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Angel Garma was a world-renowned psychoanalyst and an outstanding symbol of an era of extraordinary dynamic and creative developments in Western Culture and psychoanalysis. He is, in my view, one of the founding “fathers” of psychoanalysis in the Spanish-speaking world, and the Founding Father of psychoanalysis in Spain.
Angel Garma was born on June 24, 1904, in Bilbao, Spain, and died in Buenos Aires on January 29, 1993. He did his medical training at the Universidad Complutense in Madrid and always intended to be a psychiatrist. He was taught by distinguished professors, of the caliber of Ramon y Cajal, Ortega y Gasset and Gregorio Marañon.
He counted amongst his friends Federico García Lorca, Salvador Dalí, Luis Buñuel, Severo Ochoa, José María Hinojosa and other future famous artists of the Generation of ’27, with whom he shared the intellectual atmosphere of this extraordinary group of artists during the years leading to the Spanish Civil War.
Garma graduated as a psychiatrist in Tübingen, Germany, in 1929. He then initiated psychoanalytic training in Berlin and became a member of the German Psychoanalytic Society. He had analysis with Theodor Reik and participated in the Society’s scientific life together with Alexander, Wilhelm Reich, Spitz, Gustav Jung, Erich Fromm, Alfred Adler, etc. He befriended Ana Freud and Lou Andreas-Salomé.
In 1931, he returned to Madrid, where he was the only analyst trained as such and a member of the International Psychoanalytic Association.
The civil war and the end of the Republic put an end to the attempt to establish a psychoanalytic movement in Spain, sending his only representative
into exile. He established residence in Bordeaux and later Paris until the political situation in France deteriorated so much that he was forced to emigrate to Buenos Aires, Argentina, in 1938.
For Franco’s dictatorship, psychoanalysis was part of the Jewish-Marxist-Masonic conspiracy, the enemy that had to be eliminated. Garma and psychoanalysis wer