“Y eso como te hace sentir?” a.k.a “Psychologists

The other day one of my best friends and I were chatting about what we had learned from our respective sessions to our psychologists that week, and we realized that we didn’t really have a clue. Fun fact: Argentina is the country with the most psychologists in the world, with 154 professionals for every 100 thousand habitants, a statistic that is well above the average for the rest of the world. It seems that paying someone to listen to your problems has become all the rage in Buenos Aires. I am not attacking the validity of psychology, because I know some people are bat shit crazy, but it looks to me like Argentine middle-class has become obsessed with its own bourgeois problems, needing professional guidance to reassure San Isidro teenagers that just because they’re not lucky in love today doesn’t mean they will die alone, or something like that.

   
    With so many psychiatrists, psychologists, psycho-pedagogues and other such life guides, in the words of Carrie Bradshaw ‘I couldn’t help but wonder’ if the fact that we are so obsessed with these psychos means we become psychos ourselves. Maybe it’s because porteños are so loud they need to hand over 150+ pesos an hour for someone to actually focus on what they are saying, instead of talking back even louder. For a people ‘con tantas pilas’ it seems like we have to take some time part apart each week to talk to our own selves through that revered medium of the cult of psycho. The self-help mind-body-spirit era has become apparent in this country not through a rise in sales of books and healing crystals or whatever the hell they use, but through these gate-keepers of that big mystery known as the ‘inconsciente’. And Argentines react violently to what we don’t understand: try feeding peanut butter to a true porteño; they will smack you over the head and ask what the hell is wrong with ‘este dulce de leche trucho’.
    Though my friend and I discuss our psychos advice, most of the time we don’t really have a clue as to what that advice means. Speaking in incomprehensible psycho-babble and mentioning your ‘Other’ and inserting the phrase ‘øy eso como te hace sentir?’ every now and then seems your basic recipe for a diagnosis, or maybe it’s just my being ignorant since I can’t be assed with soul-searching or digging through my, supposed, past woes that have so incapacitated me in my present state.
    Psychologists are helpful to some, I admit that freely, but most of us porteños fall into the trap where going to these sessions becomes an addictive cycle and not a concrete problem-solving sitting, as if we are totally incapable of managing our lives by ourselves. And then, when one of your friends comes up to you and says ‘Oh my God! I have the most amazing shrink! You simply must try her!’ you realize that this sentence would be more appropriate referring to a masseuse or tasty ‘choripan’ stand on the ‘costanera’. Psychos have become the must-have consumer product of our times here in Argentina, and some of us go through quite a number of changes in our lifetimes. Cheers to mental-health, and to paying through the nose for it.
    ‘Suerte’ to all the ‘enkilombados’ and ‘enkilombadas’
    El Pendejo Porteño