Belinda Mandelbaum, Universidade de São Paulo, psychoanalyst and associate professor at the Social Psychology Department at IPUSP¹.

Stephen Frosh, Department of Psychosocial Studies, Birkbeck, University of London. Professor of Psychosocial Studies at Birkbeck².

Aline Rubin, Universidade de São Paulo, psychologist and Social Psychology PhD Student at the University of São Paulo, with scholarship of Fundação de Amparo à Pesquisa do Estado de São Paulo (FAPESP)³.

Artur Rafael Theodoro, psychologist and Master degree in Science at the University of São Paulo⁴. 

Psychoanalysis originated in Europe at the end of the nineteenth century, but since then has taken root in many countries, with special fertility in Latin America.  In each site, it developed some unique characteristics based on its dialogue with the specific cultures, ideologies, social, political and economic situations it found. This was as true in Brazil as elsewhere, and the particular history of Brazilian psychoanalysis has been the subject of some important research in recent times (Costa, 1989; Mokrejs, 1993; Russo, 2012a,b).

In this paper, we direct attention to the ‘production’ of psychoanalysis in Brazil, by which we mean the nature and quality of psychoanalytic work, represented especially by publications. We are particularly interested in work produced during the civil-military dictatorship that lasted 21 years, from 1964 to 1985. This is because in that period the institutions of psychoanalysis grew and even flourished (Russo, 2012b), yet the atmosphere of oppression and fear was also felt within the psychoanalytic movement (Frosh and Mandelbaum, 2017). A question that arises from this is whether the authoritarianism of the ‘external’ social world at that time was reflected in the work of professional psychoanalysts, and also whether it constrained their creativity in observable ways. Luciano Martins, in his essay “AI-5 Generation” written in 1979, claims that the authoritarian culture in Brazil prevented critical thought but also that analytic therapeutics contributed to numb the conflict between individual and society. In the material that follows, derived from a research project we have been developing since 2013 on Psychoanalysis and Social Context in Brazil⁵, we examine the relations between authoritarianism and psychoanalytical production, especially in a context in which the authoritarian rules that govern a whole national society resonate inside the psychoanalytical institutions. We suggest that in the Brazilian situation this resonance contributed to the psychoanalytic institutions being characterized by constraint, lack of freedom of thought and speech, sterility and even episodes of implicit censorship.  

In the course of our research we carried out interviews with Brazilian psychoanalysts who worked during the dictatorial period in Brazilian psychoanalytical institutions, and with some who received their training abroad and came back to the country during the re-democratization period that started in the 1980s. We have also examined publications in Brazilian psychoanalytic journals, noting especially those where psychoanalysts reflected on Brazilian contributions to the field. This production has longstanding roots in how psychoanalysis has been received in the country since its beginnings, and in the modes of a colonized relation with the hegemonic centres of production of psychoanalysis in the North. Some of these colonized patterns are still present in the ways psychoanalysis is thought about and practiced in Brazil, even though profound changes have occurred since the 1980s, with the process of democratization of the country and dissemination of other, more ‘dissident’ psychoanalytic groups and psychoanalytic studies, especially in academic circles.        

Anthropophagic Origins⁶

At a conference held in 2004 in Rio de Janeiro, under the title “Identifying markers of Latin American Psychoanalysis: uncertainties, complexity and pluralism”, a paper presented by  three psychoanalysts from São Paulo, “Yes, we have bananas!”, subsequently published in the International Journal of Psychoanalysis (Azevedo, Vannucchi and Sandler, 2005), portrayed Latin American psychoanalysis not just as a distinctive brand in the worldwide psychoanalytic scenario, but as claiming equal participation with psychoanalysis elsewhere.  Azevedo et al’s argument was that to attribute “uncertainties, complexity and pluralism” to the psychoanalysis produced in Latin America, as was characteristic of much of the discussion on the topic, is a sign of prejudice that arises from the colonizer-colonized relationship – hence the title of the paper, referring to a stereotype about Brazil dating from the first decades of the Twentieth Century. According to the authors, “uncertainties, complexity and pluralism” are part of all psychoanalysis, not merely the one produced in Latin America.

