had no other access to psychiatric or psychoanalytic treatment. The aspirations of this group would be frustrated by political pressures from unsympathetic governmental policies during the 1940s and ’50s. Other individuals within the APA brought with them a preference for developing specialities within the new area of psycho- somatic medicine, and. put off by the rigid structures of the medical establishment, they would chose to channel their efforts into the development of successful private clinical practices. Thus it was that a privatized psychoanalysis, withdrawn from larger intellectual and social concerns, first made its impact on the academy and popular culture in Argentina.

Indeed, by the early 1950s. psychoanalysis became highly fashionable among the European-identified cosmopolitan bourgeoisie and middle class of Buenos Aires. The APA emerged as an important part of the city’s intellectual millieu. Coffee houses filled with intellectuals discussing not only national politics, but the psychoanalysis of their everyday lives. The mass media used psychoanalytic insights about human need to sell commodities and to regulate public opinion by quoting prestigious psychoanalysts regarding controversial national issues (6, 71. The APA also became the center of psychoanalytic training for mental health professionals from all over Latin America, especially Brazil. Uruguay and Mexico.

By the mid-1950s psychoanalysis began to receive formal recognition as a significant aspect of mental health training in the university, and members of the APA entered the medical school at the University of Buenos Aires to teach psychoanalysis to medical students. When psychology was declared a major at the University of Buenos Aires, psychoanalysts were among the teaching faculty, although bound by the rules of the APA to remind students that only members of APA could practice psychoanalysis. By the late 1960s when a generation of students would return to political activism in response to their nation’s dramatic political and economic crises and inspired by significant international events such as the

Psychoanalysis confronts the politics of repression 753

Cuban Revolution, many would have been exposed to psychoanalytic thought [l, 81. In turn, this generation of politically engaged students would play a part in the political reawakening of psychoanalysis in Argentina.

Meanwhile, the reformist populism of Juan Peron during the period from 1946 to 1955, and the subsequent conservative policies of inept civilian and repressive military regimes of the following 15 years, created a climate of political unpredictability. In these insecure conditions, the political Left, among the founding members and other senior analysts of the APA, kept their politics to themselves. Occasional participation in progressive activities remained isolated from their professional identities [ 11. In general, this generation focused on shaping a highly professional psychoanalytic institute. The inclination to retreat to an isolated professionalism was reflected in the dominant themes of APA’s scientific meetings, which focused on developments in technique and the new frontiers in the study of psychosis. The broader questions which had once preoccupied psychoanalysts interested in the relationship between individual and social repression and the role psychoanalysis might play in the strategy of overturning oppressive social structures were left unaddressed. Psychoanalysts seemed to have chosen to enjoy, without conflict, their social status and material privilege as one of the Port City’s most prestigious professional sectors among its extensive middle class.

DISSIDENCE FROM WITHIN

However, this apparently complacent posture was not to last for long within a society constantly tom by political and social unrest. By the late 196Os, dissatisfaction from within the association began to be articulated. According to many of the younger candidates and a few of the founding members, the APA was showing signs of intellectual stagnation. They pointed to the lack of any substantive dialog and to its rigidly hierarchical organizational structure, which from their perspective mirrored the unjust class structure of capitalism. These critical voices accused the APA of becoming primarily a self- enclosed and self-congratulatory safe-house for an elite professional sector bound to maintain its privilege, and thus its alignment, with the ruling class and the existing social order. As the critique became more severe, the APA was attacked by some of its members for stifling real intellectual discourse and for refusing to speak out publically on significant national issues. The critics claimed that APA should take a stand, especially against the erosion of civil society.

