ABSTRACT
When in 1938 Sigmund Freud was forced to leave his native Austria at short notice, he was allowed to take his personal library, among which one found a relatively large number written by Latin American collaborators and correspondents. Several were in Portuguese, a language that, unlike Spanish, he could hardly read. This little-known fact suggests that the process of reception of his ideas in Latin America was important for Freud. Moreover, recent research has unearthed several letters that Freud exchanged with Latin American doctors and intellectuals, like Peruvian psychiatrist Honorio Delgado, with whom Freud maintained a correspondence and a personal friendship for almost two decades. In 1926, Delgado published one of the earliest biographies of Freud ever written, and Freud himself commented on this book, even correcting factual mistakes. Freud, a prolific letter writer, wrote over 30,000 pieces of correspondence altogether. However, most of the correspondence with Latin Americans has been ignored. By focusing on the epistolary relationship that Freud established with Latin Americans, as well as on the books he took with him to his exile in London, this chapter offers an original contribution to the study of the early impact of psychoanalysis in Latin America. It sheds light, not only on the early reception and circulation of psychoanalytic ideas in the region but also on the idea of Latin America that Freud constructed for himself.