In the same paper, the authors attribute the fact that the psychoanalysis produced in countries like Brazil is so little known due to the power relations in the worldwide psychoanalytic environment and their impact on publishing criteria. Additionally, they signal the difficulties with language which, particularly in the field of psychoanalysis where nuances of the meaning of words are so important, hamper the possibility of fully conveying what Latin American psychoanalysts do in their clinics. The paper is resonant with complaints about this, almost always accompanied by a sort of implicit conviction that could be translated into something like: “were it not for the language barrier, the world would know my work!” This condition is propitious in stirring up fantasies relating to the “family romance” of each analyst: “if I had been born in another house, in another country, everything would be so different…” 

In Brazil, it was the psychiatrists who initially came into contact with psychoanalysis and brought it into their classes and papers (Russo, 2012a). The early period, from the end of the nineteenth century into the first half of the twentieth, was characterized by considerable migratory flow from Europe and a rupture with traditional local institutions, produced by modernization, industrialization and urbanization processes (Valladares de Oliveira, 2012). The new elites sought their identification models mainly in Europe, and tried to build their national identities based on these. In a process of speedy urbanization, modernity became a type of cultural style that penetrated the fabric of a society which did not resist; on the contrary, it avidly consumed what was produced in the First World, dreaming the modern dreams of cinema and fashion. The conflict and mixtures between the colony and metropolis, between national and foreign, localism and cosmopolitanism, accompanied the history of the country in its five centuries after its ‘discovery’. In the first decades of the Twentieth Century, European immigration created a new demographic base, whilst the idea of periphery persisted (and still persists) in a contradictory way. The introduction of psychoanalysis in Brazil followed this impetus to modernize and develop the country, whether in the field of psychiatry (Russo, 2012a) or culture (Fachinetti, 2003).  

The social and cultural conflicts that arose from the encounter of cosmopolitan cultures with the local traditional ones became the theme in Brazil for the Week of Modern Art in 1922, an event that brought together writers, poets and painters around the debate on Brazilian identity and culture.  In the Anthropophagic Manifesto, written in 1928, Oswald de Andrade, who had been a key player in the Week of 1922, articulated a powerful mimesis: “Tupi or not tupi that is the question.” That is to say, anthropophagy became the emblem for a demand “to swallow” the European cultural legacy and transform it into typically Brazilian art and language; to be nurtured by everything the foreigners brought to Brazil, drain them of all of their ideas and bring them together with Brazilian ones, thus achieving our own cultural production.

It is curious and important for our theme to note that, from the beginning, psychoanalysis was “swallowed” in radically opposed ways by the local elites – but always holding a core position in the construction of Brazilian national identities. On the one hand, psychoanalysis offered a language and the themes for a profound process of renewal in the arts and culture shared by the urban intellectual elites. In the Anthropophagic Manifesto, Oswald de Andrade mentions Freud at least three times, including this belligerent statement: “Against social reality, dressed and oppressive, registered by Freud – a reality without complexes, without madness, without prostitutions and without penitentiaries of the Pindorama matriarchy.” Pindorama (in tupi-guarani pindó-rama or pindó-retama, “land/place/region of palm trees”) is a pre-Cabral name given to the regions which subsequently would make up Brazil. By extending its meaning, it is the indigenous name par excellence of this South American country. We see here a Freud that denounces and reveals the oppressive nature of social reality, with whom Oswald de Andrade joins to exalt the proposal of a world without complexes, without madness, without prostitution and without prisons in Pindorama.

On the other hand, and quite in opposition to this cultural idea of a return to origins, psychoanalysis was appropriated by the local elites – especially by hygienist doctors and psychiatrists – as an instrument capable of offering a route to perfect and enhance the Brazilian race. Russo (2012a) shows that, despite the fact that psychoanalysts on the whole prefer to identify with the revolutionary and transgressive face of psychoanalysis, its ideas were well accepted by the medical and psychiatric establishment, in the project of collaborating scientifically to introduce the Brazilian people to Western civilization. The peculiar pattern of reception of psychoanalysis by Brazilian physicians was greatly shaped by the racial obsessions of the social and intellectual elites in the country. If, during the first decades of the Twentieth Century, one of the main characteristics of the identity myth of the Brazilian people was as a mixture of three races – white, black and indigenous – which granted it elements of an instinctive primitivism and an exacerbated sexuality, for the civilizing and modernizing process to take its course it was necessary to educate the people, discipline it, extirpating the marks of its wild nature. Jurandir Freire Costa writes, in História da psiquiatria no Brasil (1980), that it is in the context of these ideas that the eugenics that characterized Nazi German psychiatry was exalted and appropriated by Brazilian psychiatry in the 1920s and 1930s. Fachinetti (2012, p. 45) says that, “especially from the decade of 1890, the representation of mixture as the local identity mark gained a more pessimistic version, especially because of the degeneration theories.” Therefore, in the beginning of the 20th Century, mainly due to the rapid process of urbanisation that caused the “rise of criminality, corruption, illness and emergence of an urban proletariat of ex-slaves and immigrants, the social and intellectual elites became more pessimistic about the racial problem of Brazil.” Psychoanalysis could contribute to the project of improving this national mixed identity, as it offered explanations that were non-biological, and in this sense, non-determining, for the vicissitudes of sexuality. The idea of sublimation, for example, signalled the possibility that sexual and aggressive impulses could find more noble and elevated destinies than the pure fulfilment in acts, without cultural or moral mediations. It is in this way that psychoanalysis was appropriated, not only by psychiatrists as a modern therapy, an alternative to the traditional biologically-based psychiatry; but also by pedagogues, as a tool for discipline and body control. 

