“Breaking Down”: Afflictions and Treatments During Times of Crisis in Buenos Aires

Abstract

Based on the ethnographic research carried out on speech-based therapies at health centers in marginalized areas of the Buenos Aires Metropolitan Area, this article problematizes the “breaking down” or “being broken” as a local language of afflictions that emerges from the rapidly deteriorating material living conditions related to downward social mobility. Specifically, I analyze how these discomforts turn into narrative in terms of economic and political subjective and collective crises, which combine and hybridize personal experiences with mainstream discourses of the country’s recent history. Based on a brief analysis of the changing relationships between psychoanalysis and poverty in the Buenos Aires area, I also examine how speech-based approaches classify these afflictions as “social issues,” external to their logic, as they resist to be entirely subdued to current psychological knowledge, categories, and techniques.