Latin Voices

A new issue of Psychoanalytic Inquiry, edited by Adriana Couto Silva.

You may see the entire issue here. We are currently offering three articles from the issue free to download for a month. Simply click on the titles below to view.

In the Migrant’s Suitcase: Land and Dust …

Eliana dos Reis Betancourt

BPD and Racism: Being Borderline in a Borderline World

Adrian Sanchez Psy.D., ABPP, FABP

The Varieties of Linguistic Experience in Immigrant Communities

Adriana Couto Silva MS, MA, LCPC

The following is from Adriana Couto Silva’s prologue to the issue.

I feel deeply humbled by the daunting task of assembling this issue of Latin Voices. Although this is only a small sample of the enormous range of psychoanalytic work published across the Americas and Caribbean countries, I hope it provides a taste of the richness of the Latin psychoanalytic culture. Most are translations from the Spanish and Portuguese. I feel that it is important to publish the articles in their original language as well as in English, to make available the nuances and textures that can only be expressed in an author’s mother tongue. These versions are available online.

Latin Voices inevitably tells stories about migration and its enormous impact on the identity, community and culture of Latin people in the U.S. However, the issue also gathers voices from authors outside of the U.S., and where different types of concerns affect them, and where the psychotherapeutic culture offers different theoretical perspectives native to unique environments and sensibilities. But here too we hear echoes of America and of the European colonizing influence.

We start our journey with an article written by Francisco Jordan Moore, from Chile, who invites us to consider how “violent imagination,” manifesting particularly in youth violence, arises when the developing mind becomes disconnected from a human need for stable and strong community that is a baked into the human ethogram.

Ignácio Paim Filho et al., from Brazil, reflect on the perspective of white bodies “living under the aegis of conflicts that do not belong to us” and the need for self-delineation from a Black perspective. Paim and the Sankofa group inquire about the types of psyche displacements and accommodations that their ancestors endured to survive enslavement and dehumanization. They affirm that “the Black body is here to demand another listening and another look.

Cynthia Azevedo and Leandro Santos, from Brazil, take us to Rio de Janeiro and let us in on their encounter with Laura, a young woman who lives in an underserved community. The authors explore the development of the self from Freud’s and Ferenczi’s theoretical perspectives. They tell a compelling story of Laura, who strived to delineate her sense of self under the pressure of her family’s traditional values and the need to survive poverty. Laura develops a strong bond with one of the authors and the author feels compelled to help Laura financially, so that she can move on with her dream to open up her own business.

Eliana dos Reis Betancourt, a Brazilian American psychoanalyst, invites us in to her poetic and personal account of her migration process to the U.S. and her painful feeling of isolation during the pandemic. Betancourt considers the many facets of voluntary migration and the way borders and lines between countries and between different sense of self blue when one leaves one’s original home. Calling forth Freud’s writings, Reis Betancourt proposes that we migrants will be carrying our land and dust inside of our suitcases, and that we might feel overlapping desires to return home and to stay, perhaps finding compromise in a desire to create an imaginary country. Psychoanalysis and the unconscious became for Eliana this imaginary country as it provides her with a sense of belonging and the freedom to not belong.

Adam J. Rodriguez, a first-generation Puerto Rican American psychoanalyst, argues that psychoanalysis has largely overlooked mixed-race experience and identity. He offers us a clinical case in which a mixed-race couple tended to maintain white-dominant cultural ideals and how they worked together in order to deconstruct these assumptions and to understand their unconscious fantasies around whiteness.

Adrian Sanchez, a Mexican American psychoanalyst, describes his complex relationship with a so-called borderline patient and in the process begins to reconceptualize the “borderline pathology” as a pathology of the culture as much as a pathology of the marginalized individual.

Adriana Couto Silva, a Brazilian American psychoanalyst, explores the multitude of linguistic choices during several clinical exchange and wonders about the leading and trailing edges of these choices on her immigrant patients’ selfhood. In place of a “confusion of tongues,” Adriana hopes to offer a cornucopia of tongues.