LONDON.- With the name of Freud and Latin Americathe London museum dedicated to the father of psychoanalysis opened on Wednesday an exhibition about the great echo of the Austrian neurologist’s ideas in a region he never visited.
“During the last decades, Latin America was widely accepted as the center of psychoanalysis in the world. We wanted to discover the first stories between the region and Freud,” the exhibition’s curator, Jamie Ruers, explains to AFP.
“There is a higher proportion of psychoanalysts in Latin America than in Europe,” adds Ruers, who also highlights that “one of the highest groups of visitors to the museum comes from Latin America, especially Argentina and Brazil.”
The Freud Museum, in the London neighborhood of Hampstead, was the home of the neurologist and his family since they escaped the Nazi annexation of Austria in 1938 and his youngest daughter Anna, also a prominent psychoanalyst, lived there until 1982.
The exhibition, which can be seen until July 14, shows personal letters, photographs, books, sculptures and objects from Freud’s antique collection, all from Latin America.
“Many of these pieces were sent to Freud by admirers and followers,” explains the curator of the exhibition.
Buenos Aires, reference
The exhibition highlights that: “Buenos Aires has the highest number of psychoanalysts per capita in the world.”
“In Argentina it entered easier than in other European countries because there was no established psychiatric and psychological tradition, so it was much more permeable to any idea that came from outside,” Argentine Mariano Ben Plotkin, author with the Chilean Mariano Ruperthuz Book Honoree Dear Dr. Freud.
Both have collaborated in advising the museum for the exhibition and are present in London.
In the opinion of Ben Plotkin: “a process of modernization was taking place in Latin American society, so in the urban sectors there was a great receptivity to anything that came from Europe.”
For the author of the book, there was a cultural syncretism: “which allowed things to be put together that other European countries would not have been able to put together. Freud allowed combinations that in Europe would have been unacceptable.”
“In psychoanalysis there was the convergence of a very modern medical methodology with ancient obsessions, such as the topic of dreams. Suddenly there was a scientific technique that allowed us to talk about them, about things from popular culture from a modern scientific discourse,” considered Ben Plotkin.
For his Chilean colleague Ruperthuz, from the 1970s onwards, psychoanalysis became part of daily life in Latin America. “It’s a cultural issue.”
In the exhibition you can hear some excerpts from old Brazilian radio programs about dreams, magazines from Mexico and Argentina from the 1950s and 1960s, showing how psychoanalysis was brought to the masses, according to Ruers.
Photos, letters and books
The exhibition shows a series of photos by the German-Argentine Grete Stern, titled dreams, made for a Buenos Aires women’s magazine, from 1948 to 1951, which went to a column entitled Psychoanalysis will help you.
“Freud never traveled to Latin America, although he wrote many letters and received Latin American visitors in Vienna and London,” notes Ruers.
Among the examples of the expansion of psychoanalysis in Latin America, the exhibition tells how the black Brazilian doctor Juliano Moreira, son of slaves, collected Freud’s ideas and circulated them throughout Brazil.
Freud’s enthusiasm for Latin America continued with the writing of a book in 1884 on the use of cocaine, in which he analyzed the uses of the coca plant in Bolivia and Peru.
In the 1920s, Freud established a close relationship with the Peruvian psychiatrist Honorio Delgado, whom he described as his first foreign friend, exchanging letters, books and gifts over the following decades, which can be seen in the exhibition.
When Freud moved to London he was able to bring 34 of his 62 Latin American books, many of which had dedications from their authors, which can also be seen in the exhibition.
Source: AFP
