Melanie Klein in Buenos Aires: Beginnings and developments

Int J Psychoanal 2005;86:869–94
Melanie Klein in Buenos Aires:
Beginnings and developments1
R. HORACIO ETCHEGOYEN2 and bSAMUEL ZYSMAN
a
Posadas 1580, Piso 13, 1112 Buenos Aires, Argentina — rhetche@arnet.com.ar
b
Laprida 2073, Piso 1 ‘3’, 1425 Buenos Aires, Argentina — zysman@satlink.com
(Final version accepted 30 June 2004)
a
In the first decades of the 20th century, Freud was known and quoted in Latin America
by an elite of enlightened minds. In the 1940s a convergence took place in Buenos
Aires of European exiles with local pioneers, and thus the Argentine Psychoanalytical
Association was founded in 1942. Since then psychoanalysis has grown steadily
and has spread into hospitals and universities, influencing culture at large. The
socioeconomic situation of that time permitted this phenomenon to develop, to the
astonishment of observers. In this paper the authors study the strong influence of
Kleinian thought during the first 30 years of this development. The original works of
local thinkers constitute the intellectual capital that sustains the idea of an ‘Argentine
psychoanalytic school’. During the 1970s, both society and psychoanalysis endured
deep and complex changes. Lacan’s teachings gained support and Klein’s influence
began to decline. At present the Buenos Aires Kleinians keep working, while their
relationship with Lacanians and other schools is calmer. Respectful discussions
became thus possible, oriented to strictly scientific differences.
Keywords: Freud, Lacan, Klein, object relations, Argentine School,
psychoanalysis, culture, political circumstances, Buenos Aires Kleinians
More than 100 years after its creation by Sigmund Freud, psychoanalysis enjoys the
recognition of the scientific community and has deeply permeated western culture.
At the dawn of the 20th century, some enlightened Latin American minds (among
them José Ingenieros, Aníbal Ponce, Gregorio Bermann, Carlos Alberto Seguín,
Honorio Delgado and Germán Greve) studied and even applied Freud’s work.3
But it was with Ángel Garma’s arrival in Buenos Aires in 1938, and Celes Ernesto
Cárcamo’s almost at the same time, that psychoanalysis started to be systematically
developed amongst us. These two pioneers found a fertile ground in Buenos Aires,
because Enrique Pichon Rivière, Arminda Aberastury, Arnaldo Rascovsky, Matilde
Wencelblat, Teodoro Schlossberg, Simón Wencelblat, Luisa Gambier (who would
later become Luisa Álvarez de Toledo) and Alberto Tallaferro had already formed
an enthusiastic group that studied Freud’s work (Balán, 1991). Luis Rascovsky,
Paper presented at Marcas Identificatorias del Psicoanalisis en Latinoamerica [Identifying traits of
Latin American Psychoanalysis], Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, 18–19 June 2004. Translated by Judith Filc.
2
Corresponding author.
3
Germán Greve, a Chilean physician trained in Germany, presented a paper in Buenos Aires in 1910
based on Freud’s theories; Freud (1914) mentions him.
1
©2005 Institute of Psychoanalysis
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R. HORACIO ETCHEGOYEN AND SAMUEL ZYSMAN
Flora Scolni and Jorge Weil also joined this group (Resnik, 2001). At the end of
1942 (just after Marie Langer’s arrival in Argentina) the Argentine Psychoanalytic
Association (APA) was founded; it was admitted as a provisional society by Ernest
Jones, then president of the International Psychoanalytic Association (IPA), on 12
December that year.
This paper is concerned with the influence of Melanie Klein’s work in Buenos
Aires. By the mid-20th century, this author was the Argentine analysts’ main source
of inspiration and was equally influential in all of Latin America. We will also try to
show the social context in which this occurred. Judging it pertinent to this essay’s
goal, we decided to gather all the relevant information from specialised journals.
We also consulted the work of Jorge Balán (1991), Elsa del Valle Echegaray (1986,
1999), Hugo Vezzetti (1989, 1996), Fidias Cesio (2000), Mariano Ben Plotkin
(2001), and Germán L. García (1980). The well-documented studies by Cucurullo,
Faimberg and Wender (1982); Wender et al (1995) on the history of psychoanalysis
in Argentina were also very useful to us.
The Revista de Psicoanálisis [Journal of Psychoanalysis]
When perusing this journal, whose fruitful history begins in 1943 under Arnaldo
Rascovsky, we find the key writers of the period, namely, Freud, Karl Abraham,
Jones, Sandor Ferenczi, Victor Tausk, and so on. Melanie Klein stands out among
them, and later on Ronald Fairbairn and Donald Winnicott as well as the egopsychologists from Vienna and North America. In the first issue of the journal we
come across ‘Primeros estadios del conflicto de Edipo y de la formación del superyó
[Early stages of the Oedipus conflict and of superego formation]’, which corresponds
to Chapter 8 of The psycho-analysis of children (1932), the book by Melanie Klein
that Aberastury was in the process of translating at the time. Elizabeth Goode
(known after her marriage as Betty Garma) soon joined this endeavour, and in 1948
El psicoanálisis de niños was published by El Ateneo with a prologue by Arminda
Aberastury.4 On account of this translation Aberastury started a mail exchange with
Klein in 1946. Publication of this volume constitutes a milestone in the history of
Latin American psychoanalysis and in psychoanalytic literature in Spanish and
Portuguese. We should point out that this translation was mainly based on the 1937
English edition, which Marie Langer collated with the original in German.
In the third issue of the first volume there appears ‘Los dinamismos de la
epilepsia [The dynamisms of epilepsy]’ (1943) a solid essay by Pichon Rivière
which mentions Klein frequently. Pichon believed that certain epileptic symptoms
constitute transformations of night terrors, a phenomenon Klein studied thoroughly.
In the fourth issue of this volume, we may find the book review of The psychoanalysis of children, where Aberastury expounds at great length on play technique
and its rationale. In this text, Aberastury advocates approaching the child through
the technique Klein had developed in Berlin in the 1920s, and asserts along
with Klein that the child develops an authentic transference neurosis that may
According to Ana Kaplan (personal communication), Hebe Friedenthal carried out the material task of
translating the book.
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MELANIE KLEIN IN BUENOS AIRES
871
be analysed—mutatis mutandis—like the adult’s. In this way, Aberastury takes
a definite stance regarding the 1927 controversy between Klein and Anna Freud,
a choice that constitutes a substantial change, since Aberastury analysed her first
patients using Anna Freud’s approach (Lustig de Ferrer, 1972).
The references to Klein and her school multiply in the coming years. We witness
an increasing use of her ideas to explain clinical and theoretical problems at a time
when psychoanalysis was being positively received in Buenos Aires’s cultured
milieus. We maintain that the development of psychoanalysis was connected to the
prevailing conditions in Buenos Aires society at the time, an issue rigorously studied
by Vezzetti (1996). In the first issue of volume 2 (July 1944) we may find a famous
essay by Cárcamo and Marie (Mimi) Langer on female sterility that quotes both
Marie Bonaparte’s notion of feminine masochism and Klein’s innovative ideas on
the early superego. There is no reference, however, to the deep theoretical conflict
between both thinkers’ conception of female sexuality. When Langer refers to the
psychology of menstruation in a later article (Vol. II, number 2, October 1944) based
on the ideas of Jones and Klein, she does not hesitate to attribute the girl’s guilt
feelings to the oral sadism that leads her to attack the interior of the mother’s body
in her fantasy, so as to strip it of children and penises. We can see here a significant
switch toward Klein’s ideas, especially in what concerns the origin and consequences
of guilt. Such influence becomes even more evident in her ‘Notas para el romance de
Doña Alda [Notes on Doña Alda’s romance]’, a beautiful essay on applied analysis.
These papers express an interest of Langer’s that will materialise in an enduring
book, Maternidad y sexo [Motherhood and sexuality] ([1951] 1992).
In January 1946, Ángel Garma publishes an essay on melancholia that includes
a review of the literature on the topic. He devotes a paragraph to Klein and her
ideas on the psychogenesis of manic-depressive states, which she presented at the
Lucerne International Psycho-Analytic Congress in 1934.5 Garma acknowledges the
originality of Klein’s ideas on sadism and highlights the significance of partialobjects. These will later converge in the total object (the mother), the source of
ambivalence and mourning. In his fruitful path as researcher and, undoubtedly, a
master of psychoanalysis in Argentina, Garma (Garma, 1993) will draw from Klein
(and from Fairbairn) the notion of persecutory inner objects. Yet he will move away
from Klein in relation to her theory of the depressive position, which he deemed
somewhat religious (Garma, personal communication).
