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Letter From

Letter from Argentina1

Psychoanalysis has a long and rich history in Argentina, both in the fields
of psychiatry and psychotherapy and in the cultural realm. Psychoanalytic
ideas and vocabulary have pervaded our everyday lives. You can hear them
in ordinary conversations; people will say that so-and-so is a hysteric, will
accuse you of projecting, or will tell you that their co-worker is una reprim-
ida (repressed) or un acomplejado (full of complexes). Psychoanalysts write
op-ed pieces for newspapers and are consulted for TV and radio reports.
Among them, there are playwrights, novelists, poets, and painters. Some of
them were even persecuted during the last Argentine dictatorship, and
forced to leave the country.
This connection with the social sphere has been part of psychoanalytic
practice in Argentina since its inceptions. Two of the founders of the Argen-
tine Psychoanalytic Association (APA), Marie Langer and Angel
Garma,
came to Argentina escaping persecution in Spain because of their political
activism. Enrique Pichon-Riviere, another of the precursors of Argentine
psychoanalysis, strongly believed in the deep interrelation between subjectiv-
ity and society, to the point that he eventually created the Argentine School
of Social Psychology. Furthermore, Argentine analysts have always been
interested in using their knowledge and experience to engage in community
work, as I discuss later.
While the history of psychoanalysis in Argentina is varied and interesting,
I will not dwell on it here.2 Rather, I shall focus on Argentine thinkers sig-
nificant theoretical developments. Then I describe the challenges facing our
discipline and highlight how psychoanalytic societies are responding to
them, as well as their current achievements.3
One of our first innovators was Enrique Pichon-Riviere, whose extensive
experience as a psychiatrist led him to reformulate Melanie Kleins ideas by
looking at the patient not as an individual but as a member of a family and
a society. Based on this approach, he developed a series of concepts in the
1940s and 1950s, such as link, spokesperson, dialectic spiral, and internal
group. He defined the link as a complex structure that includes the subject,
the object, and their mutual interaction through processes of communica-
tion and learning (Pichon-Riviere, 1988, p. 10). Moreover, building on the
ideas of social psychologists such as G.H. Mead and K. Lewin, Pichon-Riv-
iere developed a theory on group functioning based on the notion of Con-
ceptual, Referential, and Operative Framework (ECRO).4
1
Translated by Judith Filc.
2
Jarast (2014) offers a detailed overview.
3
Arbiser (2003) provides a very good summary of Argentine contributions to psychoanalytic theory and
technique.
4
Some of his most important articles have been recently published in English (Losso et al., 2017).

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588 Letter From

The field of child psychoanalysis expanded rapidly in Argentina thanks

to Arminda Aberastury and Betty Garma, who were the first to translate
Melanie Kleins works into Spanish.5 The first symposium on child analysis
was held in 1957. Arminda Aberastury encouraged interdisciplinary work,
and her ideas were incorporated into pediatrics and pediatric dentistry prac-
tice. She created the playing interview as part of the diagnostic process and
highlighted the significance of the assessment period, alerting to the need to
detect the fantasies of illness and cure (concepts developed by Pichon-Riv-
iere). In addition, she posited the existence of an early genital phase, and
studied the effect on the baby of the appearance of the teeth, describing the
presence of cannibalistic fantasies.6 Another significant innovator in the
field of child psychoanalysis was Arnaldo Rascovsky (1960), who was a
pediatrician before becoming a psychoanalyst. Rascovsky developed a the-
ory about the origin of mania that points to prenatal life as the starting
point of psychic life.
I cannot fail to mention Heinrich Racker, a key figure in the development
of psychoanalysis in Argentina. Racker emigrated to Argentina to escape
Nazism. Besides being a psychoanalyst, he was a gifted musician and had a
solid philosophical education. He had started his psychoanalytic training in
Vienna, but had been forced to leave after the Anschluss. He finished semi-
nars in 1946 and started a brilliant career that was prematurely ended by
his early death at 50. Racker delved into the notion of countertransference
simultaneously with Paula Heimann. According to Horacio Etchegoyen, he
stresses the dialectical relation between transference and countertransfer-
ence, challenges the myth of the healthy (non-neurotic) psychoanalyst, and
points out that countertransference reactions may give analysts clues to
what is going on in the analytic process (Etchegoyen, n/d, no pagination).
The next generation of Argentine psychoanalysts also made relevant theo-
retical contributions to our discipline. Among them, I would like to high-
light Willy and Madeleine Barangers notions of field and bastion, Jos
e
Blegers concept of glyschrocaric position (from glyschros, meaning viscous,
and karion, meaning nucleus, that is, an agglutinated core) and his innova-
tive approach to the frame, Le
on Grinbergs (1993) notion of projective
counteridentification, and David Libermans (1970) contributions to our
understanding of analyst-patient communication, which drew from the field
of linguistics. This incorporation of linguistics into psychoanalysis had