The APA’s leadership defended its insulation by insisting on the necessity of maintaining neutrality in the psychoanalytic enterprise, both in the interest of value-free scientific inquiry and of clinical treatment, in which the patient knows nothing about the analyst so that the transference to the person of the analyst will facilitate fantasies revealing the nature and etiology of the patient’s neurosis. The critics within the APA responded by asserting that neutrality on the part of the psychoanalyst was impossible; on the one hand, scientific inquiry was always organized by the ideological frame of the investigator, and on the

other hand, everything about the psychoanalyst, in- chiding his/her language, demeanor, clothing, consul- tation room and fees, embodied a most specific insertion in class and culture, negating the possibility of neutrality, even in the transference relationship. The critics argued that the psychoanalyst was no different from any other individual in society, and that to insist on a position of neutrality in the face of social, political and economic inequity was to be guilty of the worst form of denial or bad faith. Such a mystification of reality was seen essentially to represent an identification with those who intended to sustain intact oppressive social conditions and antagonistic class relations [6, 91. This issue would become a focal point of debate when the political situation in Argentina reached confrontational proportions by the late 1960s.

A decade of failed economic policies had narrowed the social base of capitalism, and the state had effectively liquidated any legitimate means through which political opposition could be expressed, especially by the radicalized Peronist working class and its growing number of allies among the middle class and students. Wielding power from the Pink House, the military had grown increasingly harsh in response to the heightened militancy of Argentina’s disen- franchized social classes. This explosive situation erupted in the general strikes of 1969, in which workers and students, with support in the communities, occupied major sectors of the capital and provincial cities. For the first time in the country’s history, a general popular uprising was underway, and only the military’s occupation of the cities in armored columns backed by air support repressed the revolt [lo].

The psychoanalytic community was directly affected by these political developments, and it became an important arena in which the right and the left confronted one another in a heated political struggle [ 1 I]. The internal conflict was affected by the fact that in the late sixties, there was a new professional and political composition to the entering candidates. Many represented a generation of psychiatrists no longer willing to accept the traditional hostility to psychoanalysis characteristic of their speciality. Others came from the Communist Party, and had become disillusioned with behavior- ism and the party’s hostility toward psychoanalysis. Still others were members of various Marxist parties and the growing left tendency within the mass-based Peronist movement (later known as the Montoneros). These candidates brought with them a new attitude toward psychoanalysis, viewing it not as a vehicle for adapting to the status quo, but as a methodology that might contribute to the alteration of existing psychological and social realities [12]. In addition to the critique of the elitism, authoritarianism and rigidity of institutionalized psychoanalysis in the APA, these dissidents argued that psychoanalytic theory must embrace a Marxist conceptualization of class society and hegemonic ideology in order to understand the external limits that functioned to constrict the POSS- ibihty of authentic individual psychological change [13, 141.

These tensions within the APA were simultaneously experienced within the psychoanalytic move-


ment in other countries. In 1968. the student and worker protests in many European nations and the anti-war movement in the United States found resonance in the concerns expressed by youthful candidates in a number of psychoanalytic associations. Along with allies among senior analysts, they became a visible force within the international psychoanalytic community at two international congresses, the first in 1969 in Rome and the second in 1971 in Vienna. The Argentines played a pivotal role in a new international organization called Plattform, which sponsored counter-congresses in 1969 and 1971 to challenge the International Psychoanalytic Association with a political critique similar to that leveled at the APA [I 51. The dissident Argentine presence was felt in the official congress of 1971, when Marie Langer. one of the founding members of the APA, presented a controversial paper entitled ‘Psychoanalysis and/or Social Revolution’. Langer asserted the inevitability of radical transformation of contemporary society and urged her colleagues to use their psychoanalytic knowledge to facilitate rather than to oppose the process of change. She admoni- shed her audience not to follow in the footsteps of the analysts who had left Cuba following the revolution, or those who were departing from Chile on the heels of the election of Salvador Allende. “This time,” she declared, “we will renounce neither Marx nor Freud” [5].

The disenchantment with the psychoanalytic establishment among dissidents in many countries was deep-seated, but it was the Argentines who actually broke with their official psychoanalytic institute in 1971. following many incidents in the politically turbulent environment which alienated them from the APA’s policies. The split within psychoanalysis oc- curred as Argentina entered into a period of deep- ening economic and political crisis. Military rule produced mounting militancy among the organized working class. university and high school youth and middle class professionals. many of whom were politically mobilized by the radicalized tendency within Peronism. Marxist and Left Peronist guerrilla forces emerged, and their armed attacks against military targets and representatives of foreign capital stood in marked contrast to the violence of systematic repression exercised by the military and para-military forces against individuals and groups critical of the alliance of interests that rules Argentina [16].

