Psychoanalysis and Brazil: Colonialism and Creativity

11 Mar 2024 6.30-8.30pm

Overview

In-house talk and Q&A with Belinda Mandelbaum and Stephen Frosh, chaired by Jamie Ruers 

As part of our Freud and Latin America exhibition programme, Belinda Mandelbaum and Stephen Frosh will discuss themes of colonialism and creativity in relation to psychoanalysis in Brazil. Drawing on work that comes out of their co-edited volume (with Rafael Alves Lima) Brazilian Psychosocial Histories of Psychoanalysis (Palgrave, 2021), Mandelbaum and Frosh will look to unpack the often-troubling histories of Brazilian psychoanalysis.

Questions around the complicity of the psychoanalytic institutions with the civil-military dictatorship, the ‘anthropophagy’ (swallowing) of ‘European’ theoretical constructs, and a tendency to reproduce hierarchical systems of control during the dictatorship years, will be analysed alongside other more progressive psychoanalytic narratives that tell a story of the emergence of possibilities for creative expressions of freedom.

By focussing on the place and function of psychoanalysis in Brazil, it becomes apparent how, in the words of this evening’s speakers, psychoanalysis as a discipline is susceptible, ‘to restrictions and/or opportunities allowed by the political contexts in which it develops’.

This discussion will be chaired by the curator of the Freud and Latin America exhibition, Jamie Ruers.

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