Just Dreams

In the violent 1970s and '80s of Cold War Argentina, the fields of psychoanalysis, psychology, and psychiatry became deeply entangled with conflicting visions of the nation’s future. Using previously unexplored archives of practitioner-activists, Marco Antonio Ramos argues that the last dictatorship in Argentina (1976-83) disappeared revolutionary dreams from the psy-professions. In place of this anti-capitalist imagination, human rights emerged at the turn of the 1980s as a platform for providing new forms of legal justice and mental health care to victims of state violence. However, this newfound human rights activism did not challenge, and ultimately reinforced, the capitalist system that is the enduring legacy of authoritarianism in the region.

Ramos offers readers an effort to reckon with the political limits and possibilities of the psy-professions in the wake of the violent Latin American Cold War. He not only provides an understanding of how fascist terror disappeared revolutionary dreams from the professional mainstream in the 1970s but also uses history to revive a clinical imagination that connected the project of the self to the construction of a better world.