The Corner Society- Woke Science: Psychoanalysis and Revolutionary Awakening in Cold War Argentina

Marco Ramos, MD, PhD Assistant Professor in the History of Medicine and Department of Psychiatry at Yale University

Woke Science: Psychoanalysis and Revolutionary Awakening in Cold War Argentina 

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 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. 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 harness the phenomenological power of “political awakening,” which they witnessed through the psychoanalytic care of leftist guerrilla fighters in the clinic. I conclude by comparing 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. 

Marco Ramos, MD PhD, is Assistant Professor in the History of Medicine and Department of Psychiatry at Yale University. His research and teaching focus on the history of mental health, with an emphasis on health activism and the history of drugs in Latin America. He is currently writing a book on Cold War violence and health justice in Argentina and is also starting a new project on the history of psychedelics, especially ayahuasca, in the Amazon. His writing has appeared in clinical, academic, and popular journals, including The American Historical Review, Bulletin of the History of Medicine, the New England Journal of Medicine, JAMA, and the Boston Review. His teaching brings a critical historical perspective to anti-racism interventions in science, medicine, and public health.