Even though it is true that Klein appears in the Revista from its inception,
we will soon find Fairbairn’s work as well, in volume 5 (1947–8). His article ‘La
represión y el retorno de los objetos malos [The repression and the return of the bad
objects]’ (1943) may be found in the first issue, and ‘Las estructuras endopsíquicas
consideradas en términos de relaciones de objeto [Endopsychic structure considered
in terms of object-relationships]’ (1944) in the next one. At that time, the reading of
Fairbairn’s work was usual in Buenos Aires. The Garmas, the Pichon Rivières, Lily
and José Bleger, David Liberman, the Barangers, and León and Rebecca Grinberg
This essay by Klein closes the book Psicoanálisis de la melancolía [Psychoanalysis of melancholia]
compiled by Ángel Garma and Luis (Lucio) Rascovsky two years later (Garma and Rascovsky, 1948).
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R. HORACIO ETCHEGOYEN AND SAMUEL ZYSMAN
read it, and Heinrich Racker quotes Fairbairn in one of his first essays (1948), where
he introduces his concept of the Moloch mother. Racker opposes Fairbairn’s ideas
on orality and aggression in early childhood, thus coming closer to Klein, even
though he disagrees with her concerning early development and primary depression.
In ‘Algunas correlaciones entre Freud, M. Klein y Fairbairn [Some correlations
among Freud, M. Klein, and Fairbairn]’, Lily and José Bleger (1962) detail the
differences among these authors. In Freud’s view, the relation of the drive to the
object is contingent, while Klein grants the object a special place without denying
drives their status as originary force, and decidedly including the death instinct.
Fairbairn, in contrast, establishes the incompatibility between drive psychology and
ego psychology in what concerns the objects, since ego psychology rejects the drive
as primary force and, of course, dismisses the existence of a death instinct.6
In the second issue of volume 5, along with Fairbarn’s essay there appears a
new article by Pichon Rivière that introduces the concept of primal illness, which
was very well received by the initial psychoanalytic group. As Resnik (2001)
recalls, Pichon draws the idea from Wilhelm Griesinger, who believed that every
pathological process begins with a depressive set of symptoms. Pichon enriches
the notion with psychoanalytic tools he takes from Freud (regression) and Klein
(mourning). Depression is the basic illness from which the other neurotic and
psychotic illnesses derive. The idea of a primal (or basic) illness entails a conception
of human development that starts from a unitary object. Schizoid mechanisms
come later, as Racker asserts in his ‘Contribución al problema de la estratificación
psicopatológica [A contribution to the problem of psychopathological stratification]’
([1953] 1957). Bleger also supported this notion with his idea of a glischro-karyc
position7 prior to the paranoid-schizoid position, as stated in ‘Modalidades de la
relación objetal [Modes of the object-relation]’, presented at the 1961 Symposium,
which later became the third chapter of Simbiosis y ambigüedad [Symbiosis and
ambiguity: The psychoanalysis of very early development] ([1967] 1990). We may
notice here an original approach by Argentine authors that diverged from Klein’s
developmental theory, where the ego (or self) is split from the beginning.
In the first issue of volume 6 (1948) we may find Klein’s essay ‘Notas sobre
algunos mecanismos esquizoides [Notes on some schizoid mechanisms]’ (1946),
translated by Bella (Beba) Fridman, the APA’s first administrative assistant. In this
article, Klein completes and refines her positions theory and introduces the concept
of projective identification. If we recall that this paper was presented to the British
Society at the end of 1946, we can appreciate how fast scientific novelties reached
the Río de la Plata. In the third and fourth issues of volume 7 (1949 and 1950), two
other extremely significant contributions to Kleinian theory were published, namely,
Klein’s ‘El duelo y su relación con los estados maníaco-depresivos [Mourning and
its relation to manic-depressive states]’ (1935), which Garma had already quoted,
The essay ends with a reference to the notion of primal illness (Pichon Rivière), in which the link
between the object and the ego may be grasped in all its complexity.
7
Translator’s note: A notion coined by Bleger, based on the Greek terms for ‘agglutinated’ and ‘nucleus’,
which refers to a position where the agglutinated nucleus predominates (see Bleger, 1972, p. 22).
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MELANIE KLEIN IN BUENOS AIRES
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and Susan Isaacs’s classic essay, ‘Naturaleza y función de la fantasía [The nature and
function of phantasy]’ (1948). The latter became the focus of intense debates during
the famous Controversies8 within the British Psychoanalytic Society between 1941
and 1945, compiled and discussed by Pearl King and Riccardo Steiner (1992).
That same volume also contains several papers by local analysts: ‘Aspectos
de la interpretación en el psicoanálisis de niños [Aspects of interpretation in child
psychoanalysis]’, by Betty Garma (1949), which we will discuss later; ‘El mito
del niño asado [The myth of the roasted child]’, by Langer (1950); and ‘El juego
de construir casas [House building play: Its interpretation and diagnostic value]’
(1958a) and ‘Fobia a los globos en una niña de once meses [Balloon phobia
in an 11-month-old girl]’ (1950), both by Aberastury. Aberastury was already
becoming a leader in child psychoanalysis, a path that would reach its peak in
1962 with her book Teoría y técnica del psicoanálisis de niños [Theory and
technique of child psychoanalysis]. An article by Marialzira Perestrello (who had
come with her husband from Rio de Janeiro to train in Buenos Aires) about a case
of infantile schizophrenia shows Klein’s influence on the young analysts of that
period (Perestrello, 1950).
The Zürich Congress
In 1949, the 16th International Psycho-Analytic Congress took place in Zürich. It
was the first international congress since the Second World War, and the APA was
admitted there as Component Society. Betty and Ángel Garma attended, along
with Arnaldo and Matilde Rascovsky and Teodoro Schlossberg, and they met
with Melanie Klein and her group.9 Betty Goode (later, Garma) discussed and
supervised with them one of her first cases, a 21-month-old boy (Pedrito), who
was the youngest child in analysis in the whole world at the time. Betty Garma
recalls that Klein was favourably impressed with her presentation and suggested
that she settle in London for a while to be trained in child analysis technique
but Betty had to decline the offer. Later, however, this opportunity materialised
through a series of supervisions the Garmas and other members of the Buenos
Aires group shared in London.
The contact with Klein left a deep impression on Buenos Aires psychoanalysis.
Both the trips to London by Argentine analysts and the Kleinians’ visits to Buenos
Aires to supervise and teach seminars became a habit that still continues. We will
mention, among others, Hannah Segal’s trips in 1954 and 1958, Wilfred Bion’s in
1968, Donald Meltzer’s several visits since 1965, Herbert Rosenfeld’s and Betty
Joseph’s two visits, and Esther Bick’s journey to Montevideo. From then on and
for almost two decades, Argentine psychoanalytic thought, always curious and
open-minded, experienced the influence of Kleinian theory at its peak. In these
foundational times, those analysts who were starting to work with children only
had at their disposal the books by Anna Freud and Melanie Klein, and Sophie
Translator’s note: In English in the original.
This encounter was doubtlessly made easier by A. Garma’s friendship with Paula Heimann, who had
been his fellow student at the Berlin Institute in the late 1920s.
8
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R. HORACIO ETCHEGOYEN AND SAMUEL ZYSMAN
Morgenstern’s essays published in the Revista de Psicoanálisis.10 Betty Garma
establishes the beginning of her collaboration with Aberastury around 1945, but it
may have been somewhat earlier, as Betty Goode was born in Paysandú, Uruguay
to an English family, and was teaching English to analysts (like Ángel Garma) and
children of analysts.
In the early 1950s a trip to Buenos Aires was scheduled for Melanie Klein and
Paula Heimann, as stated in the letter Klein sent to Betty Garma and Aberastury
on 25 June 1952 (B. Garma, 2003), but the trip was cancelled, apparently on
the orders of Klein’s physicians.11 Hannah Segal travelled in their stead, and her
visit constituted a true scientific event. Niños en análisis [Children in analysis]
(B. Garma, 1992)12 refers to this period and constitutes a valuable document, for
it introduces us to the Argentine psychoanalytic world of the mid-20th century.
We have already mentioned ‘Aspectos de la interpretación en el psicoanálisis de
niños [Aspects of interpretation in child psychoanalysis]’, which was incorporated
as a chapter in Niños en análisis. In this essay, Garma expounds on her technique
and points out the differences among the approaches to early childhood, latency
and puberty, illustrating them with a rich clinical material. The author follows
Klein’s procedure, even though she incorporates suggestions from Anna Freud’s
work, from Otto Fenichel’s book on technique (1941), and from Richard Sterba.
In the chapters ‘La escuela argentina [The Argentine school]’ and ‘El impacto y
la influencia de Melanie Klein en mi quehacer psicoanalítico [Melanie Klein’s
impact and influence on my psychoanalytic work]’ we witness her encounter
with Arminda Aberastury and the beginning of a long-lasting collaboration. Betty
Garma does not hesitate to acknowledge Aberastury’s role as a leader in child
analysis in our milieu, and states that it was Aberastury who introduced Kleinian
ideas to Argentina.
