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Emilio Rodrigué was born in Buenos Aires in 1923 and died in San Salvador de Bahia in 2008, when he was 85 years old. His career may be divided into two phases. The first one, which Rodrigué himself identified as “orthodox,” comprises his first 25 years as a psychoanalyst – from the beginning of his training at age 26, to his resignation from the Argentine Psychoanalytic Association (APA) and the IPA in 1971. The second stage, the “unorthodox” one, stretches from his resignation to his death.
Rodrigué liked to say that his analytic vocation had arisen from an interest in Freud’s work that had been transmitted to him by his father. A bon vivant Frenchman and an avid reader – “a master of leisure” – his father would spend hours locked up in his study reading the life of the saints and Freud’s writings. Rodrigué also enjoyed calling attention to his own transgressing tendencies. He used to say that halfway through medical school he had announced to his family that he would drop out and take up farm work. Since his mother, who seemed to be the addressee of this statement, had listened to it unperturbed, he had continued studying and had become a physician.
Rodrigué went into analysis with Arnaldo Raskovsky, one of the founders of the APA, during his third year of medical school (when he was 20 years old). Fairbairn’s work had made a great impression on him, and he started questioning his analyst so insistently that the latter terminated the analysis. Since he could not continue with his training in Buenos Aires,
Rodrigué decided to move to London, where he became a patient of Paula Heimann.
During his stay in England, Rodrigué excelled at his work both in the British Society and in the Tavistock Clinic – so much so that Melanie Klein entrusted her granddaughter to him for analysis, which she herself supervised. Rodrigué described this peculiar situation as his “first transgressing reward”. In London, he was also in contact with Winnicott, Jones, and other renowned analy