Enrique Pichon-Rivière

Enrique Pichon-Rivière (June 25, 1907 – July 16, 1977) was a Swiss psychiatrist naturalized Argentine, considered one of the introducers of group psychoanalysis in Argentina and generator of the group theory known as Grupo operativo (Operative Groups).

In the 1940s he became one of the founding members of the Asociación Argentina de Psicoanálisis (-APA- Argentine Psychoanalytic Association) and in the 1950s participated in the creation of the first private school of Social Psychology and the Instituto Argentino de Estudios Sociales (-IADES-, Argentine Institute of Social Studies). The originality of his theory is based on the dialectical view of the functioning of the groups and the relationship between dialectic, homeostasis and cybernetic.

Pichon-Rivière was born on June 25, 1907 in Geneva, Switzerland, his parents were French. His father had two daughters and three sons from a first marriage, when death his wife remarried with his sister-in-law, first cousin of his dead wife. Enrique is the only one born of this marriage and, consequently, the youngest of the family. Both Alphonse and Josephine, his parents, disowned their bourgeois origin, embracing progressive ideas and a rebellious attitude to cultural norms of the time, both were fans of poetry "rebel" of Rimbaud and Baudelaire, with strong socialist convictions and rejected racism and sexist stereotypes that prevailed at the start of the 20th century.

In 1910, his family comes to Buenos Aires and later moved to Chaco. His father, who had been a soldier in the Military Academy of Saint-Cyr, was sent by his family to England to learn about the textile industry, then the family decides to move to Argentina, for reasons that Enrique Pichon-Rivière himself said he was unaware, and the father begins to exploit land concessions granted by the Argentine State, where he tries to produce cotton, but without success. Thus, they must move to Corrientes, a city on the Paraná River, with permanent flood and forest environment, a place where he spent his childhood with the strong influence of the Guarani culture, contact daily with the indigenous and peasant modest lives. There he learned to speak French first and then the Guaraní and Castilian.

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