THE TURN TOWARD ACTJVJSM

The political psychoanalysts, who had separated from APA. openly challenged the ideological and political hegemony of those who in their eyes held the reins of power in Argentina illegitimately, renewing, as some saw it. the theoretical direction pointed to by Wilhelm Reich almost five decades earlier. Their willingness to articulate a clear political definition within their profession stimulated similar efforts to link theoretical principles to political praxis among other mental health professionals [6]. They published many political critiques of the current situation and of all tendencies within psychoanalysis considered to represent collaboration with the status quo. One of the primary themes to reemerge as central for psycho-

analysis was that of neutrality. The dissident analysts argued that it was necessary to encourage patients to deal in their treatment with the dramatic crises experienced in their country, especially regarding the loss both patient and analyst could not help but feel at the signs of erosion of civil society in the face of the onslaught by the military and para-military forces. Neutrality as a professional ideal was once again critiqued; only mechanisms of repression could account for a lack of affect on the part of either patient or analyst regarding the experience of living in the midst of state terror. For the analyst to ignore this as a significant issue was to comply with the patient’s denial of reality. a serious defense that compromised individual mental health [I 71.

Ex-APA members had begun in the late sixties to be active within a politically progressive organization called the Federation of Argentine Psychiatrists (FAP), where they could vocally denounce the massive outrages of governmental repression. including the murder and disappearances of political militants and union activists. The leadership of FAP signed protests addressed to the President of the Republic. which often risked their own personal safety, and they were publically praised for their solidarity by the militant labor movement [I, 141. The FAP also engaged in research and the development of programs that addressed serious social problems manifest in the popular classes. One focus was alcoholism. viewed as a vice which reinforced the most tyrannical aspects of patriarchy within the family structure and inhibited the acquisition of a critical consciousness by working class men. Alcoholism was an especially devastating social problem in neighboring Chile, and in 1972. the leadership of FAP met with their mental health colleagues in that country to discuss alcohol rehabilitation programs. They were received by the popularly elected President, Salvador Allende. himself a physi- cian, for a discussion of the relationship between mental health issues and politics [14]. FAP also attempted to represent mental health professionals who encountered problems with employers. For example, in one case. the national leadership fought a losing battle on behalf of a young psychologist working in a reformatory, whose highly successful rehabilitation program with the interned youth was opposed by the administration of the reformatory and the surrounding community because of the freedoms he accorded to his wards [I].

Determined in their goal to reassert the original revolutionary character of psychoanalysis. the ex- members of APA wished to democratize psychoanalytic training by making it available to all mental health workers, and to use their psychoanalytic knowledge to help demystify bourgeois ideology among the popular classes. Together with the Psychological Association and the newly created Association of Educational Psychologists, they formed the Organization of Mental Health Workers, which for the first time would eliminate the long-established differences between medical and nonmedical members of the mental health community and offer psychoanalytic training and supervision to psychologists who had not been able to enter the medically- controlled APA. The political psychoanalysts believed that the new organization, by offering a commonly


shared professional formation to all mental health disciplines, could ultimately create a mutually shared sense of professional and political identity and thus increase the possibilities of solidarity in union struggles and the challenge to the corrupt economic and political structures of Argentine dependent capitalism.

