"So—I will now name Latin America. What is Latin America today? I will explain in a moment why in my view it has to be named. But, first, does it in fact exist, and if so what is it? Is it the name of something so sufficient unto itself—i.e., as a continent—as to have identity? Is it the name of a concept?And what could this concept have to do with psychoanlysis" Pp.200
"These provisos notwithstanding, our original question remains essentially unanswered. Why is the International Psy
cho-Analytical Association, founded seventy years ago by Freud, unable to take up a position on certain kinds of vio
lence (which I hope to define more clearly in a moment) in any other terms than those of a pre-psychoanalytic and a
psychoanalytic juridical discourse, even then adopting only the vaguest and most impoverished forms of that traditional
legal idiom, forms deemed inadequate by modern human rights jurists and lobbyists themselves" Pp.213
"Another area—and another hemisphere—embraces all those places where psychoanalysis as an institution is firmly implanted (Western Europe, North America) and of which, though human rights are not universally respected (far from it, in fact, as witness Amnesty International's reports on European and North American countries, not to mention those kinds of violence which fall outside Amnesty's purview), at least it may be said that certain sorts of violence have not as yet, not in the period since World War II, been unleashed with the ferocity, whether state-supported or not, that is familiar at varying levels and in varying forms in so many Latin American countries"
