Ignacio Matte Blanco had an important role in organizing the teaching of Psychiatry in medical school. In this paper we describe his training, that began as a physiologist, but turned into psychiatric and psychoanalysis in his formation in the United States and the United Kingdom during the forties. After returning to Chile, in the Chair of Psychiatry at the Faculty of Medicine of the Universidad de Chile he developed pioneering ideas about undergraduate teaching of psychiatry, that were exposed not only in Chile but to the Pan-American Health Organization. He advocated decreasing the time spent in lectures, and increase clinical practice and group dynamic experiences centered in the students. He insisted that teaching had to be focused in issues useful for general physicians and non psychiatric specialists, as well as in the need to extend the psychosocial curriculum to the internship. He also pointed to the need of increasing the humanistic formation of medical students. When Matte Blanco emigrated to Rome in 1966, his influences seemed to wane, since most of his disciples inverted exclamation markeft the Clínica Psiquiátrica Universitaria, where he taught. However, since the eighties, several of his viewpoints have been included in the medical curricula of Chilean schools of medicine.