Was the Pope Psychoanalyzed?

The world is positively agog at Pope Francis’s admission that he consulted with a female Jewish psychoanalyst in Buenos Aires. He worked with her once a week for six months to resolve some personal issues and found the experience enlightening. 

Of course, for anyone who knows about psychoanalysis, six months of once-a-week treatment is not psychoanalysis. Back in the day, when psychoanalysts were rigorous, such treatment would have been called psychotherapy, the bastard cousin of the real thing.

Author James Carroll offers some reflections on it all for the New Yorker. He seems to imagine that this is a momentous event, but merely shows that he does not really know very much about psychoanalysis. He certainly does not know about how the discipline fared in France after World War II and how it is faring in Argentina today.

In France where people understood the affinities that psychoanalysis had with Catholic theology it was common for Catholics, even priests, to undergo treatment. A certain number of them left the priesthood and became psychoanalysts. Under the aegis of Jacques Lacan French psychoanalysis always opened itself to Catholicism. Priests regularly referred parishioners to psychoanalysts. For a full account one should read some of Elisabeth Roudinesco’s writings about Lacan and psychoanalysis in France.

As it happens, you cannot understand the place of psychoanalysis in Argentina if you do not understand what was happening in France. In the Freudian world, Argentina was merely a colony of France. In Buenos Aires everyone—and that means everyone—consults with psychoanalysts. Not seeing an analyst would be more uncommon than seeing one. In fact, if you live in Buenos Aires and aspire to belong to the intellectual elite you are obliged to have undergone psychoanalysis. It's like an initiation ritual into a cult.

As best I can tell, psychoanalysis is still alive and well in Argentina… and even in France. It serves as a bulwark against the temptation to become part of the Anglosphere. After all, how else can you explain why Argentina, a country filled with bright well-educated people, is such a political and economic basket case? The answer, if you care to think about it, is that the intellectual, political, media and business elites have all been psychoanalyzed.