“People are born anarchists or not”: The idea of a visceral anarchism in Roberto Freire’s work

Abstract

This article is part of a larger research in which we seek to understand how a therapeutic technique of scientific and anarchist pretension, Roberto Freire’s Somaterapia, emerged and developed from the counterculture of the 1960s and 1970s. In this article, we analyze the emergence of the idea of an “innate and visceral” anarchism in Freire’s work, the main source used in our research, seeking to understand how this notion relates to aspects of the counterculture, the therapeutic proposal of Somaterapia and the society. In the analysis, we observed points of confluence and divergence between Freire and the counterculture. We understand, mostly with Bourdieu and Pollak, that this idea of an innate anarchism refers directly to the processes of the subjects’ memory and identity construction and that the trajectories of Freire, his therapy and counterculture itself are very complex and sometimes even incoherent and contradictory historical processes.