Brazil
Psychoanalysis aroused strong resistance when it first appeared in Brazil, provoking different reactions in different milieux. Salvador-born Julian Moreira (1873-1933) was the first to speak of Freud, in 1899. In 1903 he was appointed director of the national hospital for the insane in Rio de Janeiro, where he settled for the rest of his life. An innovative psychiatrist with an international reputation, he invited his disciples and collaborators to study psychoanalytic ideas. In 1914 Jenserico Aragão de Souza Pinto published "On Psychoanalysis. Sexuality in the Neuroses." Two conferences in 1919 awoke the interest of future psychoanalysts: Franco da Rocha's "On delusion in general" (at São Paulo) and "Psychology of a neurologist—Freud and his sexual theories" by Medeiros e Albuquerque in Rio de Janeiro.
In the 1920s, physicians in São Paulo and Rio sometimes criticized psychoanalysis in a Manichean fashion: on the one hand it was labeled charlatanesque while being enthusiastically hailed on the other. It must also be said that psychoanalytic ideas arrived at a time of great effervescence that saw the publication of "modernist" literary reviews and the Semana de Arte Moderna in 1922. Influenced by the European avant-garde, this atmosphere facilitated the acceptance of psychoanalytic ideas in São Paulo.
It was there that Durval Marcondes published several articles and Osorio Cesar wrote about the artistic productions of the mentally ill. Among Juliano Moreira's disciples in Rio, Antonio Austregesilo produced somewhat superficial work but others, such as Neves Manta, Carneiro Ayrosa, and Murilo de Campos, were doing more important work, and Deodato de Morais was busy producing his excellent book A psicanálise na Educacao (1927), while J. P. Porto-Carrero continued to work on many books and articles.
Again in Rio but outside Moreira's entourage, Henrique Roxo was quoting Freud as early as 1905 but he proved to be very organicistic in his views. During the 1930s Aloysio de Paula wrote on applied psychoanalysis and Gastão Pereira da Silva, a physician and journalist, contributed to propagating psychoanalytic ideas. Mauricio de Medeiros, who occupied the chair of psychiatry in the 1950s institution, supported the psychoanalytic approach.
Although born at Alagoas, Arthur Ramos, physician and psychiatrist, was considered to be a citizen of Bahia. His thesis Primitivo e locura (1925) was widely commented on and, between 1930 and 1932, he studied Freud's work with a small group. He settled in Rio in 1934. A professor of anthropology and ethnography, he became a renowned specialist on Africa and wrote some psychoanalytic works. At Porto Alegre in 1924, João Cesar de Castro wrote Concepcao Freudiana das Psiconeuroses and in France Martim Gomes published Les Rêves (1928). Ulisses Pernambucan came under the influence of Juliano Moreira while studying medicine in Rio. He went on to become a pioneer of social psychiatry in Brazil and considered psychoanalysis as the subtlest means of penetrating the human mind.
In 1927 Marcondes founded the first Sociedade brasiliera de psicanálise in São Paulo. Although it had no training section it was nevertheless recognized by the International Psychoanalytic Association with a view to propagating Freud's ideas. In 1928 Marcondes gave his blessing to the setting up of a subsidiary branch in Rio (V. Rocha, Marcondes, and Porto-Carrero).
Thanks to Marcondes's persistent pressure on Ernest Jones, the Jewish German psychoanalyst Adelheid L. Koch, who had been analyzed by Otto Fenichel, emigrated to São Paulo with her husband in 1936, and in 1937 began to analyze Durval Marcondes, Darcy Mendonça Uchôa, Virginia Bicudo, Flavio Dias, and Frank Philips, soon to be joined by three more patients. Because she was the only qualified analyst, she singlehandedly conducted analyses, gave seminars and acted as supervisor. The first São Paulo Grupo psicanalítico, which she founded in 1944 with her first analysands, was provisionally accepted in 1945 as the Sociedade brasileira de psicanálise de São Paulo (SBPSP). It received definitive recognition at the Amsterdam Congress (1951).
