Psychoanalysis and Politics is the collective work of an international group of scholars who are all interested in the transnational dimension of psychoanalysis. Joy Damousi and Mariano Ben Plotkin coordinated the group, and they also edited this collection. The essays in Psychoanalysis and Politics developed from a desire to analyze the possibilities for the practice of psychoanalysis under conditions of political authoritarianism and restricted political freedom in Europe and the Americas in the twentieth Century. In doing this, the repressive and emancipatory political possibilities of psyc ... More

Psychoanalysis and Politics is the collective work of an international group of scholars who are all interested in the transnational dimension of psychoanalysis. Joy Damousi and Mariano Ben Plotkin coordinated the group, and they also edited this collection. The essays in Psychoanalysis and Politics developed from a desire to analyze the possibilities for the practice of psychoanalysis under conditions of political authoritarianism and restricted political freedom in Europe and the Americas in the twentieth Century. In doing this, the repressive and emancipatory political possibilities of psychoanalysis are explored in different political, cultural, and historical locations. The book is arranged into three parts, each of them preceded by short introductions and titled: Europe, Latin America, and the United States. Part I––Europe contains chapters on Fascist Italy (Mauro Pasqualini), occupied and Vichy France (Annick Ohayon), Spain (Anne-Cécile Druet), and Hungary under Fascism and Communism (Judit Mészáros). Part II––Latin America focuses on Argentina and Brazil and contains chapters examining Brazil during the Vargas Regime (C. Lucia M. Valladares de Oliveira), Argentina under Peronism (Alejandro Dagfal), the Brazilian dictatorship of the 1960s and 1970s (Jane A. Russo), and the Argentinean military dictatorships of the 1960s and 1970s (Mariano Ben Plotkin). Part III––Psychoanalysis in the United States during the Cold War and 1960s contains chapters on the fate of psychoanalysts during the times of Hoover and McCarthy (Elizabeth Ann Danto) and on psychoanalysis and different forms of cultural authoritarianism in the 1960s and 1970s (Eli Zaretsky).