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Arnaldo Rascovsky (1907, Córdoba, Argentina–1995, Buenos Aires) was born to a Rumanian Jewish immigrant family. He graduated From the Buenos Aires University Medical School at 21. He specialized in pediatrics and established a private practice and joined the staff of the Children’s Hospital in Buenos Aires. He was passionate as a physician and freethinker.
He married young to Matilde Wencenblat, daughter of Jewish immigrants from Austria and France. Early in his hospital practice he noted the incidence of families’ emotional conflicts in the origin of children’s illness. His curiosity and “natural” leadership disposition was the driving force that gave birth to the first study group of Freud’s papers in Buenos Aires. It was an eclectic gathering of medical doctors, philosophers, lawyers, and artists, together with intellectuals and bohemians.
It was this membership that shaped the spirit of psychoanalysis in Latin America and contributed to its creativity and diffusion. Psychoanalysis was, from the beginning, not a psychiatric or even a medical specialty.
When in 1938 Angel Garma arrived in Buenos Aires fleeing Spain’s dictatorship of Franco, this allowed Arnaldo Rascovsky, together with Pichon-Rivière, Matilde Wencelblat, Arminda Aberastury, Celes Cárcamo, Marie Langer and Heinrich Racker to achieve recognition in 1942 as an IPA psychoanalytic society: the Argentine Psychoanalytic Association (APA).