Popsychoanalysis

Professor Jairo Gallo Acosta offers us an original and necessary work. A book that not only broadens the horizons of contemporary psychoanalysis, but also reaffirms Latin America's intellectual potential as a legitimate site of theoretical, clinical, and political production. Perhaps it is precisely in the writing of Latin American writers, artists, and psychoanalysts that psychoanalysis still preserves something of its critical and insurgent vocation, resisting its increasing elitization, institutional neutralization, and conservative domestication. Nadir Lara Junior If Bogotá and Philadelphia, the barrio and El Barrio, the Lafargue Clinic, and this book the reader holds in their hands share anything, it is the conviction—so elementary that it is disconcerting that it must still be reiterated—that the popular sectors are not without an unconscious. Like anyone else, they have one that insists on producing discourse through whatever paths are available to it: in a dream, a slip of the tongue, a drumbeat, a hand-sewn skirt, or a name that violence took from them and that some institution, one day, will be obliged to restore. Without putting it in these terms, Popsychoanalysis is a lay analysis in the oldest and truest sense of the word: a psychoanalysis of the people, produced by someone from the people, so that the people can listen to themselves. Patricia Gherovici