Enrique Pichon-Riviere
Enrique Pichon-Rivière (Geneva, June 25, 1907 – July 16, 1977) was a French psychiatrist born in Switzerland, nationalized Argentine, considered one of the introducers of psychoanalysis in Argentina and generator of the group theory known as operational group, a very important tool in social psychology.
In the 1940s he became one of the founding members of the Argentine Psychoanalytic Association (APA) and in the 1950s he participated in the creation of the First Private School of Social Psychology and the Argentine Institute of Studies Social (IADES). The originality of his theory is based on the dialectical vision of the functioning of groups and the relationship between dialectics, homeostasis and cybernetics. In 1958 he carried out the first experience of Operational Groups at the Faculty of Economic Sciences of Rosario, called the Rosario Experience. In 1967 he carried out his first cumulative experience at the Spanish Hospital of Rosario and the following year the Rosario School of Social Psychology opened in this city, with Pichon-Rivière and his staff from the School of Social Psychology as teachers. Buenos Aires. The Irdes was founded only in 1978 and was the result of a division of that first school of Social Psychology and subsequent regrouping.
Biography
Enrique Pichon-Rivière was born on June 25, 1907 in Geneva, Switzerland, to French parents (mother from the city of Lyon and father from Brittany). His father had two daughters and three sons from a first marriage. When his wife dies, he remarries the sister of his deceased wife. Enrique will be the only child born from this second marriage and, consequently, the youngest in the family. Both Alphonse and Joséphine - his parents - renounced their bourgeois origin, embracing progressive ideas and showed an attitude of rebellion against the cultural norms of the time. Both were admirers of "rebellious" of Arthur Rimbaud and Charles Baudelaire and of strong socialist convictions. They rejected the racism and sexist stereotypes that predominated at the beginning of the 20th century.
In 1911, his family arrived in Buenos Aires and then moved to the town of Florencia, in the province of Santa Fe, in the region known as Chaco Santa Fe (as a botanical province), which generated confusion, since Pichon Rivière never lived in the province of Chaco, but in the region known as Chaco Santa Fe, corresponding to the extreme north of said province. His father, who had been a soldier at the Saint-Cyr Military Academy, was sent by his family to England to study the textile industry. Later the family decided to move to Argentina for reasons that Enrique Pichon-Rivère himself said he did not know. His father begins to exploit land concessions granted by the Argentine State, where he tries unsuccessfully to produce cotton. Thus, the family must emigrate to the province of Corrientes, first to Bella Vista and then to Goya, a coastal city on the Paraná River, which suffered recurrent floods. In that environment of the wooded wedge he spent his childhood with a strong influence of the Guaraní culture, daily contact with the indigenous people and a modest peasant life. There he first learns to speak Guaraní and French and then Spanish.
When Enrique is 6 or 7 years old he finds out what he would call "the great family secret": his brothers and sisters are not from the same mother as him, but rather half brothers and sisters (only from the same father). He completed his secondary education in the city of Goya and once completed, he founded the Goya Socialist Party.
In 1924 he began his medical studies in the city of Rosario, which he finished in 1936 in the city of Buenos Aires.
He began his internship as a psychiatrist at El Asilo de Torres, Open Door near the city of Luján, in the province of Buenos Aires. He later moved to the city of Buenos Aires, where he worked in another sanatorium and as a journalist in the newspaper Crítica (1930-1931). In this period he became interested in poetry, paying special attention to the cursed French poets and Isidore Ducasse.
Once received, between 1938 and 1947 he served as Acting Head of the Admission Service of the Las Mercedes Hospice, today known as the "José Tiburcio Borda" Interdisciplinary Psycho-Assistance Hospital, working in said hospice for fifteen years. Through research carried out by Julio Cavalli on the Aberastury family, it is known that this nineteenth-century asylum located in the south of the city of Buenos Aires was founded by the grandfather of the prestigious psychiatrist Gonzalo Bosch, who had been Juan Manuel de Rosas's personal physician. Gonzalo Bosch, who at that time directed the Hospicio de las Mercedes, would be in charge of incorporating Pichon-Rivière into the medical staff and he in turn would incorporate the brothers Arminda Aberastury (pioneer of psychoanalysis of children and adolescents in Argentina) and Federico Aberastury (embryologist from the University of Buenos Aires, widely known for having been the first president of the Argentine Society of Graphology and for his research in the area of graphology and graphopathology).
At the beginning of the 1940s, together with Ángel Garma, Celes Ernesto Cárcamo, Marie Langer and Arnaldo Rascovsky, he founded the Argentine Psychoanalytic Association (APA), from which he would later leave, more interested in the social aspect and activity. of groups in society. That led him to work at the School of Dynamic Psychology, later called the School of Social Psychology.
In 1937 he married the renowned psychoanalyst Arminda Aberastury, whom he had met through his friendship with her brother, Federico Aberastury, and who was one of the members of the recently formed APA. Aberastury influenced the theories developed by Pichon-Rivière, given the specialization he had carried out in the studies of Melanie Klein and the methods of Sophie Morgenstern.
In 1953 he created the First Private School of Social Psychology.
In 1955, together with Gino Germani and with the support of the Faculty of Economic Sciences, the Institute of Statistics of the Faculty of Philosophy and its Department of Psychology and the Faculty of Medicine in Rosario, he founded the Rosarino Institute of Social Studies (IRDES) and assumes the position of director.
On November 24, 1972, his wife Arminda Aberastury decided to take her own life. According to some close to her family, it was due to a skin disease that disfigured her. Pichón-Riviere began a relationship with his former student and collaborator Ana Pampliega de Quiroga, whom he met in 1965. [ citation needed ]