By Danny Bloom
CHIAYI CITY, Taiwan– When the local English-language newspaper in Taiwan printed a story the other day datelined “Buenos Aires, Argentina” and focused on an Argentinian psychoanalyst named Andres Rascovsky, I just knew I had to send an email to the good doctor and ask him a few questions, Buenos Aires being ”the world’s capital of psychoanalysis.” as the wire story said.
For every 120 inhabitants of Buenos Aires, a psychologist is apparently on hand to help “portenos” (as the denizens of the city are called in the local Spanish slang) make it through hard times — or simply lend an ear, as Sigmund Freud, the father of psychoanalysis, once did.
Three million people, lots of shrinks. In any language, one can say: Do the math. It adds up.
Dr. Rascovsky, in his early 60s and president of the Argentine Psychoanalytic Association, told a reporter for the French News Agency: “Psychoanalysis is so much a part of Buenos Aires because the city makes you suffer.” With humor like that, I just knew I had to contact Dr Racovsky at his office in a posh neighborhood that has been nicknamed by locals as “Villa Freud”.
Dr. Rascovsky’s office walls are adorned with deer antlers, seen as symbols of wisdom and connections to the spiritual world, the AFP story added. So I wrote to him and asked, out of curiosity, if he was Jewish, and how the name Rascovsky had come to Argentina.
The first email response I received from his secretary was in Spanish: “Buenos días, quisiera saber cual sería el mensaje para poder transmitírselo al Dr. Rascovsky. Muchas gracias!” (Good morning, I’d like to know what the message is in order to transmit it to Dr. Rascovsky. Thank you very much)
Knowing I was getting somewhere, I sent another asking for Dr Rascovsky again, and this time he himself responded:
“My father Arnaldo Rascovky was born in Cordoba in Argentina and his father came from Romania. Our family, all of us, we are all Jewish, but we are not religious. My mother’s last name was Wencelblat, and she was also Jewish, and also a Freudian analyst whose Jewish father came to Argentina from — Austria!”
The message was sent by Dr Rascovsky’s BlackBerry, or, as the note said in Spanish at the end: “Envio de mi BlackBerry de Personal.”
In all of Argentina today, some 50,000 psychologists are in the business of listening, empathizing, assisting lost souls and fearless dreamers and helping aspiring actors and writers. Want a statistic on this? Argentina, capital of the tango, has one shrink for every 700 residents, and believe it or not, that is three times more than America. And there are 200 “shrink” schools just in Buenos Aires, too.
Such sessions are partially reimbursed by social security health plans in Argentina, so it’s a win-win situation for both patients and therapists, according to sources. As for Dr Rascovsky, as director of the Argentine Psychoanalytic Association, he’s in a good position to make sure that there are as few Freudian slips as possible under his watch. “Portenos” are in good hands in South America’s ”Villa Freud”.