Ricardo Horacio Etchegoyen (January 13, 1919 – July 2, 2016) was an Argentine psychoanalyst who was President of the International Psychoanalytical Association (IPA) in 1993-1997.
Life and career
Etchegoyen was born in the Greater Buenos Aires area in 1919. His father, a physician, died when Etchegoyen was five months old. He studied at the Colegio Nacional de la Universidad Nacional de La Plata, a college preparatory school, and enrolled at the University of La Plata, earning a degree in medicine in 1948. During his university studies in the 1940s, he agitated for the university reform movement, which sought to strengthen secular education in Argentina. He was analyzed by Heinrich Racker, and began his psychoanalytic training in Argentina with Enrique Pichon Rivière, Marie Langer, León Grinberg, and José Bleger. Among his salient influences were the works of psychoanalyst Melanie Klein.Federação Brasileira de Psicanálise
Etchegoyen practiced privately in La Plata, and taught at the National University of Cuyo from 1957 to 1965. Etchegoyen headed the Psychiatry Department at the university, and earned recognition from the World Health Organization during his tenure. He relocated to London in 1966, where he worked in the Adult Department of the famed Tavistock Clinic, where he received analysis from Donald Meltzer. He returned to Argentina within a year, and joined the Argentine Psychiatric Association, where from 1970, he provided advanced training to doctoral candidates in the field.
Etchegoyen was the first Latin American doctor to have the honor of being elected President of the IPA, and continued to practice and attend international conferences until 2008. Etchegoyen died in July 2016 at the age of 97.Comunicado del Presidente de la AMPReportaje al Dr. Ricardo Horacio Etchegoyen
On psychoanalytic technique
'The book written by R. Horacio Etchegoyen, The Fundamentals of Psychoanalytic Technique (1991) Aperçu Karnac Books ed., New Ed, 2005, , is undoubtedly a work of international standing, presented as it is in the form of a researched and well-written handbook which is easy both to read and to consult'.Jean-Michel Quinodoz, Reading Freud (2005) p. 109
In it Etchegoyen examines how 'psychoanalytic technique is influenced by the wide variety of theoretical points of view...throughout the world from Klein to Lacan...and he emphasises the advantages and disadvantages of the various approaches in the light of his own clinical experience'.Quinodoz, p. 109
On the link between theory and practice, Etchegoyen wrote: "if you want to be rigorous in technique, sooner or later, you will run into the question of theory, because - as Freud stated - they are always coupled as a 'Junktim'" - one implies the other. Etchegoyen considered indeed that the 'permanent interaction of theory and technique is peculiar to psychoanalysis...[an] inextricable union'.R. Horatio Etchegoyen, The Fundamentals of Psychoanalytic Technique (1991) p. 7
On the Lacanians
Etchegoyen held discussions in Buenos Aires in 1996 with Jacques-Alain Miller, a prominent figure in the Lacanian movement.Jurgen Reeder, Hate and Love in Psychoanalytical Institutions (2004) p. 253 Etchegoyen invited Miller to the 1997 IPA Congress in Barcelona, where the latter's comments from the floor were greeted with warm applause.The transcription of this event was published in La Revue de La Cause freudienne and later commented on in Miller's "First Letter to an Enlightened Public" (Wooster Press, 2001)
Etchegoyen's capacity for bridge-building with the Lacanians had already been presaged by his Fundamentals, where he had discussed Lacanian concepts in an impartial and unpolemical way.Kirst Hall et al, The Problem with Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy (London 2010) p. 45
Criticism
It has been suggested that 'Etchegoyen's (1991) influential book, The Fundamentals of Psychoanalytic Technique may be read as an attempt to work through his (often conflicted) feelings towards two major influences on his own professional development - Melanie Klein, his dominant theoretical inspiration, and Heinrich Racker, his first analyst and mentor', whose work on transference/countertransference stands as a precursor of intersubjective psychoanalysis: Etchegoyen's 'retreat to a conservative Kleinian "one-person psychology"'Emanuel Berman, Impossible Training (Routledge 2004) p. 85 and p. 88 from Racker's influence would then appear as something of a retrograde step.
Etchegoyen's 'attention to certain similarities between the analysand's verbalization in the psychoanalytic process and Husserl's so-called eidetic reduction'Gunnar Karlsson, Psychoanalysis in a New Light (2010) p. 15 shows however his continuing sensitivity to the phenomenological aspects of the patient/analyst interaction.
Works Books 1991 The Fundamentals of Phychoanalytic Technique
Papers 1960 Comments about the analysis of a psychopath 1969 The first psychoanalytic sessionComments by Lygia Alcántara de Amaral, James Naiman y Leo Rangell, Revista de Psicoanálisis, vol. 28, 1971, pages 501-35 1970 Female Homosexuality: Dynamic aspects of the recoveryRevista Uruguaya de Psicoanálisis, vol. 12, págs. 431-77 1973 A note on ideology and psychoanalytic techniqueInternational Journal of Phycho-Analysis, vol. 54, págs. 485-6 1976 The psychoanalytical "impasse" and the ego strategiesRevista de Psicoanálisis, vol. 33, págs. 613-36 1977 Perversion of Transference. Theoretical and technical aspectsin León Grinberg, ed., Prácticas psicoanalíticas comparadas en las psicosis (Psychoanalytical practices compared in the psychosis), Buenos Aires: Paidós, Chapter 2, pages 58-83 1978 Some thoughts on transference perversionInternational Journal of Psycho-Analysis vol. 59, pages 45-53; also in Jean Bergeret, ed., La cure psychoanalytique sur le divan, Paris: Tchou, pages 177.91 1978 The forms of transferencePsicoanálisis, vol. 2, pages 1065-89 1979 Regression and ReframePsicoanálisis, vol. 1, pages 479-503 1979 Introduction to the Spanish versionto Donald Meltzer et al., Exploración del autismo (Exploration of autism), Buenos Aires, pages 11-6 1981 Notes to a history of the English school of psychoanalysisRevista de la Asociación Escuela Argentina de Psicoterapia para Graduados, vol. 6, pages 13-30 1981 Validity of the transferential interpretation in the "here and now" for the reconstruction of the early psychic developmentRevista de Psicoanálisis, vol. 38, pages 1145-65. (International Journal of Psycho-Analysis, vol. 63, 1982) 1981 Instances and alternatives of the interpretative workInternational Review of Psycho-Analysis, vol. 8, pages 401-21 1982 To Fifty years of the mutative interpretationRevista Chilena de Psicoanálisis, vol. 4, pages 23-31. (International Journal of Psycho-Analysis, vol. 64, 1983) 1983 InsightTrabajos del Psicoanálisis, vol. 2, pages 253-87 1985 The interpretative stylesPsicoanálisis, vol. 7 1988 Reflections on transference1er. Congreso Argentino de Psicoanálisis (1st Argentinian Congress of Psychoanalysis), Actas, Buenos Aires: Graffit, S.R.L. pages 77-101 1999 An essay on the psychoanalytical interpretationBuenos Aires: Polemos
See also Ignacio Matte Blanco
References