By mid-1972, they established the Research and Training Center (CDI), the most important and long-lasting of which was in Buenos Aires. The CD1 had as its objective the formation of mental health workers, whose critical training would take into account an analysis of the socioeconomic conditions which framed their practice and would locate the problems of mental health within the context of a society divided into antagonistic class interests, deteriorating as it sank ever deeper into the contradictions of neocolonialism [6]. The CD1 curricu- lum was divided into three areas of professional preparation: the first two areas focused on psychoanalysis and Marxism respectively, and the third area dealt with the relationship between theory and clinical practice. The latter included supervision of students’ clinical work in hospitals, health centers and clinics and encouraged participation in union activities at all of these sites. Ultimately the CD1 would turn out to be a short-lived experiment, unable to survive the intensification of the politics of terror in the mid-seventies. However, according to several of its most noteworthy participants, the CD1 fulfilled important objectives: it broke for a time the stratification and fragmentation of different groups of mental health workers and integrated them into one union; it demonstrated that one could acquire psychoanalytic theory and technique outside the official institute at minimal cost; and it showed that psychoanalytic theory and technique could be utilized in treatment of all social classes in a variety of settings. In its practice the CD1 represented an implementation of some of the concrete aspects of the historical debate regarding the convergence of Marxism and psychoanalysis [l, 8, 141.

In 1973, Argentina experienced a brief interlude in military rule, during which time progressive forces in every sector were able to mobilize more freely. This political opening, popularly referred to as ‘the Euphoria’, came after almost 7 years of a regressive distribution of wealth and authoritarian military rule that had resulted in a profound disaffection from the system by the middle and working classes. No sector from among the dominant class or the military seemed able to exercise political hegemony over the ailing society, and the signs of revolution were fear- fully interpreted. In the wings sat Juan Peron, master- ful politician exiled in Madrid, to whom almost all Argentines now turned as the savior in this crucial political moment. The elite, the military and their international allies all looked to Peron as the only hope to forestall the revolutionary option, while the the Left tendency within the Peronist middle and working classes believed he would facilitate radical social transformation. In June 1973, after democratic elections brought to power a Peronist-led politically progressive coalition, Juan Peron returned to Argentina from his 18 year exile.

A rush of optimism and buoyant spirits were

reflected in the mass mobilizations and political organizing that characterized the following months. Psychoanalysts were well represented among those who wished to articulate a radical political perspective, including an exposure of the excesses of the previous military regimes and the violence embedded in the very structures of dependent capitalism. Members of FAP entered the most important maxi- mum security prison for political prisoners to in- vestigate and denounce torture, and to document the socialized methods developed by revolutionary female prisoners for collectively raising their infants and young children in jail. Activists in the CD1 became hosts to numerous refugees fleeing their homelands following coups in Bolivia and Chile that had brutally felled popularly supported governments. They treated political prisoners who had been jailed during the long years of military rule in Argentina. And, recapturing an old dream, some prominent political psychoanalysts expanded their possibilities of working in public settings, such as hospitals and health centers, where they did research, taught classes and supervised colleagues, especially in group psychotherapy with a psychoanalytic orientation. Members of FAP and the Organization of Mental Health Workers went to working class neighborhoods and squatter settlements to work in health projects or public clinics initiated by progressive and Left political organizations. In these situations, they developed interventions that communicated to their working class patients the class and gender contradictions responsible for their unconscious pain and rage, while simultaneously maintaining nondirective psychoanalytic technique [ 18, 191. In addition, they continued to become more visible in union, community and political parties and groups that emphasized the importance of people organizing politically to demand profound changes in the political economy of Argentina.

REPRESSION AND PSYCHOANALYSIS

However, the possibility of doing this kind of work-linking clinical treatment with community organizing-was soon cut off by increasing class confrontations which ended in a crisis of legitimacy for the ruling progressive Peronist coalition. Right- wing Peronists who now captured the leadership of the movement, in league with their bourgeois and military allies, attacked the Peronist Left and Marxist opposition. Reactionary para-military groups, with tacit approval from the Peronist right wing, began targeting political activists for disappearance, torture and murder. Increasingly preyed upon by these death squads, the politcal psychoanalysts and their mental health colleagues could no longer continue their work openly. New priorities emerged, including a wide- spread demand among victims of political repression for psychotherapy with progressive psychoanalysts. On many occasions, psychoanalysts treated militants from various leftist organizations who sought psychological help. Sometimes the leadership of the Peronist Left requested their therapeutic intervention in order to help an activist who had suffered the trauma of torture or to make an assessment, for example, about whether a particular activist with


