The first Oral History Workshop to be held on Latin American psychoanalysis took place last fall at the New York meetings. Chaired by Jorge Schneider of Chicago and structured around the personal reminiscences of the panelists, who recounted their involvement in the origins of psychoanalysis in an area of the world now receiving particular attention by North Americans, the workshop focused on Argentina, Chile, and Brazil. Appropriately, a special guest was the President-Elect of the International Psychoanalytical Association, Horacio Etchegoyen of the Buenos Aires Psychoanalytic Association (APDEBA). A future panel will look at other Latin American countries.
Besides Etchegoyen and Schneider, who made his first analytic contacts in his native Argentina, the participants included Ramon Ganzarain from Santiago, Chile, now practicing in Atlanta; Elsa Pappenheim, an Austrian now living New York, who over forty years ago in Vienna attended medical school and received analytic training with Marie Langer, later to become one of the founders of the first analytic institute in Argentina; H. Gunther Perdigao, originally of Sao Paulo, Brazil, and now in New Orleans; Ana Maria Rizzuto, a native of Argentina trained in Boston, where she remains; and Rogelio Sosnik, now in New York, who trained at the Argentine Psychoanalytic Association (APA) and until recently taught at APDEBA.
Schneider's introduction was charming and highly personal. He highlighted first the importance of the Oral History Workshop “as psychoanalysis becomes more pluralistic” and suggested that its preservation and presentation of different models is “important for our growth as a science.” He went on to outline the various influences that shaped Latin American psychoanalysis and then narrated his personal account of how he became interested in the field, including his initial acquaintance with psychoanalysis through being a patient, as a young student, in a psychoanalytically oriented psychotherapy group. He contrasted many social practices in North and South America and showed how they affect the conduct of analysis on the two continents. Reprising the illustrious names of Argentine psychoanalysis (Garma, Rascovsky, Pichon Riviere, Liberman), he described some of their work, speaking with particular admiration of the late David Liberman, noting especially his ideas relating psychoanalytic theory to Jurgen Ruesch's theory of communication.
Next Laura Etchegoyen, an analyst trained in London, where she still lives, and the daughter of Horacio, read her father's paper “On the Beginnings of Psychoanalysis in Latin America.” In this ambitious, erudite paper Etchegoyen identifies German Grieve, a Chilean, as the physician responsible for introducing psychoanalysis to Latin America (Grieve was mentioned by Freud in “On the History of the Psychoanalytic Movement” and wrote a paper reviewed in the Zentralblatt fur psychoanalyze in 1911). Etchegoyen's paper goes on to outline the beginnings of psychoanalytic training in Argentina, Brazil, and Chile.
Rogelio Sosnik next reviewed the complex history of psychoanalysis in Buenos Aires, beginning with the founding of APA by Carcamo, Ferrari Hardoy, Garma, Marie Langer, Pichon Riviere, and Rascovsky. He placed the blossoming of the Kleinian school in the context of psychoanalytic developments of the time, such as the “Controversial Discussions” in London. He also referred to later events, such as the splitting in 1971 of the Marxist-inspired “Plataforma y Documento” movement, and the creation, through a later split, of APDEBA, to which Sosnik himself moved, eventually to serve on its faculty.
Elsa Pappenhein then spoke, quite movingly, of her personal acquaintance with Marie Langer. Classmates as children and then as adults in medical school and at the Vienna Institute, together they witnessed the beginnings of Nazism and were confronted by Eissler's requirement that trainees and members cease their political activity to conform to Nazi demands, a rule that Langer could not abide by. Through the intervention of Richard Sterba, who helped her graduate, she continued her antifascist activity, eventually leaving Vienna to fight with the Loyalists in Spain. Pappenheim later heard from “Mimi”—Langer's nickname as well as nom de guerre—when the latter arrived in Argentina, where she eventually settled. They saw each other next only many years later, when Langer visited the United States. In 1972 Langer again had to exile herself, during the years of military dictatorship in Argentina, this time taking refuge in Mexico. When democracy was restored, she returned to Buenos Aires, where in 1991 she died of cancer.
At this point the panel was interrupted by a vivid response from the floor. Several participants, most notably Horst Kachele, inquired about the fate of psychoanalysis in Argentina during the years of military dictatorship and the disappearances. This reporter referred those present to a paper by Leon Grinberg, now living in Spain, which he presented at the London meetings of the Association for the History of Psychoanalysis. Grinberg's paper includes the testimony of several training analysts from APA who were tortured or had children who “were disappeared,” abducted by paramilitary death squads. Several candidates present in the audience were particularly interested in the ethical conflicts raised by practicing psychoanalysis under a totalitarian regime.
