Garma, Angel (1904-1993)

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GARMA, ANGEL (1904-1993)

A Spanish psychiatrist and psychoanalyst, Angel Garma was born June 24, 1904, in Bilbao, and died January 29, 1993, in Buenos Aires.

Garma, a Basque by birth and temperament, went to Madrid at the age of seventeen to study medicine. After completing his studies he left for Germany, where he was a student of Robert Gaupp and Karl Bonhoeffer. In 1929 he began a training analysis with Theodor Reik at the Berlin Institute of Psychoanalysis.

When he was twenty-seven Garma became a member of the Berlin Psychoanalytic Association (BPV) after presenting his now classic paper, "Die Realität und das Es in der Schizophrenie" (Reality and the Id in Schizophrenia), which he read in October 1931. This innovative essay questions the Freudian conception of psychosis. While Freud believed the psychotic repressed reality to satisfy the id, Garma claimed that the psychotic represses the id more than the neurotic, which disturbs his relation to reality.

At the end of 1931 Garma settled in Madrid. Although he had completed his training with the Berlin Psychoanalytic Association, he soon quit the organization, decrying its growing discrimination. He remained a "direct member" of the International Psychoanalytic Association (IPA) for several years. In July 1936, before the start of the Spanish Civil War and in spite of his sympathy for the Republicans, Garma went to France to avoid the fratricidal struggle taking place in his homeland. Through the Société Psychanalytique de Paris he met Celes Ernesto Cárcamo, an Argentinean who had trained in Europe before returning to Buenos Aires. He invited Garma to accompany him. Garma preferred to remain in Paris, but spurred on by the impending world war, he eventually decided to leave.

Garma arrived in Argentina in June 1938 and quickly adapted to life in Buenos Aires, a progressive city where psychoanalysis was already being taught. Cárcamo's return in 1939 gave a new impetus to the nascent psychoanalytic movement, which was soon reinforced by the arrival of Marie Langer.

In late 1942 the Asociación Psicoanalítica Argentina (APA) was founded. Garma was its first president (1942-1944), a position he held on three other occasions during his life. He founded the Institute for Psychoanalysis, where he was a teacher for thirty-two years. During his tenure as APA president, Garma promoted scientific activity, established annual conferences, and helped organize Latin-American and Pan-American conferences.

Garma's work was widely recognized during his lifetime. He was honored publicly on his seventieth birthday and, in 1983, was named honorary vice president of the IPA. In 1989 King Juan Carlos I of Spain decorated him and the APA named the Institute of Psychoanalysis after him. A year later he was elected honorary president of the Psychoanalytic Federation of Latin America (FEPAL).

An important pioneer, Garma developed a body of scientific work of considerable importance. He made significant contributions to the study of the psychoanalysis of dreams, psychoses, perversions, psychosomatic medicine, and technique. Within his extensive body of work his detailed and careful work on gastric ulcers and headache deserve special mention.

Dream-like phenomena were a constant preoccupation for Garma. The doctoral dissertation he presented in Argentina, "Psicioanálisis de los sueños" (1940, [Psychoanalysis of Dreams]) became a classic. Garma continued to make contributions to the theory of dreams, focusing his work on the Traumdeutung, even though he sometimes disagreed with Freud's findings.

Garma's research primarily involved the theory of the traumatic genesis of dreams, the characteristics of dream-like thought, the origin of dream hallucinations, and the relation to reality. The dream originates in unconscious conflicts that configure a traumatic situation, so that, ultimately, all dreams are nightmares. The satisfaction of desire is merely an attempt to mask the traumatic situation. The dream work is not limited to providing mental content with a new form, it is a creative process, a particular type of thought, archaic and vast. Garma's theory on the origin of dream hallucination and the relation to reality, which contradicts Freud, is discussed in his essay "La realidad exterior y los instintos en la esquizofrenia" (External Reality and the Instincts in Schizophrenia), published in 1931. Here, the relation of the subject to reality is disturbed whenever he has to abandon the satisfaction of impulsive demands and submit to internal persecutory objects that channel the death impulse.

These ideas, along with others, are crystallized in two important books. Nuevos Aportaciones al psicoanálisis de los sueños (1970, [New Contributions to the Psychoanalysis of Dreams]) covers thirty years of his work, although it by no means exhausts his contributions to the field. His Tratato mayor del psicoanálisis de los sueños (1990, [Comprehensive Treaty on the Psychoanalysis of Dreams]) incorporates the work done during the last twenty years of his life. All of Garma's work is a sustained and consistent effort to unmask a fundamental structural conflict, the submission of a masochistic ego to a sadistic superego that serves as an obstacle to the free exercise of genitality.

Angel Garma had two daughters, Lucinda and Isabel, with Simone Mas, his first wife. Elisabeth Goode Rasmussen, his second wife, who was with him at the height of his career, remained a steadfast caretaker during the years of his illness. An eminent psychoanalyst in her own right, she assumed the difficult role of being the wife of a great man. Angel and Elisabeth had two daughters, Carmen and Sylvia.

R. Horacio Etchegoyen

See also: Argentina; Colombia; Congrès des psychanalystes de langue française des pays romans; Federación psicoanalítica de América latina; Spain.