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Abstract

Shortly after a Psychology major was established in Argentina in the Universidad de Buenos Aires in the late 1950s, Jos Bleger tried to carry out a vast project combining theory, application and professionalization. His behavior psychology sought an integration of psychoanalysis, Gestalt psychology, phenomenology, neo-behaviorism and social psychology; he also added some elements of G. Politzers "concrete psychology" as seen from a marxist point of view. Psycho-hygiene and applied psychology were also taken into account, and special attention was paid to the role of the psychologist. A historical analysis of the precedents and consequences of such a project will be proposed here, stressing the difficulties found in integrating such different traditions as psychoanalysis, marxism and academic psychology.

Key Words: Applied psychology / Behavior psychology / History / Argentina / Latin America

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The history of psychology in Argentina can be divided into two periods:

1) a psychology without psychologists, as a general discipline, included in the university programs and split between medicine, pedagogy, social sciences and literary and social studies;

2) the period of the academic and professional organization as an autonomous discipline.

During the first period, around the end of the XIXth Century and until the 1930's, it is possible to say that there was a first birth of psychology in Argentina, within the ideological frame of positivism and during the historical period of consolidation and modernization of the national state. On the one hand, it was a pragmatic psychology, directly concerned with the problems that arose in society and in the cultural field. On the other hand, it appeared as a psychological knowledge associated with the public institutions in charge of individual and social behavior and its troubles. Its themes were: madness and crime; barbarism and education; crowds as a new social and political subject; immigrants and the psychological construction of "nationality" as an inner sentiment. These public problems were determinant in the early domains of the discipline and gave rise to an early development of psychopathology, criminal psychology, educational psychology and social and political psychology.

My present work deals with the second period, which is that of the professional foundation of psychology and that begins when the first Psychology majors were established in Argentina in the late 1950s. Although I focus my analysis on the University of Buenos Aires, because this is the subject matter of my research, it should be noticed that besides the career in Buenos Aires, five more Psychology majors were founded in Rosario, Crdoba, San Luis, La Plata and Tucumn during these years.

Of course, psychology had been taught in the University of Buenos Aires before that time, since the beginning of the XXth Century, mainly but not only in the Department of Philosophy and Literature. Nevertheless, with the new academic frame, that implied a five-year career, new problems arose. One of them was the building of a renewed theoretical basis for the discipline; that is, the work of conceptual re-foundation, in the general context of contemporary international psychology. The other problem was the emergence, for the first time, of the issue of professionalization, that is, the project of a new professional, the psychologist, and the design of the areas, objects and goals of psychological practices. The simultaneous emergence of these two spheres of problems (disciplinary and professional) created the conditions for what I propose as a second birth of Psychology in Argentina.

In general, it can be said that between the end of the first period, sometime around the 1930's, and the beginning of the second, in the late 1950's, there was a kind of gap. Of course, during this intermediate period academic courses of psychology were still being taught and some practices in the educational and clinical areas were developed. Professional guidance, for instance, emerged as an area of practices related at the same time to the educational system and the movement of mental hygiene. Professional guidance goals aimed at better organization and adjustment of the relationship between the worker and his job; and this constituted a mode of reception and development of mental tests. But, as these practices were carried out broadly by educators or medical professionals, there was no place for the rise of the problem of disciplinary psychology, namely the project of (and the bet for) a new autonomous academic profession.

Here I would like to point out some brief explanations about the issue of "applied" psychology. I think that the "uses" of psychology, the employment of psychological knowledge and techniques cannot be dissociated from the disciplinary structure of psychology as a conceptual corpus and as a discourse. In this respect, theoretical discourse cannot be considered as a fully accomplished realm existing prior to the moment of its "application". I do not need to recall here the common views of the new historical approaches to modern psychology. Neither the concepts nor the techniques or methods can be isolated or treated without taking the institutional context into account, especially the scope of the academic and professional community.

Jos Bleger was a central figure in the early days of the Psychology major in Buenos Aires. He was in charge of the course of "Introduction to Psychology" in 1959 and he gave courses on "Personality" and "Mental Hygiene" in the early sixties. Psicologa de la conducta ("Psychology of Behavior") a very ambitious introduction to the discipline, was published in 1962, a few years after the beginning of his teaching at the UBA; clearly the book was intended as an answer to teaching requirements but, all the same, it has to be considered as a kind of solution to the problems of the re-foundation of Psychology as an academic discipline. Although the question of the professional status of Psychology was dealt with in the book, the main objective was the basic proposal of a systematic Psychology conceived as a general theory of behavior. Only a few years later, in 1966, he published Psicohigiene y psicologa institucional ("Psycho-hygiene and Institutional Psychology") where he proposed a wide new project of applied psychological practices included in the general field of psycho-hygiene.

