A nation of head cases

The NY Times reports:

The number of practicing psychologists in Argentina has been surging, to 196 per 100,000 people last year, according to a study by Modesto Alonso, a psychologist and researcher, from 145 per 100,000 people in 2008. That compares with about 27 psychologists per 100,000 people in the United States, according to the American Psychological Association.

Those numbers make Argentina — a country still brooding over its economic decline from a century ago — a world leader, at least when it comes to people’s broad willingness to bare their souls.

“There is no taboo here about saying that you see a professional two or three times a week,” said Tiziana Fenochietto, 29, a psychiatrist doing her residency at the Torcuato de Alvear Hospital for Psychiatric Emergencies, a public institution. “On the contrary,” said Ms. Fenochietto, who has been in therapy herself for the past eight years, “it is chic.” ...

After all, ordinary Argentines readily employ psychological terms that in other countries would be the preserve of psychology majors, and can hold forth on the difference of Freudian and Jungian methods.

I had no idea that a nation could be more nuts that the USA. Freud and Jung were crackpots, and did nothing of scientific merit. They were exposed as frauds a century ago.

America embraced Freudian ideas more than Europe. Only in the last 10 years have American professors turned against Freud. The majority view is probably now that Freud was wrong about most of what he said. But people are weird about stuff like this, and there are still Freudians everywhere.