The early days in Rio de Janeiro were not so easy. Dissatisfied with the official teaching of psychiatry, a group of young physicians founded the Centro de estudos Julian Moreira in 1944 and envisaged two possible hypotheses for the formation of a future psychoanalytic group: either to invite training analysts or seek training elsewhere. Intense correspondence with foreign analysts bore no fruit. Thus, from 1945 to 1947, Alcyon Baer Bahia, Danilo Perestrello, Marialzira Perestrello, and Walderedo Ismael de Oliveira began training at the Asociación Psicoanalítica Argentina (APA) with analysts who had qualified in Berlin, Paris, Vienna, and Buenos Aires.
In 1947 the Instituto brasileiro de psicanálise was founded in Rio in order to facilitate the legal arrival of foreign analysts. Mark Burke, analyzed by James Strachey and a member of the British Psycho-Analytic Society (BPS), arrived in February 1948. He was followed in December 1948 by Werner Kemper, a German psychoanalyst analyzed by Carl MüllerBraunschweig and who had worked during World War II in the Göring Institute before joining the DPG (Deutsche Psycoanalytische Gesellschaft). They both commenced training analyses almost immediately. In the beginning Burke and Kemper worked in collaboration with each other but in 1951 they separated amidst serious mutual reproaches. Kemper was expelled from the institute and, along with his analysands, founded the Centro de estudos psicanalíticos.
The four physicians who had gone to Buenos Aires returned between 1949 and 1950, both Perestrello and Walderedo having become associate members of the APA. Three groups were then formed: "the Argentineans," Burke's group, and Kemper's group. The "Argentine" group formed no alliances with either of the other two. When Burke suddenly left Brazil before his group had completed their training, three of his students left for London and the others completed their supervisions at São Paulo.
During the 1953 international conference in London, Kemper's group was recognized as a study group under the sponsorship of the SBPSP, and as the Sociedade psicanalítica do Rio de Janeiro (SPRJ) at the 1955 international conference in Geneva. Its founders included seven full members (Werner Kemper, Kattrin Kemper, Fabio Leite Lobo, Gerson Borsoi, Inaura Carneiro Leão Vetter, Luiz Guimarães Dahlheim, Noemy Rudolfer) and four associate members.
Three Brazilians arrived from London in 1954 and 1956 (two of them as associate members of the BPS). They became known as "the English." After a series of agreements and disagreements, the "Argentineans," the "English," and the "Burkians" finally accepted the sponsorship of São Paulo and were recognized as study groups at the Paris congress in 1957. The founders were the full members A. A. Bahia, D. Perestrello, and Walderedo I. de Oliveira (of the APA) and Henri-que Mendes (SBPSP), with, as associate members, Decio Sobres de Souza and Edgar Guimarães de Almeida (of the BPS), M. Perestrello (APA), Mario Pacheco de Almeida Prado (SBPSP), and three physicians who were finishing their training at São Paulo.
At the Copenhagen congress in 1959, the group was recognized as the Sociedade brasileira de psicanálise do Rio de Janeiro (SBPRJ), with fourteen founders from different backgrounds: the eight previously mentioned, along with Luiz L. Werneck, Joáo Côrtes de Barros, and Pedro Ferreira (already qualified with the SBPSP), M. T. Lyra (associate member of the BPS), Inaura Carneiro Leáo Vetter and Zenaira Aranha (SPRJ), analyzed by Kemper. In Rio Grande do Sul, Mario Martins, Zaira Martins (1945), and José Lemmertz (1947) began their analytic training with the APA. The Martins couple returned in 1947 and Lemmertz in 1949. They qualified a few years later.
