The Puerto Rican Syndrome

A revised edition of the award-winning historical account that offers timely insights into psychoanalysis and Hispanic experiences in America.

During the 1950s, U.S. Army medical officers noted a puzzling new syndrome that contemporary psychiatry could neither explain nor cure: Puerto Rican soldiers under stress exhibited a dramatic form of pseudo-epilepsy, foaming at the mouth, screaming, biting, kicking, shaking in seizures, and fainting. The phenomenon seemed to correspond to a serious neurological disease, yet physical examination failed to identify any sign of an organic origin. This unusual set of symptoms was designated “Puerto Rican Syndrome.”

In this lucid, sophisticated work, Patricia Gherovici thoroughly examines the so-called Puerto Rican Syndrome in the modern world, its social and cultural implications for the growing Hispanic populations in the United States and, therefore, for the U.S. as a whole. As a mental illness that is, allegedly, uniquely Puerto Rican, this syndrome links nationality and culture to a psychiatric disease whose reappearance recalls the spectacular hysteria that led to the discovery of the unconscious and the birth of psychoanalysis. Gherovici beautifully and systematically uses the combined insights of Freud and Lacan to examine the current state of psychoanalysis and Hispanic communities in America. Blending these insights with history, current events, and her own case material, Gherovici provides a startling, fresh look at Puerto Rican Syndrome as social and cultural phenomenon. She sheds new light on the future of American society and argues that psychoanalysis is not only possible, but much needed in the barrio.