From the phenomenology to psychoanalysis

The divergent paths of León Rozitchner and Oscar Masotta

Abstract

The article comparatively analyzes the way in which León Rozitchner and Oscar Masotta experience a passage from phenomenology to psychoanalysis in the late 1960s in Argentina. Although both arrivals share the same starting point (the intersection of phenomenology and Marxism that occurs in postwar France), the two readings present significant differences. Rozitchner’s interpretation is governed by social and political questions, already present in the development of his philosophical problems produced during his writings of the fifties and sixties. In Masotta’s case, the interest is focused on clinical practice and metapsychology. In the first part of this work, I will carry out a description of the open space by Contorno magazine, a group that served as a starting point for both of them. Once this is done, I will study separately the singularity of the two readings, the way in which in both cases the authors reach out to psychoanalysis in an attempt to solve the problems opened up by the phenomenological tradition. As a conclusion, I will point out the main differences between Rozitchner and Masotta based on the place occupied by Freud and Lacan in the two interpretations