Psychoanalysis participated in a project with a hybrid conception – both Darwinist and Lamarckian – for the enhancement of races, adopted by the Brazilian League of Mental Hygiene in the decades of the 1920s and 1930s. It also participated in the construction of a rational and scientific ideology to explain the ‘backwardness’ of Brazil and its possibilities of development. Psychoanalysis offered a ‘scientific’ discourse that was spread throughout society regarding family standards, the education of children and the relationship between genders; and that operated as a disciplining and guilt giving power. It is worth noting that although psychoanalysis was presented as a new proposal, capable of dealing with all of these issues in a context of apparent rupture with the traditional colonial standards of hierarchy among genders and generations, it only attained the penetration it had because it did not truly break with these standards – on the contrary, it offered them a scientific justification, a sort of new clothing for the old ways of living.

Thus, for example, psychoanalysts reinforced on the radio, in the newspapers and in magazines for women the importance of the mother-child relationship for healthy psychic development, against the unquestioned backdrop of the middle class bourgeois family, with its traditional roles of masculinity, femininity and childhood. For example, at a similar period in which Donald Winnicott was broadcasting advice to mothers in England, the psychoanalyst  Durval Marcondes had a weekly column in a daily mass circulation right-wing newspaper, Folha da manhã, with topics that involved psychoanalysis (in another important newspaper from São Paulo he advised on how women should dress ‘with good taste’ and ‘in order to please men’(1960, p. 48)) ; and Virginia Bicudo, one of the first psychoanalysts in São Paulo, who also worked with Durval Marcondes in the public service for children, had a programme on the radio on family life and education of children.

Brazilian Productions

Although psychoanalysis has had a profound impact in the country since the beginning of the twentieth century in such diverse areas as psychiatry, mental health, education, arts and mass culture, when we interviewed Brazilian psychoanalysts in 2016 and 2017 we were repeatedly told about the lack of a specific Brazilian psychoanalytic production, in the sense of a distinctive Brazilian psychoanalytic ‘voice’ contributing in a significant way to the development of psychoanalytic theory or clinical practice. For instance, psychoanalyst A’ comments:

During a very long time, at least, now not so much, but between the 1950s and the 1970s, analysts practically had no written voice, they had the publications, albeit there being very interesting work, but highly limited and timid, embarrassed, precarious… 

Psychoanalyst B’ has the same perception:

I think there wasn’t a tradition in Brazilian societies as a whole for people to publish papers. I can’t do a sociological examination of that, but I think perhaps people – it was too narcissistic really to expose themselves, there isn’t a tradition as well of paper publishing.

Different explanations for this lack were given by our interviewees. For instance, psychoanalyst C’ recounts his impressions of arriving in Brazil after a long training period abroad, during the 1980s:

I think it was very small, the production. [Psychoanalytic] societies were very closed by then, […] I did not have at that time a good opinion, a good view of the Brazilian production, did not feel that it was original, new, nor well written […] 

I think at the beginning the Brazilians did not have any experience of writing for peer review journals so there was not any kind of criticism, any kind of editorial, intervention, nor editorial dialogue.  So, the papers were […] very disconnected. First of all, it was my first impression. I was used to reading the British production, the International Journal, the French production, which is different, but they have a structure. In the Brazilian ones I did not feel they used to have any structure. 

[By disconnected I mean] you could not link one paragraph to the other, there was not a natural evolution of ideas, after reading the paper you did not know what it was about, what was the main thesis of the author, things of that kind […]  there wasn’t a peer review. 

