Obituary: Ignacio Matte Blanco 1908-1995

Ignacio Matte Blanco, one of the most original and creative thinkers in the field of contemporary psychoanalytic theory, died in Rome on 11 January 1995. He was born in Santiago on 3 October 1908, the younger son of an aristocratic Chilean family with venerable roots in the country's history. He was educated at the German Gymnasium in Santiago and the University of Chile, from which he graduated physician-surgeon in 1930. In the same year he took up an appointment in the department of physiology at the Pontifical Catholic University of Chile. He went to London to become a research fellow in physiology at University College, in 1933, but, before leaving Chile he had already begun an analysis with Dr Fernando Allende Navarro, the country's first psychoanalyst.

Building on the foundation of this first contact with psychoanalysis, while in London qualifying as a neuropsychiatrist at the Maudsley Hospital and Northumberland House he also trained as a psychoanalyst in the British Psycho-Analytical Society. His training analysis was conducted with Walter Schmideberg and his supervisors were Anna Freud, Melitta Schmideberg, Helen Sheehan-Dare and James Strachey. Having become a member of the British Psycho-Analytical Society in 1938, he left London for the United States two years later.

There he worked at the Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore, at the Neurological Institute of the New York Medical Center and at Duke University in North Carolina, where he was associate professor of psychiatry from 1941 to 1943. He returned to Chile in 1944, gathering around him a group of doctors who established a psychoanalytic study group. Later to become the founding group of the Chilean Psychoanalytic Association, it was recognised as a component society of the IPA in 1949 at the Zurich International Congress; Matte Blanco was several times its President. In the same year he was appointed professor of psychiatry at the University of Chile medical school and director of clinical psychiatry