paranoid tendencies endangered comrades by con- tinuing to be engaged in clandestine activity (less often the traditional Marxist Left sought such help, relying more on ‘ideological’ strength among its cadre to overcome psychological crises) (81. Clever strategies had to be invented so that psychoanalysts could utilize their skills in the psychological defense against political repression. For example, in the mid-1970s prominent psychoanalyst, Marie Langer, functioned as a supervising analyst to an imprisoned psychiatric student, who wanted direction in his psychological interventions with fellow prisoners who were victims of torture. He would write in code explaining the prison situation within the text of letters to his mother, who would pass the information to Langer. She would then type a formal supervision, including feedback and suggestions for appropriate interventions with torture victims. Then the prisoner’s mother would include this information in the body of her letters to her son in intentionally bad script so that impatient guards passed them through without struggling to censor the text. Much of the information thus acquired was submitted as testimony to international Human Rights groups indicting the Argentine government for illegal detention and torture of its citizens [I].

When the military took direct control of the government in March 1976, the political psychoanalysts were among those it declared to be an internal threat to the system. The military forces and civilian elites wanted to eliminate the chaos and corruption of the Peronist regime in favor of a repressive state that could promise free rein to the major players in the open market economy. They saw as the enemy of dependent capitalism the subversive activity of the masses and their articulate representatives; only a total war of extermination would do. ‘National security’ became the central ideological justification for the draconian policies of the next 7 years [IO]. The lines had been drawn: the armed forces had come to believe that Marx and Freud were the two main enemies of western Christian civilization, and the political psychoanalysts were committed to the struggle against the kind of ‘civilization’ that the military wished to preserve. Repression now became so thor- oughgoing that the political work being carried out by the Organization of Mental Health Workers and the Federation of Argentine Psychiatrists was stifled. Many politically committed psychoanalysts and their mental health colleagues began to disappear or to suffer torture. imprisonment and forced exile. Those who left their country experienced the painful fate of the political refugee, uprooted and suffering the anguish of the loss of homeland, family, friends and a political project that had once promised personal and social liberation. Many of them soon set about to create organizations of solidarity and commissions of progressive mental health workers who could tend to the psychological needs of individuals in the refugee communities [20,21].

A different anguish awaited those psychoanalysts who remained m Argentina. They bore witness to the deep and profound wound that political repression within their country engraved on the body politic. They could give testtmony to the successful objectives of state terror. whose indiscriminate attack against

the population was aimed at silencing critical consciousness and paralyzing political engagement [22]. They saw that while some of the individuals who became targets of official repression had been actively engaged in militant activities, trade unions and political parties, many others-the vast majority-had never been politically active. Union members. intellectuals, relatives of known guerrillas. unarmed political dissidents or individuals simply suspicious in the eyes of those who randomly detained citizens in their homes, in restaurants and on the streets. became ‘victims of a doctrine of collective guilt’. With this global strategy, the military imposed for a time a passive consensus for its rule. which had successfully restructured power in Argentina and had achieved the disarticulation of prior forms of political expres- sion. The political psychoanalysts witnessed the reality of state terror when and wherever it strikes: in such conditions of repression. the population is forced to work out in any manner possible a way of understanding the rules. the cues, what makes a good citizen and what makes an enemy of the state. Everyone is compelled to feel that their homes. their jobs, their loved ones. their lives are in jeopardy. They come to trust no one, to confide in no one. to seek isolation in self-preservation. Contact with others endangers. In this situation. individuals become obedient and potentially punitive of self and others. A kind of paranoid character disorder comes to look like a national trait [23]. One of the most outstanding features of a terrorized population is the compulsion to deny reality, to refuse to bear witness to the sinister drama that oppresses the entire nation. Denial functions as a protective defense mechanism, shielding the individual from his/her conscience and the internal or external demand to act in defiance of the systematic violation of basic human rights. The psychology of denial thus functions to sustain the politics of terror [24,25].

