“This is for your fieldwork,” remarks Pablo Velicovsky as he hands me a copy of the municipal hospital bulletin, which features a story entitled “The Psychoanalysis of Hunger.” For Pablo, the bulletin is a typical example of the assumption, within the Buenos Aires mundo-psi, that psychoanalysis is a panacea for all social problems. I am sitting at the Hospital Romero cafeteria with Pablo and his colleague, Gustavo Rechtman, two psychiatrists in the men's ward. The turns of the conversation reflect the different priorities of these two colleagues. Gustavo describes the institutional structure of Romero: the hospital takes in many patients from the villas miserias (shanties) surrounding Buenos Aires, and from the provinces, since rural health care is quite poor and the hospital is located at the edge of the city. Meanwhile Pablo grabs a napkin and my pen to sketch a description of a behavioral genetics experiment involving chickens that he has just read about: scientists in the United States have transplanted genes from one chick to another and then studied its behavior profile, as mapped by three cameras in a closed dark box in which the chick's beak was painted fluorescent. Pablo is an enthusiast of all things “neuroscientific.” He is editor of a new journal that tries to bring the latest news from North American neuroscience to Argentina. Gustavo is more skeptical about the immediate benefits of such scientific developments, and prefers to talk about problems of poverty and underdevelopment in Argentina.