During the Edinburgh congress in 1961, the Porto Alegre study group was accepted under the sponsorship of the SPRJ. And the Sociedade Psicanalítica de Porto Alegre (SPPA) was recognized at the Stockholm conference in 1963 with, as founders, the three previously mentioned members, along with Cyro Martins (APA), Celestino Prunes, and Ernesto La Porta (SPRJ), together with José Maria Santiago Wagner (already in training at Porto Alegre). In 1946 Iracy Doyle Ferreira left for the United States and trained at the William Alanson Institute of Psychiatry (WAIP). Upon returning she spread the contributions of Harry Stack Sullivan, Erich Fromm, Karen Horney, and Abram Kardiner. Around 1950 she started several training analyses and, in 1952, founded the Instituto de Medicina Psicológica (IMP), which received WAIP authorization in 1953.
On May 6, 1967, the Associacão Brasileira de Psicanálise (ABP) was founded with a view to uniting the four societies recognized by the IPA in order to foster and provide assistance for future core and study groups and to publish a joint review. In 1975 the ABP created the Recife psychoanalytic core group and the Pelotas core group in 1987. Having met all the requirements of the IPA, these two groups were admitted as study groups. The Sociedade Psicanalítica de Recife and the Sociedade Psicanalítica de Pelotas became provisional study groups at the San Francisco congress in 1995. Three new study groups were recognized: the Porto Alegre group in 1992, the Ribeirão Preto group in 1993, and the Brasília group in 1994. During the Barcelona congress in 1997, the first of these groups was admitted as the Sociedade brasileira de Psicanálise de Porto Alegre. In 2005 four other core groups, located at Belo Horizonte, Campo Grande, Curitiba, and Espírito Santo were working with a view to being recognized as study groups.
Durval Marcondes, Mario Martins, and Danilo Perestrello were posthumously named honorary presidents of the ABP.
The military dictatorship (1964 to 1985) affected not only political life but also, in a direct and particularly harsh manner, the cultural life of the country. Ideas were suppressed and censorship was openly practiced in university, literary, artistic, and scientific circles, as witnessed by the events at the famous Instituto Oswaldo Cruz. The atrocities committed by groups and individuals in the name of "Institutional Acts" are known throughout the world. The psychoanalytic milieu also suffered an unhealthy influence. Although some candidates and analysts took an active part in the struggle for the redemocratization of the country, others proved to be full of anti-communist prejudice. However, some of these same colleagues, while being politically to the right, maintained a psychoanalytic position in their consulting rooms without blindly submitting to their political ideology.
In 1973 the clandestine newspaper Voz Operária denounced Amilcar Lobo Moreira da Silva, a candidate for the SPRJ (Rio I), as a member of the military police's torture squad. An analyst from the other Rio society, SBPRJ (Rio II), Helena Besserman Vianna, sent the press cutting to Argentina, where it was published in the review Questionamos, directed by Maria Langer. The denouncement was communicated to the IPA and other psychoanalytic societies, along with the name of the candidate and his analyst, Leáo Cabernite.
This courageous denouncement was not taken seriously by Serge Lebovici, president of the IPA, or by David Zimmermann, president of the Coordinating Committee for Psychoanalytic Organizations in Latin America (COPAL), nor was it credited by the managing council for Rio I, with Leáo Cabernite as its president. It was considered to be a "rumor" and "calumny" against Amilcar Lobo. A persecution campaign was started against the person who made the denunciation (who suffered the consequences in her society) and not against its subject.