Elfriede S. Lustig de Ferrer (known as Susana) agrees on this point in the
obituary she wrote for the 1972 Revista de Psicoanálisis, a brief and penetrating
portrayal of Aberastury written after her death on 13 November 1971. Aberastury
was born in 1910. She received her education degree from the Buenos Aires
We have not been able to determine whether it was Aberastury who discovered Melanie Klein in
Argentina or if Pichon Rivière—a learned man deeply versed in psychiatry and psychoanalysis—was
the first to come into contact with the book. Betty Garma and Susana Lustig believe it was Aberastury.
We have also been unable to find out which version of Anna Freud’s book Betty Garma mentions.
Einführung in die Technike der Kinderanalyse was published by the Internationaler Psychoanalitischer
Verlag in Vienna in 1927. It was translated into English in 1928 as Introduction to the technique of child
analysis and published by the Nervous and Mental Disease Publishing Company. It was only years later,
in 1964, that Hormé published it in Spanish as Psicoanálisis del niño. Aberastury quotes the German
original in her article ‘Psicoanálisis de niños [Child analysis]’ (1946: 2), but everything leads us to think
that it was the English edition that became well known in Buenos Aires.
11
In his prologue to Niños en análisis [Children in analysis] (B. Garma, 1992), Ángel Garma asserts that
the trip did not take place because of the feud between Klein and Heimann. Alejandro Dagfal claims
that, because of this feud, Hannah Segal came to be closest to Klein, and it was Klein who suggested
that Segal travel to Buenos Aires (Dagfal, personal communication).
12
We deeply regret her passing, which occurred while this paper was being written and deprived us of
the opportunity to consult with her about certain historical data and to seek her enlightened opinion on
theoretical and technical issues.
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875
University School of Philosophy and Literature, met Pichon Rivière in 1933, and
married him in 1937, when she carried out her first child analysis. The patient was
a girl who seemed to be oligophrenic13 and who would accompany her psychotic
mother to her treatment with Pichon Rivière at the Liga de Higiene Mental [League
of Mental Hygiene]. Ferrer affirms that this first child analysis was carried out
following Anna Freud’s teachings as depicted in her book, which Aberastury must
have read. In 1942 Aberastury begins her analysis with Ángel Garma and starts
reading Klein’s work. In 1946 she begins corresponding with Klein, and in 1951
supervises with her in London. Lustig believes it was Aberastury who introduced
Kleinian thought to Argentina. Yet other protagonists of that period, such as Ana
Kaplan, believe it was Pichon who brought Klein’s books to our country (Kaplan,
personal communication).
In any case, there is no doubt whatsoever that the analysis of children and
of psychotic patients promoted by the Pichon Rivières permeated mid-20thcentury Argentine analytic thought and expanded in all directions. APA analysts
frequently travelled to London, and the London masters came to the APA. Among
the Argentine analysts who travelled to London we would like to highlight the
presence of Emilio Rodrigué. Rodrigué started his training with Rascovsky
and moved to London in 1947, where he was in analysis with Paula Heimann.
The latter was then a disciple of Klein’s, but she would formally detach herself
from her teacher after the 1955 International Congress. Rodrigué worked with
that privileged group of which he eventually became a member. He returned to
Argentina in the early 1950s, and was one of the leaders of the Kleinian group. At
the end of that decade, the curious Rodrigué moved to the United States, where
he worked at the Austen Riggs Center in Massachusetts. He returned to Argentina
in 1963 to become president of the APA (1966–8) and to teach, until he left the
APA with Plataforma [Platform] in 1971.14
Alberto Campo was also in analysis with Paula Heimann, and he returned to
Buenos Aires in the mid-1950s, after having worked with Serge Lebovici and Jean
Piaget. He was the head of the Psychopathology Department at the Buenos Aires
Children’s Hospital and he worked closely with Florencio Escardó and Mauricio
Goldenberg. With his unique consistency, he showed the way to many child analysts.
Among those who supervised in London we should also mention Langer, Racker,
Liberman, the Grinbergs, and many others, such as Benito and Sheila López, who
did so in the 1960s. There they met R. Horacio Etchegoyen, in 1966, who was in
reanalysis with Meltzer. Salomón Resnik, a student of Pichon Rivière’s, went to
London in 1957, where he was in analysis with Herbert Rosenfeld for many years.
He moved from London to Paris, where he currently lives, works and teaches to a
qualified group of students that extends also to Italy.
Pichon would later introduce the term oligothymia.
Plataforma [Platform] and Documento [Document] were two groups of analysts who were socially and
politically committed, a commitment that led them to abandon the APA (and the IPA). They shared a
concern to reach a suitable integration of their political stance and their practice of psychoanalysis, and
in certain cases they placed psychoanalysis at the service of the social revolution.
13
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A symposium on Melanie Klein15
Following the suggestion of Ángel Garma, the 1961 APA Symposium—which
was held during León Grinberg’s presidency—was dedicated to Melanie Klein
(see Revista, vol. 19, nos 1–2). In his opening words, Fidias Cesio pointed out that
the meeting constituted a tribute to Klein, who had died recently. He also stressed
the great interest her work had aroused both in Argentina and in Latin America
as a whole, an interest made evident by the presence at the meeting of analysts
from Brazil, Uruguay, Chile and Mexico. Cesio then briefly reviewed the intense
collaboration between the Argentine and British psychoanalytic groups. The 1961
Symposium evinces the maturity of the Rio de la Plata analytic group and the presence
of Kleinian ideas. The papers presented show the path taken by a distinguished
group of analysts whose contributions gave psychoanalysis the prestige it enjoyed in
Argentine society and who left a collection of works of permanent validity.
Cesio presented ‘La disociación y el letargo en la reacción terapéutica
negativa [Dissociation and lethargy in the negative therapeutic reaction]’ (1961),
a topic he would develop in other writings throughout his life. Lethargy is a
unique transferential and countertransferential reaction that Cesio refers to the
fetal psyche studied by Rascovsky and that signals a particular development
in the psychoanalytic process. It is also worth mentioning here W. Baranger’s
paper, ‘Aspectos problemáticos de la teoría de los objetos en la obra de Melanie
Klein [Problematic aspects of object theory in Melanie Klein’s oeuvre]’ (1961);
Jorge M. Mom’s ‘Consideraciones sobre el concepto de fobia en relación con
algunos aspectos de la obra de Melanie Klein [Considerations on the concept of
phobia in relation to some aspects of Melanie Klein’s oeuvre]’ (1961), a research
topic that would engage Mom for many years; and L. Grinberg’s, ‘Duelo por
el yo y sentimiento de identidad [Mourning for the ego and sense of identity]’
(1961). Liberman presented his unpublished paper ‘Forma y contenido de las seis
fantasías inconscientes del pecho perseguidor y su repercusión en los diferentes
estadios evolutivos [Form and contents of the six unconscious fantasies of the
persecuting breast and their repercussions on the various developmental stages]’,
and J. Bleger, ‘Modalidades de la relación objetal [Modes of the object-relation]’
(1961), in addition to the above-mentioned paper written together with his wife.
Liberman’s work on the reinterpretation of psychopathology that resorted to
libido and communication theories was in a budding stage, as was Bleger’s work,
which culminated in his notion of symbiosis and the glischro-karyc position.
This theoretical development was influenced by the idea of the primal illness and
Bleger’s concept of a psychotic part of the personality, akin to Bion’s (1957). It
was published as an article in the 1964 issue of the Revista Uruguaya, and became
the fourth chapter of his Simbiosis y ambigüedad [Symbiosis and ambiguity]
(1967). We can also glimpse the path taken by Willy Baranger, one of the best
interpreters of Klein’s work until he devoted himself to a revision of her ideas
from a Lacanian perspective, a project he would begin in the 1970s.
Some papers presented and quoted in this text remain unpublished.
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MELANIE KLEIN IN BUENOS AIRES
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Grinberg’s essay on mourning and identity anticipates the fruitful investigation
of one of the most creative Argentine psychoanalysts, that would lead to the
production of a number of significant texts, among them, Culpa y depresión [Guilt
and depression] ([1964] 1992) and Teoría de la identificación [Identification
theory] (1976). In his 1964 book Grinberg starts from Klein and follows a very
original development whereby he distinguishes two types of guilt—persecutory and
depressive guilt—and develops the notions of mourning for the lost parts of the
self and non-worked-through mourning. In Teoría de la identificación, Grinberg
studies the concept of identification in psychoanalytic literature since Freud with a
special emphasis on the notion of projective identification developed by Klein and
her disciples (Bion, Rosenfeld and Meltzer), adding his own contributions (types of
projective identification, projective counteridentification, and so on).