But terror was not, in the end. enough to maintain the military’s control over the state. Riddled with contradictions that now pitted their institutional interests against the economic priorities of even the business elite and large landowners, ultimately the armed forces alienated crucial sectors of support because of their increasingly autonomous exercise of power. As the regime became isolated from society, it sought escape in an ill-fated war with Great Britain over the long-disputed Malvinas/Falklands archi- pelago in the South Atlantic, a war it lost ignominiously. The military’s days were numbered.

DEMOCRACY AND REPARATION

In October of 1983, democratic elections brought a civilian government to power under the presidency of Raul Alfonsin. However, in spite of the successful ousting of the military, the traits of a population that has endured massive repression remain. Amidst the valiant actions of those militantly engaged in a judicial and political battle to redress the profound wrongdoing perpetrated on their society by the military, there remains in Argentina a legacy of unattended pain, suffering, inability to mourn and silence in the face of the historical experience of state terror. Perhaps the most urgent question relates to


the impact on the children and youth, an entire generation that has grown molded by direct and indirect experiences of loss, including the torture, disappearance and murder of loved ones and often the disruption imposed by a period of forced exile [26]. The political psychoanalysts and their counter- parts among other mental health workers understand the profound need for individuals to engage in a process of psychological reparation. They are also aware of the imperative that individual psychic repair take place within the socialized context of a recon- struction of community bonds destroyed by the military [27], so that the population will be collectively able to strengthen the institutions of civil society.

In May, 1986, Argentine psychoanalysts and other mental health workers joined health professionals from a variety of disciplines from Uruguay, Chile, Bolivia, Brazil, South Africa, France, Denmark, Sweden and the United States in Montevideo, Uruguay, where they met at an International Con- gress to deal with ‘The Consequences of Repression in the Cono Sur: Its Medical, Psychological and Social Effects’. The participants developed analyses of the psychological damage done to their popu- lations and outlined the work that needs to be done to heal the psychological wounds resulting from political repression. Various concrete experiences were shared.

One report from Argentina was presented by the Mental Health Commission of the Permanent Assem- bly for Human Rights (APDH). The commission’s representatives analyzed the psychological responses to the state of terror in Argentina and outlined their conception of prevention. They told of the strategy of selecting target neighborhoods that contained active human rights groups in order to bring the community together to begin a personal and political discourse. Utilizing films to introduce a variety of related themes, they then encouraged public discussion among the participants. The mental health workers, themselves often victims of the same state crimes from which the others in the neighborhood had suffered, viewed their role as facilitator of an horizon- tal and democratized discourse. The initial phase of this kind of exchange involved sharing information, such as the number of persons who had disappeared in the community. about which no one had known. The experiences proved to be rich in that they appeared to be providing the potential to combat individual isolation and denial of a group experience and to reestablish community bonds. As the report stated:

“The Mental Health Team tries to offer an alrernatiue to the conventional way in which mental health has been equated with public assistance and to the traditionally restricted conception of prevention. Rather, we begin with a recon- ceptuahzation of health that obliges us to include the social context in the development of the capacity of human beings for commitment, creativity and solidarity” [28].

Thus socially conscious mental health professionals are committed to the political process that will create the fundamental preconditions for the strengthening of civil society and the maintenance of democratic institutions. They recognize as an important part of this work the need to confront the

psychological impact of authoritarian rule, including the individual and collective right to mourn the violation and the loss suffered during the military’s dirty war. Such is the precondition for the psychological reparation that empowers people to once again become socially and politically engaged. The challenge is great, and only the future will tell if the fragile democracy to which Argentina has returned can be nurtured and invigorated enough to prevent the military from ever again making war on its own citizens.

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19.

