The Puerto Rican SyndromeWinner 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. |
Contents
The New Other America | 1 |
Hysteria in the Barrio | 11 |
What Is the Puerto Rican Syndrome? | 27 |
Private Agony Gone Public | 39 |
The Pathology of Otherness | 55 |
Geopolitics of the Psyche | 69 |
The Puerto Rican Syndrome Anger and Justice | 89 |
From Obsessional Rage to Hysterical Fury | 103 |
La Raza | 171 |
Blocking the Hispanic Unconscious | 185 |
The Phenomenology of Espiritismo | 197 |
The North Philadelphia Story | 217 |
Socorro María Consuelo Women on the Verge of an ataque de nervios | 227 |
From Alaska to Puerto Rico | 263 |
271 | |
285 | |
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Common terms and phrases
aggression alienation analysand analyst anger Anna argues ataque de nervios barrio become behavior Bertha Bertha Pappenheim body Breuer called castration cause clinical colonial Consuelo crowd cultural culture-bound syndromes cure described diagnosis discourse disorder dream DSM-IV Espiritismo experience fact fantasy father Freud Freudian function Gherovici ghetto Grosfoguel Guarnaccia Hispanic hysteria hysterical symptoms identified identity illness interpretation island jouissance label Lacan Lacanian language Latino logic look manifestations María meaning mental health mirror stage mother neurosis North Philadelphia notes object obsessional Other's desire patients Philadelphia Philadelphia Story political population position produced psychic psychoanalysis Puerto Rican syndrome question race racial rage Rat Man's Raza reality reveals Rico seen sexual signifier situation social Socorro Spanish spirits status strategy stress structure symbolic symp Taíno talk therapy tion trauma treatment truth U.S. Army U.S. Census Bureau unconscious United violence woman York