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By Ricardo Bernardi
During the last decades there has been in Latin America an increasing interest in research in psychoanalysis and, at the same time, passionate controversies about the validity and usefulness of this kind of research for psychoanalysts. Both the way in which clinicians have become interested in research as well as the objections that have been posed are partly similar to those which took place in other regions but they also present characteristics that respond to the peculiarities of Latin American tradition, which helps to understand the difficulties and crises of the marriage between research and psychoanalysis. Latin American psychoanalysis is increasingly pluralistic regarding its theoretical and technical orientations (Freudian, Kleinian, Freudo-Lacanian, Bionian, Winnicottian, etc.). These diverse approaches coexist in the societies and also in the analysts’ minds, in their implicit theories, and in their operative models. Latin America has always been open to external influences from Europe and North America, and local traditions have been strongly influenced by new ideas coming from overseas. These external influences have sometimes led in the history of psychoanalytic ideas to very marked shifts, some kind of “geological” gaps in the dominant theoretical orientations. The theoretical landscape presented marked changes without a clear discussion of the reasons for it. For example, the hegemonic predominance of Kleinian thought in Argentina and Uruguay before 1970, later gave place to a pluralism with an increasing influence of French thought, and especially Lacanian, in the following years up to today (Bernardi, 2002). The interest in research did not follow this pattern. It has never been a dominant trend; it is shared by analysts with diverse theoretical orientations; and it has been present from the very beginnings of Latin American psychoanalysis. Some pioneers, like José Bleger or David Liberman, have had a keen interest in combining different methodologies to complement classical psychoanalytic inquiry. Liberman started recording patients and analysed the tapes with diverse approaches as early as the 1960s and 1970s. However, this trend did not become widely accepted and in the following decades the mainstream favoured a strongly speculative metapsychological thought. The attempts to complement this kind of thought with empirical research of different kinds were often resisted. These resistances are present in all Latin American region, from Mexico up to Chile. Ramonet, Cuevas, Lartigue, Mendoza and López Garza state that in Mexico, psychoanalysis has on one side to face the scientific community’s claim for a more rigorous proof of its effectivity, and, on the other side, the resistance of the analyst to this kind of empirical studies (Ramonet, S., Cuevas, P., Lartigue, T., Mendoza, J., & López Garza, D., 2005). Sometimes there is an overt aggression towards the ideas that come from the empirical research field, such as the one narrated by Juan Pablo Jiménez in FEPAL Latin American congress, in 1990. When he proposed the complementation of psychoanalytical clinical knowledge with other methodologies and systematic research, he felt surprised by the hostile answer from the audience (Jiménez, J.P., 2008). However, this rejection was not unanimous. Analysts from different parts of Latin America were also interested in the research advances and some societies created research groups. This step towards a wider pluralism, that includes research contributions, was successful in many places and in several psychoanalytical societies there is a sustained interest in discussing diverse kinds of research. The IPA activities during the last decades favourably influenced this direction.
When Horacio Etchegoyen was President, the IPA supported an Argentinian proposal to develop a multicentric study in several countries of Latin America, in order to study process and outcomes of
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