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In 1937, in a corridor in Hospicio de las Mercedes1 in Buenos Aires, Arminda Aberastury wonders about an eight-year-old girl diagnosed with oligophrenia. The girl is running while her mother sees a psychoanalyst, Enrique Pichon-Rivière.2 Arminda Aberastury, who is married to Pichon-Rivière, goes with him to the hospital every day, and in the waiting area she plays with the girl and wonders about her diagnosis.
This was the first step into what later would make Aberastury the leading pioneer in child psychoanalysis in Argentina and South America. Aberastury became intrigued while playing with this girl and read the first book on child analysis.3 When she was 17 years old, one of her brother’s friends had given her the Complete Works of Sigmund Freud. These readings triggered a strong interest in psychoanalysis. She trained and joined the Argentine Psychoanalytic Association in its early days. Very early in her career she started to teach child analysts, rethinking and deepening understanding of key aspects of the Freudian view on childhood.
She helped to eradicate the ideas of a naive childhood and a Rousseaunian upbringing typical of naturalistic discourses still current in those times: “The paradise of childhood, the idealization of the child, the mother and maternity, the devaluation of the father’s role in the first stages of development”4 were the prevailing representations that Aberastury helped to dismiss.