started with Luisa Alvarez de Toledos paper on El an
alisis del asociar, del
interpretar y de las palabras [The analysis of association, interpretation,
and words], published in 1954.
The notion of psychoanalytic field is based on W. and M. Barangers idea
that the neutrality of the analyst is an impossibility. They claim that in the
analytic situation there are two people unfailingly bound and complemen-
tary while the situation lasts and involved in the same dynamic process
(Baranger and Baranger, 1961, p. 3). What they designate as a bipersonal

5
I have discussed the history of child psychoanalysis in Argentina and the rest of Latin America else-
where (Ungar, 2005).
6
See Aberastury (1962, 1968).

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 Letter From 589

field is a temporal and spatial structure with its own dynamics and laws.
While they define the field as bipersonal because there are two actual sub-
jects involved, they describe it also as tri and even multipersonal due to
the divisions within each of the participants in the field. What underlies this
structure is a shared unconscious fantasy that is the product of unconscious
communication and of a joint creation process.
Jos
e Bleger (1967) expanded the traditional notion of psychoanalytic set-
ting in his discussion of encuadre, and for this reason the word encuadre, in
this case, has not been translated as setting but as frame. He describes the
analytic situation as including a process and a non-process. The non-process
corresponds to the frame, that is, to the aspects of the situation that remain
constant, which go beyond the rules established at the beginning of the
treatment. Bleger argues that the frame is the repository of the patients
psychotic anxieties and, in this sense, is mute. When it is disturbed for some
reason, these aspects that seemed mute are activated and appear in the
scene. The analyst can thus interpret what is taking place in the session and
re-establish the analytic situation.
Based on Rackers work on the countertransference, Le
on Grinberg posited
the existence of a projective counteridentification. This term refers to distur-
bances caused in analytical technique by the excessive intervention of projec-
tive identification on the part of the analysand, which gives rise in the analyst
to a specific reaction (Grinberg, 1993, p. 47). When the analyst is unable to
process the patients projective identification, he sees himself passively led
to enact a role which the analysand actively although unconsciously
forced into him (Grinberg, 1958, quoted in Etchegoyen, 1999, p. 283). Grin-
berg distinguishes this phenomenon from the countertransference by pointing
to the compulsory nature of the analysts act. According to Horacio Etche-
goyen, the concept of projective counteridentification is theoretically as well
as technically important, and it poses an open and absorbing question that
of pre- or non-verbal communication (Etchegoyen, 1999, p. 282).
While not necessarily an innovator, Etchegoyen, who was also a member
of this early generation of analysts, was an extremely influential thinker,
not only in Argentina but also worldwide. His Fundamentals of Psychoana-
lytic Technique, which has been published in more than six languages, is the
most comprehensive guide to the theory of psychoanalytic technique. Fur-
thermore, he was the first Latin American IPA president (199397), and
taught several generations of analysts. Among the topics into which he
delved are psychoanalytic interpretation, the role of early transference in
the psychoanalytic process, and perverse transference.
We should also mention here two other Argentine analysts who made
important contributions to psychoanalysis: Joel Zac (1973), who discussed
psychopathy from a psychoanalytic perspective, and David Rosenfeld
(1992, 2006), who has been a major contributor to the psychoanalytic
understanding of psychosis. He has written about the transference and
insight in the analysis of psychotic patients, and built on Tustins notion of
autistic capsule to address severely disturbed adult patients.
As I stated earlier, one of the most interesting aspects of the evolution of
psychoanalysis in Argentina is the close connection between our field and
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the social sphere. An aspect of this connection is the interest Argentine psy-
choanalysts have historically shown in the presence of this sphere in their
consultation rooms. Perhaps because of the peculiar vicissitudes of political
life in our region, this interest has been present in other Latin American
countries as well, and has manifested itself in different ways. For instance,
analysts have contributed their expertise to the field of human rights. They
have been involved in the treatment of victims of state terror and in the
process of restitution to their families of origin of the children kidnapped
by the dictatorship. Some of the human rights organizations where psycho-
analysts were involved were Abuelas de Plaza de Mayo (Grandmothers of
Plaza de Mayo) and APDH (Human Rights Permanent Assembly).
This work led to a very rich reflection on the effects of social and politi-
cal trauma on the psyche. Among the authors who have dealt with these
issues are Janine Puget, Mar
a Lucila Pelento, and Julia Braun. Puget
(1991) created the term state of threat to refer to the psychological effects of
the permanent fear in which we lived under the dictatorship. Pelento and
Braun (1991), in turn, coined the notion of special mourning processes to
describe the ways in which the relatives of those who had been kidnapped
and disappeared (whose bodies were never recovered) dealt with their
bereavement.
During the dictatorship, the outside world forced its presence into the
consulting room; patients were bringing their fear, their pain, and even their
disavowal to their analysts offices. At the same time, the analysts them-
selves were immersed in that same world. It was at this time that Janine
Puget and Leonardo Wender (1982) developed the concept of overlapping
world to refer to the irruption of the outside (at first, the world of the psy-
choanalytic institution, and later, the social sphere in general) into the ses-
sion. This conceptualization was further expanded by Puget and
Berensteins (1988, 1997) with their notions of link and link interaction. In
this context, they posited the existence of three different dimensions in the
patient-analyst relationship, namely, the intrasubjective, the intersubjective,
and the transsubjective. The intrasubjective space is the space where subjects
interact with their own internal world; the intersubjective space, where they
interact with other subjects; and the transsubjective space, where they inter-
act with the external world in general.
Berenstein and Pugets concept of link drew from early developments by
Pichon-Riviere but took greater distance from traditional psychoanalytic
ideas. These authors postulate the need to quit thinking about interpersonal
relationships in terms of subject-object relations. They refer, instead, to sub-
ject-subject or intersubjective relations. From this perspective, subjects
establish links that constitute unconscious structures different from each
subjects individual unconscious.
Berenstein and Puget question the central role attributed to individual
history and determination in traditional psychoanalysis, and point to the
relevance of what they call the new, that is, events that affect the dynam-
ics of the link and cannot be referred to that history. These ideas laid the
foundations for very rich theoretical developments, among them, Julio Mor-
enos (2014) notion of connection.
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 Letter From 591