I think that before [establishing a peer review system in the Brazilian Journal of Psychoanalysis] the criterion was if someone was important or not […] 

Psychoanalyst C’ is referring to closed psychoanalytic societies, where the selection criteria for publishing in their own journals was not the quality of the text, its originality or novelty, but who wrote it. That is, the psychoanalytic society followed, according to the interviewee, a kind of social hierarchization in line with the wider Brazilian society, which defines exclusive places, a kind of ‘who is who’ of Brazilian psychoanalysis, including the privilege of being published, regardless of the quality of the written text. This is how the “disconnected, unstructured” texts were made, especially those which were not submitted to a peer review. If, concerning psychoanalytic practice, as we have reported elsewhere (Frosh and Mandelbaum, 2017), official psychoanalytic societies defended ‘purity’, meaning non-contamination of clinical practice by the external world, the publishing criteria were, in their turn, exterior to psychoanalysis itself. Rather than examining the quality of psychoanalytic thought or practice, the criterion for publication ‘was if someone was important or not.’ 

The views of psychoanalyst C’ regarding the hierarchization of psychoanalysts and the privileges stemming from that – in this case, being published regardless of the quality of the text, which in turn would contribute to reinforce the status of those who are able to get their work published – are related to the observations of psychoanalyst D’ regarding the presence of a strong hierarchy in the relationship between analysts and patients in Brazil. Additionally, D’ makes an explicit connection between the hierarchization of psychoanalysis and the surrounding conditions of authoritarianism in Brazil during the dictatorship. He says:

[…] I think that in Brazil there is a “plus”. It is as if this presupposition that there is a difference in the positions of the analyst and analysand was exaggerated in the Brazilian psychoanalytic tradition, to the level of a caricature.  And I believe that this exaggeration and this caricature are an effect, be it of the conservative political tradition of Brazil, or of the strength this gained during the military dictatorship. […] here in Brazil there are invariant points, connected to this hierarchy that crosses in the IPA psychoanalytic discourses or the Lacanian psychoanalytic discourses. 

That is, according to C’ and D’ and others who communicated similar perceptions, Brazilian psychoanalytic societies were (and possibly still are) characterized by training regimes and professional relations founded in submission and lack of freedom of speech, and this situation was accentuated during the dictatorship, which exaggerated the already-prevailing tendencies to hierarchization in Brazilian society (Ribeiro, 1995; Holanda, 2003). This   could be seen in the relationships between analysts and analysands and also in their teaching spaces and knowledge production; and in the view at least of psychoanalyst D’ it resonated with what happened in the wider social context during the same period. This is confirmed by analyst E’, who arrived from Argentina in the 1970s and narrated what he found in the Sao Paulo psychoanalytic society, affiliated to the IPA:

There was this British fascist behavior towards patients some people had. Some people in the society looked like that horrible British Kleinian fascism, and we were in a different wave. 

The very strong language here, in which the occasional reference to Kleinians as ‘fanatical’ (Etchegoyen, 1987)becomes articulated as “fascism”, indicates strength of feeling and also gestures towards an opposition to the “colonialism” of British school psychoanalysis that supposedly exported attitudes and ideas to be mimicked elsewhere. Interestingly, Rocha Barros (1995) gives a contrary view of the reasons for the muddled or derivative use of Kleinian ideas in Brazil, attributing this to the “consumption” of such ideas without proper attention to their sources and nuances (i.e. anthropophagy), but also stating that, 

By this procedure, local consumer groups become owners of certain psychoanalytic ideas, simplified by the very use to which the ideas have been subjected. These ideas thus serve to institutionalise and legitimate the domination of these local consumer groups, segregating a large part of the psychoanalytic community from access to the more advanced and innovative forms of psychoanalytic thinking. Ideas and theories are likely to become simplifications, used merely as techniques to proclaim superiority and, of course, the segregated sectors tend to treat these ideas as exotic and alien to their environment. (Barros, 1995, p. 838)

The author suggests that a certain simplified reading of some of the ideas and practices of foreign psychoanalytic societies became appropriated by powerful groups within the Brazilian psychoanalytic institutions and were used to preserve status rather than to advance knowledge. This sometimes produced opposition, but mainly subservience and idealization from those groups excluded from power, again to the detriment of the development of a creative and critical psychoanalysis. 

