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This is the first time that a text by Pichon-Rivière has been translated into Italian. The text in question is the first volume of a trilogy that, alas, is little known in our country. The complete work is entitled Del psicoanàlisis a la psicologia social. The second volume is La psiquiatria, una nueva problematica and the third, El proceso creador.
It is not an organic work, in that it consists of a collection of a few articles, of many lectures and seminars, and of material recorded in short-hand and gathered by students and colleagues who actually heard the author speak. Pichon-Rivière was born in 1907 in Geneva and he died in Buenos Aires in 1957. In 1942 he founded, along with Garma, Raskovski and Marie Langer, the Argentine Psychoanalytic Association (APA), which was to make many precious contributions to psychoanalysis.
It needs to be said that for Argentine psychoanalysts the spoken word was the preferred mode of communication. Ideas circulated within more or less numerous groups without sporting the personal signature that they would have had if published. However, although those ideas are in a sense anonymous, their genealogy is not difficult to reconstruct and the path almost always leads to Pichon-Rivière, an initiator and himself a model of theory, praxis and of transmission in psychoanalytic thought. His merit lies less in his written work (which was published tardily) and his theoretic schemata (which a modern critical eye will find unduly eclectic and unresolvedly contradictory) than in the originality of his thought, which was so intimate with, and bound to, experience. In this sense the book, which is composed of words that were not intended for the written page, is fascinating, albeit partial, testimony.