Abstract

The article highlights the origins of Freudian thought as the germ of the advent of psychoanalysis and, in particular, the discovery of the unconscious as one of the disruptive effects that changed the course of human history. The writing suggests that Freud’s Jewishness, in post-Enlightenment Europe in the 19th century, enabled an intellectual formation capable of sustaining political impulses that were not always explicit in the history of psychoanalytic theory. By retracing the path of building ties with the polis, established by the first generations of European analysts, in the so-called Red Vienna of the 1920s (Danto, 2019), the authors articulate links between psychoanalysis and politics. Finally, they discuss the symptomatic effects of the erasure of the political dimension, through the supposed neutrality of the psychoanalytic movement in Brazil and, especially, in the context of the Brazilian dictatorship.