You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
At the beginning of the 20th century, Argentina was, in the eyes of the world, one of the most promising countries in terms of prosperity, freedoms, and upward social mobility. Attracted by these promises, huge numbers of Europeans ventured to try their luck in these lands. Among them was the Pichon-Rivière family. They arrived in the country when Enrique was three years old, and they settled in the inhospitable Chaco region, still threatened at that time by the raids of the Guaraní Indians. By the time Enrique was eight, they had moved to the province of Corrientes and eventually ended up in the city of Goya, where his mother founded the Colegio Nacional (Public High School). Sports, poetry and painting were the great passions of his childhood, adolescence and early youth. In his Conversations with Vicente Zito Lema (1976), he confesses that his readings of the Count of Lautréamont, Rimbaud and Artaud exerted a constant influence on his thought during this time and for the rest of his life. In 1946, he published ‘Lo siniestro en la vida y en la obra del Conde de Lautréamont’ (The Sinister in the Life and Work of the Count de Lautréamont). In Buenos Aires, he got involved in the bohemian literary, journalistic and artistic groups that were part of the city’s exuberant intellectual life. After he graduated as a medical doctor in 1936, he started to work at the Hospicio de la Merced, where he put into practice his inexhaustible inventiveness, which was very much out of synch with the conservative psychiatric practices of the overly structured institutions of the time. Finally, the Hospicio ended up firing him. However, it is precisely in this context and environment that the seeds
of what would be, in 1958, ‘the Rosario experience’,1 which gave rise to the ‘operational groups’ with the corresponding notions of the ‘emergent’ and the ‘mouthpiece’, developed. His singular quality as an innovator in the field of psychiatry and his interest in the articulation of indiv