Nosotros

La librería paidós fue fundada en 1957 por Jaime Bernstein (especialista en ciencias de la educación) y Enrique Butelman, de formación filosófica. Desde su creación, la librería se especializó en psicología. Por entonces funcionaba en una de las oficinas de la Editorial Paidos en la calle Cabildo. Fué recién en 1962 que Bernstein y Butelman crean la "Sociedad Librería Paidos" independiente de la Editorial, y trasladándose a un local propio. El siguiente artículo, publicado en inglés en el journal "Dispositio", Vol. XVIII, No. 45, pp. 157 – 158, relata brevemente la historia de la librería en el contexto de la historia cultural y política de nuestro país.

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MEMOIRS OF A BOOKSTORE

Paidos Bookstore:
1957. A group of intellectuals creates a space, in the University of Buenos Aires, for the field "Psychology," ascribing it to the School of Philosophy and Letters. The de facto Argentinean President, Pedro E. Aramburu, appoints Risieri Frondizi vice-chancellor of the Institute of Higher Education, while the economic depression makes the dollar equal to 50 pesos of the national currency. By that time two persons, Jaime Bernstein, specialist in sciences of education, and Enrique Butelman, trained in the philosophical field, decide to establish a bookstore specializing in psychology. Without any experience in this activity, without a model or an accurate estimate of hypothetical customers, that act was – as perhaps happens with any real bookstore – more a creation of an intellectual space than the opening of a space for sales.

1993. Psychology is already an autonomous career, taught not only in the University of Buenos Aires, but disseminated in the whole country by private and public colleges; the psychologists registered in Buenos Aires exceed thirty thousand, any taxi driver knows very well the neighborhood christened Villa Freud, where psychoanalytic offices abound. In its bars it is not surprising to distinguish, among comments about the last game of the soccer championship, discussions about "unconscious desire," "transference," or the insights and blunders of the last Spanish translation of the Seminar of Jacques Lacan, who in the Villa plays as if on the hometeam, with as much popularity as Maradona. In other areas of the capital bookstores devoted to different specialties were grouped; for example, the juridical ones close to the tribunal, the ones about sociology, philosophy, medicine, and economy near their respective colleges; but no case is like that of the psychology bookstores, which have contributed to give Villa Freud its own personality. The Santa Fe, Las Heras, Scalabrini Ortiz, and Coronel Diaz avenues mark the perimeter of this Villa that is the center of the "Psy" activity of the city and the country.

More than 35 years after that shared dream, what in 1957 was an open question today is an unavoidable certainty that "the psychological" requires specialized bookstores; witness the number of visitors who look over shelves filled with books devoted to the most varied theoretical lines and psychotherapeutical practices. Paidos is the oldest in this "Buenos Aires Psy." There, Marcelo Bernstein, inheritor of the founders’ project, displays to the curious eyes of so many practicing psychoanalysts – be it from the easy chair or from the divan – an ample collection of books but also of journals, general publications, seminars, national and foreign articles, tests, essays. There are to be found the specialized publishing houses: Amorrortu, Nueva Vision, Lugar Editorial, Paidos, to name a few of the most representative; the production of national authors stands out on the display tables. These authors are the third generation after those pioneers who with tenacity and inventiveness created a space in this country and expanded the concerns with the subjectivity, turned into science, of the psychic. Many of those used to visit our house, as new authors do today.

The psychoanalytic activity has multiplied itself, diversified itself; the number of institutions devoted to graduate studies, its scientific development, lectures, colloquia, symposia, conferences, defined our conception of the "Psicolibro Club" to inform the members about recent publications and the events that take place periodically. The disciplines ascribed to "the psychological" produce a heterogeneous collection, which includes treatment with flowers, corporal, psychodramatic, psychosomatic, psychoprophylactic, psychotherapeutically brief, supportive, gestalt, cognitive, transactional, sexologic, astrologic, yogic, and mental control techniques, without forgetting the boom of "self-help" and "know yourself." Nevertheless, a reference, a last name stays beyond good and evil, free of concessions, somebody to whom month after month we dedicate the cover of the Psicolibro magazine: Sigmund Freud.

The distant beginning, with the military in power and intellectuals backing Academic Psychology, with pioneers of psychoanalysis in full bloom, after the expansion, the civic-military alternations, the boom of the Psy college, the schools – Kleinism, Ego Psychology, Lacanism departing from Freud; the surreal psychological variety, Peron’s third presidency, after the dark period, the Military Process, the intellectual as a suspect figure – "doubt is a brag of intellectuals" declared, without any hesitancy, a so-called "hero of the Malvinas war"; the return of democracy in 1983, of market economy in 1989, of the French psychoanalysts that assiduously visit us, of old ideologies with new names, postmodernism, the return to Freud, postfreudianism, and numerous others, are themes and thesis of the texts aligned on shelves or displayed on the tables of the bookstore. Yet, basically, what is revealed, what is spoken out loud, quietly, meditated or discussed amongst the books is the priceless value of a bookstore, the living memory and a place in it that cannot be bought but can only be deserved.