Madness in Buenos Aires — 2008 ·

Patients, Psychiatrists and the Argentine State, 1880–1983

By Jonathan Ablard

“Ablard … shows something that many scholars have suspected but no one has been able to prove: that despite discourses and intentions, the Argentine state has been historically weak and therefore its ability for exercising social control has been very limited. I hope that Ablard’s book will encourage other scholars to take a fresh look at other dimensions of social control in Argentina.”

Mariano Ben Plotkin — author of Argentina on the Couch: Psychiatry, State, and Society, 1880 to the Present

“Like the very best historical and cultural documents, Ablard’s book tells us as much about ourselves as it does about its putative subject matter. It brings to our attention the inter-relationship of class, poverty, social stigma and social division. It is rich in detail (there are 60 pages of notes and another 20 of references), and he skillfully uses both personal research and archival material, but the books remains accessible and absorbing.”

metapsychology

“In Madness in Buenos Aires, Jonathan Ablard convincingly demonstrates that Argentine psychiatric institutions were not the agents of social control that Foucauldian scholars have maintained they were in Europe and the United States. While Argentina had the most developed system of mental hospitals in Latin America, according to Ablard a weak state limited these institutions' policing and coercive functions.... (T)his is a well written, carefully researched contribution to the history of medicine in Latin America and a refreshing revision to the now accepted wisdom that these institutions served as instruments of political policing and social control.”

Social History of Medicine

Madness in Buenos Aires examines the interactions between psychiatrists, patients and their families, and the national state in modern Argentina. This book offers a fresh interpretation of the Argentine state’s relationship to modernity and social change during the twentieth century, while also examining the often contentious place of psychiatry in modern Argentina.

Drawing on a number of previously untapped archival sources, author Jonathan Ablard uses the experience of psychiatric patients as a case study of how the Argentine state developed and functioned over the last century and of how Argentines interacted with it. Ablard argues that the capacity of the state to provide social services and professional opportunities and to control the populace was often constrained to an extent not previously recognized in scholarly literature. These limitations, including a shortage of hospitals, insufficient budgets, and political and economic instability, shaped the experiences of patients, their families, and doctors and also influenced medical and lay ideas about the nature and significance of mental illness. Furthermore, these experiences, and the institutional framework in which they were imbedded, had a profound impact on how Argentine psychiatrists discussed not only mental illness but also a host of related themes including immigration, poverty, and the role of the state in mitigating social problems.

Jonathan Ablard is an assistant professor at Ithaca College, where he teaches Latin American history.