The Unconscious between East and West: Bassin, Langer and a transnational discussion on leftist psychoanalysis (1959-1979)

GARCÍA, LUCIANO NICOLÁS

Budapest

Conferencia; 38th Annual Conference of the European Society for History of Human Sciences; 2019

Central European University

This presentation focus on the ideas on the unconscious and psychoanalysis of soviet psychiatrist Filip Bassin and how they were disputed by leftist psychoanalysts, specifically, Cesare Musatti in Italy and Marie Langer in Argentina. During Khrushchev Thaw, soviet psychology regained interest around the topic of unconscious activity, which meant dealing again with psychoanalytic theories, which by then were mainstream in western psychiatry and with a strong presence in some European and south American countries, specifically Italy, France and Argentina. In this context, Bassin tried to provide a new theory of the unconscious, compatible with dialectical materialism and the findings of soviet psychologists and physiologists, in particular Dimitri Uznadze, Lev Vygotsky, Alexei Leontiev and Piotr Anokhin, but also that could provide with a constructive critique of Freud?s ideas, both form an epistemic and political stance. Bassin published his ideas in in Italy, France and USA during the fifties and sixties which begun a heated discussion on both the scientific status of psychoanalysis and the political commitment of psychoanalysts with leftist ideas, such as Cesare Musatti. As a result of those discussions Bassin published The problem of the uncounscious in 1968, the first major book on the subject in the USSR since the twenties. The book restarted the discussions, and got an Italian translation with a preface of Musatti in 1971 and several sections missing. Meanwhile, leftist psychoanalysts organized the Plataforma movement in Italy which derived in a series of critics of psychoanalytical institutions as well as a more politically engaged production of theories and practices. That movement had its resonance in Argentina, where leftist movements had significant impact in psychology, psychiatry and among the members of the Argentinean Psychoanalytic Association (APA). Several members of the APA were involved, together with communist psychiatrists opposed to psychoanalysis, in the reconstruction of the Argentinian Psychiatry Federation. In July 1971 both communist psychiatrists and leftist psychoanalysts made a trip to Russia and other countries of the Eastern bloc. In Moscow they had a meeting with Bassin and Marie Langer proposed him to translate the book in Argentina. In 1972 the book was translated form the Italian version and with a preface of Langer. Shortly after the book and new articles of Bassin were published in France, were he hardened his critiques to psychoanalysis. Those critiques were addressed by Langer and published in the Italian journal Psicoterapia e Scienze Humane. The discussions on the unconscious and psychanalysis both within the USSR and in the western scene led Bassin and Leon Chertok to organize an international congress on the unconscious, which was finally held in 1979 in Georgia. Meanwhile, Langer, who had to flee from Argentina due to state violence, turn to althusserian views and rejected Bassin account on the unconscious.This article will address how the discussion was led simultaneously by epistemic concerns, political positions in the new left and the events occurred in that period in the contexts involved in the discussion, not as mere biases, but as conditions of possibilities of what could be stated and to what objectives.