![Sample our Behavioral Sciences journals, sign in here to start your access, latest two full volumes FREE to you for 14 days]({"type":"image" , "src" : "/sda/110801/TOC-Subject-Sample-2021-Behavioral-Sciences.jpg"})
Abstract
In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, many Italians emigrated to South America, especially to Argentina and Brazil, in search of a better life than the one they were living in a country tormented by social and economic unrest. Later, with the advent of a political situation in Argentina strongly marked by instability, especially with the coup d’état that sanctioned the rise to power of General Videla in 1976, those who could boast even distant ties of kinship in Italy chose that destination instead to continue to build their lives. Among these were several who had been trained in psychoanalysis in Argentina. Once they started working in Italy, they necessarily passed on their training background influenced by a psychoanalysis that, in Argentina, had already started to think in terms of “field” and begun to be applied to groups and institutions.
Acknowledgements
Thanks go to Mauro Rossetti, Maria Elena Petrilli, Maria Gabriella Sartori, Giorgio Corrente, Marta De Brasi, Cristina Diana Canzio, and Silvia Amati Sas for their generosity in agreeing to share their time and answer my questions.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Notes
1 These two more defined types of migration are guided by an idea of seeking stability, whereby one starts from one place and settles in another with the intention of being there “permanently” for a long period of time, perhaps for a lifetime. However, a third type of migration must also be considered – “emigración golondrina” – a temporary emigration, motivated by work considerations and substantially characterized by annual cyclicality. This type of migration, however, involved the countries bordering the Atlantic more than it did Italy.
2 All translations of original work are by Anna Paola Tombesi, unless otherwise indicated.
3 José Bleger, in particular, was to deal with these issues in a text published in Citation1999, Psìcohigiene y psicología institucíonal. Fernando Ulloa is another figure who would focus on specifically investigating the topic of institutional dynamics.
4 Hugo Vezzetti, professor of the history of psychology at the University of Buenos Aires and author of important texts on the Argentine history of psychology and psychoanalysis, argues that although Lagache is rarely mentioned, he still constitutes an unavoidable reference in the particular way, with a French influence, in which Klein’s thought was received in Argentina (Cueto, Citation2004).
5 From 1948 to 1953 Rodrigué was in London, where he carried out an intense training experience in psychoanalysis. In the English capital, as reported by the Brazilian website dedicated to him (www.emiliorodrigue.com.br), Rodrigué also undertook the first rudiments of working with groups in addition to having the opportunity to study with the most illustrious names in psychoanalysis at the time (Ernest Jones, Melanie Klein, Anna Freud, Wilfred Bion, John Rickman, Donald Winnicott, Michael Balint, Edward Glover, Elliot Jaques, Joan Rivière, Marion Milner, James Strachey, and Hanna Segal).
6 In the intervention on “Applications of group psychotherapy” that Pichon-Rivière proposed during the First Latin American Congress of Group Psychotherapy, in 1957 (and not in 1951 as is erroneously reported by the text), he wrote: “From Kurt Lewin, for example, we have taken the notion of field, that of situation and many aspects of some topological principles of learning” (Citation1975, p. 76).
7 In 1958, at the Latin American Psychoanalytic Congress that took place in Sao Paulo, Brazil, Rascoswky presented a report on the subject “Desenvolvimiento primitivo del individuo,” in which he introduced his important theses on fetal psychism.
8 Heinrich Racker was born in Poland in 1910 and reached Argentina in 1939 to escape Nazism. He died in Argentina in 1961.
9 The chair in psychology was actually established in 1955, but the coup d’état in September of that year meant that the course of study was not activated until the following year (González, Citation2016).
10 In 1948, in Calle Copernico, he founded the Pichon-Rivière Institute (also called “little Salpêtrière,” of which Etchegoyen, in an interview released to Fernando Fabris, said: “It was the center of psychiatry and psychoanalysis of those years”). In 1953, he founded the School of Dynamic Psychiatry, and in 1955, together with the sociologist of Italian origin Gino Germani, the Instituto Argentino de Estudios Sociales; these then merged to give birth in 1958 to the Private School of Psychiatry, which became the School of Social Psychiatry in 1962; in 1967, this institution in turn became the First Private School of Social Psychology.
