Introduction

Around 1930, Arnaldo Rascovsky, a well-known pediatrician in Buenos Aires, specialized in endocrinology and neurology at Children’s Hospital, and Enrique Pichon-Rivière, a psychiatrist at the Central Mental Health Hospital in Buenos Aires, organized several reading groups with papers published by Freud and his collaborators. Although they had diverse backgrounds, they thought that psychoanalysis would enrich them, and they embraced with passion and curiosity the study of the evolving literature. In those days, neither of them had the opportunity to pursue a formal analytic training, but there is no doubt that the two of them created a welcoming setting for the newcomers to this field.

In Latin America, the interest in Freud’s works started early in the 20th century. In this book, we would like to acquaint the English-speaking reader with the work of the pioneers of South American psychoanalysis and some of those who have more recently developed further some of their teachers’ contributions.

Many of the contributions of South American psychoanalysts are now part of accepted standard analytic theory – as is the case of Heinrich Racker’s contributions to the theory and clinical use of countertransference – while others, such as Jose Bleger and David Liberman, are less known or almost unknown, primarily due to lack of translation.

Twentieth-century wars created the conditions for an almost seamless continuity between European and South American psychoanalysis. Many of the displaced European professionals moved to South America in search of shelter. As we will describe, the same circumstances prompted the return to their countries of native South American analysts trai