Community Psychology in the River Plate Region (Argentina-Uruguay)

This chapter describes the historical, sociocultural, economic, and political drivers that set the scene for the emergence of psychology in general, and, more specifically, of community psychology (CP), in the River Plate region. CP began to develop in Uruguay and Argentina through professional field practice, which was chiefly based on common sense, social awareness, and/or political conceptions. Then, a number of psychologists who used to work and are currently working with communities started to conceptualize and search for theoretical references, more particularly with regard to CP development in Latin America and Spain. The cultural power of the clinical model together with its unsuitability as a tool for the effective exercise of community psychology or for the creation of a theoretical framework for such a discipline may have prevented it from fully developing in these two countries, in contrast with what occurred in the rest of Latin America. However, in the foreseeable future, CP is expected to expand in both theoretical and practical terms, given the sociocultural, economic, and political crisis that hit both countries following the recipes of the Washington Consensus.