Woke Science: Psychoanalysis and Revolutionary Awakening in Cold War Argentina

Event Description:
In the 1970s, a young generation of psychoanalysts in Argentina attempted to forge a “new science” that would liberate the oppressed classes in Latin America. These practitioners connected political revolution to psychological liberation and imagined mental health as a site where broader visions of justice, from Marxist revolution to decolonization, could be transformed through experiences of care, intimacy, and love. However, their diverse dreams of a more just science were crushed by the rise of the violent dictatorship of General Jorge Videla in 1976. With support from the United States, Videla’s regime “disappeared” citizens through imprisonment, torture, and murder to stem the tide of Communism. Military officials labeled Freud and Marx “ideological criminals,” and activist-practitioners were murdered, forced into exile, or driven to abandon their revolutionary politics out of fear. This talk resurrects these visions of justice from the terror that attempted to erase them from history. In contrast to structuralist approaches to Freudo-Marxism that emerged in Europe at the time, militant psychoanalysts in Argentina developed a humanist attention to the emotions and embodied experiences of the revolutionary subject. A central concern of their work was an attempt to study and harness the phenomenological power of “political awakening,” which they witnessed through the psychoanalytic care of leftist guerrilla fighters in the clinic. Marco Ramos compares their preparatory vision of a science oriented toward future revolution to the reparatory understanding of human rights that would come to dominate the field of mental health following the trauma of the Latin American Cold War. The talk concludes with a discussion on the possibilities and limits of “awakening” as a platform for structural change.
 
Event Speaker:
Marco Ramos, Assistant Professor in History of Science and Medicine at Yale University
 
Event Information
This event is free and open to the public; Registration required. Please contact scienceandsociety@columbia.edu or historyofscience@nyu.edu with any questions. 
 
This event is part of the New York History of Science Lecture Series.
 
Sponsoring Organizations:
 
Columbia University in the City of New York
NYU Gallatin School of Individualized Study
The Graduate Center, City University of New York
The New York Academy of Medicine
The New York Academy of Sciences
 
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