Moreno describes a mode of relating to the outside world that does not
include the creation of representations, which correspond to the mechanism
of association. Instead, it involves capturing the outside directly. According
to this author, both mechanisms participate in every human experience.
Argentine analysts have made other significant contributions to the devel-
opment of psychoanalytic theory and practice. Among them are Jorge
Garc
a Badaraccos (2000) work on multi-family psychoanalysis, Luis Kan-
cypers (2004) development of the notion of fraternal complex, and Leticia
Glocer Fiorini and Mariam Alizades ideas on psychoanalysis and gender.
Glocer Fiorini (2007, 2017) has inquired into problems related to women
and psychoanalysis and into the notions of femininity and the feminine. She
approaches psychoanalytic concepts such as sexual difference from an inter-
disciplinary perspective. Her goal is to think of the category sexual differ-
ence with other logics beyond binary logic. To do so, she argues, we must
rethink the construction of sexed subjectivity in a triadic mode, with the
support of the paradigm of complexity (Glocer Fiorini, 2017, p. 164). Ali-
zade (1999), in turn, devoted her research to feminine sensuality. She argues
that men are incapable of understanding it, and that fantasies of female ero-
genic overflowing may often be at the heart of both men and womens sex-
ual pathology. Alizade promoted the creation of COWAP (the IPA Women
and Psychoanalysis Committee) and worked tirelessly both as Latin Ameri-
can co-chair and as overall chair of this committee.
While the first psychoanalytic association was established in Buenos
Aires, the practice of psychoanalysis spread nationwide over the years.
There are three IPA component societies outside the capital city. These are
the Mendoza Psychoanalytic Society, in Mendoza City (Mendoza Province),
the Rosario Psychoanalytic Association, in the city of Rosario (Santa F
e
Province), and the C
ordoba Psychoanalytic Association, in C
ordoba City
(C
ordoba Province). These are all very active institutions. In addition, dif-
ferent controversies emerging within APA led to splits that resulted in the
creation of two new societies that also became part of the IPA the Buenos
Aires Psychoanalytic Society (APdeBA), which became the IPA component
society in 1979, and the Argentine Psychoanalytic Society (SAP), which was
created in 1998.
In the last three decades of the 20th century, Argentine psychoanalysis
started taking different paths that led to its expansion beyond the Interna-
tional Psychoanalytic Association. Lacanian analysis took centre stage in
the late 1970s and during the 1980s, especially in academic and mental
health institutions. This is a particularly interesting phenomenon because it
shows the intricate connection between psychoanalysis and culture. The
growth of Lacanian analysis did not start in psychoanalytic societies but in
the literary realm; its dissemination was promoted by a literary critic, Oscar
Masotta, and started in study groups that met in private homes (Bal
an,
1991).
Significant social and technological transformations have affected the
practice of psychoanalysis in different ways. The late 20th century brought
major social, political, and economic changes to the country. The 197683
dictatorship established a reign of terror that deeply disturbed the Argentine
Copyright 2017 Institute of Psychoanalysis Int J Psychoanal (2017) 98
592 Letter From

