Inside Dictatorship’s basement: Psychoanalysis of the torture over the political prisoners in Brazil post-1964

Abstract

This article explores the hypothesis in which the torturers and other members of repressive agencies in Brazil’s dictatorship maintained the group unity through the psych mechanisms of identification as described by Freud in “Mass Psychology and Analysis of the ‘I’” (1921). Starting from the ALN’s militant case, Eduardo Collen Leite – so-called “Bacuri”, who was severely tortured and murdered in 1970 we illustrate the relevance about the existence of the “out group” for your own support.