“My history with psychoanalysis,” says Betty Milan, “dates from anguish that could have led me to suicide. I overcame that anguish thanks to analytical work. I was 18, and the name of the psychoanalyst is Isaías Melsohn, a teacher at the Brazilian Psychoanalysis Society. With him, I traveled a good part of the road while in medical school.
“Later, I encountered Jacques Lacan (letter) and underwent five years of analysis (1973-1978). Meanwhile, the analyst Magno Machado Dias and I founded the Freudian Schoolof Rio de Janeiro, which played a major role in increasing awareness of Lacanian psychoanalysis in Brazil. In 1985 we brought together more than a thousand persons in a conference sponsored by Gilberto Freyre. My work in the psychoanalytical field was mainly clinical, and the term that best suits me is ‘practicing analyst.’ I taught little but wrote some articles on psychoanalytical theory that were published in magazines and newspapers and are available below.

“What I know comes from my clinical observations and my books, which in different ways invigorate psychoanalysis. It also comes from my son, who in the collage that opens this page, represented the unconscious by an exclamation point and the conscious mind by a question mark, leading me to rethink these concepts from the standpoint of punctuation. He’s even more Lacanian than I am!”

essays and articles PSI

Betty Milan the psychoanalyst appears in technical works in the form of essays, lectures, interviews, and newspaper articles. Some of them were published in book form while others were published in periodicals or remain unpublished.
Working on the formulation of text in her Selected Works, the author gathered all the material in the trilogy entitled Psi – still unpublished in print form but accessible on this site.

The presentation of the titles O jogo do esconderijo and Manhas do poder, previously published volumes on this theme, can be found under the menu item BOOKS. The third part of the set consists of the selection of articles entitled O saber do inconsciente.

(see Portuguese version)