ABSTRACT
A recent experience can set the scene for my exploration of this history. It is October 16, 2011, and I am back once more in Buenos Aires, which feels like home to me because of the central role it has played since the
late 1960s in my personal, professional and political life. It is a balmy spring evening, and a group of psychoanalysts I have known for years has gathered in a colleague’s home to share a meal and enthusiastic discussion about the psychosocial meanings of the uprisings of the millions of people, from Tunisia to New York, who are protesting the disastrous impact on their lives of corporate globalization. These Argentine psychoanalysts have a long history of progressive political activism that has taken them out of their consultation rooms to offer their psychological services to diverse populations in nontraditional settings and circumstances. They are eager to hear my report from the United States (US) because I have just arrived from participating in the inaugural Washington DC Occupy events. My videos vividly depict the excitement of the thousands who arrived in the US capital from everywhere in the country to take part in the innovative democratic general assemblies and colorful demonstrations that protest the many manifestations of the unjust and inequitable structures of US capitalism (Blumenkranz et al., 2011; Gitlin, 2012). My Argentine colleagues are intrigued and express their relief at witnessing evidence of consciousness among the popular classes in this country about the nature of the systemic sources of the escalating immiseration throughout the world, whose impact now extends to citizens within the heart of Empire itself. I am excited, after years of having lived with my Argentine colleagues through their country’s tumultuous history, to demonstrate that more people in the US are understanding, and protesting against, some of the same exploitative political and economic forces that Latin Americans have militantly struggled against for decades. And I am glad to convey to my Argentine friends, in response to their queries, that a network of psychoanalysts within this country identifies with the concerns of the Occupy movement and are increasingly effective in creating a presence within the profession for a dialogue about the relationship between social and psychological pathology, intrapsychic and class conflict and models for reparative action (Layton, Hollander and Gutwill, 2006; Harris and Botticelli, 2010).
