After 1955, there was in Argentina a social and cultural renewal, in which psychoanalysis ceased to be a private practice, limited to the wealthy residents of Buenos Aires. Freudian ideas arrived to new institutional settings, where they suffered several transformations allowing them to enlarge its public. For example, the use that was made, in certain public institutions, of some techniques based on psychoanalysis, such as group psychotherapy, involved a remarkable multiplication of the number of patients that were treated. At the same time, this practice stemming from psychoanalysis was no longer an exclusive right of the members of the Argentine Psychoanalytic Association, for it could be carried out by physicians and psychologists beyond its ranks. Thus, an alternative space for analytic training and treatment was created, and the official association begun to lose its monopole over the "legitimate uses" of psychoanalysis. In this paper we focus in the case of the Psychopathology Service of Lanús Hospital, directed by Mauricio Goldenberg Between 1956 and 1972. It is a good example of this process of expansion and transformation of a "plebeian" psychoanalysis. The methodology that has been used is a classical one in the field of history, which is based on the analysis of texts and documents referring to the period of study.
History; psychoanalysis; health