Antonio Corel MD (23 May 1935 - 14 July 2022)

Dr. A. Corel was a psychoanalyst in private practice in Paris and a member of the Paris (SPP) and the Argentine (APA) societies. He died of Coronavirus. Before becoming an analyst, he was an extremely well known and highly esteemed medical doctor and researcher in Argentina.  

His analyst in Argentina was Rebeca Grinberg. In 1976 he became a psychoanalyst of the APA with a wonderful paper on construction in Freud’s work at a time when that concept was not widely used or recognised. In his approach history is constructed in the psychoanalytic process. After leaving Argentina and taking up residence in Paris, he became a member of the SPP.  

Antonio Corel was an extremely modest person, a deep thinker who worked mostly behind the scenes. He never put himself forward but helped wherever he was needed, and on several occasions, he had sacrificed his career for his family. Whoever wanted to get to know him better needed a little effort, but they then came into contact with a highly sensitive person whose delicacy of thought could be felt not only in his personal relationships but in his intellectual work, for instance in his 2013 paper for the ‘Psychoanalytic Inquiry’, where he described the “field, where the ‘field’ concept grew”. In this article he elaborated the intellectual atmosphere, in which the concept of the ‘psychoanalytic field’ (Baranger’s, 1961) developed.  

For many years Antonio was active as a cinema critic and part of the jury of the famous ‘Mar del Plata’. He also contributed to ‘Diario la Prensa’ where he was responsible for the discovery of many authors. He looked at films from the perspective of a very deep analytic understanding, and in 2004, writing in the IJP about Theo Angelopoulos, a man against frontiers, he said “Angelopoulos’s cinematic writings seem to converge with our psychoanalytical method. We also recover fragments, necessarily anachronistic since they belong to different times and spaces and are thus able to reconstruct the patient’s history”. He cited A, the protagonist of the film: “The end will be my beginning. And so, it is for us.” To be “ready for new beginnings, having acquired a new gaze”, was like a motto for Antonio’s life.  

Highly appreciated by all, he acted for many years in the working parties of the EPF as a moderator of the ‘listening to listening-groups’ of Haydée Faimberg. For around 25 years, he took part in the ‘French-English clinical meetings’, co-chaired by Anne Marie Sandler and Haydée Faimberg. For more than 15 years he was a reviewer for the ‘International Journal’ and the ‘Quarterly’. He presented papers at different Inter-national Congresses reading Shakespeare fluently in English and offering accounts of  ‘Angelopoulos’ and Orson Welles in ‘Citizen Cane’. In Finland, a congress was organised for him on Construction.  

For his wife, Haydée Faimberg, their daughter Claudina Corel and her husband Laurent Mathiew, their son Eduardo Corel and his wife Marina Ivanova Corel, for their four grandchildren and for the whole analytic community, his death leaves an inner void, an irretrievable loss.    

Dieter Bürgin (Swiss Psychoanalytical Society)