Before exploring Bleger's works on behavior and psycho-hygiene I would like briefly to introduce his background. He was born in the province of Santiago del Estero, in the north of Argentina, where he completed his first education. After having studied Medicine in Rosario, in the province of Santa Fe, he returned to Santiago del Estero and started his work as a psychiatrist in 1946. Later on he went to Crdoba and as of 1954 he settled in Buenos Aires, where he became a psychoanalyst, member of the Argentine Psychoanalytic Association. Moreover, since his youth Bleger had been a member of the Argentine Communist Party. In 1957 Psicoanalisis y dialctica materialista ("Psychoanalysis and materialist dialectics") was published. It was an attempt at reconciling the method and practice of psychoanalysis with the principles of Marxist philosophy. In this respect, the works of the Hungarian- French philosopher Georges Politzer and the project of a "Concrete Psychology" played a fundamental role in the shaping of Bleger's thought.

Politzer was born in 1903 and died in 1942, in Paris, killed by the Nazis. At that time he had had a prominent role in the French Resistance and when he was captured by the Gestapo he had to choose between becoming a collaborationist teacher or being shot. He refused to collaborate and his brave and tragical end was decisive in the exaltation of Politzer as a heroic figure in the left tradition after the war. Having become a model of intellectual and revolutionary commitment to more than one generation, Politzer was of course known in Argentina among leftist and radical groups; he was especially known for his textbook on Marxist philosophy. Nevertheless, his psychological works were less known.

In fact, there was a real gap in Politzer's writtings between the first works that proposed the building of a "concrete psychology" and the period after 1929, when he joined the French Communist Party. When he became a full-fledged Marxist and a communist leader he had given up his project concerning a new psychology and, moreover, he had completely rejected the chance of rectifying Freudian psychoanalysis by means of a Marxist critique. Bleger, then, twenty years later, was trying to fulfill the task Politzer had not only left uncompleted but had explicitly rejected. I do not intend to examine Bleger's first book but only to place it in line with his subsequent writings on psychology of behavior. In this respect, that first work already proposed a new psychology with a double goal. First, radically to renew the scientific tradition of the discipline; but, at the same time, to build the basis of a knowledge on subjectivity, a topic that he considered represented a gap in Marxist theory and practice.[2]

Politzer's critique coined the concept of drama to point out the basic object of psychology. By this term, that generally refers to human action and human reality, he stressed the main goal of the very re-foundation of psychology as a human science.[3] Clearly, then, Politzer's view rejected the behaviorist solution, namely the reduction of the complex problem of human experience to the model of a psychology of animal behavior according to the reflex act scheme. On the other hand, he also rejected the "classical" psychological tradition that stressed the "inmediate experience" of consciousness and the "inner life", which he called the "animist tradition". In short, Politzer proposed a way out of the crisis of Psychology by depicting a fundamental principle of unity: the human being and the concrete meaning of his different forms of action and expressin.

As a consequence of his heteredox project, both from the Marxist and the psychoanalytic point of view, Bleger's first book had a negative reception. He was expelled from the Communist Party a few years later and, as far as the APA community was concerned, he received only a silent disapproval: the book did not deserve any commentary or discussion at all.

In spite of the evident influence of Politzer's works, Psicologa de la conducta is not a general treatise of "concrete psychology". Bleger's book shows a more eclectic composition since it was written picking up viewpoints from several sources. The issue of the unity of psychology was given particular attention from the Introduction onwards; combining the Marxist view of the human sciences (whose source was The German Ideology by Marx and Engels), with Politzer's inspiration. But, at the same time, it was probably Daniel Lagaches project for the unity of psychology that he had in mind when he defined psychology as a "science of behavior". Lagache was a French psychoanalyst who occupied a chair of psychology at the Sorbonne in the late forties; facing a similar challenge as Bleger, that is the need to propose a general plan for teaching Psychology, Lagache presented a work about "L'unit de la psychologie" as his inaugural lesson. In that work he proposed, briefly, the project of an integrated discipline conceived as "the study of behavior", without any resemblance to the Watsonian tradition. He tried to bring together the "humanistic" and the "naturalistic" traditions of psychology.

