Introduction

The papers that make up the South American contribution to this book are informative about the way that psychoanalysis has developed and matured in the three countries which are represented: Argentina, Chile and Brazil.

Argentina is the Latin American country in which psychoanalysis has gained the greatest preeminence, ‘socialized’ and disseminated itself. It is also the one whose psychoanalysts had, and still have, the greatest participation at an international level (although still less than they deserve). This is likely to result from the association of a privileged economic setting, characterized by the presence of a large middle class, with a high level of education among the population. This has enabled Gustavo Jarast, author of the paper about Argentina, to choose an authorial approach to study the concepts of projective identification most used in that country.

His study discusses the contribution of four important authors: Heinrich Racker, León Grinberg, and Willy and Madeleine Baranger. It is worth emphasizing not only the cosmopolitan nature of this group but also the type of training they had. Willy Baranger is of French origin, studied philosophy and it was as a philosophy professor that he went to Buenos Aires. Racker was born in Poland but graduated in philosophy in Vienna, having migrated to Argentina due to the war. There was certainly a mutual fertilization between the receptive environment they encountered in Buenos Aires and the European cultural experience/background they were able to offer.

Juan Francesco Jordan-Moore, author of the paper about Chile, centres his presentation on a conceptual discussion: is projective

identification a solipsistic concept? What is the weight of intersubjectivity? He describes how this question has gained relevance in the Chilean psychoanalytic milieu, lists the psychoanalysts that have discussed it, and presents the arguments they have used, supported either by ‘classical’ authors (such as Rosenfeld and Bion), by