11 Lagache in “L’unité de la psychologie” (Citation1984), wrote that the task of clinical psychology is to study human conduct – that is, to investigate the ways of reacting of a concrete and complete man in the face of a situation, trying to establish its meaning, structure, and genesis. It is also important to note that in “Le problème du transfert,” presented at the same conference in Paris in 1951, Lagache was already talking about the “champ psychanalytique,” meaning a situation defined by the interactions of the patient and the psychoanalytic environment, including the person and the role of the psychoanalyst: “In the same way, we could define the psychoanalytical field in terms of the interactions between the patient and the psychoanalytical environment, linking the person and role of the psychoanalyst to the latter” (Lagache Citation1952, p. 101, translated by Lorenzo Sartini).
12 “He described the link as a complex structure that includes the subject, the object, and their mutual interaction, through processes of communication and learning in an intersubjective frame. The link is both conscious and unconscious, mental and interactional, and it has a central temporal dimension in that it links the generations” (Losso, de Setton, & Scharff, Citation2017, p. xxv).
13 The full quote is: “Interpretations are working hypotheses predicated on phenomena observed in the analytic field.”
14 These lessons that Pichon-Rivière gave in 1956/1957 within the Asociación Psicoanalítica Argentina were transcribed by one of the participating students, Fernando Taragano, who collected them in the text Teoria del vinculo, published in 1979 (Pichon-Rivière, Citation1979a).
15 José Bleger would deepen the concept of field in the text Psicologia de la conducta (Citation2007), where, generalizing the concept and defining it as “a delimitation in space and time of the phenomenon under study” (p. 65), he writes: “The part of the field or situation that surrounds the individual is called context or space … The subject–context relationship is therefore not a simple linear relationship of cause and effect between two different and separate objects, but both are integral parts of a single total structure, in which the agent is always the totality of the field and the effects are also produced upon, or within, itself as a unity” (p. 54). On closer inspection, Psicologia de la conducta can be considered a complete investigation into the concept of field, since in the text Bleger basically outlines the methods of observation and study of a human being always, inextricably, conditioned by their concrete conditions of life.
16 With the concept of bastion the Barangers mean “the unconscious refuge of powerful phantasies of omnipotence” (Baranger & Baranger, Citation2008, p. 814) – that is, an unconscious resistance of the patient to analytic work. More precisely, with “bastion” we mean a part of the patient’s life that constitutes a security for them, and which is not put into play for fear of losing it, otherwise having to do with a state of vulnerability and despair. The risk that the Barangers highlight is that, during the analytic work, an unconscious collusion can be created between patient and analyst such that this aspect is not addressed, causing a block in the development of the analytic process.
17 During those years any kind of gathering, assembly, or meeting between people was forbidden by the government, since meeting with each other could indicate starting to create protest cells against the authoritarian and repressive government policies.
18 Interviewed on March 16 and July 9, 2021.
19 Interviewed on July 16, 2021.
20 Basaglia, at a certain point, in response to the idea expressed by Petrilli of being able to return to Argentina, replied that he would not have made her return to Argentina since her generation was already marked.
21 Interviewed on August 16, 2021.
22 A paradoxically fortunate situation, says Sartori, since the alternative was being placed in an “irregular” prison, where it was not possible to know what would happen to you, nor what had happened to the many – too many – people who had disappeared (desaparecidos).
23 Interviewed on October 1, 2021.
24 The first CRPG was founded in Palermo by Corrao.
25 A psychiatrist and psychoanalyst of Chilean origin, she moved to Italy in 1966 together with her husband, the psychoanalyst Ignacio Matte Blanco.
