At a psychoanalytic clinic like WILA we are always thinking about how to understand and be with our clients.
As a provider of community low-fee therapy we struggle with holding the pain and hurt that many of our clients experience often feeling tragically unseen. Another tragic outcome for the community is that what they have to offer goes squandered – unwanted, unread, unwritten.
Enrique Pichon Rivière was such a contributor. His early career was luminous and productive, but his increasing focus on treating institutional populations, groups and families relegated his passions to increasing indifference in the global analytic community. We can see in his legacy and how it was forgotten an example about the mistakes we make every day not only as clinicians in mental health, but as citizens of the world.
A review of his work has begun to flourish after the translating efforts of Losso, Setton and Sharff (2017), amid a resurgence of interest in community, group and family process, in the analytic community. Yet, most of his life can only be viewed through little windows, stained by the decades since his work and the opacity of our cultural milieu and oversight.
Enrique Pichon Rivière’s life was until very recently was largely unseen by the English-speaking world. Rivière’s work was lost due to his interdisciplinary expansion, his linguistic, geographical and social affiliations and due to his zeal for personal and oral traditions in the honor of his cultural “homeland,” as he would call it. Pichon Rivière was born in Switzerland, 1907 to French parents. His family were dedicated socialists and so fleeing the impending wars on the continent, they ended up in northern Argentina. At seven he learned that of six siblings he alone was born to his mother – as his father had been married to his mother’s sister until she passed.
He was raised in intimate contact with the Guarani tribe in northern Argentina whose otherwise unfortunately unheralded developments where inspiring to Rivière. They developed uses for many Amazonian plants, were the first to create and drink Mate and mastered the cohabitation of the region in which they lived. But by the time Rivière arrived they were largely displaced and relegated to raiding fields or townships during the colonial epic in that era. Early on he was exposed to the richness of a forgotten, and in some colonial perspectives, “unwanted,” culture.
Rivière’s global sense of connection recalls a piece written by Adam Blum on Freud’s “oceanic feeling.” Blum followed Freud’s notion that at the height of falling in love, the boundary lines between the self and the other seem to blur. “Possession presumes scarcity; identification, by contrast, is an infinite horizon, beheld in unison,” (Blum, 2022). Rivière’s identification with his adopted homeland was just this, an identification that led to a color-explosion of brilliance and creativity.
Pichon Rivière focused his theories on his conceptualization of a link. He framed that every mind could only be understood as it connected to family, community, culture and homeland throughout both time (legacy, ancestry) and space (culture, family and reality). This encouraged his preference for groups and family inclusion in work. His group work led to the elaboration of a process focused on the participants’ group identity creation. Pichon Rivière developed his analytically inspired group technique in his work in institutions, and when a political and economic upheaval led to the immediate termination of his entire nursing staff, he utilized his patients in the counseling and working roles and noted they were more dedicated and patient than his previous staff.
This messy, imprecise and uncontained work is precisely the kind of work which further isolated his efforts from the global analytic community. Indeed, the community was growing by leaps and bounds during the time of Enrique’s early work, and in continental Europe, where his French heritage and Spanish language permitted slightly more exposure, he was viewed as a pioneer.
Enrique Pichon Rivière wrote in his career about many things, Boxing and Soccer, Psychiatry and contemporary life. And, like Freud who investigated the literary genre of horror (calling it the uncanny before the latter genre was formalized) he did his own ravenous and spooky following of the artistic work of the Count of Lautréamont’s “Songs of Malador.”
This work was, just as was Rivière’s, largely condemned as heretical. Pichon Rivière was among the earliest to interpret the piece as a process of healing and working through great suffering by its author Lautréamont. The Count himself was born in Montevideo Uruguay, the son of a French diplomat stationed there. His poetic work was rejected as the ravings of madness by the literary zeitgeist, and was associated with his eventual suicide.
Pichon Rivière considered the experiences of extreme states to be a focal part of the study of the human experience – not a disqualifier from important psychological work. He, perhaps, deeply understood an accused heretic, a French immigrant whose relationships to both his homeland and new home was fraught. While he was fascinated by interdisciplinary thinking, art, philosophy, sport, aesthetics –he was lumped in with an ecumenical schism centered around the centralizing either of the individual unconscious or the social ties in the analytic sphere of thinking.
Among French analysts he was accepted in early decades (before his figurative excommunication) as a contemporary of progressivists like Bion, in later years he was followed largely only by Spanish-speakers, especially in South America. That is the base of his legacy, and where he founded both the first psychoanalytic institution, and his country’s first school of Social Psychology – both of which survive in Argentina to this day.
Spanish is a massive global language, though perhaps it does not enjoy the prevalence, or more frankly, respect and regard of other Continental languages among the Anglosphere. Perhaps Pichon Rivière’s ties to Spanish saw his window draped and blinded from the world. Even now, American analysts peer East to the European continent and seemingly overlook the rich tradition in the Americas.
As clinicians, we also must wonder: what windows are we looking in, and who are we blind to?
The modern climate of therapeutic intervention in America has become decidedly impoverished in the humanistic sense. Financial determinations have become paramount, and their priorities and have served to pursue brevity, behavior and convention more so than the phenomenological world. The world came to understand about Pichon Rivière only as South Americans took Enrique’s continuing influence back to the continent as relational theories surged in both North America and Europe alike. These theories influenced other brazen trailblazers like Rene Käes in the modern Institutional movement of French analysis. And his recognition became inevitable with the promotion of the likes of former IPA head and Argentinian Virginia Ungar – who was trained in his school.
Contemplating the forgotten in our modern society reminds us of our greater context and identity. We must consider the importance of silenced migration narratives, of intercultural exchange of linguistic barriers. We can see the links in our world to an endless panoply of forgotten inspirations. His legacy reminds us of economics, and their impact on identity – his work largely taking place within treatment institutions. In the American context, few dedicated analysts find themselves able to use their extensive training in that arena and institutional treatment is often segregated to the “low-income,” patient. In many cases this treatment is often more concerned with immediate and emergency aid and financial efficiency, and has strayed from the rich process of deep, lasting growth.
This is the very process to which WILA has dedicated its cause. We strive to create an opportunity for low-income treatment of rich quality, of the integration of modern, experiential and healing thinking. We value group approaches and interdisciplinary analytic thinking that can create a richness in healing others have given up.
We are fortunate in that we can also embrace the larger family of analytic practice in its many schools and subsects thanks in large part to Enrique Pichon Rivière and dozens if not hundreds of other authors all over the globe. His was a great contribution to our goal – even if for most of our existence we never knew about him. His legacy and story remind us of the invisible connections that exist between us, that somehow through time and space ‘link’ us all together, even if we only see so little, through small and stained windows.
Blum, A. (2022) How to Surf the Oceanic Feeling. Psychoanalytic Dialogues 32:547-562
S. de Setton, L. (2017). The Linked Self in Psychoanalysis: The Pioneering Work of Enrique Pichon Riviere (1st ed.). Routledge. doi 10.4324/9780429482328