Muito obrigado MV for sharing me your memories of Buenos Aires on the River Plate. Media lunas (croissants) and cafe cortado (coffee with milk), a very old fashioned subte (subway), nights filled with people (including children walking around at midnight), and some lines from Borges, are what I remember best. Oh, and a Jewish wedding I happened to stray into on a saturday evening... they accepted me as an uninvited guest, gave me that little cap to put on my head, I didn't understand a word of what the rabbi was saying, but it was a wonderful event.
Hitoshi Oshima has written an interesting book called The Capital of Psychoanalysis on Buenos Aires. He is a Japanese historian of ideas who lived there for several years, and during his stay he went through sessions of psychoanalysis using Spanish as a medium language. He is married to an Espanola and has a perfect command of Spanish, still it is doubtful, so people say, if psychoanalysis is ever possible in a language other than one's own mother tongue. (I am more of the opinion that there is a part of one's psyche that only a foreign language can shed light on.)
Buenos Aires has more psychoanalysts per capita than any other cities in the world including New York. Most of the psychoanalysts are Jewish, naturally, and many of them are Lacanian, I heard.
Buenos Aires, a proud city where time stopped counting itself around 1930...
