The Revista de Psiquiatria y Disciplines Conexas in the Diffusion of Preventive Psychoanalysis in Chile (1930-1940)

The present article makes a historiographical reconstruction of the preventive uses that psychoanalysis had in Chile between 1930 and 1940. In order to do so, this study analyzed the Revista de Psiquiatria y Disciplines Conexas in its national version. The findings are due to a context linked to a strong atmosphere of ideas of progress and of high moral and social ideals. In this sense, psychoanalysis appeared as an armory of conceptual tools that collaborated with various discourses of the time, such as: mental hygiene, criminology, education and prevention, among others. Freudianism starts to stamp an important feeling of hope opposite to the blind determinism of the theory of mental degeneration formulated by Benedict Augustin Morel or the anatomopathological perspective of the psychiatry of that time. In this regard, the concepts that were offered to qualify these logics were the Oedipus or Electra complex, character formation or sublimation, being the latter the cornerstone on which preventive, reeducative or psychagogy notions, that were seeking to face mental illnesses, are based. Doctors Luis Custodio Munoz and Manuel Francisco Beca are key speakers on this matter. Finally, as from this review, psychoanalysis is closely linked to the regulated conduction of sexual impulses, and it also promotes the behavior of the population in high principles of moral improvement, as an emancipating project of the human being towards better standards. Subject matter received thanks to the neo-Lamarckian perspective and demonstrated in the object of study of this investigation.