Other presentations are no less significant, not all of them published: ‘El concepto
de enfermedad única en la obra de Melanie Klein y sus continuadores [The concept
of primal illness in the work of Melanie Klein and the post-Kleinians]’, by Pichon
Rivière, which we have already discussed, and ‘La posición maníaca y la organización
fetal [The manic position and fetal organisation]’, by Arnaldo Rascovsky et al.,
which summarises Rascovsky’s original perspective on early development. A year
before the symposium, Rascovsky had published El psiquismo fetal [The foetal
psyche] (1960), where he maintains that the child has a psychological life before
its birth and that the ego appears as the double of the id and already deals with
the phylogenetic fantasies described by Freud and Ferenczi. This research precedes
the current studies on this topic (Meltzer, Bion, Alessandra Piontelli, Elizabeth
Bianchedi, and so on), and hence represents a cutting-edge thought that the author
proposes as a development of Kleinian theory. We should not leave out other papers
devoted to clinical practice, such as ‘Aportación al estudio de la manía en el niño
[A contribution to the study of mania in the child]’, by Vera Campo, ‘El aporte
de Melanie Klein al análisis didáctico [Melanie Klein’s contribution to training
analysis]’, by Marie Langer, and ‘Algunos problemas en relación con la enseñanza
de la teoría de la técnica [A methodological approach to the teaching of psychoanalysis]’, by Langer et al. (1964), focused on a Kleinian approach to learning
phenomena in psychoanalysis.
We have dwelled on the 1961 Symposium because we believe it places us on a
sort of vantage point, where we can glimpse the past and its foundational efforts,
the present of the 1950s and early 1960s, full of promising works, and a future
laden with possibilities that would fortunately materialise to a large extent, giving
Argentine psychoanalysis an astonishing richness. Argentine analysts could not
know then what intricate paths our discipline and our country would follow.
The Pichon Rivière Institute
After his graduation, in 1936, Pichon Rivière was admitted to the old Hospicio de las
Mercedes (Las Mercedes Hospice) and the Liga de Higiene Mental (Mental Hygiene
League). He would soon start a memorable teaching career, training an outstanding
group of students (Liberman, Edgardo Rolla, Bleger, Racker, Cesio, Joel Zac,
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R. HORACIO ETCHEGOYEN AND SAMUEL ZYSMAN
Resnik, and so on) a very original and rigorous psychoanalytic psychiatry. When he
was let go from the Hospice in 1949, Pichon founded the Pichon Rivière Institute
(better known as the Copérnico Street clinic or the little Salpêtrière) with the help of
Francisco Muñoz (known as Don Paco), a true patron of Argentine psychoanalysis.
Willy and Madeleine Baranger, Luisa G. de Álvarez de Toledo, Alberto Tallaferro,
Jorge Mom, David Liberman, Fidias Cesio, Diego and Gilberta (Gilloux) Royer de
García Reinoso, Danilo and Marialzira Perestrello, José and Estela Remus Araico,
Fortunato Ramírez, Oscar Contreras, Aniceto Figueras, Ana Kaplan, Marcela Spira,
and many more would work at the Institute. It was there that Rolla switched from
neurology to psychoanalysis. Etchegoyen would travel every Saturday from La
Plata to attend Pichon’s courses. The Clinic’s two administrative assistants, Elena
Evelson and Janine Puget, would become very prestigious analysts. Vezzetti (1996)
sketches the line that runs from José Ingenieros to Pichon Rivière, and highlights
the latter’s original contributions to psychiatry, a topic that Wender et al. (1995) and
Plotkin (2001, 2003) have also considered.
The Revista Uruguaya de Psicoanálisis [Uruguayan Journal of Psychoanalysis]
As a logical consequence of the developments we are describing, a distinguished
group of Uruguayans organised the Uruguayan Psychoanalytic Association (APU)
and invited Willy and Madeleine (Madé) Baranger to take charge of analytic training
there in 1954. It was then that the Revista Uruguaya de Psicoanálisis was founded.
In this way, a trend was started that would encompass most of Latin America—the
influence of Buenos Aires psychoanalysis on analytic training and on the creation
of psychoanalytic societies. Cesio (2000) designates this process as ‘the Latin
American psychoanalytic epic [gesta]’.
The first issue of the Revista Uruguaya, which appeared in May 1956,
included a classic Kleinian essay, ‘La importancia de la formación de símbolos
en el desarrollo del yo [The importance of symbol-formation in the development
of the ego]’ (Klein, 1930),16 and an article by Willy Baranger, ‘Asimilación
y encapsulamiento: Estudio de los objetos idealizados [Assimilation and
encapsulation: A study of idealised objects]’ (1956). Baranger compares
Freud’s and Klein’s theoretical stances concerning idealisation, dissociation and
persecutory anxiety, and their effects on the integration of the ego as a ‘shell of
the inner object’. He bases his exposition on clinical material, and we can already
see the path his research would follow—the study of the metapsychological status
of the object in Klein—which would lead him to talk of the ‘assembly of the
citizens of the inner world’ (Baranger, 1971). The problems Baranger believed
this and other Kleinian concepts such as unconscious fantasy and early oedipal
conflict presented, would be predominant topics in his subsequent research, which
gradually drew him away from the English school. The theoretical production of
the Barangers, who stayed in Montevideo for almost a decade, left traces on
both banks of the Río de la Plata. Both Argentine and Uruguayan psychoanalysis
It also contains Klein’s congratulatory note, sent from London, and warm words from the Pichon
Rivières, who travelled especially for the presentation.
16
MELANIE KLEIN IN BUENOS AIRES
879
showed an unmistakable Kleinian stamp for a long time, their subsequent changes
notwithstanding.
The Revista Uruguaya, which will soon celebrate its 50th anniversary, always
maintained an intense rhythm of production and reflected the Kleinian influence
on local psychoanalysis for a long time. In the 1956 issue, Madeleine Baranger
publishes ‘Fantasía de enfermedad y desarrollo del insight en el análisis de un niño
[Illness phantasy and insight development in the analysis of a child]’, which follows
Kleinian theory and technique. Aberastury, in turn, publishes ‘Detención en el
desarrollo del lenguaje en una niña de seis años [Arrested language development in
a six-year-old girl]’ (1956). It is a beautiful essay that anticipates her great text ‘La
dentición, la marcha y el lenguaje en relación con la posición depresiva [Dentition,
walking and language in relation to the depressive position]’ (1958b), where she ties
these three developmental stages to the increase in depressive anxiety. It is during
this period that Aberastury presents her original ideas on the ‘previous genital phase’
and develops her work on prevention and elucidation in paediatric dentistry.
Other articles also deserve our attention. We would like to mention the essays
by Héctor Garbarino (1960) and Mercedes Freire de Garbarino on Klenian clinical
practice and psychosis, and the one by Marta Nieto, who is the initiator of child
analysis in Montevideo and introduces the clinical significance of the use of
language, a distinctive aspect of Río de la Plata psychoanalysis. Finally, we should
recall Madé Baranger’s ‘Mala fe, identidad y omnipotencia [Bad faith, identity and
omnipotence]’, presented at the APA in 1959 and published in the 1963 volume
of the Revista Uruguaya, a paper that was part of the incipient local interest in the
psychodynamisms of psychopathies, and W. Baranger’s ‘La noción de “material” y
el aspecto temporal prospectivo de la interpretación [The notion of “material” and
the prospective temporal aspect of interpretation]’ (1961–2), where he brilliantly
applies the concept of depressive position to clinical practice, as he does in ‘El
muerto vivo [The living dead]’ (1962).
Psychoanalysis and mental health
Both the founders of Argentine psychoanalysis and the generations that followed
were highly educated and had a vast psychiatric knowledge. Their contributions
to training in the field of mental health and to the dissemination of psychoanalysis
enhanced the psychoanalytic movement, and had repercussions on medical and
psychological training in the decades we are studying here. Many young people
who would later become analysts were among the students at the well-attended
classes at the Buenos Aires University Medical School, where they learned the basic
psychoanalytic ideas, including Klein’s. These courses were held for many years,
and were taught by Ángel Garma, Rascovsky and Aberastury (Antonio Barrutia,
personal communication).
In those years, which correspond to Risieri Frondizi’s tenure as President of
Buenos Aires University, the Psychology Institute at the School of Philosophy
and Literature became the Department of Psychology. Risieri Frondizi and his
predecessor, José Luis Romero, were at the helm of Buenos Aires University
880
R. HORACIO ETCHEGOYEN AND SAMUEL ZYSMAN
during its most distinguished period, which ended brutally in 1966 with the ‘night
of the long sticks’, during General Onganía’s dictatorship.17 The Department of
Psychology became the School of Psychology in 1985 (Hugo Vezzetti, personal
communication). Psychoanalysis maintained a strong presence at Buenos Aires
University thanks to the teaching of outstanding professors such as Liberman, León
Ostrov, Bleger, Garma, Aberastury and others, and in Rosario,18 where it was taught
by María Isabel Siquier and Eduardo Téper. This process also took place at the Cuyo
and Córdoba Universities,19 although the project suffered from the same difficulties
as every other attempt to bring about change in our country.20
Object-relations theory was taught at universities and disseminated in a very
influential psychiatric journal. This publication, whose prestige was due to its quality
and content, appeared in October 1954 under the title of Acta Neuropsiquiátrica
Argentina, and was the result of the collaboration between Guillermo Vidal and
Mauricio Goldenberg, both of whom did so much for Argentine psychiatry. As
Vidal would explain later, after the first few years there was a clear bifurcation
in the journal’s content. The psychiatric topics became prevalent, and in 1962 the
journal’s name changed to Acta Psiquiátrica y Psicológica de América Latina]
Latin American Psychiatric and Psychological Quarterly] and reached all Spanishspeaking countries. The journal kept Vidal as its director, and its secretary was Carlos
Sluzky, Goldenberg’s right hand at the Policlínico de Lanús (Lanús Hospital), who
would later have a brilliant career in Palo Alto, California and in Massachusetts,
and who has recently retired.21 The Acta’s editorial board included several Kleinian
analysts, a fact worth remembering, since it is evidence of the repercussions their
teaching to psychiatrists and psychologists had in the field of mental health.
