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The present paper by Luisa de Alvarez de Toledo was first published in 1954 in issue 3 of Volume XI of the APA's Revista de Psicoanálisis. It became a landmark paper both in Argentinian psychoanalysis and in Latin America more generally. The author was a prominent member of the Copérnico Clinic in Buenos Aires where she and the director, Enrique Pichon Rivière, were famous for working without a fixed schedule long hours into the night. It was a time of lively and fruitful exchanges and a sense of discovery and excitement between the different generations of analysts working there.
The paper itself was conceived and written when Argentine psychoanalysis was strongly under the influence of the British school, and especially of Melanie Klein and her followers, among whom the authors most frequently quoted were Paula Heimann and Susan Isaacs. Obviously Freud remained the main reference, but there were other influences and a number of trends beginning to emerge that eventually crystallised in new ideas.
The differences between these trends perhaps lie principally in the place to which they assign guilt in the genesis of suffering and the curative process. While to a member of the Kleinian school guilt was the engine of integration, reparation and sublimation, for another, led by Angel Garma, guilt was seen mainly as an obstacle to psychic development owing to the equation of masochism and the sadistic superego. These two theoretical orientations were manifested in different techniques of handling the negative transference.
A further group of analysts, led by Pichon Rivière, were greatly influenced by the French dynamic psychiatrists and by the ideology and philosophy of dialectical materialism, so that they approached Klein's ideas from a different viewpoint. The emphasis fell upon object relations, the field of research being widened to embrace a subtle determination of the status of the object in terms of its place in the subject's external as well as his internal world;