‘He didn’t even know there was a dictatorship’: the complicity of a psychoanalyst with the Brazilian military regime

The history of psychoanalysis in Brazil during the civilian-military dictatorship (1964-1985) has come under increasing scrutiny in recent years as an instance of institutional complicity with authoritarian rule. The case of Amilcar Lobo in Rio de Janeiro is now well known. However, there is less documentation of events in São Paulo, leading to a misrepresentation of the Brazilian Psychoanalytical Society of São Paulo as having passed relatively unscathed through the dictatorial period. This paper confronts this misrepresentation by documenting the case of a psychoanalyst from São Paulo who was involved with the torture regime. A detailed account is presented of claims made to the authors about the actions of this psychoanalyst in relation to a political prisoner of the period, and some parallels are made with material in two published works by him. It is suggested that this particular psychoanalyst’s behaviour reflects attitudes prevalent in the Brazilian Psychoanalytical Society of São Paulo at the time, including its support for the view that political resistance was a sign of psychological ‘immaturity’ or pathology