An IPA committee visiting Rio came to no firm conclusion, but in October 1980 Amilcar Lobo was definitively excluded from the SPRJ as a trainee candidate. In 1981 ex-prisoners identified Amilcar Lobo before the Commission for the Rights of Man of the Brazilian Bar Association. When questioned, the ex-prisoners provided the following statements: "Lobo did not torture people directly but he supervised prisoners' health to determine whether they could continue to be tortured or not." Sometimes "Lobo acted in two stages: firstly he evaluated vital data and checked their capacity to resist torture, then he administered medicines intravenously in order to make it easier to acquire information." In 1986 a group of prisoners appeared at an assembly of the SPRJ to confirm these accusations. In 1988, when Lobo's guilt had been proven, the regional medical council struck him off the register of physicians. The federal council later amended the suspension to thirty days. Informed of this situation, the IPA wrote to the SPRJ stating the necessity of expelling Cabernite. Cabernite had resigned not long before in "disgust" at the IPA's attitude and now asked to be reinstated. In the course of an assembly in 1993 he was reinstated by vote. Disturbed by this resolution, which they considered to be contrary to the statutes, the president of Rio I, Claudio de Campos, and his colleagues in the managing council resigned from their positions. An ethics commission was formed to study the Cabernite case. After a two-year study, a long report recommended expelling Cabernite from the society and suspending another incriminated member, La Porta, for one year. At the end of 1995 an assembly of Rio I discussed the report and refused to accept the recommendations of the ethics commission. Six members resigned immediately. This was followed by a controversial debate, many members of the SPRJ being unable to accept this "lack of respect" for the study and efforts of the ethics commission. To highlight their difference from the leadership of Rio I without however resigning from it, they founded the Groupo Pró-Etica and published a small journal, Destacamento.
Other societies manifested their discontent when Cabernite was granted an amnesty, speaking of a possible sanction for the SPRJ. For several years the executive council of the IPA had not considered the Besserman-Lobo-Cabernite problem in an impartial fashion. In 1995, however, during the presidency of Horacio Etchegoyen, the executive committee rehabilitated Helena Besserman Vianna and in 1997 appointed an ad hoc investigating commission consisting of members from Europe and North and South America to study all the documents and present a report that would be available to all IPA members at Barcelona. Having heard all parties in the dispute, the executive council was to elucidate the problem in an objective manner.
In March, 1997, Cabernite resigned definitively from the SPRJ. The report considered him guilty of unethical and morally reprehensible conduct and concluded that he could not be admitted under any circumstances into any IPA-affiliated psychoanalytic society. During the Barcelona congress in July 1997, the executive council unanimously accepted and ratified the ad hoc commission's report.
Psychoanalytic ideas were first introduced at a university level by Marcondes, Bicudo, Danilo Perestrello, and Oliveira, and later by Mendonça Uchôa, Renato Mezzan, Portella Nunes, Prunes, P. Guedes, and Zimmermann. Medical (non-psychiatric) circles were pervaded with a dynamically charged atmosphere under the influence of Danilo Perestrello, Gernandes Pontes, Miller de Paiva, and Capizano, who inculcated psychosomatic concepts and accorded great importance to the physician-patient relationship, with the help of Mario and Cyro Martins, J. Mello Filho, A. Eksterman, and others. With regard to the relationship between psychoanalysis and the arts, literature, and mythology, it is essential to mention the contributions of Bahia, Cyro Martins, Meneghini, Hermann, Marialzira Perestrello, Nosek, Oliveira, Honigsztejn, David Azoubel, and many more. Nise da Silveira conducted research into the artistic production of mental patients and created the "Museu do Inconsciente." Some articles by these authors have become known abroad.
In 1928 Marcondes published the first and only issue of Revista brasileira de psicanálise, although the review reappeared in 1967 with the BPA. The SBPSP publishes the IDE review and its Institute publishes the Jornal de psicanálise. For two years the two Rio societies published the Revista de psicanálise do Rio de Janeiro. The SBPSP publishes TRIEB and the SPPA publishes the Revista de psicanálise de Porto Alegre.