26 In that period the associations of therapists interested in work and research on groups were the Società Italiana di Psicoterapia Analitica sui Gruppi (SIPAG) chaired by Leonardo Ancona, Institute of Group Analysis of Rome (IGAR) chaired by Fabrizio Napolitani, Group Psychoanalysis Association (APG) chaired by Ferdinando Vanni, Il Pollaiolo chaired by Francesco Corrao, Italian Group-Antropoanalytic Society (SGAI) chaired by Diego Napolitani, and Lo Spazio Psicoanalitico of Paolo Perrotti.
27 COIRAG still exists today and is deeply rooted and active in Italy, including training institutes in psychoanalytic psychotherapy present in the cities of Milan, Padua, Palermo, Rome, and Turin. It should be pointed out that one of the various associations that are currently part of COIRAG is ARIELE Psychotherapy, an association that finds in Pichon-Rivière and Bleger two fundamental reference authors to pursue a model of research and interventions on individuals, groups, institutions, and the community, called psychosocioanalysis. The theoretical-operational model of psychosocioanalysis was founded by a psychotherapist with psychoanalytic training, Luigi Pagliarani (1922–2001), and was the result of the close collaboration he initially had with Franco Fornari (an SPI psychoanalyst), his interest in Wilfred Bion’s psychoanalytic theory, and his encounter with the socioanalytic thought proposed by the Tavistock Institute, especially through the contributions of Elliott Jacques and Isabel Menzies (see https://arielepsicoterapia.it/cornice-teorica/). Subsequently, with the publication of the first Italian translations of certain texts by Pichon-Rivière (El proceso grupal. Del psicoanálisis a la psicología social) and Bleger (Psicohigiene y psicologìa institucìonal and Simbiosis y ambiguedad: estudio psicoanalìtico), Pagliarani came into contact with certain conceptual and operational systematizations that aroused his interest and that are now firmly part of the psychosocioanalytic toolbox.
28 The reference is to the first “Italian–Argentine SPI–APA meeting” which was held in Rome in 1998 and was followed by other such meetings.
29 In Argentina this formula is also used to indicate the period of terror experienced under the military dictatorship of General Videla (personal communication from Marta De Brasi).
30 The group operative concept is a theoretical-clinical perspective that starts from the technique of the “operative group” founded by Pichon-Rivière. It is a perspective that considers the group a bridge between the individual and society and which, from this research point of view, aims to analyze the social dynamics and the modes of production of subjectivity.
31 Themes very dear to José Bleger, so much so that, as previously reported, in 1958, he published the book entitled Psicoanalisis y dialectica materialista.
32 Interviewed on May 3, 2018.
33 Interviewed on October 16, 2021.
34 Pichon-Rivière’s pupil with whom he collaborated at the School of Dynamic Psychiatry.
35 Under the influence of Badaracco’s thinking and experience (Borgogno, Citation2010), Andrea Narracci, in Rome, and Francesca Viola Borgogno and Francesco Comelli, in Milan and Turin, also began to use the multifamily group technique. This is a technique that in Italy has also found an application more directly linked to the conception of Pichon-Rivière’s operative group, through the work carried out by the group of the José Bleger Study and Research Center.
36 Interviewed on August 26, 2021.
37 Giovanni Bollea was a well-known Italian psychiatrist among the founders of modern childhood neuropsychiatry.
38 Encuadre means frame in English.
39 With respect to the situation of “closure” of Italian psychanalysis, at least until the twenty-first century, we also refer to the words of Roberto Losso, a psychoanalyst at the APA, who worked widely in Italy and in contact with Italian psychoanalysts, thus having a certain knowledge of the state of psychoanalysis of the country (see the interview “Freud en las pampas. Viaggio nella psicoanalisi argentina: Aprirsi al mondo” with Francesco Bollorino in 2011 that can be found on the “Psychiatry on line” YouTube channel – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xPEBJVnpf_U&t=307s).
