‘No memory, no desire’: Psychoanalysis in Brazil during Repressive Times

In his description of the emergence of psychoanalytic technique, Freud (1914, p. 147) devotes space to the importance of ‘discovering from the patient’s free associations what he fails to remember,’ and to this day the work of rescuing the past and shaping it with meaning in order to construct a personal history remains a central task of the psychoanalyst. Psychosocial studies adds to this the claim that internal and external worlds intercept one another; and the mental processes that an individual experiences through the lens of the ‘internal world’, such as repression, denial, remembering and working-through, also operate to some extent in the external world, that is, in groups, institutions, and society (Frosh, 2010).