Pharmaceutical reason: Subject and psychotrope in Buenos Aires (Argentina)

This dissertation is about the interaction of experts, objects and institutions in the Buenos Aires psychiatric community. More broadly, it is concerned with contemporary transformations in conceptions of the human. Over the past two decades, the view that mental illness is located in the brain and that biochemical interventions are the most efficient and effective means of treatment has become predominant in North America. This study explores the factors involved in the spread of this view to another institutional and epistemological milieu, tracing its adaptations there as well as the resistances it faces.; This work focuses particularly on the role of two technologies, the psychopharmaceutical and the diagnostic standard, in reshaping the contours of contemporary psychiatry. Both representation of and intervention into mental disorders imply a model of the disorder's cause, and therefore an understanding of how behavior arises in the interaction between the human organism and its environment. Because of its strong psychoanalytic tradition and charged political atmosphere, Buenos Aires is a unique experimental site for the investigation of mutations in psychiatric knowledge. In this setting, it became clear that pharmaceuticals themselves do not alter epistemological frameworks. Rather, they introduce a series of problems whose possible solutions arouse intense professional conflict.; The study of controversies over mental disorder in a distinctive milieu reveals some of the multiple and competing conceptions of the human that coexist within the west, and helps to identify the process of their transformation. In Buenos Aires, differences in the use of pharmaceuticals and diagnostic standards pointed toward larger tensions surrounding the causes of mental disorder and the task of the psychiatrist. Does pathology spring from the brain or from the past? Does chemical intervention attack the cause of distress or only the symptom? Differing answers to such questions indicate the way in which psychiatry is a site for investigating how we are remaking ourselves as we invent new means for managing our lives and intervening in our bodies.