This paper summarizes the development of my professional identity as psychoanalyst and psychiatrist. It describes the influences on my dedication to the study of severe personality disorders, namely, the training experiences I had under the guidance of Ignacio Matte-Blanco, in Chile; the research team of Jerome Franck at Johns Hopkins; the work in the Psychotherapy Research Project of the Menninger Foundation under Robert Wallerstein, my personal working relationship in New York, with Edith Jacobson, Margaret Mahler, the introduction to British Psychoanalysis by John Sutherland, and to French analysis in sabbatical times in Paris. I conclude by a brief overview of my theoretical orientation, combining ego psychological, object relations, and Kleinian approaches in the development of a synthesis that inspired my present research on the psychoanalytic psychotherapy of severe personality disorders.
I was trained in medicine and psychiatry in Santiago, Chile, under the leadership of Professor Ignacio Matte-Blanco, an outstanding psychoanalyst and psychiatrist who brought psychoanalysis to Chile, single-handedly developing a strong psychoanalytic institute and society there. As chairman of the Department of Psychiatry of the University of Chile in Santiago in the late 1940s and throughout the 1950s and 1960s, he became a pioneer there for modern psychodynamic psychiatry. It was his inspiring teaching that determined my decision to become a psychiatrist and a psychoanalyst. Matte-Blanco insisted on the need to maintain an independent, objective stance regarding scientific controversies, to not to be swayed by group pressures but remain attentive to scientific evidence. He taught us not to become imprisoned by one’s own ideas and to be open at all times to challenges to those ideas.