Another striking element in the features of the production that psychoanalyst C’ found on arrival in Brazil is the lack of an editorial dialogue, which suggests that the texts were, according to him, disconnected from any kind of dialogue with other Brazilian texts or authors. Indeed, C’ tells us that Brazilian psychoanalytic societies, when he arrived in the country, were much more connected to the European societies than to one another:

Enormous rivalry between societies, I would say, not only between societies but between states. I think the Sao Paulo Society avoided any link with the Rio de Janeiro Society and vice versa. I think that we were closer to European Societies than to the Rio de Janeiro Society.

Rocha Barros (1995, p. 837) notes the predominance of Kleinian thinking in Brazil [from the 1960s to the 1980s] and comments, “for some Societies, London (represented almost exclusively by the Kleinian group), next to Buenos Aires, has had a central influence in the development of our psychoanalytic thinking.” Similarly, Marina Massi (2007), in her thesis regarding the publications of Paulista psychoanalysts in the Revista Brasileira de Psicanálise between the 1960s and 1970s, observes that 90% of the references were to foreign authors, especially Freud, Klein, Bion and Hanna Segal. The other 10% of references were to a group of preeminent figures of the Sao Paulo Psychoanalytic Society, especially Durval Marcondes, Virginia Bicudo and Luiz Almeida Prado Galvão⁷.

This appreciation is confirmed by the perception of psychoanalyst F’, having arrived in Brazil from Europe in the 1980s:

[…] when I got back to Brazil what struck me was that people did not study together. … Obviously there is no Brazilian school […]There has to be interlocution, I have to be in a discussion with you, you have to discuss my work, I have to discuss yours, there has to be a community of work, and there isn´t one. At times you present some work at the Society, they go there, debate it with you, the discussion is super interesting, pertinent. They leave, go on to carry out similar work, there is not a hint of holding a discussion with you. They base themselves on Fedida, B. Joseph, Roussillon, who is in vogue now, he is from Lyon. When there is a Brazilian production, it is so individualized… This does not happen here, ties at work [Why?] I believe it´s because of poverty or narcissism itself. And envy as well, to take from another and take it for yourself. Eyes are geared to the outside world, towards the large international centres, basically Paris, London…relationships of idealization, Bion, Lacan, languages no one understands. There is no room to think together, to write jointly. 

Towards the end of 1970s, the lack of a national production was spotted in the Revista Brasileira de Psicanálise itself, an official organ of the psychoanalytic institutions affiliated to the IPA. For instance, the psychoanalyst Gecel Szterling, then president of the Sao Paulo Psychoanalytic Society, published a paper arguing that:

The new ideas, the new discoveries have no easy traffic in the discoverer himself, nor among the psychoanalysts to which they are presented: maybe this is one of the factors that hinder our researchers´ motivations to treasure their discoveries and write something about them. (Szterling, 1976, p. 24-25).  

Moreover, in 1984, the editorial of the same journal, written by Ana Maria Azevedo and entitled “The crisis”, exposed the same lack of publications of scientific papers, which could have been caused, according to the text, by “restrictions, fears, particular objections, or even disinterest from the members” (Azevedo, 1984, p.5). The author makes a special call for the participation of colleagues, “so that the RBP can continue existing, contributing in an effective way to the exchange of ideas, really representing the lively and contemporary state of psychoanalysis in Brazil” (Azevedo, 1984, p. 6). Heitor Bandeira de Paola (1984, p. 265), in the same volume, states that in Brazilian societies the priority has been to train clinical analysts and that being “eager for new knowledge, without an adequate native response, brings us to repeat the model of ‘import of technology’”. 

Paola also criticizes the adoption of a nationalist posture, such as the support of “carioca psychoanalysis” or “Brazilian”, similarly to the argument proposed by Azevedo et al (2012). However, he resents the lack of appreciation of national thinkers, “which never counted with crowded audiences and high prices as overseas visitors” (Paola, 1984, p. 265).

However, in the same edition of Revista, Doin (1984) raises the question of ‘why so many write so little’ and claims there existed a deficit of scientific skills in the society, which erroneously was misunderstood by an idea that only “a good personal analysis would make us think efficiently in terms of science” (Doin, 1984, p. 10). Even though Doin (1984) seemed to agree that aspects of the psychoanalysts’ life could affect scientific production, he says not to believe in a direct correlation between personal analysis and scientific proficiency. To solve this problem, he suggests pragmatic measures such as offering courses about epistemology and scientific method, the creation of a commission about scientific writing, developing knowledge of the English language and assuring a safe and pleasant place for public presentation of works. 

