The democratic psyche: gender, mental health, and militancy under the Augusto Pinochet dictatorship

Abstract

This essay investigates the work of mental health professionals associated with Chilean non-governmental organizations that were created at the end of the 1970s in opposition to Augusto Pinochet’s dictatorship: The Vicariate of Solidarity and the Foundation of Social Aid of the Christian Churches (FASIC). Those professionals helped political prisoners and their families reconstruct their subjectivities, which meant overcoming everyday survival and private life and participating in society in a dynamic way, typically through a political project. Mental health professionals put ideas about politics, human rights, and subjectivity in dialogue with the dictatorship’s practices and victims’ personal experiences. They argued that individual recovery was a collective process and that collective resistance depended on the reconstruction of the individual. This invoked the populist notion of the individual’s participation in the collective. I contend that ideas about gender based in populist patriarchy influenced mental health professionals’ concepts about reconstructing subjectivity. Above all, they focused on the male-headed nuclear family, or at least a person’s identity as a member of one, as the concept had consolidated under populism. As a result, mental health studies tended to subjugate women militants’ experiences to those of male militants and their wives.