Why is psychoanalysis so popular in Argentina?
It may not be in exactly the way you’re thinking, but Argentina has been described as a lonely place.
Anecdotal answer: when I was a kid, in the 60s and 70s, it wasn’t nearly as popular. It was something you wouldn’t tell anyone; something to be ashamed of. If you went to a shrink, that meant you were crazy. Then some major public figures admitted to seeking shrinks. As-far-as I know, the first was Woody Allen. More so than now, Allen was, back then, really cool to the intellectual crowd. So if HE did it — and even boasted/joked about it — it stopped being a bad thing. Amongst certain “New York” types, being neurotic is a badge of honor. Again, I trace this back to Allen. It really stems from a whole tradition of ethnic humor, but Allen made it popular. Maybe via the normal process of middle-class people (and then working-class people) trying to mimic the upper classes (or maybe due to some other process), the shame factor gradually fell away from therapy altogether. Now therapists are a dime-a-dozen. They’re all over daytime TV. So the process by which therapy became popular as as s
I do not know if it is popular but assuming it is I would guess much of it might be attributed to the following factors:’ 1) A medical reimbursement system that is different then ours. i.e., one where the patient does not have as much personal financial exposure–In contemporary American Healthcare only the lower upper class or upper class could realistically afford traditional psychoanalysis 2) Whether one likes it or not American professional schools and universities/colleges( in general) are the best in the world and psychoanalysis has not been considered or taught as a credible psychotherapeutic strategy since the mid sixties–I would guess, given the European influence in Argentina and their University systems that curriculum and Best Practices are a bit behind . 3) In a similar vein psychoanalysis, by any objective measure, is a very poor substitute(if a substitute at all) for cognitive behavioral techniques and/or state of the art medication. I am not sure how available those ar
I know that there’s a large community of Lacanian analysts in Argentina (as there are in most parts of the world outside of the US-about half of all analysts the world were trained as Lacanian). I don’t know that this is the reason, but Lacanian analysis can be very different from the American version of Ego Psychology: it tends to be looser in terms of time, faster, and more focused on self-exploration rather than cure. That said, rmhsinc is wrong about the efficacy of psychoanalysis as cure: all psychotherapies are about the same as all others in terms of effectiveness, CBT is no better than psychoanalysis is no better than EMDR is no better than medications. This has been conclusively demonstrated by meta-analysis, along with the overall general efficacy of psychotherapy (the effect size is .8!). [See Wampold, The Great Psychotherapy Debate] CBT is certainly quicker, but there may be some cultural issues at play that make speed less of a sought after ingredient of treatment.
