“There is an old joke,” says Juan Carlos Stagnaro, “about how the Mexicans descended from the Aztecs, the Peruvians from the Incas, and the Argentines from the boats, because we are a country of immigrants.” Stagnaro, a psychiatrist in his fifties, graying with a thin mustache, leans forward with enthusiasm. It is already late evening in his office, but we will spend two more hours talking. He is speaking of his publishing ventures: Stagnaro is editor of Vertex, the most widely read psychiatry journal in Argentina, and head of a publishing house that prints classical works in psychiatry, both European and Argentine. He was exiled during the dictatorship because of active involvement in the labor movement, and went to France, where he studied with the psychiatric theorist and historian Georges Lanteri-Laura. Stagnaro returned to Buenos Aires with a strong vision of the political and epistemological importance of sustaining a European tradition in Argentine psychiatry.

Our discussion of the expansion of the “North American” paradigm in global psychiatry, based on DSM and neuroscience, provokes Stagnaro to reflect on Argentina's complicity in processes of “cultural colonialism”: “We have always felt, above all in Buenos Aires, that we were something like the Europe of Latin America. But this has brought us both light and shadow: on the one hand, we strive to emulate the thinking of more central countries and, on the other hand, we have a mania for the copy. I think it can be understood very well if one understands the concept of cultural colonialism as having two elements: it is the intention of those who colonize, and it is also the passivity of those that let themselves be colonized.”