Gunther Perdigao's presentation, which immediately followed, addressed these issues quite dramatically. Perdigao referred first, though, to the enormous distances candidates must travel in Brazil—as Leopold Nosek, President of the Brazilian Psychoanalytic Association, put it, “Imagine what it would be like to live in Lisbon and travel to Moscow for your analytic sessions.” Placing that distance as the context, Perdigao told of the experiment in “condensed” analysis being undertaken by the Sao Paulo Society. He outlined the history of Brazilian psychoanalysis, which after some early stirrings crystallized upon the emigration, arranged by Ernest Jones, of Adelheid Lucy Koch from Germany to Sao Paulo in 1936. She became an approved training analyst, for a long time the only one in Brazil, being analyst, supervisor, and teacher to all the candidates. Two societies subsequently developed in Rio. One of them, the Psychoanalytic Society of Rio de Janeiro, was the site of an event that occasioned an
IPA investigation: a candidate was found to have been a police torturer, while his analyst was aware of the situation but chose to remain silent. The analyst eventually had his medical license revoked. The Brazilian groups created later have developed strong ties with Argentina and with London.
Ana Maria Rizzuto shared first the experiences that led to her pursuing an analytic career: her first encounter with Garma, Grinberg, Langer, and Rascovsky, all of whom traveled to teach in the city of Cordoba, where she attended medical school. She remembers “their shared passion for their work” and “the clarity of their presentations in the context of collaborative teamwork.” She was particularly impressed with Langer, whose wonderful Maternity and Sex has finally been translated into English. Rizzuto's presentation had a special poignance, as she narrated a journey during which she left behind these figures, who had impressed her and shaped her interest in the field, never imagining that their writings would be totally absent in her North American training.
Beginning to look at what she had left behind, Rizzuto rediscovered the wealth of psychoanalytic writings by Latin Americans seldom read in the United States, seldom translated, and seldom even mentioned. Intrigued by this and wishing to inquire into the relation between the analysts of North and Latin America, she mailed questionnaires to the presidents of fifteen societies and two study groups of FEPAL and the IPA. The respondents knew the work of Mahler, Greenson, Jacobson, Hartmann, Kris, Loewenstein, Kohut, Kernberg, Brenner, and Arlow. Geographic proximity to North America—Mexico, Venezuela—seemed, together with the size of the society, to correlate with greater knowledge of North American authors. Ego psychology is taught by all of the institutes, though with many reservations. One respondent reflected that “the preponderance of ego functions over unconscious mechanisms reveals discomfort with what is paradoxical, absurd, contradictory, and even incomprehensible.” The respondents thought that very few Latin American authors were known to North American analysts, mentioning Racker, Garma, Grinberg, and Etchegoyen. When asked which authors should be better known, they mentioned Langer, Bleger, Liberman, the Barangers, Rascovsky, Cesio, Hermann, and Lopez. Asked what should be done to improve relations, the Latin Americans responded almost unanimously: joint meetings with clinical presentations, and the publication of a bilingual journal.
Ramon Ganzarain's contribution closed the panel. An analysand of Ignacio Matte Blanco. who had trained at the British Society and returned to Chile in 1943, Ganzarain also attended his lectures. At a psychiatric ward of acute female patients in Santiago de Chile's psychiatric hospital, Matte Blanco and his students were known as “Matte and his twelve apostles.” This was the core of the future Chilean Psychoanalytic Society, recognized by the IPA in Zurich in 1949. Analysis in Chile, always linked to the British, spread, however, from the University; there psychoanalysts held academic chairs in both medicine and psychology. Ganzarain spoke of the extension of psychoanalytic treatment to psychotics, and mentioned that Klein, Rosenfeld, and Bion are read widely, in addition, of course, to Freud. Referring to the “brain drain” suffered by the small Chilean society because of emigration, Ganzarain reflected thoughtfully on the reparative efforts made by Chile through its active participation in regional activities, particularly the “trans-Andean” meetings held every spring with the Mendoza Society from Argentina. Ganzarain's final comments, on the state of psychoanalysis in Chile, reflected his thinking that rival theories and educational approaches are today better integrated than ever before in the institutional life of Chilean psychoanalysis.