Sigmund Freud never set foot in Argentina, let alone Buenos Aires. But then, he never had to. The capital has been shaped by his couch and ideas more than anywhere in the world.
If you wander around the city long enough, you'll discover Villa Freud, a small psychoanalytic enclave where many psychologists once kept their practices. It's a neighbourhood within the larger neighbourhood of Palermo, the city's coolest area. In 2020, a bill was proposed to rename one of its streets after Freud himself: “A tribute,” it explained, “to a figure… so dear to many residents of the city of Buenos Aires.”
It is not just Freud’s theory that has taken hold here, but his practice. Argentina has approximately 222 psychologists per 100,000 inhabitants, roughly one for every 450 people — the highest rate in the world. In Buenos Aires, the numbers are higher still, with 1,572 psychologists per 100,000 people. Here, therapy is not a luxury but a habit; some residents reportedly skip meals to pay for it.
In other words, with or without Freud’s blessing, Buenos Aires has become the world capital of therapy.
Whether it stays so, however, is another matter entirely. Since Javier Milei became president in 2023, the country’s therapeutic spirit has found itself under a sustained political attack.
National budgets are being cut and publicly funded departments shut down, all at a time when therapists are being forced to adapt to a new digitised world. In Argentina as elsewhere, Freud’s books have begun to lose shelf space to TikTok bestsellers. In-person sessions are now carried out over Zoom. A number of therapists I spoke to described patients arriving with ready-made interpretations of themselves, after attempting to self-analyse using ChatGPT.
The result is an Argentinian “superego” that feels, for the first time in decades, unsettled. Is Freud’s hold beginning to slip?
Freud’s theories arrived in Argentina without too many aspirations. In 1925, his complete works were translated into Spanish — directly from German — in 17 volumes by a Madrid publisher. They failed commercially in Spain, but found an eager readership in Argentina.
The country at the time was a society in flux, undergoing rapid immigration and urbanisation. Psychoanalysis, with its focus on individual identity, self-examination, and the construction of modern subjectivity, proved a natural fit. It helped people see themselves as individuals in a rapidly changing 20th century.
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