Néstor Braunstein

In 1978 he was banned from his duties and positions in all Mexican psychiatric institutions because of his critical epistemological views on the official taxonomies of the so-called mental illnesses (then DSM-III and CIE-10).

Immediately after arriving in Mexico he published (with some chapters written by Marcelo Pasternac, Frida Saal and Gloria Benedito): Psicología: Ideología y ciencia in which he demolishes academic psychology and denounces its conceit as a true science.

Beginning in 1981 he became the editor of a continuously reprinted series of books, Coloquios de la Fundación with 13 titles published that helped to expand the knowledge of Freudian and Lacanian psychoanalysis in Latin America.

Braunstein was also the chairman and co-founder of the first officially recognized psychoanalytic teaching institution in the country (Centro de Investigaciones y Estudios Psicoanalíticos, 1982) where he taught until 2003.

He was active in the psychoanalytic lecturing circuit and gave both opening and closing lectures in several international symposiums including the following: Bogota (Pontificia Universidad Javeriana, 1991) [3], Beijing (Psychoanalysis International Symposium, Peking University Health Science Center, Beijing April, 2001), Paris (Lacan, 100 ans, la Sorbonne, January 23, 2000), New York City (Columbia University and Fordham University, 1992 and 2008) [4] Apres-Coup announcement of Columbia lectures, Madrid (Universidad Complutense, Master en Teoría Psicoanalítica 1993 and 1997) [5], Istanbul (Istanbul'da Psykanaliz, Etkinlikleri Sürüyor, September, 2001), Rome (Fondation Européennne pour la Psychanalyse, RSI /Eros-ion, Les peintures de Leonardo Cremonini, May, 1999) and Santiago de Chile (Universidad Andrés Bello.

His works dealt with a variety of subjects in terms of the relationship between psychoanalysis and culture: philosophy from Plato to Wittgenstein and Derrida; literature from Sophocles to Sebald and Christa Wolf; the visual arts; music; opera; film theater; history; theology; medicine; neuroscience; law; linguistics; anthropology; academic psychology; pedagogy; politics; psychiatry and daily life in the 21st century.

In 2003 he turned his attention to the subject of memory, articulating the meaning and research on the ability to remember in psychoanalysis and its constant references (Sigmund Freud and Jacques Lacan) and those sources that can be derived from other disciplines such as literature, philosophy, history and neuroscience.

In this sense he argued that psychoanalysis can be understood as a sort of science of jouissance in the speaking being, a sophisticated knowledge that has been carefully constructed, first by Freud, continued by Lacan and still ongoing.