He was analyzed by Heinrich Racker, and began his psychoanalytic training in Argentina with Enrique Pichon Rivière, Marie Langer, León Grinberg, and José Bleger.
Etchegoyen was the first Latin American doctor to have the honor of being elected President of the IPA, and continued to practice and attend international conferences until 2008.
[6] In it Etchegoyen examines how 'psychoanalytic technique is influenced by the wide variety of theoretical points of view...throughout the world from Klein to Lacan...and he emphasises the advantages and disadvantages of the various approaches in the light of his own clinical experience'.
[11] It has been suggested that 'Etchegoyen's (1991) influential book, The Fundamentals of Psychoanalytic Technique may be read as an attempt to work through his (often conflicted) feelings towards two major influences on his own professional development - Melanie Klein, his dominant theoretical inspiration, and Heinrich Racker, his first analyst and mentor', whose work on transference/countertransference stands as a precursor of intersubjective psychoanalysis: Etchegoyen's 'retreat to a conservative Kleinian "one-person psychology"'[12] from Racker's influence would then appear as something of a retrograde step.
Etchegoyen's 'attention to certain similarities between the analysand's verbalization in the psychoanalytic process and Husserl's so-called eidetic reduction'[13] shows however his continuing sensitivity to the phenomenological aspects of the patient/analyst interaction.