Read e-book online The Puerto Rican Syndrome (Cultural Studies) PDF

Winner of the Gradiva Award in old Cultural and Literary research and The 2004 Boyer Prize for Contributions to Psychoanalytic Anthropology

throughout the 1950's, US military scientific officials famous a brand new and difficult syndrome that modern psychiatry may neither clarify nor medication. those medical professionals said that Puerto Rican squaddies below rigidity behaved in a truly atypical and dramatic demeanour, displaying a theatrical kind of pseudo-epilepsy. Startled physicians saw fearful and disoriented sufferers foaming on the mouth, screaming, biting, kicking, shaking in seizures, and fainting. The phenomenon appeared to correspond to a significant neurological illness but, as with a few kinds of hysteria, actual exam did not determine any signal of an natural beginning. This strange set of signs, entered into scientific files as "a workforce of notable psychopathological response styles, prompted through minor stress," and was once distinct "Puerto Rican Syndrome."

during this lucid and complex new paintings, Patricia Gherovici completely examines the so-called Puerto Rican Syndrome within the modern global, its social and cultural implications for the growing to be Hispanic inhabitants within the US and, for that reason, for the united states as a complete. As a psychological affliction that is, allegedly, uniquely Puerto Rican, this syndrome hyperlinks nationality and tradition to a psychiatric disorder whose reappearance remembers the surprising hysteria that ended in the invention of the subconscious and the beginning of psychoanalysis. Gherovici fantastically and systematically makes use of the mixed insights of Freud and Lacan to envision the present country of psychoanalysis and the Hispanic group in the US. mixing those insights with background, present occasions, and her personal case fabric, Gherovici presents a startling, clean examine Puerto Rican Syndrome as social and cultural phenomenon. She sheds new gentle at the way forward for American society and argues that psychoanalysis is not just attainable, yet a lot wanted within the ghetto.

From the exchange Paperback edition.