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Nowadays, any mental health professional working on the Caribbean island of Cuba who wishes to train in psychoanalysis can apply for membership in the Asociacíon Psicoanalítica de Cuba, a study group of the International Federation of Psychoanalytic Studies, complete with its own Facebook page. But decades previously, the small number of Cuban physicians impassioned by Freudian ideas had no such opportunities in their native land, and so, in 1958, Dr. Humberto Nágera Perez, a promising and energetic young psychiatrist from Havana, had to travel to faraway London to embark upon candidacy at the Institute of Psycho-Analysis, the training body of the British Psycho-Analytical Society.
Dr. Nágera ran a construction company in his spare time, and he had accumulated sufficient financial resources to train overseas; hence, he had the ability to support himself in a foreign country without any government subsidy. In due course, Nágera settled into adult psychoanalytical studies, undertaking a training analysis with the Austrian-born refugee Dr. Willi Hoffer, his clinical supervision with German-born Mrs. Hedwig Hoffer (the spouse of Dr. Hoffer), and with Dr. Ilse Hellman, a native of Vienna. Each of these distinguished practitioners worked closely with Anna Freud, and Nágera found himself firmly situated in the “B” group of British psychoanalysts, who owed a primary allegiance to Anna Freud and the classical tradition, rather than to the “A” group, led by Melanie Klein, or to the so-called Middle Group, whose proponents included Dr. Michael Balint and Dr. Donald Winnicott.
In 1959, Willi Hoffer, keen to encourage his promising new analysand, facilitated an introduction to Anna Freud, then director of the Hampstead Child-Therapy Clinic and Course, located on Maresfield Gardens, across the road from Anna Freud’s family home (where her father had died some twenty years previously). Nágera began to attend Anna Freud's regular Wednesday afternoon clinical seminars, initially, as a