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The history of psychoanalysis in Argentina finds its beginnings in the late 1930s, with the arrival in the country of Ángel Garma and Céles Cárcamo. The former, trained at the Berlin Institute, had been a patient of Theodor Reik and was supervised by Otto Fenichel. The latter, trained at the Paris Psychoanalytic Society, had been analysed by Paul Schiff and supervised by Rudolph Lowenstein (Arbiser, 2003).
Both Garma and Cárcamo were to find in Buenos Aires an enthusiastic local group, with young professionals well disposed to the study of Sigmund Freud at its nucleus. This collective of people was led by Arnaldo Rascovsky, a prestigious paediatrician, and Enrique Pichon-Rivière, a clear-thinking psychiatrist. The arrival from Europe of both psychoanalysts provided the opportunity for the beginning of personal analyses and, in time, the creation of the Argentine Psychoanalytic Association (APA) in 1942 as a Provisional Society of the IPA (Cucurullo et al., 1982; Etchegoyen and Zysmann, 2005).
The local group was familiar with Freud's work, which had been circulating in Buenos Aires since the 1920s, translated into Spanish directly from the German by López Ballesteros and published by Editorial Biblioteca Nueva de Madrid. This translation preceded even the publication of the Gesammelte Werke. Jorge Canestri draws our attention to the fact that, in the introductory note to this edition by Biblioteca Nueva, consultation with Padre Gemelli, Rector of the Catholic University of Milan, was sought on ‘moral grounds’. This man, of Fascist ideology and anti-Semitic roots, was a voice of authority in Europe in those dark days. Padre Gemelli advised the study and interpretation of psychoanalysis in its Christian sense, in the manner by which scholars ‘made Aristotle into a Christian philosopher’. The present-day relevance of this observation is striking in its paradox. As Canestri points out, it conveys the attempt to domesticate, to distort and to alter thought, so as to adapt