A brief introduction to Enrique Pichon-Rivière and the film El Francesito
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BYiFQpOn0HE
A brief introduction to who Enrique Pichon-Rivière was, as well as to the story told in the film El Francesito. I would also like to say a few words at the outset about the Argentine director Miguel Kohan. He has a background as a psychoanalyst and social psychologist, having trained at Pichon-Rivière’s School in Buenos Aires during the years of the military junta. He subsequently trained as a film director at the University of California. It was with the project El Francesito that he was admitted to the programme.
The challenge in making the film was to find a kind of metaphor that could convey a good image of a person whose personality had deeply affected him. It was obvious that words alone would neither suffice nor do Pichon-Rivière justice. So how could one create an image of someone who no longer exists, and who himself had such a strong belief in the importance of being able to share things verbally? For Kohan, visiting the places where Pichon-Rivière had lived during his childhood and exploring what those places had meant to him seemed to offer a possible way, as a director, both to open his mind and to find an aesthetic form of expression.
What we see here, then, is the result of this search for a cinematic expression of this fascinating personality within Argentine psychoanalysis, psychiatry and social psychology.
A brief background may be useful.
Enrique Pichon-Rivière (1907–77) was born in Geneva to French parents, who emigrated to Argentina when he was very young. He grew up in the sparsely populated north-eastern part of Argentina, in the province of Chaco, where the presence of the indigenous Guaraní culture was particularly strong. According to Pichon-Rivière himself, this environment would have an important influence on him and on his future life.
Pichon-Rivière trained as a physician, specialising in psychiatry, and subsequently as a psychoanalyst. Over the course of his career, he became one of the major figures in Argentine psychoanalysis, group theory and social psychology. He was one of the founders of the APA, the Argentine Psychoanalytic Association. According to the Dictionnaire de la Psychanalyse by Elisabeth Roudinesco and Michel Plon (1997), Pichon-Rivière was the greatest of the Argentine psychoanalysts and, together with Marie Langer, one of the most eminent figures in Latin American psychoanalysis. His writings are frequently referred to in psychoanalytic texts, particularly in Argentina and other South American countries.
Yet Pichon-Rivière had an ability to captivate his listeners orally that was perhaps even greater than his ability as a writer. One of his “disciples”, the psychoanalyst José Bleger — another major name in Argentine psychoanalysis — argued that Pichon-Rivière’s lively and dynamic thinking functioned better in personal, spoken presentations than in the more constrained form of written text. The lectures he gave took more the form of working groups; the participants were actively involved in “an atmosphere of intellectual and scientific creation”, in which the themes being addressed were continually revised and reworked.
According to Bleger, one should really speak of Pichon’s praxis rather than of his theories. According to eyewitnesses, he had a remarkable ability to perceive different situations, intervene in them, and then construct theories on the basis of those interventions.
His interdisciplinary thinking can to a great extent be described as a tendency to allow creative, interfering aspects to emerge in both theory and practice. And he moved simultaneously within several different fields — psychiatry, psychoanalysis, art and journalism. This can be seen, at least in part, in the heterogeneous mixture of people who celebrated Pichon’s 70th birthday in 1977, only a few weeks before his death. Among them were psychiatrists, psychoanalysts, psychodramatists, psychologists, sports commentators, historians, anthropologists, actors, playwrights, artists, tango poets, musicians, and many others.
The Pichonian movement is still very active in the Latin part of the world — in various countries in South America and, in Europe, particularly in Spain, Italy and France. Most recently, from September 8 to 10, there was a major gathering in Salvador, Bahia, Brazil, where participants could take part either via Zoom or in person. During the pandemic, the difficulties of meeting physically were addressed through the Zoom platform, giving participants experiences that will certainly be familiar to anyone who had to work digitally during the pandemic.
Since this is a film about a figure who may not be familiar to everyone, it may be useful to know a little about some of the people and contexts referred to in the film.
The opening scene concerns the search for some surviving voice recordings in which the protagonist, Pichon-Rivière himself, can be heard speaking. It is his son Joaquín Pichon-Rivière, himself a social psychologist, who talks about this on the telephone with the director, Miguel Kohan.
The next scene takes place at the psychiatric hospital in Buenos Aires where Pichon-Rivière worked for several years during the 1940s, and where he experimented with new treatment methods within what was, at the time, a very biologically oriented and traditional psychiatry. He tried to encourage psychoanalysts to become interested in working in psychiatric hospitals, and it was there that he also experimented with the concept of the operative group, which he would later develop, particularly during the 1960s and 1970s.
