ABSTRACT
The author met Enrique Pichon Riviere in Buenos Aires in 1969 at the home of Marie Langer, who invited him over for lunch because she wanted him to meet Pichon Riviere; she thought the author could find in Pichon Riviere’s ideas the answers to his questions. Langer’s friendship with Pichon Riviere had started many years earlier. In the 1940s, they had established the Argentine Association along with A. Ravskovsky, A. Garma, and C. Carcamo. Pichon Riviere was the first to suggest the use of a group technique to address problems in symbol formation, a technique that works with group members’ response to theory, thus integrating thought, affects, and actions. Pichon Riviere’s research is tied to different types of clinical practice, namely, psychosomatic medicine, psychoanalytic family therapy, and the group formation that he designated as “operative group". One of his greatest contributions to the field of psychopathology is the concept of proto-body image.
