Psychoanalysis and Dictatorship in Chile: A Non-Existing Relationship

Abstract

This paper offers a critique of the Chilean Psychoanalytic Association (an affiliate of the International Psychoanalytic Association)¹ from 1973 to the Chilean democratic transition in 1990. During the period under examination, this group struck a moral, political, theoretical, and clinical stance, which entirely disavowed the context of the violent military dictatorship in which it existed and practiced appearing to be “saving” or “protecting” the purity of psychoanalytic thought from the intrusion of environmental factors. To demonstrate this disengagement I present the story of a member of the society who was detained and then disappeared in 1976, an event that went institutionally unnoticed and unprocessed among its members. Despite the fact that alternate strategies for facing and managing the traumatic effects of the oppressive regime were being developed by other agencies, only a small group of analysts ever supervised psychotherapists working with human rights violation victims or were willing to take seriously the effect this had on patients and on society as a whole.

Notes

¹ By psychoanalytic institution, I am referring to the Chilean Psychoanalytic Association and its teaching Institution, which is a constituent part of the Association. In Chile in the years I am referring to, it was the only formal psychoanalytic institution. After dictatorship ended, several other institutions developed.

² The ILAS is a nongovernmental organization, created in 1988, by a group of psychologists and psychiatrists for the purpose of providing psychotherapeutic attention to victims of political repression during the military dictatorship in Chile (1973–1990) and to investigate the relationship between mental health and human rights.

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Notes on contributors

Carla Fischer Canessa

Carla Fischer Canessa, M.D., is a Psychiatrist from the University of Chile. She received her psychoanalytic training at the IPA-affiliated Chilean Psychoanalytic Institute and became a psychoanalyst. She is affiliated with the IPA and IARPP. She is a teaching fellow of the Magister of Trauma and relational psychoanalysis in the Universidad Alberto Hurtado in Santiago, Chile. She works as a psychotherapist in the Ilas network (Instituto Latinoamericano de Salud Mental y Derechos Humanos). She has a private practice in Santiago, Chile.