Psychoanalysis in Franco's Spain: Crónica de una agonía anunciada

Was psychoanalysis actually prohibited in the psychiatric community during Franco’s regime, as some historians have claimed? Did Spanish analysts find a way to diffuse Freudian discourse in that context without compromising their principles, as they repeatedly asserted? This article aims to provide a critical examination of these two widely spread ideas by re-assessing the conditions under which the psychoanalytical community was able to develop in the Spain of Franco’s dictatorship (1939-1975). It is my hypothesis that the circulation of Freudian discourse was, at the time, subjected to strong restrictions but not banned and that the analysts themselves accepted those restrictions in order to be tolerated – if not recognised – by the psychiatric community.

Historiographical works on the situation of psychoanalysis during the dictatorship began to appear soon after Franco’s death, engendering an interpretative tradition that remains a reference today. These essays, published by psychiatrists who had themselves experienced professional repression for political reasons, sought to define and demonstrate the ultra-conservative ideological orientation of the leaders of the psychiatric establishment. Within that framework, they studied the rejection of psychoanalysis and reached the conclusion that Freudianism was simply banned from official psychiatric discourse .
It was, however, during the years of dictatorship that the first Spanish psychoanalytical society was actually created and officially recognised, by both the IPA and the Spanish government. Moreover, at that time, analysts were not only able to practise, but also to participate in official meetings of the psychiatric community, and in Catalonia at least, to hold university posts. How can this apparent contradiction between the undeniably anti-Freudian stance of the almighty psychiatric establishment during Franco’s regime and a concomitant possibility for psychoanalytic discourse to be diffused over the same period be explained? What were the limits, if any, of this diffusion? Under what conditions and to what extent was this discourse tolerated by the ultra-conservative psychiatric establishment? Were psychoanalysts obliged to compromise their theoretical or ideological principles in order to practise? In other words: which features of psychoanalytical discourse and/or the way it was diffused by Spanish analysts allowed it to be tolerated by psychiatry under Franco?