José Bleger’s work (also published in the Revista de Psicoanálisis and
in the Revista Uruguaya) appears often. In the first issue of volume 4 Bleger
publishes ‘La división esquizoide en psicopatología [The schizoid split in
psychopathology]’ (1958), where he introduces Kleinian concepts to explain the
multiple ways in which this mechanism manifested itself. Faithful to his Marxist
ideas, Bleger studies alienation in general and compares it to Émile Durkheim’s
notion of anomie. In alienation, says Bleger, the fate of both subject and object is
objectification, which leads to the feeling of void (‘sentiment du vide’) described
by Pierre Janet. In the third issue of the same volume we come across Grinberg’s
lecture ‘Motivaciones psicológicas de la superstición y el tabú [Psychological
motivations of superstition and taboo]’, given in July 1958 to the Student Union
Translator’s note: The authors refer to a famous incident of police repression ordered by the military
dictatorship against students and professors that led to the expulsion of a number of professors for their
political views, and the consequent resignation of many others.
18
Translator’s note: One of the largest Argentine cities, in the Santa Fé province.
19
Translator’s note: In the provinces of Mendoza and Córdoba.
20
The smear campaign against the then professor of psychiatry at Cuyo National University, R. Horacio
Etchegoyen, when he presented a paper on a psychopathy case whose theoretical understanding was
based on Kleinian ideas, constitutes a perfect example of this fate.
21
Many future analysts received a pluralist psychiatric training at the Psychopathology Department
run by Goldenberg at the Policlínico Gregorio Aráoz Alfaro, in Lanús [a town in the Buenos Aires
metropolitan area].
17
MELANIE KLEIN IN BUENOS AIRES
881
of the Buenos Aires University Medical School, then an intellectual hotbed,
symptomatic of the renewal of university government that followed the toppling
of the second Peronist administration.22
In volume 6, nos 3–4 (1960), Aberastury summarises Klein’s ideas for
psychologists and psychiatrists. In the same issue we find articles by Mauricio
Abadi, Fernando Taragano, Mauricio Knobel and Edgardo Rolla. Nasim Yampey
(1962) publishes his review of Narrative of a child analysis (1961) by Klein. He
states there that ‘Melanie Klein is undoubtedly, after Freud, the greatest figure
among psychoanalysts.’ This issue also contains ‘Codificación en los análisis de
larga duración [Coding in long-lasting analyses]’ (1962), where Rolla claims that
‘projective identification is the vectorial foundation of communication’. In 1963
(vol. 9) we find an essay by Etchegoyen, Haydée Sicilia, Estela D’Accurzio and
José Antonio Valeros that studies psychological and social factors in paediatrics.
The essay starts with George H. Mead’s theoretical framework so as to connect it
with the notion of identification in Freud, Fairbairn and Klein.
The fourth issue of volume 13 includes a tribute to Pichon Rivière. In the first of
this group of articles, ‘El socratismo de Pichon [Pichon’s Socratism]’ (1967), Vidal
affirms that Pichon Rivière ‘promoted psycho-social research, combining Melanie
Klein’s new contributions with team-work modality and the use of the most modern
diagnosis, treatment, and research techniques’. After essays by Bleger and Fernando
Ulloa, Pichon writes ‘Una nueva problemática de la psiquiatría [New problematics
in psychiatry]’ (1967), where he summarises his ideas, based on the work of Freud,
Fairbairn and Klein. Pichon teaches us that the new problematics in psychiatry consists
in promoting a dialectical spiral in the face of conflict, whereby a genetic continuity
is established on the basis of successive syntheses that solve contradictions and open
the way for a new reading of reality. Volume 15 (1969) devotes two issues to papers
presented at the First Conference on Child and Adolescent Pychopathology, mostly
produced by members of Goldenberg’s celebrated Psychopathology Department.
We find there the bylines of Aurora Pérez, Octavio Fernández Mouján, Lea Rivelis
de Paz, Samuel Zysman, Emilce Dio and Hebe Friedenthal, along with distinguished
foreign guests (such as Leo Kanner, Leo Eisenberg, David Zimmerman and Luis
Prego Silva), and local thinkers such as Aberastury, Lustig de Ferrer and Kaplan.
The Kleinian influence was very evident in these essays, and it served as the basis
for dialogue between psychoanalysts and psychiatrists.
In volume 26, no. 4 (1970), a tribute to Ángel Garma, there are contributions by
Vidal, Aberastury and Carlos Paz. Aberastury points out Garma’s use of Kleinian
ideas, and Garma presents an essay on the superego and manic reactions, where
he mentions Meltzer’s article ‘Metapsicología de los estados ciclotímicos [A
contribution to the metapsychology of cyclothymic states]’ (1963). In 1972, shortly
after his lamented death, Acta publishes an enduring paper by Bleger, ‘Esquizofrenia,
autismo, simbiosis [Schizophrenia, autism, symbiosis]’, which summarises long
years of work. Bleger specifies his ideas and opposes confusion (described by
Translator’s note: In Argentina, public universities are autonomous agencies governed by a Council
composed of professors, graduates and students.
22
882
R. HORACIO ETCHEGOYEN AND SAMUEL ZYSMAN
Rosenfeld and based on projective identification) to syncretism, a remnant of an
archaic organisation of the personality that the late Bleger called symbiosis.
Psychoanalysis and Argentine society
Argentine and foreign observers and scholars have always been struck by the
extraordinary development of psychoanalysis in Argentina since the late 1940s.
Visiting analysts from other countries were unable to overcome their astonishment
when they saw how many people were in analysis and the large numbers of
professionals who wished to train as analysts. There were times when psychoanalysis
was so prevalent that it became part of Argentine culture, with articles in newspapers
(such as La Nación and La Opinión, this latter founded in 1971) and in magazines.
Psychoanalysis was incorporated into hospital departments and higher education
programmes. The regular presence of the discipline in local newspapers may be
traced to 1930, when the daily Jornada (which replaced Crítica, closed by General
Uriburu’s dictatorship) included a ‘psychoanalytic advice column’ (Hugo Vezzetti,
personal communication). The famous magazine Primera Plana, founded by Jacobo
Timerman, made frequent references to psychoanalysis, and Pichon Rivière wrote a
weekly column for it in 1966 and 1967. His texts approached cultural and political
topics from a psychoanalytic perspective that was much appreciated by the readers,
as were Florencio Escardó’s contributions. The latter introduced psychoanalysis to
the Children’s Hospital and disseminated it, along with Eva Giberti, then his wife,
at the parents’ school.23
The valuable advances of Argentine psychoanalysis would join those produced
in the rest of the world. As we pointed out at the beginning of this article, we believe
it is reasonable to try to establish the possible correlations between psychoanalytic
developments and social change, as other authors have done (Cucurullo et al.,
1982; Vezzetti, 1989, 1996; Wender et al., 1995; Plotkin, 2001). We have already
mentioned that in the first half of the 20th century there were enlightened minds in
our midst familiar with Freudian theory. Some of them even mention Freud’s ideas
in their work, but this state of affairs was very different from the later expansion
of psychoanalysis. Without pretending to exhaust all possible explanations, we
believe it is legitimate to claim that, from the beginning of the 1940s, a series of
internal and external factors came together in a way that enabled and maintained the
extraordinary and persistent growth of our discipline.24
In the period 1900 to 1930, Argentine society underwent structural changes not
without violence (for instance, during the so-called ‘Tragic Week’).25 These changes
led to the emergence of an educated middle class that comprised a large number
Translator’s note: This project involved working with parents from an approach that combined
paediatrics, child psychiatry and psychoanalysis.
24
To such a point that allows to speak of an Argentine School of Psychoanalysis.
25
Translator’s note: The authors refer to a week in January 1919 when a strike backing the demand
for the reduction of the working day from 11 to 8 hours, Sunday rest, and a wage rise ended in a
bloody repression that included pogroms against Jews led by the ‘Liga Patriótica Argentina’, a gang of
aristocratic youngsters.