In an earlier paper in which psychoanalysts from the Sao Paulo Psychoanalytic Society discussed the theme of generational conflict in society but also in the psychoanalytic institution, they put forward the idea that a primary functioning of mind affects the psychoanalytic production. In their argument, archaic conflicts of rivalry experienced within the family group are replicated in psychoanalytic institutions, blocking the emergence of new ideas and the progress of psychoanalysis. 

The persecutory anxiety can become so intense that it blocks the creative capacity. It delays the presentation of works, it slows the capacity of elaboration, its own ideas are devalued and it ends up focusing on theoretical models of known theories (…) specially by big masters, as children taken by castration phantasies and idealisation. (Szterling et al, 1973, p. 332)

In so far as this psychoanalytic reading of this situation is not necessarily wrong, it also does not point to the possible rationality of the psychoanalytic institution as a potential place for these archaic oedipal conflicts to be reedited or a place where persecutory anxiety might be exacerbated. Nonetheless, it helpfully reveals some of the elements of the psychoanalysts’ own reading of their difficulties at the time.

On the other hand, the opening to the exterior, according to the model of “import of technology”, was quite wide. Many of our interviewees treasured the openness of Brazilian psychoanalytic institutions (especially those of the less ‘official’ psychoanalytic ‘Circles’ in Rio de Janeiro and Minas Gerais) to diverse traditions and authors, albeit always foreign ones: the English, the French, Argentinians, and some Americans here and there. This is seen by them as a favourable feature of Brazilian psychoanalysis – this openness to everything that comes from outside, always facilitated by the proficiency with foreign languages of the local elites, to which most of the psychoanalysts belong. According to many interviewees, this marks a certain syncretism that had become characteristic of Brazilian psychoanalysis. Psychoanalyst C’ says that:

I think that the Brazilians at that time, even at that time, were open to the production not only from British psychoanalysis but also from French psychoanalysis, they were open to many different views in psychoanalysis, even in terms of general culture, in terms of novels that have been read by the Brazilians, they had an experience of a very wide range of authors. There was not, I think, prejudice in Brazil against different languages, different nationalities, different styles, so there was an openness, I think, in terms of knowledge of different productions, I would say. 

Psychoanalyst G’, who trained in Sao Paulo, proposes a model of religious syncretism to understand the training of Brazilian psychoanalysts:

We, Latin Americans, work with religious syncretism, this at a time in which this was seen as jumble, a mishmash, in the theoretical rigor of a school. But simultaneously in Brazil it is common for people to be able to read in English, French and Spanish. The French until a short time ago did not read English, the English did not read French, they were closed inside their own nutshells. Could it be that syncretism also has value? 

Psychoanalyst A’ suggests that the Portuguese language is very susceptible to terms imported from other languages, and reflects upon how this shaped the psychoanalysis spoken in Brazil:

[…] we are a language that is not very cultured when compared to Italian, German or French languages, albeit having a great tradition, because the countries which speak [Portuguese] have not had hegemonic positions in the cultural world for more than three centuries or even four centuries (we had the Sixteenth Century). Therefore, it is a language which easily applies to the idea of colonization; it is colonized, in a way that gets to be transfigured. We read the translation, essays written by colleagues in Portuguese that seem to be French, albeit the rhythm, the terms used, when it comes to the influence, they are French. Or then English. Work with incontestable content. I am not referring to this, that you read in the journals, and that announces their affiliation not only to authors, Klein, but to the English language culture, a form of English language. … During a long time at the society, as it is still very common nowadays, people used to say “you did not realize this concept very well”, “that is psychoanalysis which is not real”, it is the English “real”, it is not our “real”. Or then when we translate “instinct” for “pulsão”, I know that is controversial, but although it has now been included in the dictionary, it is not in our language. Impulse yes, instinct yes. 

Every language assimilates terms from other languages, but it seems that psychoanalyst A’ talks about the tendency, characteristic of the Brazilian psychoanalytic scene, not only to import technology, but to speak English or French in Portuguese, to affiliate to a foreign culture, abandoning thus its own vocabulary. Using a metaphor from religion to talk about the assemblage of a Brazilian psychoanalytic identity, psychoanalyst H’ reminds us of the first bishop of Brazil, dom Pero Fernandes Sardinha, who arrived in Salvador from Portugal in 1551. His trajectory was marked in Brazilian history for his being, according to some controversial accounts, devoured by Caeté natives, in an anthropophagic ritual at the shore of the Brazilian northeast, in 1556. Anthropophagy was the practice, performed by some native tribes, to eat prisoners who were captured during wars.