Lagache's concept of behavior was connected to a specifically French tradition, more clinical, that had developed outside the American mainstream. In this respect, the deep difference between Lagache and Watson appears clearly in the way Lagache conceived of the suitable data for studying human behavior. In fact, he adopts a conceptual frame combining the Lewinian scheme of the "psychological field" with a broad phenomenological approach about the "given experience" and a Freudian view on "overdetermination" in the emergence of the symptom. As a result, behavioral analysis includes four kinds of traits: 1) external and observable behavior; 2) lived experience; 3) somatic changes; 4) products and perfomances.[4] Now, Bleger's project of behavioral psychology is still more complex since he also incorporates the Marxist Weltanschauung, whose basic postulate is that of the human being as a social and historical subject, and Politzer's approach on "drama".

Of course, it is not my intention to make a complete description of the different sources that nurtured Bleger's study of behavior. My purpose is to stress the links between his eclectic discourse on behavior and the main project of psycho-hygiene as the basic realm of psychological praxis. It is clear that the model of Lewinian's topology had a definite use in the general proposition of an applied discipline whose areas would be extended from the psychological field to the fields of group, institution and community. In this view the domains of psychology as a discourse and as a corpus of practices were founded on the ground of Marxist claims about society and its crisis. On the one hand, that implied the purpose to define the place of psychology as lying between the human and social sciences. The answer to this "epistemological" requirement was the proposition of different "levels of integration" of natural and human reality, each of them offering a specific range of phenomena to the different sciences.

On the other hand, and this is more important for the projection of the discipline as an applied one, this Marxist thought emerged in a context dominated by a sensibility of change. If the sixties were a time of reforming discourse and feelings in the Western World, in Argentina this external influence interacted with the conditions of the period that began with the fall of the Peronist regime. The broad notions of changing both the State apparatus and the economical base were closely bound to an ambitious program of cultural and, above all, social reform. That meant modernization and openness to the developed countries, and also implied that the Peronist period should necessarily be considered an anomaly in the long-term development of modern Argentina. Therefore, a renewed idea of progress was applied to the necessary transformation of the more "private" zones of society.

By this time, Gino Germani, who was the Founding Father of Sociology at the University of Buenos Aires, proposed the category of transition as a fundamental trait of the emerging change from a traditional to a modern-mass society in Argentina. Actually, he not only used Erich Fromm's ideas about the fear of freedom to analyze the Peronist masses, but focused his sociopsychology on the changing Argentine family. The idea of "transition" necessitated the belief in an "intermediate" position for Argentina between the fully developed and the entirely underdeveloped countries; in this view, Argentina was a nation under transformation that could see its near future reflected in the social and family patterns of the USA or of Western Europe.

A new family was emerging as a result of complex movements of urbanization based on migration from the country to the big cities; and those social changes went hand in hand with new attitudes, roles and values related to the "nuclear family" type: that meant less children but a stronger emotional bond, an increasing presence of women in the job market and a general reduction of father-centered authority. Now, Germani described a new family type in a way that mostly fitted the ideal society that the renewed discourse of change was promoting. It can be suggested that in the traits of the promised family he singled out, was also depicted the general meaning of the task that psychological practices had to accomplish in relation to individuals, groups, institutions and the whole community.

The main goals of psycho-hygiene, then, refer directly to the social functions of psychology and its practitioners. In Bleger's view the crisis of psychology in its "technological" or applied dimension could only find a solution by stressing a full commitment to the "reformist" mood that promoted social change. On this basis he projected the role of psychologists, broadly speaking, as agents of change. Hence, this was the most important attempt to reconstruct the discipline as a science and as a profession since its beginnings at the end of the XIX Century.

Of course, the use of the word "hygiene" showed the inspiration that Bleger had taken from public medicine; in fact he had started out teaching mental hygiene, which was a movement that had constituted a leading development in Argentine psychiatry since the 1920's. I want to propose that the general meaning of hygiene when applying to psychology was the commitment to public matters as opposed to the private setting of the psychoanalysts office. When Bleger tried to give examples of the kind of situations that could be considered typical problems for psychological practices centering on the public sphere, he mentioned ordinary conflicts like tensions in a factory or such as the upbringing of children in the family or the sexual guidance of teenagers. To sum up, psycho-hygiene is projected outside the field of medicine, even of mental hygiene. "It does not have to do with illness but with the usual conditions of daily life" (p. 121)

At the same time, Bleger gave psychoanalysis a founding place in the construction of the new discipline as an operative one. He distinguished "operative psychoanalysis" from clinical psychoanalysis but also from "applied" psychoanalysis. Operative psychoanalysis is something different from the simple use of a theoretical corpus; it means a practice of knowledge that simultaneously transforms its object, being at the same time a technical device and a research praxis.

In conclusion, if the broad model of hygiene provided the basic pattern for constructing a public psychological field, the methods and concepts of psychoanalysis (especially the Kleinian stream) gave specific tools that, in general, came from clinical experience.