Freuds Mexico: Into the Wilds of Psychoanalysis (MIT Press)

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Freud’s Mexico: Into the Wilds of Psychoanalysis (Book Review)

Freud's Mexican disciples, Mexican books, Mexican antiquities, and Mexican dreams. Freud's Mexico is a completely unexpected contribution to Freud studies. This book bears detailed testimony to Freud's relationship to a country he n Freud's Mexican disciples, Mexican books, Mexican antiquities, and Mexican dreams. This book bears detailed testimony to Freud's relationship to a country he never set foot in, but inhabited imaginatively on many levels. In the Mexico of the s and s, Freud made an impact not only among psychiatrists but also in literary, artistic, and political circles.

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Gallo writes about a "motley crew" of Freud's readers who devised some of the most original, elaborate, and influential applications of psychoanalytic theory anywhere in the world. Freud owned a treatise on criminal law by a Mexican judge who put defendants--including Trotsky's assassin--on the psychoanalyst's couch; he acquired Mexican pieces as part of his celebrated collection of antiquities; he recorded dreams of a Mexico that was fraught with danger; and he belonged to a secret society that conducted its affairs in Spanish.

Hardcover , pages.

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Lists with This Book. This book is not yet featured on Listopia. Gaby rated it really liked it Jun 09, Kostis rated it it was amazing Mar 04, Carol rated it it was amazing Nov 05, Michael Hellman rated it it was amazing May 20, Virginia Castillo rated it it was amazing Dec 22, Jenna Mayhew rated it liked it Sep 09, Evelyn marked it as to-read Dec 15, Andrew Bourne marked it as to-read Mar 07, Lenny is currently reading it Jul 14, Wctiii marked it as to-read Sep 28, Julie is currently reading it Oct 26, Che marked it as to-read Mar 16, Pamela marked it as to-read Sep 17, Mariano Camberos marked it as to-read Mar 18, Abby marked it as to-read Dec 02, Diasy marked it as to-read Jan 07, Ery is currently reading it Jan 09, Providing a very detailed account of the visits Freud made to the Vienna Museum of Anthropology, where he was on friendly terms with the curators of both the Aztec and Egyptian antiquities, Gallo suggests that Freud constructed for himself a museum in his office!

The advancement of geistlickheit was for Freud at the core of that aspect of cultural transmission that passed unconsciously between generations. For Freud, the Jewish advance in religious thinking, monotheism, and the prohibition on idolatry was made possible because of the traumatic repression of the murder of the man Moses.

But Novo had little time to analyze the larger questions of Mexican masculinity and perhaps gynophobia , as he was more interested in his own sexuality and that of his contemporaries. Novo read in order to discover his own symptoms and those of Freud.

Freud's Mexico: Into the Wilds of Psychoanalysis

For clinical reasons Freud was quite firm in his own Wild Analysis that his theory did not imply that free sexual expression was the cure for individual neuroses. Another reader of Freud was the poet Octavio Paz, who was continually drawn to and criticized for the position of the exile.

Via this exile he was able to enter what he called in his great work of The Labyrinth of Solitude. This was the refusal to acknowledge the rape of indigenous people and the illegitimacy of progeny, and the subsequent inability to produce a culture that was able to identify what it was that it wished to transmit. Paz received considerable criticism within Mexico and Latin America for what appeared to be his avoidance and isolation from political struggles in contrast, for example, to Pablo Neruda.

Don Quixote in the New World

In Mexico City was itself the site of an event of international and historical importance. Leon Trotsky, an avid reader of Freud, was assassinated by a man who had traveled under the alias of Frank Jacson and refused, after his arrest, to give any name other than Jacques Mornard. The Trotsky case turned out to be a good opportunity to put into practice this psycholegal theory. Unable to conduct the analysis himself, he asked a forensic psychiatrist, Jose Robleda, to apply a battery of psychological tests to uncover the unconscious motives behind the assignation.

The assassin was sentenced to 20 years in prison, and upon his release he was quickly whisked to the Soviet Union, where he received a state pension before dying of cancer. Caridad Mercader had been a powerful political activist in the Spanish Republic and then an agent for the Soviet Union.

During the Spanish Civil War she traveled to Mexico, where Diego Rivera painted her portrait and may also have become her lover. In , Eitingon had convinced his mistress Caridad to recruit her son for the assassination of Trotsky, but when her son was arrested she returned to Moscow where she was awarded the Order of Lenin for the sacrifice of her son. Remarkably, this sacrifice of a son was also linked to a piece of mythology that suggests the paranoia that had entered the Freudian movement and compromised its own transmission and institutionalization.

References

While Fromm immediately gained a considerable following as a teacher, he preferred to conduct psychoanalytically oriented studies of Mexican peasants than begin a psychoanalytic association. He was one of a number of Catholic thinkers who questioned why Vatican II was so silent on the question of psychoanalysis, given that it was a clearly established field of psychological inquiry which could be employed for the greater understanding of the kind of difficulties that priests and laypeople confronted in the modern world.

Were the Catholic Church, the Communist International and the International Psychoanalytic Association suffering some similar symptoms linked to the repression of traumatic events whose secrecy compromised the various purposes—transmissions—of all three institutions?

Perhaps it would have confirmed his own discovery of the place of human sacrifice at the heart of any form of cultural order and his own fears that the IPA, by providing lay analysis, would sacrifice his own creation.

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