Latin America

Abstract

Latin America (LA) refers to a broad region encompassing the vast majority of countries in South and Central America: Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Costa Rica, Cuba, El Salvador, Ecuador, Guatemala, Guyana, Haiti, Honduras, Mexico, Nicaragua, Panama, Paraguay, Peru, Puerto Rico, Dominican Republic, Uruguay, and Venezuela. Although these countries share similar linguistic elements and some cultural and historical elements, they are vastly different in their social, cultural, economic and historical characteristics. With respect to Psychology, in general, the scientific practice in LA due to its political and economic context, presents great challenges to overcome: universities’ shortage of economic resources and the “reconstruction” of universities whose development stopped during years of military dictatorships governments, among other factors, have a direct effect on the construction of psychology and its theoretical orientations. In the most countries, psychoanalysis prevailed over other theoretical approaches until the end of the twentieth century. Since then, other theoretical approaches have been gaining ground and prestige among professionals and scholars. The present chapter will not exhaust the subject once we did not carry out a historical study. However, as a method for data collection, we conducted interviews with renowned psychologists from most countries in LA. Thus, this chapter aims to present some of the historical and critical analysis of the development of clinical and scientific psychology in the different countries of Latin America.