The Influence of Argentine psychoanalytic culture in Italy

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.