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León Grinberg was born in Buenos Aires on February 23, 1921, and studied medicine in Buenos Aires. He already showed his vocation for psychoanalysis, as did his companion David Liberman. They were great friends and both came to stand out in their field.
Shortly after his qualification in medicine, Grinberg entered the Asociación Psicoanalítica Argentina (APA), becoming an associate member in 1952, at the age of 31. His career was meteoric, and in four years he became professor of the Psychoanalysis Institute and training analyst.
Grinberg belongs to a second generation of APA analysts, along with Resnik, Rodrigué, Arminda Aberastury and many others. He underwent analysis with Arnaldo Rascovsky and continued with Marie Langer to the completion of his studies, becoming, later, her collaborator and friend.
With Langer and Rodrigué, he wrote two books on group psychotherapy. The first, Psicoterapia del grupo: Su enfoque psicoanalítico (Group psychotherapy: A psychoanalytic approach), was published in 1957. Pleasant and rigorous, it was the first of its genre written in Spanish and of great influence in Latin America and Spain to date.
In 1959 he published El grupo psicológico: En la terapéutica, enseñanza e investigación (The psychological group: In therapy, teaching and research), divided into three sections in collaboration with more than 20 specialists.
Without a doubt, the stimulating dynamics of the group were an incentive leading Grinberg during those years to study the regressive mechanisms of mental functioning, which at times the group expresses with diaphanous
clarity. An outstanding text of these years is “Aspectos mágicos en la transferencia y la contratransferencia” (“Magic aspects in transference and countertransference”) that was presented at APA (Argentine Psychoanalytic Association) in 1956 and published two years later. In this paper, Grinberg introduces the concept of projective counteridentification, to which he will refer in many other works.
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