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It is important to understand how three registers - the psychological, the political and the ideological - converge to frame unconscious life in ways that either inhibit or facilitate individual and group capacities to exercise free speech and free association. Here a model for assessing how these registers of human affect and behavior either facilitate these freedoms of expression or sabotage them in favor of submission to authority is suggested. The discussion is positioned in the context of two traumatic periods in Argentine history, namely the military dictatorship's Dirty War (1976-1983) and the country's complete economic collapse in 2001. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article deals with the emergence of psychoanalysis in Buenos Aires, Argentina. During the Spanish colonial period, Buenos Aires emerged as Latin America's most cosmopolitan capital dominated by the representatives of the country's oligarchy. By the turn of the twentieth century, most of the city's inhabitants were foreign-born. Its culture was textured by the immigrant experience. But a military coup in 1930 has made the politics in the presidential palace a blend of fascistic and anti-Semitic ideas. This forced the Argentine culture to adjust to the abrupt halt in the immense flow of immigration and foreign capital. Psychoanalysis made its appearance in Buenos Aires during these times. There had been an interest in psychology and psychoanalysis among social scientists and philosophers since the turn of the century, especially from 1923 on following the translation into Spanish of the complete works of Freud.