Comments on León Grinberg's Life and Work1

(Final version accepted 12 December 2008)

The death of León Grinberg on 25 September 2007 gives me the occasion to reflect about his life and his work. He spent ten years debilitated, in the loving care of his wife and sons, Daniel and Alberto, the only ones with whom he could carry on an emotional interchange, as with the friends who visited him, such as Mariano and Silvia Dvoskin, Valentín Barenblit and myself. If he was reluctant to receive continual visits, it was surely out of discretion. The lively, stimulating dialogue he had maintained for years with all psychoanalysts had been interrupted forever.

In collaboration with his wife Rebeca, Grinberg wrote the preface to the French edition of Racker's Estudios sobre técnica psicoanalítica, published by Paidós in Buenos Aires in 1960 (Racker, 1960). This version appeared in Césura, edited by José Luis Goyena and Claude Legrand, under the title études sur la technique psychoanalytique: Transfert et contre-transfert, which was on its way to being printed in November 1977, one month before León's unfortunate stroke. The publication paid up a debt of many years of French psychoanalysts, as Racker's book had, literally, been read around the world. Its prologue is the last writing together of two notable psychoanalysts and was the culmination of their work, for León and Rebeca Grinberg — as they themselves state — were disciples and friends of Racker and received their learnings not only at the Asociación Psicoanalítica Argentina (APA) but also in Escobar, where they spent their weekends. With his fertile idea of projective counteridentification, Grinberg completed and amplified Racker's concepts of concordant and complimentary countertransference, utilizing more decisively than Racker the idea of projective identification. To have highlighted the communicational value of this mechanism, which the genius of Melanie Klein never took much into account, is a relevant merit of Grinberg.

I owe much to Grinberg. He was, first, m