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Editors' Note: The following review was scheduled to be one in an occasional series of essays on influential psychoanalytic books not available in English. As the essay was approaching completion, so too was an English translation of the book. Under the editorship of Leo Bleger and John Churcher, the translation is a collaboration of the editors with Susan Rogers. There will be a preface by Horacio Etchegoyen and another by the editors. Tentatively titled Symbiosis and Ambiguity, the translation will be published by Routledge in the New Library of Psychoanalysis and can be expected in late 2011. An earlier English edition was commissioned in 1987 by Free Association Books, and for many years this translation was advertised as forthcoming, under the title Symbiosis and Ambiguity: The Psychoanalysis of Very Early Experience. A draft translation was made, but the translator became terminally ill while working on it. The agreement between the Blegers, who own the copyright, and Free Association Books expired in 1989. Although that version was never completed or published, references to it as a forthcoming title by Process Press (successors to Free Association) can still be found on the internet (e.g., on the Amazon and Karnac websites), complete with an ISBN number and publication dates of 2001 or 2002.
South American psychoanalysis, particularly in Argentina, has a character of its own, whether a practitioner sees himself as Kleinian, Lacanian, or more traditionally Freudian. The early psychoanalysts arrived in Argentina before World War II from a variety of European countries, with a consequent variety of psychoanalytic training and theoretical backgrounds. From Celes Carcamo, who trained in Paris, and Maria Langer, trained in Vienna, to Angel Garma, who trained in Berlin, the result was the development of a unique, highly original, heterogeneous brand of clinical and theoretical thinking that only now is being recognized internationally for its many early contribution