Mexican psychoanalysis in the 20th century

The canonical history of Mexican psychoanalysis – as written in a few articles and a little book – posits that Mexican intellectuals, unlike their Argentinean or Brazilian counterparts, expressed little interest in Freud in the early years of the 20th century. Psychoanalysis did not enter the mainstream until the 1950s, when Santiago Ramírez and Ramón Parres founded the APM (Mexican Psychoanalytic Association), the first Mexican organization to gain the recognition of the International Psychoanalytical Association (IPA). 1Interest in a different kind of analysis spiked after Erich Fromm moved to Mexico City in 1950 to teach at UNAM, the National University. His courses and publications brought together a wide spectrum of interests that included psychoanalysis, Marxism, Buddhism and even Talmudic exegesis. Fromm was a charismatic teacher who gained a large following, and eventually his disciples formed a new association, the SPM (Mexican Psychoanalytic Society), that presented itself as an alternative to the orthodox APM. Thus the stage was set for what would become a long-drawn struggle between two analytic tendencies, one Freudian, the other Frommian.