REFERENCES

The author is researching the life and work of renowned Austrian-born psychoanalyst. Marie Langer. one of the six founding members of the Argentine Psychoanalytic Association. Much of the material for this article comes from 70 hr of taped interviews with Langer from 1983 to 1987 in Mexico and Managua regarding the history and vicissitudes of the Argentine psychoanalytic movement. Editorial Collective. Repression of scientists in Argentina. Science for the People 9. 13-17, 1971. Robinson P. The Freudian Left. Harper & Row, New York, 1967. Brown B. Marx, Freud and the Crifique of Everyday Life. Monthly Review Press. New York, 1973. Langer M. Psicoanalisis y/o revolution social. In Cuestionamos II (Edited by Langer M. er al.). Granica, Buenos Aires, 1973. Braslavsky M. and Bertoldo C. Apuntes para una historia reciente de1 movimiento psicoanalitico argentino. In Cuesfionamos II (Edited by Langer M. er a/.). Granica. Buenos Aires, 1973. Interview with Eduardo Pavlovsky. Argentine psychoanalyst and playwright, Los Angeles, May 1987. Interview with Ignacio Maldonado, Argentine psychoanalyst, Mexico City, February 1984. Langer M. er al. Cuestionamos I. Granica, Buenos Aires, 1971. Corridi J. Argentina. In Lark America: The Struggle With Dependent! and Beyond (Edited by Chilcote R. and Edelstein J.). Wiley, New York, 1974. See also Corridi J. The Fitfiil Republic: Economy, Society avd Politics in Argentina. Westview Press. Boulder, Cola, 1988 and Garreton M. The failure of dictatorships in

the Southern Cone. Telos 68, 71-78. 1986. Langer M. Vicisitudes del movimiento psicoanalitico argentino. In Razon, Locura _v Sociedad (Edited by Basaglia F. et al.). Siglo Vientiuno. Mexico, 1978. Langer M. el al. Memoria, Hisroria y Dicilogo Psico- analirico. Folios Ediciones. Mexico. 198 I. Bigliani C., Bighani L. and Esmerado Capdouze L. Dependencia y autonomia en la formation psico- analitica. In Cuesrionamos I (Edited by Langer M. er al). Granica, Buenos Aires, 1971. Langer M. er al. Cuestionamos II. Granica, Buenos Aires, 1973. Kesselman H. Plataforma international: psicoanalisis y antiimperialismo. In Cuesfionamos I (Edited by Langer M. ef al.). Granica, Buenos Aires, 1971. Portantiero J. Dominant classes and political crisis. L&n Am. Perspecr. 1, 95-120. 1974. Achard de Demaria L. er al. Crisis social y situacibn analitica. In Cuesrionamos I (Edited by Langer M ef al.). Granica, Buenos Aires, 197 I. Langer M. and Bermann S. Patologia femenina y condiciones de vida. Presented at the FAP Congress, Cordoba, 1973. Langer M. and Siniego A. Psicoanalisis, lucha de clases y salud mental. Mexico, 1975. Unpublished manuscript.


20. interview with Alicia Stolkiner, Argentine Educational Psychologist. Mexico City, February 1984.

2 I, Interview with Leticia Cufre, Argentine Psychologist. Mexico City, February 1984.

22. Simpson J. and Bennett J. The Disappeared and the Mothers of the Plaza. St Martin’s Press, New York, 1985.

23. Corradi J. Terror in Argentina. Telos 54, 61-76, 1982-83.

24. Interview with David Rosenfled, Argentine psychoanalyst who works with torture victims, Los Angeles, Calif.. August 1987.

25. For a brilliant study of psychological denial and the process of coming to consciousness, see the Argentine film The Ojicial Story.

26. Ruderman M. and Veraldi B. Programa de Prmencidn y Asistencia en Salud Mental Para Afectados Directos por la Represidn aAos 1981/1986 Argentina. Centro de Estudios Legales y Sociales, Buenos Aires, 1984.

27. Interview with Hobart Peter, participant in the Mon- tevideo Congress, Los Angeles. Calif., July 1986.

28. Giberti E. Vn Aporte Para la Pretrencidn de la Violacidn de /OS Derechos Humanos. Asamblea Permanente por 10s Derechos Humanos. Buenos Aires. 1986.

hollander, psicoanálisis, represión, argentina

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