ABSTRACT
Whenever the author talks about her experience of conducting psychoanalytic cures with poor Puerto Ricans and other Latinos, she triggers doubt as if the idea of working psychoanalytically with minority, people of color, had to be dismissed, as if, in other words, poor people could not afford to have an unconscious. Several clinical vignettes are deployed to show how psychoanalysis is not only possible but much needed in the barrio. What is important is the link between the history of the coining of the “Puerto Rican syndrome” and a relatively unknown incident of insubordination of Puerto Rican soldiers during the Korean War. The syndrome was born both as the consequence of an impossible colonial situation and as the historical return of Freud’s most canonical modalities of hysteria. Psychoanalytic practice is not immune to the effects of history, and this history is not only made by men and women, but also by their unconscious enjoyment. Lacan referred as much to Marx as to Freud to define a theory of unconscious enjoyment, here brought to bear on a number of recent case studies in the Philadelphia barrio. In that context, Gherovici contends that one can intervene clinically as a psychoanalyst effectively by avoiding the narcissistic traps of altruism. There are currently two wrong attitudes being adopted that are linked: (1) the exclusion of poor people from the reach of psychoanalysis and (2) considering them as underdeveloped and only as objects of charitable activities, which has the result of infantilizing them. By reintroducing a minimal form of payment, one can reinstate the analysands’ agency. In the end, the author illustrates the usefulness, pertinence, and emancipatory potential of psychoanalysis with barrio populations.
