The Puerto Rican Syndrome

by Gherovici, Patricia

• ISBN13: 9781892746757
• ISBN10: 1892746751
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2003-11-17
• Publisher: Other Press

Summary

Winner of the Gradiva Award in Historical Cultural and Literary Analysis and The 2004 Boyer Prize for Contributions to Psychoanalytic Anthropology During the 1950's, US Army medical officers noted a new and puzzling syndrome that contemporary psychiatry could neither explain nor cure. These doctors reported that Puerto Rican soldiers under stress behaved in a very peculiar and dramatic manner, exhibiting a theatrical form of pseudo-epilepsy. Startled physicians observed frightened and disoriented patients foaming at the mouth, screaming, biting, kicking, shaking in seizures, and fainting. The phenomenon seemed to correspond to a serious neurological disease yet, as with some forms of hysteria, physical examination failed to identify any sign of an organic origin. This unusual set of symptoms, entered into medical records as "a group of striking psychopathological reaction patterns, precipitated by minor stress," and was designated "Puerto Rican Syndrome." In this lucid and sophisticated new work, Patricia Gherovici thoroughly examines the so-called Puerto Rican Syndrome in the contemporary world, its social and cultural implications for the growing Hispanic population in the US and, therefore, for the US as a whole. As a mental illness that is, allegedly, uniquely Puerto Rican, this syndrome links nationality and culture to a psychiatric disease whose reappearance recalls the spectacular hysteria that led to the discovery of the unconscious and the birth of psychoanalysis. Gherovici beautifully and systematically uses the combined insights of Freud and Lacan to examine the current state of psychoanalysis and the Hispanic community in America. Blending these insights with history, current events, and her own case material, Gherovici provides a startling, fresh look at Puerto Rican Syndrome as social and cultural phenomenon. She sheds new light on the future of American society and argues that psychoanalysis is not only possible, but much needed in the ghetto.

Author Biography

Patricia Gherovici

Patricia Gherovici is an analyst in private practice and founding member and director of the Philadelphia Lacan Study Group and Seminar. She has published in numerous journals and collections, most recently Where Id Was: Challenging Normalization in Psychoanalysis (Continuum: 2001). She is the former director of a mental health clinic in Philadelphia.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments	p. xi
Series Editor's Introduction	p. xv
The New Other America	p. 1
Hysteria in the Barrio	p. 11
What Is the Puerto Rican Syndrome?	p. 27
Private Agony Gone Public	p. 39
The Pathology of Otherness	p. 55
Geopolitics of the Psyche	p. 69
The Puerto Rican Syndrome: Anger and Justice	p. 89
From Obsessional Rage to Hysterical Fury	p. 103
Ataques: Defensive Violence?	p. 121
Awake from the Ataque	p. 145
La Raza	p. 171
Blocking the Hispanic Unconscious	p. 185
The Phenomenology of Espiritismo	p. 197
The North Philadelphia Story	p. 217
Socorro, Maria, Consuelo: Women on the Verge of an ataque de nervios	p. 227
Conclusion: From Alaska to Puerto Rico	p. 263
References	p. 271
Index	p. 285
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