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In this book divided in three parts—theoretical, clinical, and personal— Samuel Arbiser, an Argentinian training analyst, gathers papers he has written between 1972 and 2012. Together they provide a panoramic view of the development of psychoanalysis in the region of Rio de la Plata from the 1950s to the 1980s.
The author describes an early psychoanalytic movement in Argentina characterized by a Kleinian hegemony. This was followed by a period of theoretical and technical pluralism marked by French psychoanalytic thinking, particularly that of Lacan. While authors like Enrique Pichon-Rivière, José Bleger, David Liberman, Willy and Madeleine Baranger, and Horacio Etchegoyen were influenced by these currents of thought, they developed their own innovative and enriching concepts.
Always referring primarily to Freud, Arbiser weaves a fruitful and lively dialogue between his teachers and predecessors and his own clinical experience. Throughout the chapters, he shows that it is possible to be open to new ideas while remaining faithful to one's roots.
Arbiser allows us to discover the vitality of Argentinian psychoanalysis, especially through the ideas of Pichon-Rivière, of whom he was particularly fond. This Swiss-born analyst was the founder of psychoanalysis in Argentina. Creative freethinker, inexhaustible innovator without a dogmatic straitjacket, with multiple and diverse interests (artistic, sporting, political, social) and with a scientific, psychosocial, and multidisciplinary worldview, he was little known in Europe and North America. His fertile creativity did not always coincide with his written work. Because for the most part he taught orally, in seminars and lectures, his seminal ideas could be found only piecemeal in various writings. This seems to have