ABSTRACT
This Introduction delineates the conditions of emergence of this project upon the perplexity caused by some unexpected preliminary results of our own research on therapeutic resources in Buenos Aires, Argentina. The surprising results prompted us to broaden the scope of our original project, extending it to the city of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. The Introduction discusses certain important aspects of the national narratives constructed in Argentina and Brazil, as well as some of the similarities and differences between the two cities where we carried out our analysis. It also introduces some fundamental topics that are discussed in more depth in chapter 1, such as the limits of the concept of “therapeutic culture” as it usually appears in current literature.
