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This volume is a compilation of Pichón-Rivière's notes, lectures, comments, and previously published papers on a wide variety of psychoanalytic and psychiatric subjects covering a period of twenty-five years. The title, Collected Papers, would have corresponded more accurately with the contents. The author's theoretical orientation, like that of most of his colleagues in Buenos Aires, is in a general way identified with Melanie Klein. Within the Kleinian orientation, however, Pichón-Rivière is quite original in his approach to many topics that reach far beyond the limits of psychopathology, such as art and creativity.
Certain basic theoretical constructs are consistently applied by the author to a wide range of data, including clinical psychiatric observations, problems of technique in psychoanalysis, psychotherapy and group therapy, psychosomatic illness, psychiatric training, and the teaching of psychiatry to medical students. The explanatory constructions are based on theoretical principles vastly different from traditional ones, even though they are formulated in familiar language. In these formulations, the idea of (internal) object vicissitudes is substituted for the usual structural theory. For instance, resistance and defense are viewed as resulting not from inner danger but from a dread of change, which expresses 'basic fears': the fear of loss of object, originating in the depressive position, and the fear of attack from the object, originating in the schizoparanoid phase. The notion of a rich early infantile