The Psychological Professionals and the Making of Youth in Argentina, 1956--1976

MANZANO, VALERIA

Nueva York

Congreso; 123rd Annual Meeting, American Historical Association; 2009

American Historical Association

This paper explores the ways in which the “psychological professionals” constructed youth as a crucial cultural category in 1960s and 1970s Argentina and the ways young people responded to that construction. By looking at professionals’ writings, conference proceedings, and popular press, this paper reconstructs the crafting of youth as a cultural category as well as the broader issues that category served to address, especially the transformations in sexuality and the emergence of youth political mobilization. Yet these professionals did not only theorize but also actively contribute to the creation of specific departments of youth psychology and psychoanalysis in public hospitals. By the late 1960s, young people—at least in the Buenos Aires metropolitan area—responded by increasingly attending to those departments, some of which became the sites of radical experimentations with youth group therapy and psychodrama. By looking at those experiences, this paper attempts to assess how young people engaged in the field set by the “psychological professionals” and how they helped re-craft a category of youth in the 1970s, associated with the promises of revolutionary politics and social transformation.