A State of High Anxiety

Wounded in mind and spirit, they come to the offices of Mirta Goldstein, a psychoanalyst of the old-fashioned stripe, the kind with a couch in one corner of her office and the collected works of Sigmund Freud in another.

Her clients are well-educated Argentines suffering from the estres (stress) brought on by the unraveling of their lives. “I’m afraid I’m going to fall apart,” a female patient tells her one afternoon.

That morning, the client had been waiting in a seemingly endless line of people at the bank, all trying to get their money out before the country collapses. Four people cut in. A shouting match ensued. “They called me a crazy woman,” she tells Goldstein. Hours later, the insult still leaves her unhinged--”una loca.”

The client wonders: Am I really losing my mind? It is a question people ask again and again in a city that, even before its current economic and social decline, was already one of the most psychoanalyzed places on Earth.

Now, as Argentines watch their political system degenerate into a game of musical chairs for the presidency, with the peso almost certain to be devalued soon, every day brings a new indignity and a new personal setback to sort out on the couches and chairs of the 40,000 psychiatrists, psychologists and therapists who work here.

Buenos Aires is said to have the highest proportion of analysts of any city in the world. Many, like Goldstein, work in the elegant Palermo district of tall apartment buildings and pleasant parks, a neighborhood that is known locally and in travel guides as Villa Freud.

“We Argentines have a certain vocation for personal reflection,” says Orlando D’Adamo, a psychology professor at the University of Belgrano here and author of “The Ugly Argentine,” a treatise on the Argentine national identity.

“Our national identity has been based on the idea that we are a rich country, a country with opportunity,” D’Adamo says. “Now, people have stopped believing in the future.”

Listen to Argentines of any social class reflect on the crisis and you will hear voices of anger, confusion and despair.

“I don’t know what’s going to happen next, that’s the worst thing,” says Gaston Diaz, 33. University-educated in sociology, he now drives a taxi for a living. “The sense of insecurity kills you. My wife wants us to move to Uruguay. She has a sister there. The truth is that things are very difficult for us here.”

In years past, Villa Freud sessions centered on the more routine concerns of middle-class life: distant spouses, unresolved childhood traumas, the anxieties of businesspeople driven by relentless ambition.

Today, many of those same clients are stumbling in, shaken by frozen bank accounts, their businesses teetering on the brink of bankruptcy. They also live under a persistent fear of becoming victims of an unrelenting crime wave of carjackings and home-invasion robberies.

Their adult children might be leaving for Miami, Madrid or some other distant locale.

“People feel completely impotent in the face of their reality,” Goldstein says. “This provokes a sense of humiliation and guilt. People begin to feel an inner violence. They have more car accidents. They use more prescription drugs. They have more psychosomatic illnesses.”

Signs of the country’s slow psychic collapse are everywhere in Buenos Aires. They invade even the most placid corners of this city, known as the Paris of Latin America.

Beggars drift into the cafes and trendy shops of the Recoleta district--an unknown phenomenon until recently. Senior citizens launch into tales of woe on the commuter trains to the suburbs--”Forgive me, passengers, for interrupting your day. But my husband is at home, suffering from cancer, and of course we can’t afford the treatments.”

During his first week in Buenos Aires, an American journalist came upon a body on the street in Villa Freud, an older woman in a nightdress surrounded by a team of police officers and emergency workers. She had just jumped from her fourth-floor balcony, a suicide.

“She had tried once before, the poor woman,” said one onlooker. “She was sick.”

“No, no, it’s because of the pensions,” said another bystander. “How can you expect people to live on what they give you? And then they cut it. What an outrage!”

The Argentine crisis has hit so swiftly and so thoroughly that it has changed the way psychoanalysts work in Buenos Aires, which is one of a handful of places outside Vienna where the ideas of Freud--considered passe in some psychological circles--are still dominant.

“You don’t really have time to work on the more serious issues people have, the underlying root cause of their problems, because all they can do is talk about how everything is falling apart around them,” says Fernando Weissmann, another Villa Freud analyst.

Freud placed heavy emphasis on childhood traumas and parental relationships as the bases of most neurosis.

But as Weissmann points out: “What sense does it make to talk about your client’s relationship with his younger brother when he doesn’t have any money and he’s got bill collectors at the door?”

Still, there are more than a few of Freud’s disciples here who see in the Viennese thinker’s ideas a clue to the way in which the current crisis is playing out in the collective, unconscious mind of the Argentine people.

For Andres Rascovsky, president of the Argentine Psychoanalytic Assn., the crisis strikes at the psyche as a series of betrayals and violations by men whom Argentines see as father figures--namely, the politicians running the country.

One of the most sinister figures haunting the Argentine unconscious, Rascovsky says, is former President Carlos Menem, who ran the country until 1999. To many middle-class Argentines, he remains a symbol of government corruption.

“He is the figure of the perverse, malignant father,” Rascovsky says. “The father who seduces his child with sweet words.”

At the other end of the spectrum is Fernando de la Rua, the recently deposed president, who appears as a weak and absent parent who allows his family and home to fall into ruin.

“People are having dreams in which they return to an infantile world,” Rascovsky says. “They have an enormous distrust in the adult. In their dreams, they are facing some threat, some sort of collapse or avalanche.”

One of Rascovsky’s clients, a man in his 50s, lost his business and had to move in with his parents. Another, a successful entrepreneur, is suffering from a recurring nightmare related to a trauma from his teenage years.

Twenty years ago, in high school, the client was a leftist activist. Many of his friends were put in prison, and the client himself was driven into exile. He later returned to Argentina, started a business and became quite wealthy. Then the economy started to collapse.

In his nightmare, the client is being tortured with electric shocks, just as his friends had been years ago. But the man performing the torture is a pudgy, balding man whose face is unmistakable to any Argentine--it is that of Domingo Cavallo, the former minister of finance.

Once seen as a national savior for ending Argentina’s hyper-inflation, Cavallo is the man most blamed by Argentines for their current plight.

“People have lost faith in ideas and in leaders,” Rascovsky says.

Now, with the country’s crisis taking on ever deeper and stranger dimensions, people have sunk even lower into despair.

For Carola Rubiani, 31, the daily struggle to keep her husband’s restaurant afloat has become an all-consuming concern.

“Since the end of October, he hasn’t served more than 30 meals in a single day,” she says. “I’m sure he’s going to have to close it. What will we live from? I go to bed at night worrying about how we’re going to keep on going, what sort of life we’ll give to our children.”

With so many people suffering deep sadness, and with their services needed more than ever, more than a few of the capital’s psychologists and analysts are facing a quandary: what to do when their clients can’t pay.

“It’s a huge ethical question,” says Goldstein, who also works as a volunteer therapist at a local church. “How long do you keep on treating them? We’ve got bills to pay too.”