The current article's basic premise is that psychoanalytic discourse is always appropriated by an interpreter thereof who belongs to a historical and cultural tradition. From this perspective, the production of subjectivity in psychoanalytic practice is marked by the analyst's prime tradition. Thus the major relevance of investigating the discursive routes by which psychoanalysis entered Brazil, identifying its anchoring points in local culture and history. The article thus outlines the urbanization and modernization process in early 20th-century Brazil, together with the entry of psychoanalysis in a field of divergent forces. What occurred was a struggle for discursive hegemony between two antagonistic and irreconcilable readings: on the one hand, psychiatric-hygienist discourse with its reformist and universalizing reading of psychoanalysis; on the other, that of the modernist vanguard, with a reading that subverted established codes in the pursuit of singularity. Both were constituted in the wake of a quest to forge what was viewed as the desired Brazilian. This study covers the modernist psychoanalytic bias, with its unique utilization in the analysis of culture and subjectivities, as well as its role in the construction of new worlds.
Brazil; history; psychoanalysis; modernism