This article reconstructs, from the frame of reception studies, the creation and later fracture of a pavlovian psychiatric circle within Argentinian communism. The emergence of this circle, the appropriation of Soviet and French psychiatric clinical knowledge, and the construction of idiosyncratic psychotherapeutic models depending on other competing local psychiatric schools are analyzed, as well as the divergences resulting from different interpretations of the scope of pavlovism. The intersection between epistemic and political values in the effort to construct a psychotherapy consistent with the premises of Marxism-Leninism and Communist partisanship is emphasized.