This concept has lived on among his followers in both South America and Southern Europe — and, in fact, also in Gothenburg, Sweden, at the Gothenburg Psychotherapy Institute. It was brought there in the 1970s by one of Pichon-Rivière’s early disciples, Angel Fiasché, together with his wife Dora.
In this scene at the psychiatric hospital, a bust of Pichon-Rivière is to be installed, while his son Joaquín gives a short speech.
Joaquín then tells us a little about Pichon-Rivière’s background. The film moves into the region of north-eastern Argentina where the family lived, an area consisting largely of jungle that extends into, among other countries, Bolivia and Brazil.
The next scene addresses the ways in which influences from the indigenous Guaraní culture may have contributed to Pichon-Rivière’s somewhat different way of thinking. It is a mythological world that is described enthusiastically by Vicente Zito Lema, who, towards the end of the 1970s, conducted an extensive series of interviews with Pichon-Rivière.
The interviews were subsequently assembled into a book, Conversaciones con Pichon-Rivière. Sobre el arte y la locura. Since then, the book has acquired an almost legendary status and has become something of a “must-read” for anyone interested in Pichon-Rivière and his way of thinking. The book is available in Swedish under the title Samtal med Enrique Pichon-Rivière. Om konst och vansinne, and copies can be purchased from me.
Ana Quiroga, his final life partner, then tells us more about Pichon and his relationship both to Guaraní culture and to the French culture he inherited through his parents, which also had a profound influence on him.
Surrealism is an important chapter in Pichon’s life. The film touches upon an important French precursor of surrealism, the Comte de Lautréamont — a figure who fascinated Pichon. He wrote about Lautréamont during the 1940s and, while investigating Lautréamont’s life in Paris, also came into contact with Jacques Lacan and the group of surrealists who were active there.
Pichon was fascinated by the night and by nocturnal life, and he came to move within such marginal worlds as those of bohemia, brothels and tango. These experiences helped shape part of the frame of reference — the ECRO — that lay behind aspects of his approach to treatment.
In the next scene, his son Joaquín once again enters the story and tells us about the period when Pichon was dismissed from the psychiatric hospital because he had introduced a new philosophy of treatment there, and had consequently come into conflict with conservative, ultra-reactionary Nazi groups at the hospital.
A short sequence follows with one of Pichon’s disciples, Avenburg, who briefly describes what Pichon-Rivière called the “basic unit of work”: existing situation – intervention – emergent – new existing situation, and so on. This constitutes a core element of Pichon’s way of conducting both individual and group treatment.
Another disciple then appears, a more colourful figure who would later further develop Pichon’s methods among poor people in Argentina. His name is Alfredo Moffatt. He reflects on the “eccentricities” that characterised Pichon and on the way in which these led him to go against the prevailing psychoanalytic thinking in Argentina at the time.
Pichon was very interested in football and, during his early years, founded a football club in the province where he grew up. The club still exists, and we make a brief visit there. Pichon used football as a “metaphor” for processes, particularly within groups, and to illuminate certain important aspects of them.
We return to Joaquín Pichon-Rivière, who tells us about the gradual breakdown, in the mid-1950s, of his father’s marriage to the first important woman in his life, Arminda Aberastury, the famous Argentine child psychoanalyst.
In the language of the film, this development also serves as a metaphor for Pichon’s movement away from psychoanalysis towards his own version of social psychology — a version that placed great emphasis on being operative and action-oriented.
The daughter of Pichon’s second important woman, Coco, whom he married in 1959 and remained with until 1964, tells us about that period and its tragic ending: Coco died in a car accident.
Ana Quiroga then tells us how, in the mid-1960s, when she and Pichon met, they became increasingly interested in everyday life, and how knowledge of everyday life was an important ingredient in being able to “read” what was happening in society.
The exploration of what is obvious or everyday — the explicit — could be understood as a more or less “royal road” — comparable to Freud’s description of dreams as the “royal road to the unconscious” — towards reaching the most determining, implicit social relationships.
Together, Pichon and Quiroga published a book on this subject, based on the chronicles Pichon had written for a newspaper during the 1960s.
As mentioned earlier, Pichon was deeply interested in culture and moved extensively within cultural circles. The next scene in the film touches upon this aspect of his life through a film director, Stagnaro, and a craftsman, Kovacs.
The film ends with the eventual discovery of a voice recording in which Pichon’s own voice can finally be heard, telling stories from his childhood.