social fabric. In addition, it signalled the beginning of neoliberal policies in

Argentina. Such policies resulted in a loss of formal jobs and of the safety
net, a loss that led to impoverishment and job insecurity, with significant
effects on Argentines mental health. Moreover, we have witnessed a pro-
gressive weakening of traditional family ties and the emergence of new fam-
ily configurations and gender identities. To these changes, we should add
the massive presence of technology in our everyday lives. These transforma-
tions have entirely changed psychoanalysts experience in their consulting
rooms. For example, we are seeing more severe pathologies and a signifi-
cant presence of borderline cases, manifested in the increase in eating disor-
ders and substance abuse, among others.
Argentine analysts have responded to these new challenges by looking
beyond traditional psychoanalysis for potential answers. They have
increased their exchange with other disciplines, an exchange whose founda-
tions had been laid by Pichon-Riviere and by child psychoanalysis practi-
tioners in the 1950s and 1960s, as I mentioned earlier. Picture a fourth-
grade classroom in a Buenos Aires neighbourhood. If you went in and
asked the children what is a psychoanalyst, most of them would raise their
hands and say they knew one. The recognition enjoyed by our discipline
has made it possible to engage in a dialogue with the neurosciences, the
social sciences, and the law. Such dialogue is not only fruitful but necessary,
because the unprecedented transformations we are witnessing cannot be
addressed from a single perspective.
Psychoanalytic associations have diversified their activities in both the edu-
cational and the therapeutic dimensions, and have increased their connection
with the community. APdeBA created a university institute, IUSAM, that
offers a variety of certificates and masters programmes. In this way, psycho-
analytic training, which used to be a private endeavour without official recog-
nition, has become a graduate degree that is recognized by the Ministry of
Education. APA has entered into agreements with El Salvador University
and Buenos Aires University to offer masters programmes and a PhD pro-
gramme; and the C
ordoba Psychoanalytic Association offers a graduate pro-
gramme jointly with the National C
ordoba University.
Additionally, all IPA component societies are actively engaged in
research. APA has six research studies underway: Baby Observation
Group, Mother-Preschooler Play Interaction, Retrospective Case History
Study on Potential Causes of Eating Disorders in the Public Health Sys-
tem, The Inventory of Personality Organization in Clinical Control Sam-
ples, Childhood at Risk: Transmission and Activation of Archaic Defense
Mechanisms, and Body Image Perception and Dissatisfaction in Buenos
Aires Adolescents and Youth. APdeBA has designed and is implementing
several research projects in the framework of IUSAM, among them, Sui-
cide: Healthcare Emergency in Taf
del Valle, Tucum
an, Argentina, Link
Suffering, and Psychic Change from the Patients Perspective. SAP has a
research programme that currently includes three projects: a comparative
study on clinical inference between psychoanalysts and cognitive psy-
chotherapists; a study on patient perception of change; and a research on
vulnerability and resilience. Finally, the C
ordoba, Mendoza, and Rosario
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 Letter From 593

societies have created a Working Party to compare clinical methods. It is

also worth mentioning that most of these associations publish their own
journals, which serve as a space to disseminate their research and ideas and
to engage in a dialogue with other societies this side and beyond the
national borders. Furthermore, APA also has its own publishing house.
With regard to the community, all the societies offer open lectures and clin-
ical discussions, supervision services, and extension courses within the institu-
tions, and have different kinds of exchange agreements with hospitals and
mental health centres. APA, furthermore, created the Enrique Racker Center
for Research and Guidance, whose goals are the expansion and application
of psychoanalysis through community activities, and APdeBA, the David
Liberman Psychoanalytic Center for Guidance and Research, intended to
offer psychological care and guidance to the community, in particular, to
those populations that do not have access to private mental health care.
With this brief review of the past and present of psychoanalysis in Argen-
tina, I have tried to show that our discipline is deeply rooted in Argentine
culture and society, and that its practice, teaching, and research has evolved
and continues to evolve to respond to our rapidly changing world. I hope
that you will join us in July and have the opportunity to see this lively,
engaged, and inquiring professional community at work.
Virginia Ungar
Buenos Aires Psychoanalytic Association, Repu
blica De La India 2921,
Piso 12 Buenos Aires 1425, Argentina
E-mail: virginiaungar@gmail.com

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Int J Psychoanal (2017) 98 Copyright 2017 Institute of Psychoanalysis