Clinic, politics, and commitment:

Hélio Pellegrino and the subversion of silence

Abstract

This paper explores the trajectory of Hélio Pellegrino, highlighting his active engagement in the fight against authoritarianism and the military dictatorship in Brazil, as well as his courage in challenging rigid institutions. Hélio Pellegrino embodied the synthesis of the intellectual committed to social transformation, integrating psychoanalysis with public and political engagement in times of coups, silencing, censorship, and the torture of political prisoners. His combative stance extended not only to the institutional practices of traditional psychoanalysis but also to the public confrontation of ethical issues, as in the case of the self-proclaimed «psychoanalyst» Amílcar Lobo, a collaborator in acts of torture. In this emblematic case, Pellegrino exposed the contradiction between the clinical commitment to human care and involvement in acts of torture. This denunciation transcends the Brazilian context and reveals the ongoing tension between psychoanalysis and authoritarianism in Europe and globally, standing out as a particular episode within a broader historical framework of international psychoanalytic institutions. His intense participation in spaces of resistance, such as the Symposium «Psychoanalysis and Politics» at PUC-Rio, is recalled as a moment when he confronted the dilemmas of analytical neutrality in dark times. Beyond being a psychoanalyst, Hélio was also a poet, journalist, physician, and psychiatrist—a defender of a living clinic open to the people, opposing the confinement of knowledge. He believed in psychoanalysis as a subversive and transformative practice, open to human encounters and historical processes. The first social psychoanalysis clinic in Brazil was born from his restlessness. Together with Kattrin Kemper, whose experience at the Berlin Polyclinic inspired a commitment to democratizing psychoanalysis, he proposed a model aimed at the working classes, breaking with the elitism of traditional consulting rooms. There, in Morro dos Cabritos and the streets of Copacabana, psychoanalysis assumed another face, one close to the suffering of the people. His trajectory reconstructs the struggle for ethics in psychoanalysis, transforming the consulting room into a space of human encounter that transcends the mere application of psychoanalytic technique—a gesture of presence in the face of the other’s suffering, capable of opening unexpected paths to freedom. This study revisits this restless and luminous figure, reaffirming the relevance of his courageous trajectory, his intellectual contributions, and his clinical and political psychoanalytic praxis.