Published: October 2025

Keywords:
Maria Nichterlein, Gilles Deleuze, Felix Guattari, Psychoanalysis, Unconscious, Psychotherapy, Critique, Collaboration, Process, Language, Complexity, Closed Systems, Open Systems, Societal Influences.

Maria Nichterlein

Clinical Psychologist, Counselling Psychologist and Family Therapist, specialising in complex presentations, including complex trauma. Enjoys teaching and supervising.

m.nichterlein@bigpond.com

Maria Nichterlein: My Background

My background, like many in my generation, is one of displacement and nomadic life. My parents escaped a mad Europe – my father from Germany as a youngster between the two World Wars, and my mother as a child with her family from the Spanish Civil War. They did so in Chile, a welcoming country at the time. My mother lost her family very early, and when she married my father, she was welcomed into my father’s family. This meant that I was born into German as my mother tongue and Spanish as the official language of the country.

Displacement – being different – was central to my making sense of the world, so, perhaps not surprisingly, I became interested in psychology as an area of further studies.

Studying at the university is when things became really difficult for me. If they were complex before, studying psychology in the midst of a dictatorship was beyond comprehension. A point that exemplifies this is the fact that the head of our department at the Universidad de Chile – the most prestigious place of study for this career – was not only an expert in phenomenology and qualitative traditions of testing, but also the head of the dictatorship’s propaganda and the trainer of torturers.

Of course, censorship, violence and significant fear were central ingredients of the regime, but the strong contradiction between the purposes of the knowledge I was studying and its perverse application into civil life was deeply problematic for me. This contradiction created an insatiable desire to ‘solve the enigma’ that defined my studies: the human condition. This enigma was further complicated by the fact that, in line with our colonial heritage (Europe and then an emerging ‘brave America’), the books and the theories we read and studied were immersed in normativities that were foreign to my experience. They belonged to the North and were often alien to the cultural practices of the South. No matter how hard I tried in my studies, some of its assumptions or its claims simply did not make sense.

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