23
MELANIE KLEIN IN BUENOS AIRES
883
of university graduates who enjoyed a promising financial future and cherished
ambitious projects such as the development of analytic training and the founding of
a psychoanalytic society. At the same time, crucial events were taking place in the
rest of the world. In Europe, after the fall of the Weimar Republic and the fragile
communist enterprises in Germany and Hungary, fascism and nazism had begun their
expansion. That is when the diaspora of analysts from Continental Europe started.
These analysts emigrated to Great Britain, the United States, and also to Argentina.
In this way, Ángel Garma, Langer, Racker, and also Ludovico (Vico) Rosenthal (a
future translator of Freud into Spanish) arrived in Argentina, and Adelaida Koch in
Brazil (in 1930).
Sebreli (2002) describes how the local scene echoed ideological conflicts in
other parts of the world. At first a conflict arose between third- and fourth-generation
Argentines and the immigrants, who were discriminated against and persecuted for
their libertarian, socialist or anarchist ideas, and for defending social justice. The
immigrants’ views were antagonistic to those of the Argentine dominant classes,
who saw themselves as patrician and aristocratic and who shared the views of the
equally conservative Catholic Church. This was the Argentina of Alejandro Korn,
Aníbal Ponce, Manuel Gálvez and José Ingenieros, as well as Hipólito Yrigoyen,
Marcelo T. de Alvear, Alfredo Palacios, Juan B. Justo and his wife Alicia Moreau,
Manuel A. Fresco, General Agustín P. Justo, José F. Uriburu and Lisandro de la
Torre. Knowledge of Freud’s work was limited, bearing witness to the humanistic
education of a progressive elite.
Later, the deep chasm between fascism and anti-fascism expanded and crystallised
in a struggle between the local Axis supporters and their democratic opponents, a
struggle that entailed a series of alliances and contradictions that reconfigured former
differences. It is at this conjuncture that Peronism emerges.26 We certainly cannot
analyse this process here. We will only try to show how, in our view, it influenced
the development of psychoanalysis in Argentina. After winning the presidential
election in 1946, Peronism settled as a popular regime that ended the patriotic fraud
of the so-called ‘Infamous Decade’ (Década infame)27 and recognised the rights of
the working class. Yet despite these positive measures, Perón’s government started
persecuting its opponents. Among them were the first local psychoanalysts and—it
is worth recalling—those who had arrived from Europe as political refugees.
Due to the characteristics of the first Peronist administration, ideological
persecution operated at the public level, as evinced by the expulsion of university
professors and chiefs of hospital departments, who were replaced by loyal
Peronists. If they did not expose themselves to public attention through political
activism, health professionals could withdraw into private practice, keeping out
of public office. Many did this and created a flourishing professional practice. A
paradigmatic case was that of Enrique Pichon Rivière, who, having been deprived
Tulio Halperín Donghi, a distinguished historian, dealt in depth with this subject in his book La
República imposible (The impossible Republic), 2004.
27
Translator’s note: In 1930 the first military coup took place in Argentina, starting a cycle of military
and civilian governments that would last 50 years. The 1930s were designated ‘the infamous decade’
due to the combination of fraud, corruption and repression that characterised the period.
26
884
R. HORACIO ETCHEGOYEN AND SAMUEL ZYSMAN
of his department at the Hospicio de las Mercedes, opened his own clinic sponsored
by the Francisco Muñoz Foundation, as mentioned above, where he continued his
fruitful teaching. Ramón Carrillo, the Minister of Public Health, forced the APA
to admit only physicians for psychoanalytic training. The Association acquiesced,
but also obtained permission for non-physician analysts who had already finished
their training to continue to be members. The incipient Argentine psychoanalytic
movement may have benefited to a certain extent from this forced retreat into the
intimate realm, which allowed analysts to focus on their specific task in the manner
of the early Freud’s splendid isolation.
The unity of the initial psychoanalytic movement (led by enlightened and
resolute figures) was not as solid as it seemed at first sight. There existed from the
beginning a latent split between its two great leaders, one a militant exiled atheist,
the other a native and Roman Catholic. Thinking in terms of the basic assumption of
fight and flight (Bion, 1961), we might conclude that the politically hostile external
world of the period may have served to reinforce unity. In any case, the breach
led to Cárcamo’s departure, leaving Ángel Garma in command of the political
scene. Cárcamo, who was a classic Freudian analyst and deeply believed in the
need to respect one’s fellow human beings, soon became the reference point for a
large group of analysts (some of them Roman Catholic) who, unlike their mentor,
participated in the Association’s activities. At the same time, Cárcamo himself kept
up friendly relationships with other colleagues with whom he spent weekends in
Escobar, where Marie Langer, León and Rebecca Grinberg, the Rackers and other
analysts owned weekend homes.
The group led by Ángel Garma and Arnaldo Rascovsky, which constituted the
majority in the first years, held a distinctive view of psychoanalysis. Both Garma and
Rascovsky firmly believed that the full and joyful practice of sexuality was evidence of
mental health, and regarded genitality as its goal. Interpretations aimed at moderating
the action of the superego and fostering instinctive satisfaction—restricted by various
forms of inhibition and by the subjection of a masochistic ego to a sadistic superego—
were common. These analysts posited goals to achieve in the working, financial and
erotic areas, and considered social success a proof of the therapeutic effectiveness of
psychoanalysis. The financial prosperity Argentine society enjoyed during those years
contributed in a way to support this perspective. As Kleinian ideas on the structuring
function of the depressive position and its reparatory ability began to take hold and
were expressed in interpretations and in the importance attributed to the setting, the
Escobar group, led by Langer, started to take shape and to acquire political weight in
the Association. Even though Cárcamo was not at all Kleinian, his point of view on
society and ethics brought him close to this group.
On the other hand, another group of analysts clustered around Pichon Rivière—
among them, Álvarez de Toledo, Liberman, Bleger, Zac, Resnik, Rolla, the García
Reinosos and Ulloa, all members of the Copérnico Street Clinic. Pichon was
very learned in psychiatry, psychoanalysis and art. Because of his origins, he was
streetwise (tenía calle), and on the basis of his life experience he built a unique
psychoanalytic psychiatry that greatly valued social interaction. Even though he
was basically a Kleinian analyst, the influence of Harry Stack Sullivan and Fairbairn
MELANIE KLEIN IN BUENOS AIRES
885
was evident in his ebullient personality. His approach was also rooted in French
psychoanalysis and psychiatry, as Wender et al. (1995) and Plotkin (2001) point
out. The recognition Pichon enjoyed in France is illustrated by Hernán Kesselman’s
narrative of a group trip to Europe: ‘Jacques Lacan, knowing that Pichon is in
France, cuts his vacation short and summons his students for a historic meeting with
his fellow-student’ (1975).
Álvarez de Toledo, a patient of Cárcamo’s, occupied an outstanding place in
this group. Her essay ‘El análisis del “asociar”, del “interpretar”, y de “las palabras”
[The analysis of “associating”, “interpreting” and “words”]’ ([1954] 1996) was
written several years before the transcendental studies by philosophers of language
J.L. Austin and John Searle. Based on Pichon’s concept of communication and on
this essay, Liberman carried out his outstanding research, which crystallised in
two fundamental books, namely, La comunicación en terapéutica psicoanalítica
[Communication in psychoanalytic therapy] (1962) and Lingüística, interacción
comunicativa y proceso psicoanalítico [Linguistics, communicative interaction, and
psychoanalytic process] (1970–2). Liberman’s work constituted a serious attempt
at construing a psychoanalytic psychopathology that would integrate Freud’s and
Abraham’s libido theory and Klein’s notions of persecutory and depressive anxiety
by means of an interdisciplinary approach of great epistemological consistency.
Soon after that, Ernesto César Liendo and María Carmen Gear begin their extended
research, which relies on the ideas of Pichon, Liberman and Gregorio Klimovsky in
its search for a psychoanalytic psychopathology, and whose results may be found in
their book Semiología psicoanalítica [Psychoanalytic semiology] (Gear and Liendo,
1975) as well as in many other works by them.
At the end of the 1940s Racker launched a research project that proposed a theory
of countertransference that unsettled the prevailing ideas on the psychoanalytic
process. His work culminated in his Estudios sobre técnica psicoanalítica [Studies in
psychoanalytic technique] (1960), which Grinberg would later expand in his papers
on projective counteridentification. It is worth recalling here the clever way in which
Racker mediated between Cárcamo and Garma regarding their religious differences.
In a carefully thought-out 1955 essay, the atheist Racker considers that Freud’s attitude
towards religion may also be understood in the light of his own oedipal complex and
his conflict with his father. In this way, the author concludes in a Solomonic way, that
unconscious mechanisms may lead both to religion and to atheism.
The arrival of Lacan
The late 1960s and the 1970s were marked by social and political changes of great
magnitude, accompanied by a state of social violence and decay whose effects can
still be felt today. This state of social upheaval impacted on psychoanalytic thought
and practice. The risk of losing their lives during the ‘leaden years’28 forced analysts
into a new retreat that was very different from the earlier one. A large sector of the
Translator’s note: ‘Los años de plomo’, a phrase that is commonly used to describe the 1976–83
dictatorship.
