Madeleine Baranger

Madeleine Baranger, who passed away on 19 June 2017 at the age of 97, was born in France in 1920. A graduate of Classical Studies at the University of Toulouse (1941), she was a member of the Argentine Psychoanalytic Association and the International Psychoanalytical Association since 1959. Between 1954 and 1965, she and Willy Baranger founded the Uruguayan Psychoanalytical Association, organising the Institute of Psychoanalysis, where she was Director from 1955 to 1964, collaborating with the Revista Uruguaya de Psicoanálisis (Uruguayan Journal of Psychoanalysis), and acting as a training analyst, supervisor, and professor. She continued these activities at the Argentine Psychoanalytic Association upon her return to Buenos Aires in 1966, always maintaining her anti-authoritarian, anti-dogmatic, and anti-Pygmalion position as a champion of tolerance and respect for the other and for the creative potential within each subject. She received the Konex Award in 1996 and the international Sigourney Award in 2008.

Her work can be seen as a series of investigations on a range of thematic clusters related to the theory of technique, psychopathology, and the impact of the ethical and ideological on the analytic task.

She authored papers presented at several Congresses of the International Psychoanalytical Association, as well as books and articles published in Spanish and translated into French, English, Italian, and Turkish.

She published numerous papers in prestigious psychoanalytic journals, including the International Journal of Psychoanalysis, the Argentine Psychoanalytic Association's Revista de Psicoanálisis (Journal of Psychoanalysis), and the Journal of the Uruguayan Psychoanalytic Association.

Madé's entire body of work serves as a call to broaden the borders of psychoanalysis and to keep alive the promise of its galvanising, questioning power. Her manner of participating, more than giving answers, was to pose questions. This is the most poignant aspect of her work: it