You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
The discussion of this book calls for a preamble in order to place the author in his context. His geographical area is Buenos Aires, the site of a strong analytical group, where he is a young training analyst ('young' when measured by the yardstick of the long curriculum that analysis requires). I mention location for there is, I am afraid, something like a geographical bias in the main centres of analytical thinking in the northern hemisphere. Scientific ideas do not travel well and each group tends to become isolated, having a distorted and polemical view of what happens across the ocean.
The position of the Argentine movement—and this too could be said to be a bias—is to receive the wealth of contradictory opinions coming from the north and to benefit from the controversy. Grinberg's book is one of the most representative examples of this position. For that reason alone it deserves serious consideration. His approach is rewarding from the outset, for in the initial chapters, where he deals with the roots of guilt in man and in humanity, what he has to say on myth, magic, religion and philosophy enriches Freud's ideas on the subject and shows how they were complemented by subsequent thinkers such as Reik, Melanie Klein, Money-Kyrle, Winnicott, Rickman, and Kris.
It is not Grinberg's contention or aim to bring about an integration of all these different views. He