28
886
R. HORACIO ETCHEGOYEN AND SAMUEL ZYSMAN
Argentine intelligentsia, including many analysts, saw Perón’s return to power as a
positive alternative. We have already referred to Plataforma and Documento, two
groups that proposed the inclusion of psychoanalysis in socialist political projects.
Their members finally resigned from the APA in 1971, convinced of the Association’s
reactionary and authoritarian nature and of its inability to change in accordance with
social transformations. Even so, Klein’s remarkable influence was also present in
these attempts to articulate psychoanalysis and social concerns. Hernán Kesselman’s
essay ‘La responsabilidad social del psicoterapeuta [The social responsibility of the
psychotherapist]’ (1969) suggests that analysts understand this responsibility on the
basis both of sociological concepts and of the psychoanalytic ideas of Freud, Klein,
Fairbairn and Bion.
In any case, a wide turn occurs in this social context that signals the waning
of Klein’s influence and the boom of Jacques Lacan’s ideas. The first mention
of Lacan’s oeuvre in Argentina seems to be Emilio Pizarro Crespo’s review in
Psicoterapia (Psychotherapy), a journal Gregorio Bermann published in Córdoba
in the 1930s. In Buenos Aires, Lacan started to be known in the 1960s thanks to
renowned Argentine literary critic Oscar Masotta, whom Pichon Rivière brought
into contact with the writings of the French thinker (Andrés Rascovsky, personal
communication). Masotta founded the Freudian School in 1974, and his influence
may be traced in Germán L. García’s thorough study (García, 1980).
During this period, many analysts who saw Lacan as the great revolutionary within
psychoanalysis found his teachings very suitable for their goals concerning a social
revolution. Lacan always criticised Heinz Hartmann and the ego-psychologists, but he
was never particularly hostile to Klein. Argentine Lacanians, however, chose her as a
target in their struggle because she represented the APA ‘Establishment’. In the face of
the increasing social commotion, these analysts attacked her for her emphasis on the
inner world to the detriment of social reality. They also made use of the dogmatism
of the Kleinian group as a key argument. Lacan’s break with the IPA in 1964 was
read in Buenos Aires as a revolutionary and anti-imperialist move, for Buenos Aires
Lacanians connected Lacan’s theoretical consistency with the expectations of the 1968
French social movement. We cannot forget here the significance of the ‘Cordobazo’,
a popular revolt that shook Onganía’s dictatorship.29 This complex social process led
to the progressive replacement of Kleinian clinical practice by Lacanian theory, and
Lacanian clinical practice was seen as a logical and necessary step.
The creation of the Buenos Aires Psychoanalytical Association (APdeBA)
Readers can understand from the facts just summarised that Argentine analysts—and
the country as a whole—were enduring difficult times. The end of the 1960s and the
beginnings of the 1970s, still under the shadow of the ‘Cordobazo’, not only announced
the coming years of terror but were also the scenario where diverging points of view
Translator’s note: The ‘Cordobazo’ was named after the city of Córdoba, where it took place. It
consisted of a series of demonstrations in which the student movement, the workers and other social
forces united to protest repression, and it marked the beginning of a strong popular movement that
lasted till the early 1970s.
29
MELANIE KLEIN IN BUENOS AIRES
887
took form in the APA. Once the split of ‘Plataforma’ and ‘Documento’ took place,
there remained, however, some of their proposals to be considered: on one side, the
political issues, such as the membership categories in the Association and the right to
vote; and, on the other, those related to the Institute and its functioning (the teaching
curricula and the teaching system). These critical opinions were addressed in a reform
proposal presented by Jorge Mom together with Willy and Madeleine Baranger under
the banner of scientific and ideological pluralism.
This proposal, which coincided and was contemporaneous to the candidates’
views, was implemented in the mid-1970s and produced deep changes that brought
about discomfort to some members who gathered in the Ateneo de Psicoanalistas
de Buenos Aires (Buenos Aires Psychoanalytic Atheneum). It began functioning
in 1975 and finally led to another splitting in the APA. In 1977, the XXX IPAC in
Jerusalem accepted the Buenos Aires Association as a provisional society. This was
indeed a different splitting, since it did so with the APA’s approval.
APdeBA was considered for some years a predominantly Kleinian institution.
The reality is that, while admitting the strong influence of Klein’s theories, analysts
of all schools coexisted there from the beginning and all important authors have
taught in its Institute.
Some conclusions
This paper attempts to sketch the landscape of Argentine psychoanalysis during
the years when Kleinian and post-Kleinian ideas predominated. Regardless of
our personal limitations, this is a difficult task because of the abundance of events
and protagonists that distinguished this period. That is why we have been forced
to leave some of these events and protagonists out. We have tried to portray
events in an objective way while knowing that our choices are debatable, and
that each person’s own predilections and conflicts always influence decisions
as to what to include and what to leave out. We have tried to achieve a balance
and weighed our choices carefully, but only the reader can judge whether or
not we have been successful. In reviewing the history of those years, Melanie
Klein’s notorious prominence became striking to us. We know very well that
other scholars may offer different versions of this period, but we believe that
ours is a plausible one.
In sum, we believe that it is valid to assert that Klein exerted a powerful
influence on Argentine analysts and their theoretical and technical developments.
What follows are some significant examples to support our contention:

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Persecutory objects play a key role in Ángel Garma’s theories on the dialectics
of a sadistic superego and a masochistic ego;
Arnaldo Rascovsky’s notion of a foetal psyche penetrates into the most archaic
region of the psyche and precedes the paranoid-schizoid position;
Pichon Rivière’s psychoanalytic psychiatry always unfolds within the parameters
of persecutory and depressive anxiety, while his notion of primal illness
completes and modifies Klein’s theory by locating the beginning of development
in an initial moment of integration of the ego;
888
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R. HORACIO ETCHEGOYEN AND SAMUEL ZYSMAN
Heinrich Racker’s contributions to psychoanalytic technique and his great
discovery of countertransference as a technical instrument relied of course on
Freud’s work, but also on Klein’s, Anna Freud’s and Fairbairn’s;
Resnik’s and David Rosenfeld’s work on psychosis (Resnik, 1978 and on;
Rosenfeld, 1992 and on) is inscribed in the footsteps of Pichon, Klein, Herbert
Rosenfeld and Bion;
David Liberman’s concept of communicative interaction and his theory of
communicative styles have the ideas of Pichon Rivière and Álvarez de Toledo
as their starting point, but Freud and Abraham’s libido theory and Klein’s
notion of the paranoid-schizoid and depressive positions constitute their
background;
León Grinberg’s conception of mourning is based on Klein’s notion of the
depressive position, but it adds the concept of the mourning for the lost parts of
the ego and redefines guilt as depressive and persecutory. Moreover, Grinberg
particularly studies identity, illuminating it from the perspective of positions
theory and ego psychology, especially Erikson’s views;
José Bleger’s syncretism theory and his notion of the glischro-karyc position
once again accounts for the archaic psyche, and discriminates fusion (ambiguity)
from confusion (projective identification);
the ideas on child analysis developed by Aberastury, Betty Garma, Rodrigué,
Campo, Rebecca Grinberg, Evelson, Delia Faigón, Kaplan, and others follow a
manifestly Kleinian path, as we have already shown;
the Barangers’ field theory is developed on the basis of not only the ideas of Kurt
Lewin and Merleau-Ponty, but also of the notions of introjective and projective
identification;
the studies on psychosomatic medicine that are distinctive to the Argentine
school (on asthma, sterility, gastric ulcer, hypothyroidism, and so on) have
always had Klein’s work as an unavoidable point of reference;
we can also find the Kleinian stamp in the work of Etchegoyen, Campo and
Zac (1973) on psychopathy, which was discussed along with mania in the 1964
symposium;
the studies on female sexuality launched by Langer decidedly embrace Jones’s
and Klein’s ideas, and strongly criticise the phallic monism in Freudian theory.
Melanie Klein today
Buenos Aires Kleinian and post-Kleinian analysts continue to work and develop
new lines of research. Interest on the ideas of Bion, Meltzer, Segal, Betty Joseph,
Roger Money-Kyrle, and Herbert Rosenfeld is high. Furthermore, the influence
of Gregorio Klimovsky’s teaching on epistemology (1994 etc.), Alex Kacelnik’s
teaching on ethology, and Osvaldo Guariglia’s teaching on ethics and hermeneutics
is very visible among many Kleinians. We may also find an expansion of the Kleinian
practice of the observation of babies following the ideas of Esther Bick.
