Chapter 13 Argentina

Arminda Aberastury was the founder of child psychoanalysis in Argentina. She was born in Buenos Aires, into an aristocratic family of Basque origin. Her father was a lawyer and land-owner. When, after her secondary-school studies, the young Arminda wanted to study medicine, her family forbade her: it was not done in their circles. In those days the age of majority was 25, so she studied educational science and eventually gained a PhD in that subject. She became engaged to Enrique Pichon-Rivière1 when she was very young, and while he was studying medicine. She attended lectures with him and thus underwent the same training, although she could not obtain the corresponding diplomas. Sidonia Mehler, one of her friends, to whom we owe this information, says she was a beautiful, fascinating and intelligent woman, astute and cultivated (I. 7). She was nicknamed ‘La Negra’ (the dark one) (Ferrer and Garma, 1973).

Her husband, Enrique Pichon-Rivière, was a brilliant man, with a very original personality. He became one of the masters of psychiatry and then of psychoanalysis in Argentina. In a report to the First Agentinian Congress on Child and Adolescent Psychopathology in 1969, Arminda Aberastury stated: ‘My technique was first of all based on what Anna Freud and Sophie Morgenstern had created in child analysis. From 1940 onwards I was influenced by the theories and techniques of Melanie Klein onto which, year after year, I grafted my own ways of doing things, my own discoveries and those of my colleagues who worked and are still working with me’ (Aberastury, 1972:13).

From 1952 onwards she often visited Melanie Klein in London. Klein had asked her to stay in Britain but she preferred to return to Argentina. In her later years she reproached Melanie Klein with a certain lack of culture and was no longer ‘an out and out Kleinian’ (I. 7). She worked hard to disseminate Klein’s ideas, however, and she herself described a primary genital phase,