Mariano Ben Plotkin

The world’s leading authority on the history of psychoanalysis in Argentina, Mariano Ben Plotkin holds undergraduate degrees in history (1983) and economics (1984) from, respectively, the Universidad de Belgrano and Universidad de Buenos Aires. He continued his studies in history at the University of California, Berkeley, with the support of fellowships from the University of Buenos Aires, the SSRC, the Mellon Foundation, and UC Berkeley, receiving his Ph.D. in 1992.

On completing his graduate work, he moved to the East Coast, where he held appointments at Harvard University as Lecturer in History and Literature (1992-95), at Colby College as Assistant Professor of History (1995-98), and at Boston University as both Assistant Professor of History and Research Associate at BU’s Institute for the Study of Economic Culture.

Since returning to Argentina in 2000, Mr. Plotkin has been a researcher with CONICET, and since 2002 Senior Researcher at the Instituto de Desarrollo Economico y Social (IDES); in 2009 he was elected to a two-year term as President of IDES. Concurrently he has also been Professor of History at the Universidad Nacional de Tres de Febrero (UNTREF). In 2001 he was appointed holder of the Domingo Sarmiento Chair at the University of Salamanca, and he has been a visiting professor at Harvard, the University Paris 7 Denis Diderot, and the Universidad del Rosario, Bogotá, Colombia.

Among his many publications are the monographs Freud in the Pampas: The Formation of a Psychoanalytic Culture in Argentina, 1910-1983 (Stanford UP, 2001), which has been translated into Spanish and French; Mañana es San Perón. Propaganda, rituals politicos y educación en el regimen peronista (1946-55) (Buenos Aires: Ariel, 1994; 3rd ed., UNTREF, 2010), which was published in English by Scholarly Resources as Mañana es San Perón. A Cultural History of Peron’s Argentina (2002); La privatización de la educación superior y la ciencias socials en la Argentina. Un estudio de las carreras de Psicología y Economía (Buenos Aires: CLACSO, 2006); El día en que se inventó el peronismo: la construcción del 17 de Octubre (Buenos Aires: Sudamericana, 2007); and, most recently, Histoire de la psychanalyse en Argentine. Une réussite singulière (Paris: Campagne Premiere, 2010). He has also edited a number of volumes, including Argentines on the Couch. Psychiatry, Society and the State of Argentina, 1880-1970 (U. of New Mexico Press, 2003) and The Transnational Unconscious. Essays in the History of Psychoanalysis and Transnationalism (London: Palgrave, 2009), with Joy Damousi, and written or coauthored scores of articles. During his Guggenheim Fellowship term, Mr. Plotkin will delve deeper into this area of research with a study of the diffusion of psychoanalysis in Argentina under authoritarian regimes.