The April 2002 meeting ‘Melanie Klein en Buenos Aires: Desarrollos y
perspectivas [Melanie Klein in Buenos Aires: Developments and perspectives]’,
MELANIE KLEIN IN BUENOS AIRES
889
organised upon Samuel Zysman’s initiative together with Horacio Etchegoyen,
Elizabeth T. de Bianchedi, Clara Nemas, Virginia Ungar and Roberto Oelsner, which
attracted a large number of psychoanalysts and involved distinguished Río de la
Plata analysts, is proof of the importance Klein’s ideas still have in the Buenos Aires
analytic community. This meeting comprised a historical perspective, a clinical
perspective and a theoretical perspective.
To conclude, we believe it is fair to say that, just as there was a rich (and
sometimes tumultuous) period of growth and expansion of psychoanalysis in our
midst, this period was followed by a stage of perhaps less accelerated development,
in accordance with changing socio-political circumstances. Nonetheless,
equally significant transformations took place during this period. What seemed
like insurmountable differences and irreducible personal resentments among
members of different groups—often depending on institutional conflicts, the
struggle for power and unresolved transferences—gave way to more respectful
and fruitful discussions that focused on theoretical and technical problems in
psychoanalysis.
In the last few years, a constructive dialogue began between Jacques-Alain
Miller and R. Horacio Etchegoyen, which started at a meeting fostered by Juan
Carlos Stagnaro and Dominique Wintrebert in 1996. At this opportunity, the then
IPA president and the president of the Association Mondiale de Psychanalyse (World
Psychoanalysis Association) initiated a dialogue that was published in Vértex (1996)
and later in a booklet entitled Se rompe el silencio [The silence is broken] in 1997.
This meeting was followed by another, at the Hotel Bauen in Buenos Aires in July
2000, with the participation of Graciela Brodsky, Elizabeth Tabak de Bianchedi,
Eric Laurent, and Samuel Zysman. The large audience worked in groups under
the co-ordination of Rodolfo Moguillansky and Ricardo Nepomiachi to discuss
the mutative effect of the psychoanalytic interpretation (Stagnaro and Weintrebert,
2001).
In 2001, to commemorate Lacan’s centennial, Miller and Etchegoyen held a
new conversation (‘Lacan argentino [Argentine Lacan]’).
Distinguished Argentine Kleinian analysts such as Clara Nemas, Virginia Ungar,
and Carlos and María Adela Ríos attended the meetings on Donald Meltzer’s work
in London (1998), Florence (2000) and Barcelona (2002). In 1999, moreover, a
symposium on Bion’s work took place in Buenos Aires, following an international
trend that continued soon in São Paulo. Finally, we would like to mention the
participation of several Buenos Aires Kleinian analysts in the international clinical
seminars Roberto Oelsner organises in London every year with the participation of
distinguished Kleinian analysts from the British Society.
We may say that there is a more civilised and harmonious coexistence today,
and that inter-theoretical dialogue is beginning to constitute a healthy habit.
Present-day Kleinian analysts in Buenos Aires share an approach especially
focused on a clinical practice enriched by the contributions of the post-Kleinian
analysts (as we have already mentioned) and of other thinkers from younger
generations. The current theoretical production is extensive and diverse, but we
will leave its analysis to future studies.
890
R. HORACIO ETCHEGOYEN AND SAMUEL ZYSMAN
Translations of summary
Melanie Klein in Buenos Aires. Anfänge und Entwicklungen. In den ersten Jahrzehnten des 20.
Jahrhunderts war Freud in Lateinamerika einer Elite aufgeklärter Geister bekannt und wurde von ihnen
zitiert. In den 1940er Jahren fanden sich in Buenos Aires europäische Exilanten und lokale Pioniere
zusammen, und so wurde 1942 die Argentinische Psychoanalytische Vereinigung gegründet. Seither hat
sich die Psychoanalyse stetig weiterentwickelt, Verbreitung in Krankenhäusern und Universitäten gefunden
und die Kultur insgesamt beeinflusst. Die sozioökonomische Situation jener Zeit ermöglichte es, dass sich
dieses Phänomen zum Erstaunen seiner Beobachter entwickeln konnte. Dieser Beitrag versucht, den starken
Einfluss des kleinianischen Denkens während der ersten 30 Jahre dieser Entwicklung zu erforschen. Die
ursprünglichen Arbeiten der lokalen Denker bilden ein intellektuelles Kapital, das es rechtfertigt, von einer
„argentinischen psychoanalytischen Schule“ zu sprechen. In den siebziger Jahren des 20. Jahrhunderts
haben die Gesellschaft und die Psychoanalyse tief greifende und komplexe Veränderungen erfahren.
Lacans Lehren fanden zunehmende Unterstützung, während die Zahl der Klein-Anhänger abnahm. Derzeit
sind die Kleinianer in Buenos Aires weiterhin aktiv, und ihre Beziehung zu den Lacanianern und anderen
Schulen ist ruhiger geworden. Auf diese Weise sind respektvolle Diskussionen möglich geworden, die sich
konsequent an wissenschaftlichen Meinungsverschiedenheiten orientieren
Melanie Klein en Buenos Aires. Comienzos y desarrollos. En las primeras décadas del siglo XX Freud fue
conocido y citado en América Latina por una élite ilustrada. En los años 40 convergieron en Buenos Aires
analistas exiliados de Europa y pioneros locales, fundándose así la Asociación Psicoanalítica Argentina, en
1942. Desde entonces el psicoanálisis ha crecido sin pausa y se ha expandido en hospitales, universidades,
y la cultura en general. La buena situación socioeconómica de aquel tiempo permitió el desarrollo de este
fenómeno, para asombro de sus observadores. Los autores estudian la fuerte influencia del pensamiento
kleiniano durante los primeros 30 años de este desarrollo. Las originales aportaciones de los pensadores
locales constituyen un capital intelectual que justifica la idea de una “escuela psicoanalítica argentina”.
Durante los años 70 tanto la sociedad como el psicoanálisis argentinos sufrieron profundos y complejos
cambios. Las enseñanzas de Lacan ganaron adeptos y las de Klein empezaron a menguar. Hoy los kleinianos
de Buenos Aires siguen trabajando, mientras que su relación con los lacanianos y otras escuelas es más
serena. Esto permite discusiones respetuosas, que se orientan a las divergencias estrictamente científicas.
Melanie Klein à Buenos Aires. Débuts et évolution. Dans les premières décennies du 20ème siècle, Freud
n’était connu et cité en Amérique Latine que par une élite d’esprits éclairés. Dans les années 1940, des
européens exilés se regroupaient avec les pionniers locaux de Buenos Aires, et s’est ainsi que l’Association
Psychanalytique Argentine était fondée en 1942. Depuis, la psychanalyse a gagné en prestige, elle s’est
diffusée dans les hôpitaux et les universités, et influence plus largement le domaine culturel. La situation
socioéconomique de l’époque a permis à ce phénomène de se développer, au grand étonnement des
observateurs. Le présent article a pour objet l’étude de la grande influence de la pensée kleinienne pendant
les trente premières années de ce développement. Les travaux originaux des penseurs locaux constituent un
capital intellectuel qui confirme l’idée d’un’ « école psychanalytique argentine ». Pendant les années 1970,
aussi bien la société que la psychanalyse ont subi des changements profonds et complexes. L’enseignement
de Lacan a gagné en audience tandis que celui de Klein a commencé à décliner. À l’heure actuelle, les
kleiniens de Buenos Aires continuent à travailler et leurs relations aux lacaniens et aux autres écoles sont
plus sereines. Des discussions dans le respect de l’autre sont ainsi possibles, orientées exclusivement vers
les différences scientifiques.
Melanie Klein a Buenos Aires. Gli inizi e l’evoluzione. Nei primi decenni del Novecento, in America
Latina Freud era conosciuto e citato da una élite di menti illuminate. Negli anni quaranta la convergenza a
Buenos Aires degli esuli dall’Europa con i pionieri locali portò alla fondazione, nel 1942, dell’Associazione
Psicoanalitica Argentina. Da allora la psicoanalisi, in Argentina, ha avuto una costante crescita, diffondendosi
negli ospedali e nelle università ed esercitando il suo influsso sulla cultura in generale. La situzione socio
economica di allora consentì lo sviluppo di questo fenomeno, che lasciava stupefatti gli osservatori. Questo
articolo si propone di studiare il forte influsso del pensiero kleiniano nei primi trent’anni di quel processo
evolutivo. Le opere originarie dei pensatori locali costituiscono un capitale intellettuale che giustifica
l’idea di una “scuola argentina di psicoanalisi”. Negli anni settanta sia la società sia la pscoanalisi subirono
profonde e complesse trasformazioni. Gli insegnamenti di Lacan presero impulso e quelli di Melanie Klein
incominciarono il loro declino. Attualmente i kleiniani di Buenos Aires continuano a lavorare e il loro
rapporto con i lacaniani e i seguaci di altre scuole è meno turbolento. Sono così possibili discussioni più
rispettose, orientate sulle differenze strettamente scientifiche.
MELANIE KLEIN IN BUENOS AIRES
891
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