Psychoanalysis and Dictatorship in Chile: A Non-Existing Relationship

This paper offers a critique of the Chilean Psychoanalytic Association (an affiliate of the International Psychoanalytic Association)¹ from 1973 to the Chilean democratic transition in 1990. During the period under examination, this group struck a moral, political, theoretical, and clinical stance, which entirely disavowed the context of the violent military dictatorship in which it existed and practiced appearing to be “saving” or “protecting” the purity of psychoanalytic thought from the intrusion of environmental factors. To demonstrate this disengagement I present the story of a member of the society who was detained and then disappeared in 1976, an event that went institutionally unnoticed and unprocessed among its members. Despite the fact that alternate strategies for facing and managing the traumatic effects of the oppressive regime were being developed by other agencies, only a small group of analysts ever supervised psychotherapists working with human rights violation victims or were willing to take seriously the effect this had on patients and on society as a whole.