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The Puerto Rican Syndrome. Patricia Gherovici. New York: Other Press, 2003. 296 pp.
The Puerto Rican Syndrome opens with description of northeastern Philadelphia's Puerto Rican barrio being whitewashed in preparation for its use as the futuristic backdrop of the movie Twelve Monkeys. That the Barrio actually needs to be restored before it can acquire a convincingly gritty, "post-Apocalyptic" (p. 2) look, reflects the ineffectual, misplaced paternalism of U.S. policies toward Puerto Rico and Puerto Ricans that Gherovici convincingly argues is at the root of the "Puerto Rican syndrome." This historically and politically situated inquiry, part ethnography and part psychoanalytic theory, explores the social construction of the name that mystified U.S. army psychiatrists gave to a broad collection of symptoms in the 1950s-including extreme anxiety, rage, and depression-which were experienced by Puerto Rican men who were veterans of the Korean War.
Drawing from her own historical research, Freudian and Lacanian theory, and case studies from her clinical practice as a psychoanalyst, Gherovici argues that the Puerto Rican syndrome is a form of hysteria, as Freud defined it, and, as such, "the Puerto Rican syndrome, like any hysteria, forces itself...