40 Many psychoanalysts merged into the “Plataforma” group, giving up the association with the APA: Gilberte Royer de García Reinoso, Diego García Reinoso, Marie Langer, and Emilio Rodrigué (members with didactic functions); Eduardo Pavlovsky (a full member); Armando Bauleo, Hernán Kesselman, and José Rafael Paz (adherent members); and Lea Nuss de Bigliani, Fany Baremblitt de Salzberg, Gregorio Baremblitt, Guillermo Bigliani, Manuel Braslavsky, Luis María Esmerado, Andrés Gallegos, Miguel Matrajt, Guido Narváez, and Juan Carlos Volnovich (candidates). While not members of the APA, Eduardo Menéndez, León Rozitchner, and Raúl Sciarreta also joined the group, and later other APA psychoanalysts and psychologists who held the same ideas did so too (see Volnovich, Citation2000). José Bleger and, in a more marginal position, Enrique Pichon-Rivière participated in the experience, but they did not give up the APA. Conversely, other psychoanalysts joined the “Documento” group instead: Diana Etinger de Álvarez, Hugo Bellagamba, Marcos Bernard, Hugo Bleichmar, Emilce Dio de Bleichmar, Santiago Dubcovsky, Carlos Kaplan, Raquel Kielmanowicz, Ignacio Maldonado, Julio Marotta, Aldo Melillo, Lea Rivelis de Paz, Aída Dora Romanos, Jorge Rovatti, Leopoldo Salvarezza, Fanny Elman de Schutt, Jaime P. Schust, Horacio Scornik, Gilberto Simoes, Raquel Kozicki de Simoes, and Femando Ulloa (see Grupo Documento, Citation1972).
41 This type of intervention is currently proposed by a specific professional figure, the Superior Technician in Social Psychology, trained in the various private schools of social psychology with a “Pichonian” setting, as they are called, which have developed in Argentina as well as in other Latin American countries.
42 If in recent years Bleger has been mentioned again, even within the APA, it is done specifically with reference to his works that are recognized more markedly as psychoanalytic, namely the text Symbiosis and ambiguity (Citation2012). In fact, the works that investigate the methods of intervention with groups, institutions, and social communities are almost never mentioned. Paradoxically, however, the theory proposed by Bleger on symbiosis constitutes a basis for thinking about the social production of subjectivity, or the collective subject, as we say today. As for Pichon-Rivière, the resumption of his theoretical and practical legacy, paradoxically, seems to take place with even slower and more uncertain times.
43 Without claiming to be exhaustive, I register that the following texts were translated and published in Italy back in the 1970s: Estudios sobre técnica psicoanalítica by Heinrich Racker, published in Argentina in 1960, appeared on the Italian market in 1970; Psicoanálisis de los sueños and Nuevas aportaciones al psicoanálisis de los sueños by Angel Garma, from 1940 and of 1970, appeared in Italy in 1971 and in 1974; El psiquismo fetal and El filicidio: la agresión contra el hijo by Arnaldo Rascowsky, published in Argentina in 1960 and in 1973, appeared in Italy in 1980 and in 1974; Identidad y cambio by León and Rebeca Grinberg, published in 1975, was translated and published in Italy in 1976; the Italian edition of Ideología, grupo y familia, by Armando Bauleo, which includes two texts published in Argentina in 1974 (Ideología, grupo y familia) and in 1977 (Contrainstitución y grupos), was published in Italy in 1978; and Maternidad y sexo, by Marie Langer, published in 1951, arrived on the Italian market in 1981.
44 Juan Carlos Volnovich is a psychiatrist and psychoanalyst who carried out a didactic analysis with José Bleger and who was part of the APA until 1971, when he left it together with the psychoanalysts who organized the Grupo Plataforma. With the advent of the Videla regime he was forced into exile in La Habana.
Additional information
Notes on contributors
Lorenzo Sartini
Lorenzo Sartini is a psychologist and psychotherapist with a psychoanalytic orientation, working in Bologna, Italy. He is a member of and researcher at the “José Bleger” Study and Research Centre in Rimini. He is also a lecturer in “Psychosocioanalysis and Institutional Analysis” at the COIRAG school of psychotherapy in Milano and a member of ARIELE Psicoterapia in Brescia, as well as being a lecturer in “Theory, Technique and Methodology of Group Analysis” at the SFPID school of psychotherapy in Bologna. He translated into Italian and edited José Bleger’s book Psicología de la Conducta.