It must be said that the country has other societies in addition to those affiliated with the IPA. The short-lived Sociedade de psicologia individual (Adlerian) was founded in the 1930s. In 1994, during the presidency of Horus Vital Brazil, the IMP took on the name Sociedade psicanalítica Iracy Doyle and was affiliated with the International Federation of Psychoanalytical Societies (IFPS). It publishes Tempo psicanalítico and Cadernos do Tempo psicanalítico. The Sociedade brasileira de psicoterapia de grupo was founded in December 1958 with twenty-six members and Walderedo de Oliveira as president. Following the foundation of the Associação brasileira de psicoterapia analítica de grupo, the affiliated societies changed their name to "Analytic group psychotherapy." The Rio de Janeiro society is currently called GRADIVA. The Círculo brasileiro de psicanálise, founded in 1956 in southern Brazil, is affiliated to the IFPS and comprises about ten sections scattered over several cities. The Recife society publishes two reviews: Revista psicanalítica and Cadernos de psicanálise. In 1963, in Belo Horizonte, Father Malomar Lund Edelweiss founded the Círculo psicanalítico de psicologia profunda (Igor Caruso), affiliated with the IFPS, which in turn led to the founding of other societies.
Because the two Rio IPA-affiliated societies refused to accept non-physicians, a group of nine psychologists founded the Sociedade de psicologia clínica in Rio in 1971 with Maria Regina Domingues de Morais as president. In 1989 it changed its name to Sociedade de psicanálise da cidade and published Foco and Cadernos de psicanálise. In 1967 Werner Kemper returned to Germany leaving his wife Kattrin and two sons in Brazil. In 1968 she left the SPRJ, followed by several of her analysands. In 1969 four of them along with four people linked to Father Malomar founded the Círculo psicanalítico do Rio de Janeiro (affiliated to the IFPS), which Kattrin Kemper joined in 1972.
In São Paulo the Sedes Sapientiae, founded in the 1970s, took an active interest in social problems, organized specialist courses, a psychoanalysis department from 1985, and published Percurso. With a Jungian orientation, the Sociedade brasiliera de psicologia analítica (founded in São Paulo in 1975) and the Associação jungiana brasileira operate in São Paulo and Rio. They are both affiliated with the International Association for Analytic Psychology.
There are many Lacanian societies. The Campo freudiano was dissolved after operating for fifteen years and, spurred on by Jacques-Alain Miller, eleven founders created the Escola Brasileira de Psicanálise do campo freudiano (EBP) in Rio de Janeiro in June 1995. The EBP is a member of the World Association of Psychoanalysis and numbers five sections and three secretariats. It would be impossible to mention all the societies and groups in the different schools: It is currently essential to maintain a certain pluralism in terms of ideas.
Following the IFPS 1989 congress, a Forum brasileiro de psicanalíse was opened up to all societies with a view to reconciling different theories. Emilio Rodrigué, a former full member of the APA, has lived at Salvador (Bahia) for more than twenty years. Without belonging to any society, he is respected for his profound humanistic culture and his independent spirit.
Freud's work has been and still continues to be the basic subject of study in the majority of Brazilian societies. As early as 1950, Kleinian ideas enjoyed great popularity in Rio and São Paulo, thanks to Decio de Souza, V. Bicudo, Philips, and Lyra, and thanks to the couple Mario and Zaira Martins at Porto Alegre. Some Rio and São Paulo analysts underwent a second analysis and attended seminars and supervisions at the British Society. Several Kleinians visited Brazil. For several years the founders and members of societies not affiliated to the IPA attended courses by Arminda Aberastury and Mauricio Knobel. Sándor Ferenczi, Karl Abraham, Wilhelm Reich, and William Fairbairn were studied in turn. Donald Winnicott has been taught since 1970. Bahia and Philips, and then León Grinberg, introduced Wilfred Bion in the 1970s, and his theories continue to receive widespread dissemination. Heinz Kohut's self psychology has been taught since 1980. Many societies not affiliated to the IPA conduct in-depth studies of Lacanian thought, which was not introduced in IPA societies until the end of the twentieth century. The different schools are involved in disputing the right to dispense training in a more democratic manner than formerly.
MARIALZIRA PERESTRELLO
Bibliography
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