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A hundred years have passed since the publication of the first ever book on child psychoanalysis, written in German by Hermine Hug-Hellmuth in 1921 (On the Technique of Child Analysis), followed soon after by Anna Freud’s Introduction to the Technique of Child Analysis in 1927 and Melanie Klein’s The Psycho-Analysis of Children in 1932. Building on the groundbreaking contributions of these brilliant pioneers, child analysis, alongside adult analysis, has undergone extensive development over the past century, in both theory and technique. Many important books in this field have emerged over the years. One might naturally wonder about the significance of translating and publishing a 60-year-old book written by Arminda Aberastury in 1962. Who was she?
Reading Arminda Aberastury’s Theory and Technique of Child Analysis, I quickly realised that the questions coming to my mind reflected my unfamiliarity with the history of child psychoanalysis in South America. The editors, Jill Savege Scharff and Lea Sofer De Setton, have successfully drawn the attention of English-speaking readers to the foundational work of Arminda Aberastury. It seems to me that the editors are like archaeologists who discovered and deeply appreciated a long-buried treasure and felt compelled to share it with the world.
In the Foreword, Virginia Ungar offers a comprehensive overview and provides a compass for readers to navigate, not only the sociocultural context in which Aberastury published her book, but also a broader historical development of child psychoanalysis in Argentina. She reminds readers that child psychoanalysis is entrenched in Argentine culture, and that Aberastury and her colleagues played an essential part in laying the foundations for the growth of this field and for Argentina, which has the highest number of psychoanalysts per capita in the world. Reading this book offers a glimpse into how Aberastury and her colleagues contributed to that remarkable development.
Psychoanalysts have