Brazil: Mental Health in Social Distress? The Dialectic Between Inner Psychic and External Social Reality

Abstract

Kemper J. Brazil: Mental Health in Social Distress? The Dialectic Between Inner Psychic and External Social Reality. Int Forum Psychoanal 1992;1:129-134. Stockholm. ISSN 0803-706

On hand of Brazil's socio-economic and political environment the author focuses on the necessary interrelationship and interdependence between external social and internal psychic reality. He illustrates how the social order affects the practice of psychoanalysis limiting its efficacity and social scope. Although socially revolutionary in the invididual case psychoanalysis is restricted to a small elite in Brazil and elsewhere and can only become accessible to the man in the street if a more favourable socio-economic environment is created which will allow him to integrate the language of psychoanalysis into his existential horizon. The best prospects for social transformation and change lie in an active political engagement in the social process outside of the clinical setting of our private psychoanalytical practice.